Page 44 of Our Song

‘Oh, hi!’ I flash the most brilliant smile I can muster. ‘I thought I spotted you over there!’

I turn my beaming smile (don’t overdo it, Laura) on Liz. ‘Hi, I’m Laura!’

‘This is Liz,’ says Dave. We haven’t seen each other since I moved out last year, but I can still read him like a book.

I know he thinks he’s doing the brave, honourable thing coming over to say hello.

He probably wants to make sure I haven’t, like, slit my wrists or something.

For someone who avoids serious emotion, he must be very proud of himself.

Whether this is all fair to Liz or not is another point.

Or maybe he just wants to have a close-up gawp at the famous Tadhg Hennessy.

‘Lovely to meet you!’ I say. ‘This is Tadhg. Tadhg, this is Dave.’

Tadhg’s left arm is still casually, affectionately slung over my shoulder. I take his left hand in my own and his thumb gently strokes the calluses on my fingertips. It is very distracting. In a good way. I can see Dave’s gaze focus on our hands in confusion.

‘Hi,’ says Tadhg.

‘Tadhg and I have been working together,’ I say.

‘Well,’ says Tadhg, dropping a tender little kiss on my cheek and pulling me closer to him, ‘not just working.’

Liz’s eyes are wide as saucers, and Dave looks frankly stunned.

I turn and smile up at Tadhg with real affection. His eyes are sparkling. He looks back to Dave. ‘Though of course, as you probably know, Lol’s basically a musical genius, so the work is going pretty well too.’

I let out a perfectly genuine laugh. ‘Is it now?’

Tadhg bumps the end of my nose with his and despite, or maybe because of, the ridiculous cheesiness of the gesture, I feel myself beam back at him.

‘You know it is,’ he says.

I turn back to Dave and his fiancée and take in their dazed expressions. I don’t have to force my smile now. ‘Well, it was good to see you. Oh, and congratulations!’

‘Um, thanks,’ says Dave. ‘I suppose we’d better go.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ mutters Liz. I feel a bit bad for her – she hasn’t done anything wrong, and she’s been put in a weird situation.

But I can’t feel that bad. I’m not a saint.

‘Bye!’ says Tadhg.

I lean against him as Dave and Liz turn to go. Before they disappear from our view, Dave looks back for a second as if to confirm that Tadhg’s arm really is around me, and that we really are holding hands. I give him a little wave with my free hand.

‘Was that okay?’ says Tadhg when they’re totally out of sight.

‘That was perfect ,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure,’ says Tadhg, and that’s when I realise our fingers are still entwined. Even though it would be worryingly easy to imagine it meaning something, I gently extract my hand from his and slip out from under his arm. Then he says, ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I sigh and lean back in my seat. ‘It’s just … this is the first time I’ve seen him since we broke up.’

‘Ah,’ says Tadhg. ‘And you haven’t been in contact since?’

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘Not until last week when he rang me and told me Liz was pregnant.’

‘Last Friday when you said you’d got some weird news,’ he says, ‘was that what you meant?’

I nod. ‘Yeah. It was … it was a shock. I mean, I’m glad we’re not together anymore. I didn’t care when he told me they were engaged. But her being pregnant … it brought up a lot of stuff.’ I sigh. ‘What Dave said when he left me made me— It made me feel bad about myself.’

Why did I admit that? It must be the shock of seeing Dave and his new woman.

That, and the more than half a bottle of wine I’ve just drunk.

I’ve always wanted Tadhg to think I’m confident and that I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks of me.

Even though that isn’t even vaguely true.

I could never, ever bear the idea of him feeling sorry for me.

But fuck it, maybe it’s time we were more honest with each other.

‘Well,’ says Tadhg, ‘then he’s an arsehole.’

I laugh despite myself. ‘No arguments there.’

‘I don’t know what he said to you,’ says Tadhg, ‘but if it made you feel bad about yourself, it was bollocks.’

‘Well, some of it was just factual,’ I say. ‘He wanted something and I couldn’t give it to him.’

‘Like what?’ says Tadhg and then catches himself. ‘Sorry. Ignore that. It’s none of my business.’

And I find myself saying, ‘He dumped me because I can’t have kids.’

Wow. I’m really being honest now.

There’s a moment of silence and then Tadhg says, ‘If I say you’re better off without him, will you believe me?’

‘Oh, I know I am,’ I say. ‘But the whole thing … It was a lot.’

‘Do you … Do you want to talk about it?’

And to my surprise, I actually do.

So I take a deep breath, and I tell him.

‘I always had really bad period pains, and it turned out to be endometriosis. You know what that is?’

‘Not exactly,’ admits Tadhg.

‘This is massively oversimplifying, but it’s when the tissue that’s meant to be on the inside of your womb grows outside it.

Which isn’t a good thing, obviously. Anyway, it can lead to fertility problems and that’s what happened to me.

We’d stopped using contraception and nothing had happened after a year, so I went to get everything checked out – I was in my mid-thirties after all – and that’s when they diagnosed it. ’

I remember the day in 2017 when the consultant broke the news after the laparoscopy.

It turned out that I was an extreme case.

The tissue had grown around my fallopian tubes, scarring them badly, blocking them beyond any treatment.

There was extensive scarring in my womb too. There was so much … damage.

‘Could they treat it?’ says Tadhg.

‘I had surgery,’ I say, ‘which removed some of the tissue, and afterwards the doctor made it clear that there was absolutely no way I could get pregnant naturally, and even with fertility treatment the odds were essentially non-existent.’

‘And … how did you feel about it?’ says Tadhg. I meet his eyes. He doesn’t look sorry for me. He looks as if he cares about me.

I look down at the table. ‘I mean, I’d always assumed I’d have children. It wasn’t like being a mother was my greatest dream, but I like kids and I wanted to have my own and I always thought it would happen. And suddenly I was told it wouldn’t. Because I was … broken.’

When I look up again, Tadhg’s still looking at me with that kind, steady gaze. ‘You’re many things, Lol. But broken is not one of them.’

‘Well, that’s what Dave thought.’ I close my eyes as the memory floods back. ‘I thought infertility was something we were both dealing with. But it turned out he thought it was my problem.’

And I tell Tadhg what happened after Dave told me he didn’t want to marry me.

At first I simply couldn’t believe he was serious about leaving me.

It was ludicrous. Impossible. This was Dave .

Dave, the man who had gone down on one knee eighteen months earlier and proposed to me on the corner of Aungier Street where we first kissed.

My Dave. Dave who loved me. How could he have stopped loving me?

He couldn’t. He just couldn’t . I felt like I was going mad.

‘I still care about you,’ said Dave. ‘Of course I do. But I think … I think we want different things.’

‘How do you know what I want?’ I cried. ‘You never talk to me properly these days! You’ve been weird and distant for the last few months and—’

The last few months. Ever since I had the surgery.

In the immediate aftermath, when we were both in shock and trying to accept the diagnosis, we had proper conversations about what we would and would not do in the future.

I thought we were on the same page. I thought we were going to make a new, different life for ourselves.

But quite quickly Dave seemed to … withdraw.

A thought struck me, so horrible I could barely bring myself to say it aloud.

‘Is this … is this about the fertility stuff?’

He didn’t look at me.

‘I thought we both decided we didn’t want to try fertility treatment.’ My voice was shaking. ‘Or adoption or anything. You said you didn’t want to do that.’

‘I don’t,’ said Dave. ‘That’s all … It’s too much.’ He still couldn’t look at me. He was such a fucking coward. ‘But I still—’ He swallowed. ‘I still want to have a family.’

‘But you and me,’ I said. ‘Aren’t we a family? Just the two of us? Aren’t we enough?’

I only said it because I thought it would make him realise the utter madness of what he’d been saying. I only said it because I thought it would make him come to his senses. I only said it because I was sure he’d say ‘Yes, of course we’re enough’.

But he said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But we’re not. Not for me.’

‘And so,’ I tell Tadhg, ‘he left me and found someone who could give him a baby with no trouble at all.’

‘Well,’ says Tadhg, ‘he’s a dickhead who didn’t know how lucky he was.’

We sit for a moment in surprisingly easy silence, and then Tadhg notices the ma?tre d’ is looking nervously over at our table.

He clearly doesn’t want to bother a superstar, and we’ve got three-quarters of a bottle of wine left, but they must need the table for the next customers. We’ve been here for over two hours.

‘I think we’d better go,’ says Tadhg, and then he says, ‘Do you want to go home just yet?’

‘Not really.’

‘Do you fancy going back to my place and playing the guitar very, very loudly?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, please .’