I got no words

Like a liar, like a thief
Like a war-torn child who needs relief
I’m reeling hazy, force from the blow
I just can’t find the words to let you go
I got no words, I got no words for you
I got no words, I got no words it’s true
- The Datsuns, 2004

In the wee small witching hours of the night, in the long, dark midnight of the soul, there’s places the mind visits that it never goes in daylight. Dark places. Places littered with fear and terror and pain. And regret. I don’t need to explain, I think, why Brad Priddle’s last hours come to mind. They visit me at night sometimes. I know he didn’t take two days to die in the back of that abandoned paddy van, I know shock and blood loss from being taken to with that sawn-off killed him pretty quickly. And I know it wasn’t my fault. I know all this in daylight. Somehow, at 3am, that level of detail slips the mind somehow. So I think of Priddle, waiting to die as his life ebbed away into a puddle of blood and gore and entrails. I think of McCarthy’s last moments, semi-conscious and sinking in frigid water, thousands of miles from home. I think of Matt, the tree, the impact, the end. I don’t fucking want to, let’s be clear. It’s just how the subconscious mind chooses to torture its captives in the blackness of night.

This fresh image of hell would stay with me too, I knew. I knew whenever I saw Senior Constable B.S. Toogood in my travels again, I’d always think of that eleven year old boy he’d once been, and how differently he might have turned out had he and his big sister not decided to sneak out of home and go and find their old man on Father’s Day, 1997. And found him with half his face blown off from a self-inflicted shotgun wound.

“How did you cope?”

She shrugged. “How did you?”

“I didn’t,” I replied, surprised to suddenly be the subject of the question. “Got drunk a lot. Bombed my HSC. Girlfriend left me. Wrote a bunch of shit songs. Got drunk some more. Standard operating procedure. It’s not like it compares… You?”

“Don’t remember,” she said.

“Drunk?”

She shook her head. “Too young for that. I just don’t remember. I can’t account for nearly two years of my life. Blanked completely. It’s like I woke up one morning, suddenly there was this new, already created life that I’d been air-dropped into. I was at a preppy private school on the Gold Coast, I had an orthodontically perfect smile and someone had straightened my nose after I’d bent it one way falling off my bike then back the other way falling off the uneven bars, my mum was wiped on Valium… and there was this boring old tosser called Gerald living in my house who I was being told to call Principal Toogood at school and Daddy at home.”

“Shit, eh?” Sorry. It was all I had.

“So I just went with it. I blended in. I’d always been OK at blending in, I guess I’m a social chameleon, had the advantage of having moved towns and schools so much… as well as all those years of drama school. I needed to fit in, so I invented our mutual friend.”

“Bethany?”

That ironic smile. “You want to know a secret?” she challenged. “Up until I went to the AIS, you realise the only people who called me Bethany rather than Beth were my mother, her parents, and my teachers when I was in trouble for talking during Scripture…”

“Talking about how sincerely you believed everything you were being taught, yeah?”

“Yeah, something like that,” she grinned.

“Bethany believed it, though?”

“She did,” Bethany said. Or was this Beth I was speaking to? And why did my head hurt so much? “Bethany was a good little Christian girl, like all the other good little Christian girls. She spent her time talking about hair and boys and pop singers and Home & Away plotlines and crap like that, and if I’d met her in the street I’d have wanted to slap her until she fell over or went away. She was based on a lot of girls I’d known who I’d wanted to slap, including most of the brain-dead oxygen thieves at that school. But she was just a self-defence mechanism. I just needed to survive long enough to work out what I was going to do next.”

“And?”

A laugh. “When I work it out,” she confessed, “I’ll be sure to let you know…” She contemplated her nails. Still in character, apparently. “Bethany just took over. She was a parasite… she is a parasite. But I’ve been doing this for so long, I can barely remember what it used to be like not to be like this. And… I had a few episodes in my late teens. Messy. Self-harm mostly, the usual pathetic teen-angst, nobody-loves-me stuff. Pathetic embarrassing emo crap. A few late-night ambulance rides with blood down my wrists. I’d show you the scars but it’s hardly worth bothering with. Healed now, mostly, but Mum found out. Made me go see her doctor, where I learned what SSRI stands for. At least he didn’t bomb me out with Valium like Mum. She’s a shell of what she used to be. Thankfully.”

“You’ve been on them ever since?”

“You mean, was I mixing antidepressants and alcohol the night we got together?” she replied with a wicked smirk. “Well, yeah. A bit. But alcohol doesn’t affect me that much…”

“What happened to ‘You’re probably not as drunk as me?’”

“I lied,” she shrugged. “Figured you did your best work with drunk women. Needed that psychological advantage…”

I shook my head. “You can’t mix that shit. I don’t care who you are. It fucks you up.”

She nodded, conceding the point. “Look, when we met, I’d been planning to get off them anyway, I was in a good space – I was more often not taking them than taking them, it went in cycles, I’d feel OK for a few months and do without them, then the wheels would fall off and I’d need better living through chemistry. Your timing was perfect, my appetite – for everything, especially the fun stuff you’re into – it all just goes to hell when I’m on them, and all I want to do is curl up and sleep. You know, you were my record for the longest period without training wheels,” she said proudly. “Only a couple of little wobbles…”

“Never noticed,” I admitted. Which was probably as much a tribute to my ignorance as her acting skills, both of which were very well developed.

“I’m good at hiding them,” she said. “So long as I don’t make too much of a scene, or break too much stuff…” A self-deprecatory roll of the eyes. We both knew whose stuff she was talking about. “But then, you had to go and freak me out totally by asking to marry me, and when I pointed at the biggest, pointiest, priciest-looking ring in the shop you said ‘Fine’ instead of ‘You’re kidding, you’re not worth that you silly bitch’, and the old Bridezilla in Mum started awakening, and Gerald started thinking he was actually my father and should have some input in this if he was bankrolling it… and I had another little episode while you were out of town, or rather a freaking monumental one, and needed my magic personality pills, at about twice the usual dose.” That part-confessional, part-conspiratorial smile told its own story. Woulda got away with it if it wasn’t for them meddling meds… “And that was all fine and that was OK, and I was still kinda sleeping, or as much as I ever used to – though the acid-trip nightmares meant I had to invent a reason not to stay at yours so much… ‘born again virgin’ was the best I could come up with I’m afraid… I know, I know. I suck.” She gave me her best puppy-dog look, playing for sympathy. Realising it wasn’t working particularly well, she offered, “Or maybe I should have more often?”

“Might have added value to the business case,” I muttered. It was probably fairly pathetic that it was the denial of sex which had pissed me off the most re Bethany’s gameplaying, but I always reckoned sex was as good a barometer for the health of the relationship as anything. Very, very few relationships with bad sex are going well. Doesn’t apply as vice versa obviously though.

“You stuck around,” she pointed out. “No matter how much reason I gave you to leave… in a weird kind of way, that made me feel better. Given I was kinda freaking the fuck out over everything else, work, family, the wedding… actually the wedding preparations were going OK, because I was agreeing with whatever Mum told me, because the drugs and Bethany were protecting me. Until.”

“Until?”

“Until I found you with your arms around your girl on that couch. Your ‘biographer’…” She left the irony hanging in the air. “And yeah, I know you guys are supposedly just friends – or at least were until she sold you out for a big story. I know she was your best friend’s girl and all that and you weren’t making it all up. I know all that now. But not then. Just… just think about me. Here’s poor little broken-down, fucked-up me, coming back to her boyfriend’s place and finding you with this tall, gorgeous Amazon with great hair and great tits… I mean if you’d actually sat down and thought hard about trying to find the perfect weapon to smash my self-image… seriously, if you’d put six months of research into it and had a fucking cattle call for auditions, you couldn’t have done it any better… I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that but I don’t think it was good because the next thing I knew I was lying on your bathroom floor surrounded by shattered glass and bleeding quite dramatically. And that someone, possibly me, had gone crazy and destroyed most of your house. I decided you probably wouldn’t like me much after that, so I ran away and hid from you for about forever. Because I’m grown-up and mature like that.”

“Didn’t you send me emails wanting to catch up?”

A sardonic frown. “Yeah, that was a fun discovery. I found those in the trash of my email at home,” she said darkly. “Apparently someone, let’s say with a vested interest in seeing a wedding go ahead with one of her favourite creations centre-stage – the dress, obviously, the contents less so – managed to get into my webmail and send off a few messages while I was at work. Clever enough to figure out my password – not so hard since Firefox remembers it, I guess – but not clever enough to empty the trash before I found the evidence...”

“So…” I tried to come up with an articulate way of asking ‘what the hell are you doing here’, and failed. “Why tonight? What changed?”

“You,” she said. “Almost overnight – or so it seemed to me – this other person appeared, and the Andrew I knew was gone. OK, I realise now why you stopped turning up to work, and why you never called – after my idiot brother had scared you off, anyway – but Andrew just disappeared. And suddenly this Angus was emerging. Bethany would not have liked Angus. She’d have prayed for his soul,” she smirked. “But Beth…”

“Would Angus have liked Beth?” I asked.

She exhaled. “You’re speaking to her, you idiot. What’s up with you, dissociative personality disorder or something?”

“So it’s my fault?”

“Entirely,” she replied. “I’ll be sending you the invoice for my therapy.”

“What, so this isn’t it?”

“No,” she sighed, “this is probably going to result in needing a lot more of it… I’m kidding. It’s good, it’s all good. I’m glad we can stop lying to each other, and we can’t hurt each other any more. You’re a fucking bastard, and I’m a fucking mess, but at least we’re being true to ourselves.”

I was glad this made sense to her, it at least made one of us.

“Of course,” Beth added, “I should make the disclaimer that I’m utterly fucking manic at the moment, and the world is streaming past like it’s warp speed on Star Wars... I’m probably making a hell of a lot less sense than I think I am, yeah?”

“It’s all good,” I replied. If this was ‘manic’ Beth – chatty, funny, self-deprecating, talking in long, looping stream-of-consciousness bit-torrents which alternately baffled and intrigued – I’d rather her to ‘Bethany’, and said as much.

“Yeah, you can say that. You just got great sex strings-free without even having to buy me dinner. Or even get off your couch. But you wouldn’t like the other side,” she admitted. “It’s not very spectator-friendly. And it’s kind-of a two-for-one deal. You get me, you get the other stuff. I mean, I love being manic – and I know that’s not the latest PC name for it, but fuck it, I like the old name. I wouldn’t trade it for being normal, whatever the hell that is. There’s all this screaming white noise but then there’s these beautiful moments of clarity, of pure insight, where everything makes sense… but then I know I’ve got maybe twelve hours before it’ll all come crashing down into black and I’ll find all the sharp kitchen objects have been mysteriously hidden and the non-prescription painkillers have disappeared out of the bathroom – not they’d do much for me anyway, and not like I ever would, or could. Once you’ve had that happen to you, there’s no way you could do that to someone else. Especially the people who went through it with you in the first place.”

“It’s the most selfish thing anyone can do to the people who love them,” I offered, almost glad to be able to contribute something from personal experience, troubled by how inadequate I felt in absorbing all, or any, of this. “Full stop.”

She nodded. “You said something in that interview which scared me a little. Well, you said a lot of things that scared me, a lot, thinking I could be that close to you and not have a clue who you actually were… yeah, I’m a hypocrite. But the part that scared the hell out of me was how much the stuff about your brother resonated with me. The bit where you said you hated the person he’d turned into, not just because of what he did, but because deep down he hated that person just as much…”

“That’s how you feel about your Dad?”

Beth shook her head. “No. It’s a bit more complicated, and I guess I only realised when I read what you said, if you actually said it of course... It’s Mum, but it’s the other way around. I hate the person she was, not just for everything she did to Dad, and me, and Brad, but because she hates what she did and what she was so much she pretty much destroyed herself psychologically in order to kill that person off… I know that doesn’t make sense, and I know I’m giving her credit for choosing to have a mental breakdown rather than accept her part in causing Dad’s suicide. But I can’t live my life hating my Mum, or Gerald, or myself for what happened. I don’t have that option. If I did, I might as well…” She flicked her thumb over the balcony. I presumed she didn’t mean ‘go down the shops for a carton of milk’.

“You’re better than that anyway,” I said gently. We were getting into worrying, uncomfortable territory now, because this was territory I’d found myself in, albeit fleetingly, over the bleakest hours of the past few mornings. “You’ll keep going, because you can’t do the same thing back to your family. No matter how bleak it gets – and it’s been pretty fucking bleak recently – it’s never an option, because someone already went there first.”

“And fucked it up for everyone else,” she added with black humour, the kind that appreciated the irony of being in a mindset to be content to die on a semi-regular basis, but being actively prevented from doing so. “Yeah. I kind of have to forgive her, because I don’t think she ever will.”

There had to be a way out of this morose fucking conversation.

“Speaking of your mum… what was the dress?” I asked.

“Oh, the dress…” She taunted me with a frown. “Well, I guess you can know, since you’re never going to see it. You’d have hated it. Corset up the back, lots of braiding. It’d have taken you hours to unwrap your present at the end of the night. You’d probably have lost interest and gone off to look up lesbian porn on the internet…”

“Yeah,” I teased, “pretty much.”

“Looked good in the photos though,” she conceded wistfully. “Apart from the clotheshorse, who was a bit short and dumpy and whose feet were too big.”

“Says who?”

“The ballet shoe industry,” she replied. “You realise, I’ve been this height since I was eleven. For a few years there I was the tallest girl in my class, if you can imagine that…”

“Good times?”

“Hell yeah. Captained the NSW South Coast combined primary schools netball team. I dominated.” Christ, she sounded like Dr Cletus talking about his rugby form. Schoolyard sports types were all the bloody same. “Plus, boys like you when you’re tall. Not too tall, obviously, otherwise they get insecure…”

“My biographer would probably agree with you on that,” I offered.

“Yeah, but she has great hair, and great tits, and can drink entire bottles of red wine without falling over, so she can just fuck off.”

“Maybe you should have gone to bed with her then,” I countered, and immediately regretted it.

“Oh don’t tell me you went there too. Knew you must have screwed things up somehow…”

“No, no. We didn’t. Maybe we should have, that was the problem. We’d had a lot to drink at her sister’s wedding, and we almost ended up falling into bed together, but we didn’t, and we had a big argument instead, and she said some stuff, and I said some stuff, and a week later I’m reading my darkest secrets, the ones she’d previously assured me would never see the light of day by her hand, in the feature interview of the Weekend Australian Magazine…”

“God, what did you say?” she asked incredulously.

“That she still belonged to McCarthy.”

“Your old friend? Her ex?” She looked even more incredulous. “She wrote the article, her own ex-boyfriend being killed in a motorbike crash is half the story, and she’s pretending she wasn’t part of it? How the hell does that work?”

“It doesn’t,” I replied. “Welcome to gonzo journalism, Lena-style. She’s been doing this kind of stuff for as long as I can remember. I just didn’t expect to be the victim of it. She didn’t have the right to do that. To Rachel, as much as me. But hey, you live by the sword…” I wondered if that was in any way an appropriate cliché. Probably not, but Beth seemed to not bother with filtering much of she said when she was in this sort of mindset - even swearing, if rather endearingly - so why should I? “I mean, we’ve taken advantage of the positive press she’s given us over the years, even though we all knew it was on the fringes of dodgy. When it comes back and bites you in the arse, what are you going to do? Stop letting your life cross over with your work? It’s not as though we did much of that anyway. Not compared with Marty’s stuff these days. I’ve never written a love song in my life. Wouldn’t know where to start. Probably not with a twelve bar blues riff played fuck-off loud, which is half my back catalogue cancelled out.”

“You do bring a lot of yourself into your work though, more than I would have expected for a bogan thug.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean, based on what I knew about you… which isn’t very much, apparently, since everything I used to think I knew about you went out the window with that article…” She looked a little guilty. “Okay... confession time,” she admitted, raising a hand. “I did see a little bit of your show the other week. I wasn’t going to, I’d planned to stay away, wash my hair, hide under the bed, even watch Rove, anything. I was desperate. But I was still in town, and I was feeling OK, and I thought I could sneak in and noone would notice. I got in OK, Brad was on duty there. I stayed up the back and hoped not to be recognised. You guys were just playing cover songs, I think, but you had so much energy, and vitality, and just such a swagger… That shocked me as much as the article, maybe. You could have come out as Carlotta the drag queen and it wouldn't have been any more confusing. I didn’t understand who this guy in the loud T-shirt with the bright orange guitar was, and what he’d done with my ex…”

“Sounds a bit like tonight for me.”

“Yeah,” she sighed, “I can see that. Except you can apparently handle that sort of thing without freaking the fuck out completely, and I can’t. And I was in a big sweaty crowded room of strange people, so when I had my inevitable freak-out it was always going to be much more humiliating. Flashback to the worst days of high school. Cover your face and run for the exit before anyone sees you cry, sort of thing…”

“Why, what happened?” I tried an apologetic smile. “What’d I do?”

“You dedicated a song to me,” she replied.

“Oh,” I mumbled. “Yeah, that was… that was me trying to be funny. That ended up being for someone else.”

“I know,” she said. “Hence the running for the exit, trying not to cry bit.”

Yeaahhhh. You’re a winner.

“You said it,” I winced. “Angus is a bastard. There’s a reason he’s been locked away for a lot of years.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d never have told you if it hadn’t come up. It was childish, pathetic really. It was just me developing a crush on the lead singer because he was cute and played the guitar and I started to remember he used to be pretty good in bed even when he really didn’t like me much… and then he went out of his way to stick the knife in, because he really didn’t like me much. Story of my life… It’s why the only proper, grown-up relationship I’ve ever had, is with you. A relationship of convenience, both of us pretending to be someone else and hoping the other wouldn’t ask too many questions.”

“Same here,” I admitted. “Jessica – the other girl – was the previous record holder. Almost made five months.”

“Five?” She seemed astounded. “Maybe you can show me how to do that one day. I’ve never made it beyond two. I couldn’t hide behind Bethany long enough. I mean, I could create a persona, I knew what hairstyle she’d have, what clothes she’d wear, what music she’d listen to…”

“Crap,” I interceded quickly, with a grin.

“Hey, what do you want? I’ve just never been that into music. And Dad used to listen to Triple J… it’s one of the things I just couldn’t handle after that. Roy and HG on Saturday afternoons when we went fishing. Helen and Mikey when he dropped us off at school. He said it kept him young, he’d been listening to it since it was Double J when he was growing up in Sydney. He used to talk about going to all these gigs back in the day, Sunbury, Narara, AC/DC at the Haymarket in 1977, the Saints at the Oxford Funhouse, the Angels on the Opera House Steps on New Years… all before he met Mum, of course. Even though he used to say grunge was just punk with flannies and whining, he used to love it.”

“Not young Bethany’s cup of chai latte, though?”

“Not so much. She’d have thought the Hottest 100 was the list of Cosmo’s most eligible bachelors.” Beth smiled. She seemed to find it hard not to when she was rolling with the manic upness like this.

“And a lemon yellow VW Beetle, the sort of cutesy shitbox driven only by florists and real estate agents…”

“Hey look, here’s the thing,” she offered. “I didn’t actually pick that car. I didn’t need to. Gerald figured it would be perfect for Bethany, so he bought it for her. Doesn’t that say my work here is done? Bethany’s ‘Daddy’ buys her a car, AND it’s so fucking preppy it’d make you throw up. I don’t even need to try any more, the bitch perpetuates her own cover story.”

“So Bethany has the hair, the car, the clothes, but not the man… and why is that? Because you can’t keep up the pretence indefinitely?”

“More that I can’t go more than a few months without the wheels falling off,” she said. “Without wanting to scream at myself for being so shallow and weak to accept this pathetic charade as my life. You were an anomaly. Not only were the gaps between longer, but I managed to have them when you weren’t looking. The Christmas before last when you went down to see your family… Christmases are usually pretty bad anyway. That wasn’t a good one, because I was trying so hard to hold it all together all year, scared as hell you’d find out I was a loony, and it all unravelled pretty spectacularly. So I had a crash then. And last Christmas too, but luckily I already had a cover story in place, so you didn’t miss me.”

“No Christmas with your father’s… Gerald’s family in Melbourne then?”

“Not so much. More in a darkened room at an expensive clinic in the foothills of Mount Coot-tha. We did get turkey for Christmas dinner, but the nurses didn’t seem that keen to let me any where near the carving implements. Still, it was nice enough. Four stars. I’d go back. I’ll probably have to, if this Christmas goes as it usually does. Not very well.”

“Where is it, up Bardon somewhere?”

She shook her head. “Other side. Further out, on the road up to Mount Nebo. I think, anyway. I’ve never been there with my head on straight, so I couldn’t really tell you…”

“Usually the only mentalists on that road are Mad Mick and the boys from Mount Road,” I quipped. She looked confused. I realised that like practically all of my friends (and family), Beth hadn’t met Mick. “Mate of mine. He and his uncle run a motorbike shop up that way where I worked during uni. The one with the busted scaphoid. And everything else. He’s had more big hits than U2. Except less middle of the road, more off in the trees.”

“Was he there on the night of your show?” Beth asked. “Seemed like a lot of your friends came out to see you play. Not that I recognised any of them, of course… Hey, don’t worry, if I was going out with me I’d be sure to hide me away whenever anyone came to visit too.”

“It wasn’t like that. A lot of those guys I hadn’t seen in years. There wasn’t anyone to hide you from. I moved out here because I didn’t want to associate with people any more. People left me alone, I liked it. More than I should, but hey, you get that on the big jobs.” That was an utterly meaningless statement I’d picked up from Bear on my NZ trip, it was one of his cheerfully aimless standbys.

“I hadn’t even seen your brother until I saw him on stage,” she marvelled. “I still haven’t met him. Brad’s the only member of my family who’s met any of yours…”

“By met, I presume you mean harassed?”

She hadn’t heard that, or had chosen not to. She just shook her head and laughed ironically. “We were going to be married… we were about to send the invitations out, for fuck’s sake…. and I hadn’t met any of your family. Wasn’t that absolutely insane? Why did we ever think this was going to work? Then again, maybe it’d have been better had everyone met at the wedding. Not enough time beforehand for everyone to decide they didn’t like each other. Everyone would have been too busy falling out with each other to notice me having a little meltdown in the corner. Or a fucking enormous meltdown, whichever came first.”

“You wouldn’t have,” I maintained, with no evidence whatsoever to back myself up.

She shrugged. “Yeah,” she replied, “I would have. I don’t think I’d have made it through without crashing again. Probably not during, just in the days afterwards. During the honeymoon. That would have gone well,” she remarked sardonically. “And then you would have known… and the whole house of cards would have come down. You’d have wished you’d kept the receipt for the marriage licence, take it back for a refund. So maybe… maybe you need to call up your friend Megan Lane and say thanks. If you hadn’t taken off for a weekend with her, none of this would have happened, and you might have been spending your honeymoon hiding all the sharp cutlery in the honeymoon suite. Better I crashed then, than before it was too late. You think?”

“I try not to,” I said. “I’d like to think I would have been understanding. I could have helped.”

“You’d think so. And you’d be wrong,” she said bluntly. “Doesn’t matter what you think you could have done. When you’re actually there, there’s not much you can do, other than wait for the drugs to kick in. It gets tiring pretty quickly, like dealing with a psychotic two year old. Not responsive to reason. Does not compute. Exterminate. Put it this way,” she said, trying to soften the impact. “You’re not the first to want to help, and you wouldn’t have been the first to give up and run away screaming. And it’s pretty awful for me, but it’s much, much worse for the people who have to watch.”

“Sounds like childbirth, or so Jeff tells me,” I offered. The Jeff, having been there for his and Beck’s first labour – seventeen hours of screaming agony, blood and gore like one of those ‘80s Peter Jackson fillums Beth had impressively referenced earlier (that AND an old Chemical Brothers album, credit where due), half the tools in the shed being used on his beloved, and ending with an emergency C-section amidst Beck bleeding out profusely like a harpooned whale on the deck of a Japanese ‘research’ vessel, she and Josh spitting distance from death – not even the threat of divorce could compel him to be there for the second. As soon as Beck went into labour with Claire he suddenly found a lot of ploughing to do out the back of the farm, and his phone didn’t work up there. I didn’t blame him in the slightest. There was absolutely nothing he could bring to that situation which would have added any value. Claire, of course, was a stress-free forty minutes, a lot less time and anguish than the ear-bashing he subsequently got from his better half for going AWOL at the critical moment.

“Yeah, but you usually get nine months’ notice for that,” she pointed out. “Apart from Christmas, Dad’s birthday and Dad’s anniversary, I can’t circle dates on a calendar and prepare for the worst. It’d be handy though, at least I could get my alibis organised. There was one a few months ago – probably why I missed your brother and his family, they were up during the mid-year holidays weren’t they? The wedding planning meltdown. I think I convinced you I had glandular fever or something, yeah?”

“Hmmm…”

“Come on, it had to be something that would make you keep your distance for long enough for me to get it together again. I know you must have thought I’d been off snogging teenagers, but I thought I just about got away with it. I think I’d rather you thought I was playing spin-the-bottle with the senior girls netball team than discovered I was a closet depressive in need of medication.”

“Why not a little from column A, a little from column B?” I suggested.

“Hey. Just because I’m OK with watching, doesn’t mean I’m OK with doing. OK?”

“OK,” I grinned. “Are you OK with me thinking about you being OK with doing?”

“Do I have any choice?” she inquired.

“Probably not,” I admitted.

She gently eased herself off the balcony rail and padded onto the deck. My shirt didn’t quite cover her panties; the red marks on her thighs from the balcony reminded me how long we’d spent out here. We’d probably talked more in the past little while than we’d done in the past year – she’d talked enough for several years – and there’d been more honesty there than at any time in our relationship. Which, in one of those heroically stupid ironies that dominated my life, could only happen because our relationship, such as it had been, was over, and all the lies and bullshit which we’d been using to try and convince ourselves, each other and everyone else, could finally be put to rest. No more pretending. And it felt… I didn’t know how it felt. I didn’t know how to reconcile any of this, make sense of it, even put it into context.

I did know I wanted more of that couch-style action though. I ain’t as dumb as I look, kids. I stood, and sidled around the table to meet her.

“Up to much tomorrow?” I asked.

“Work,” she said flatly. “Like normal people have. Remember, rock star?”

“Nup,” I grinned. “Blow it off. I’ll take you fishing instead.”

She winced. “Angus… Andrew… don’t. I know what you’re trying to do…”

“Take you fishing?”

“…And it’s sweet, but…” She put her arms on my shoulders, looked up at me, straight into me. “I’m not looking for that. I’m not looking for anyone to protect me. I can see you saying Nooooo,” she said, shaking her head almost comically, “but I can see it in your eyes saying Yesssss. I’ve survived like this for more than ten years now, and you mightn’t think it’s much of a life, and you’re right. But it’s mine, and I’ve fought for it, all of it. Even that stupid lemon yellow Beetle you love so much, and yes I feel like a fucking florist when I’m driving it, but it’s a symbol of making it this far. I never, ever, thought I would. Not waking up that morning and finding out I was Bethany Toogood, preppy private-school bitch instead of Beth Alexander, smashed and broken and fucked-up, too tall for junior-high gymnastics, too short for everything else, feet too big for ballet, nose too crooked to be pretty, but going to have a crack at it anyway because that’s what my Dad taught me to do. If you told me then I’d still be alive now, let alone almost human…” She shook her head. “One day I’ll figure out what it is that I’m going to do with my life, and I’ll puff myself up all big and brave and I’ll go and sink my teeth into it, and I won’t let go until it does.” She spoke with an intense clarity that I’d have given anything for. Seemed I needed to go batshit insane in order to find it, King Lear styles. “But for now… I don’t need to be protected. I don’t want anyone to ‘save’ me. I just want to have some fun while my buzz lasts.”

“Fishing is fun,” I protested, mock-offended. “But riding motorbikes down the beach, that’s fuckin’ FUN, girl…”

She squeezed my shoulders. “I’m being just a little bit serious, Angus.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t do serious very well. I’d apologise for it, but I can’t be fucked being serious long enough to apologise about anything.”

She bit her bottom lip, considering her options.

“Which would make you, by definition… fun, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Like you say, I’m a fucking rock star, babe. Fun is my job description.”

“Cool,” she said. “Take me to bed then.”

The sunrise streamed through my bedroom window, ladling luscious luminescence generously across the pretty blonde girl with the dimpled, ironic smile, who still somehow thought she was a short, dumpy, injury-ravaged mess with a crooked nose. I was pretending to be asleep, because it let me watch her in peace. Unfortunately I wasn’t watching her sleep, I was watching her get ready to leave. She’d found her running gear, even returned the shirt she’d borrowed, which gave me one less excuse to drop by hers in the future. I’d been surprised she’d stayed the night. Not because she didn’t seem to want to – and she wanted to very, very much, judging by how we’d spent the early hours of the morning – but because I was waiting for the inevitable crash. The regret, the shame, the guilt, the I-can’t-ever-see-you-again. Hours before while she’d still had her ‘buzz’, she’d seemed sanguine about it. “Figure I’m going to regret this anyway,” she’d explained, “so why not regret it properly? Might as well earn all that lovely shame and guilt and self-loathing...”

“Last chance,” I offered. “Work, or fun. Your choice.”

“Work,” she said flatly. “I work for my family, remember. If one of them doesn’t see me sometime soon, there’ll be a search party sent after me.”

There was no crash, not that I could see, not while she was with me. She’d assured me it would come, she knew herself well enough by now, but I wouldn’t see it, I wouldn’t know about it, and she’d come out the other side pretty much unscathed, probably, so it wasn’t any concern of mine. She was a little subdued, a little defensive, but she mostly just seemed tired. I remembered Jessica at the end of our time together, she’d been the same. It’s what I do to people, apparently. Then again, we’d also had the same sort of experience drawing the relationship to a close.

Beth slipped a hand into the pocket of her loose-fitting jogging shorts.

“Finally remembered the reason I came here last night,” she admitted.

“Yeah?”

She tossed a dark blue shape towards me. It bounced, more because I wasn’t quick enough with morning lack-of-reflexes than through any lack of accuracy on her part, but I scooped it up on the half-volley, still curled up in the sheets. It was a rounded box around the size of the palm of my hand, lined with a velvety material. I knew without opening it what it contained, but I opened it anyway.

“Merry Christmas,” she smiled wistfully. “Buy yourself something nice.”

With that, she turned and walked out of the room. I heard the front door close behind her moments after I’d tossed the engagement ring onto the bedside table and sagged back into the sheets. They, like the room and me, lingered with sweat and Stella, and all the other scents of love having been made. I had a million things I should have been doing, but I stayed there, staring at the ceiling, for a lot longer than I should. Then I staggered out of bed and fucked off downstairs to find my copy of Hayabusa's Skunk Works in order to crank Exit Strategy as loud as the morning would allow.

Get in their head, get under their skin, and leave them wanting more. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to break up with someone.