One Perfect Summer

it on,’ I say in a monotone.
    She doesn’t say another word; she just gets her laptop out of a drawer and places it on my lap. The DVD is still inside and the movie is halfway through, so all she has to do is press Play.
    I recognise his voice instantly. He’s talking about fighting, but I can’t see his face. All I can see is a figure in a dark-grey hoodie punching a punch bag, while his commentary plays over the top. And then suddenly the hooded figure attacks the bag with a high, powerful kick and his hoodie flies back to reveal his face. I nearly knock the computer off my knees in shock. Lizzy swiftly takes it from me before I break it.
    ‘It’s Joe!’ I gasp.
    My friend’s face is wracked with anxiety. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know if I should show it to you . . .’
    ‘It’s Joe,’ I say again. ‘It’s him.’ I feel breathless and dizzy, like I’m going to faint.
    ‘I’m so sorry, Alice.’ She’s fretful and worried.
    ‘You’d better get Jessie,’ I say.
    She looks perplexed. ‘Why?’
    ‘You’d better get him.’ I don’t know why. I just need him here. I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience. She calls him on her phone, but I don’t take in what she’s saying. I’m staring at the laptop on the dressing table. I daren’t put the movie back on again.
    She ends the call and comes to sit next to me. She takes my hand. Mine is limp.
    ‘I thought I recognised him, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure,’ she says. ‘He looks . . .’
    ‘Different,’ I interject. He’s cut his hair – it’s short and black – and his body is more muscular and toned. ‘What happened to him?’ I whisper.
    ‘I don’t know.’ She shakes her head.
    ‘Why didn’t he come for me?’ My eyes fill with tears.
    She squeezes my hand. There’s nothing she can say about that.
    ‘I know this is all really big.’ She waves her hands around her. ‘But you don’t have to go through with it. It’s not too late. You could still track him down.’ She picks up the DVD case. ‘It says on the credits his name is Joseph Strike,’ she tells me.
    ‘Joseph Strike?’ I ask with dulled surprise. ‘Not Joe Strickwold?’
    ‘No. Joseph Strike. I guess it sounds better. It’s more showbiz.’
    I don’t know him anymore. It hits me like a ton of bricks. The Joe I knew wouldn’t have changed his name. Maybe he’s altered beyond all recognition. He won’t be the boy I once knew. I know Lukas. I know where I stand with him. I’m not going to hurt him like Joe hurt me.
    ‘Tell Jessie not to come,’ I say in a flat voice.
    ‘What? Why?’
    ‘I need to get dressed.’
    She looks startled as I calmly stand up. ‘Alice,’ she says.
    ‘And you need to get dressed too,’ I add. I can’t meet her eyes.
    ‘Don’t you want to watch any more of it?’ she asks in a gentle voice.
    ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘There’s no point.’
    I’m not me as I walk in a daze down that long, long aisle lined with over four hundred guests – most of whom I don’t know. I see Jessie’s red hair in my peripheral vision as I pass him, but I don’t look his way; I don’t want his sympathy. I hold my dad’s slightly shaking arm tightly as he guides me towards married life with my new husband. My husband who is not and who will never be my first love, and that’s got to be okay because I can’t turn back now.
    I see Lukas up at the end watching me solemnly as I approach and I remind myself that I love him. It doesn’t matter that I don’t feel it right now, right this second. At this very moment, I feel numb. I don’t feel anything at all.
    Twenty minutes later we’re married.



 
    It’s like someone drugged me the day I got married. I wasn’t me. I managed to shut out that DVD and barely think of Joe as I flittered around like a social bloody butterfly, making small talk in a foreign language and ignoring my friends because they knew way, way, way too much about the old Alice. That Alice was dead and buried. And I didn’t even mourn her.
    Not at first, anyway. And certainly not for the first four days of our honeymoon. Then reality started to set in. I had to nurse Lukas because he got ‘food poisoning’, which turned out to be a stomach bug. Naturally I caught it and consequently spent a miserable day throwing up my guts in our suite-on-stilts in the Maldives while he went on a full-day’s dive trip. Sitting there in a cold sweat on our immaculate bathroom floor in front of a