The Girl You Left Behind

photocopy and places her notes back
     inside her bag.
    Mo pulls off her earphones. ‘So. Half
     an hour to St Pancras. Do you think you got what you wanted?’
    She shrugs. She cannot speak past the huge
     lump that has risen in her throat.
    Mo’s hair is scraped back into
     jet-black furrows from her face, her cheeks milk pale. ‘You nervous about
     tomorrow?’
    Liv swallows and flashes a weak smile. She
     has thought about almost nothing else for the past six weeks.
    ‘For what it’s worth,’ Mo
     says, as if she has been thinking about it for some time, ‘I don’t think
     McCafferty set you up.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I know loads of crappy, mendacious
     people. He’s not one of them.’ She picks at a piece of skin on her thumb,
     then says, ‘I think Fate just decided to play a really sick joke and dump you both
     on opposing sides.’
    ‘But he didn’t have to come
     after my painting.’
    Mo lifts an eyebrow.
     ‘Really?’
    Liv stares out of the window as the train
     rolls towards London, fighting a new lump in her throat.
    Across the table, the couple bedecked in
     tinsel are leaning against each other. They have fallen asleep, their hands
     entwined.
    Later she is not entirely sure what makes
     her do it. Mo announces at St Pancras that she is heading over to Ranic’s house,
     leaving Liv with instructions not to stay on the Internet all night looking up obscure
     restitution cases, and to please stick that Camembert in the fridge before it escapes
     and poisons the whole house. Liv stands in the teeming concourse, holding a plastic bag
     of stinking cheese and watching the little dark figure as she headstowards the Underground, a bag slung nonchalantly over her shoulder. There is
     something both jaunty and solid in the way Mo talks about Ranic; a sense that something
     has shifted for both of them.
    She waits until Mo has vanished into the
     crowd. The commuters wash around and past her, a stepping-stone in a stream of people.
     They are all in pairs, arms linked, chatting, casting fond, excited looks at each other,
     or if alone, head down, determinedly heading home to the person they love. She sees
     wedding bands, engagement rings, hears snatches of murmured conversations about train
     times, last-minute pints of milk, and
Can you pick me up from the station?
Afterwards she will think sensibly about the many people who dread the partner they
     return to, look for excuses not to board the train, hide in bars. But for now the bored
     people, the miserable people, the other lonely people are invisible. She reads the crowd
     as if it can only be an affront to her single state. I was one of you once, she thinks,
     and can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be one of them again.
    I never knew real happiness until you.
    The departure board flickers its new
     destinations, the glass-fronted shops packed with late Christmas shoppers. Is it ever
     possible to be the person you once were? she wonders. And before she can be completely
     paralysed by the answer, Liv takes hold of her suitcase and half walks, half runs to the
     Underground station.
    There is a peculiar quality to the silence
     in the flat when Jake has gone back to his mother. It is a solid, weighty thing,
     entirely different from the quiet that occurs whenhe goes to a
     friend’s for a few hours. The acute stillness of his home in those hours is, he
     sometimes thinks, tinged with guilt; a sense of failure. It is weighed down by the
     knowledge that there is no chance his son will come back for at least four days. Paul
     finishes clearing up the kitchen (Jake had been making chocolate Krispie cakes – puffed
     rice is scattered under every kitchen appliance) – then sits, staring at the Sunday
     paper he picks up each week out of habit and invariably fails to read.
    In the early days after Leonie left, he
     dreaded the early mornings most. He hadn’t known how much he loved the irregular
     pad of little Jake’s bare feet and the sight of him, his hair standing on end, his
     eyes half closed, appearing in their bedroom to demand to climb in between them. The
     exquisite icy chill of his feet; the warm, yeasty scent of his skin. That visceral
     sense, once his son had burrowed into the middle of their bed, that all was well with
     the world. And then, after they’d gone, those early months of waking up alone,
     feeling as if each morning simply heralded another day he would miss of his son’s
     life. Another series of