The Girl You Left Behind

that ultimately, it’s just a
     painting.’
    Paul stares at his brother’s
     back.
It’s never just a painting, he thinks.
    Jake is at a friend’s house. Paul
     arrives to pick him up at three thirty, as arranged, and Jake slopes out of the
     friend’s front door, his hair mussed, his jacket hanging over his shoulders in
     apparent preparation for his adolescent years. It never ceases to shock him, the
     familiar jolt, the umbilical nature, of parental love. Some days he struggles not to
     embarrass his son with the depth of his love for him. He wraps an elbow around the
     boy’s neck, hooks him towards him and drops a casual kiss on his head as they set
     off for the tube station. ‘Hey, fella.’
    ‘Hi, Dad.’
    Jake is cheerful, pointing out the various
     permutations of a new electronic game. Paul nods and smiles in the right places, but
     even as he does so, he finds he’s conducting aparallel
     argument in his head. He keeps working it over silently. What should he say to her?
     Should he tell her the truth? Will she understand if he explains it to her? Should he
     just steer clear? The job is everything, after all. He learned that a long time ago.
    But as he sits beside his son, watching his
     thumbs flicking on the controls, his total absorption in the pixelated game, his mind
     drifts. He feels Liv, soft and yielding against him afterwards, sees the drowsy way she
     lifted her eyes to his, as if she were dazed by the depth of her feelings.
    ‘Did you get a new house
     yet?’
    ‘Nope. Not yet.’
    I can’t stop thinking about you.
    ‘Can we go for a pizza
     tonight?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Mm.’ He nods. The hurt on her
     face as he had turned to leave. She was so transparent, every emotion registering on her
     face as if, like her house, she had never known what she should conceal.
    ‘And ice cream?’
    ‘Sure.’
    I’m terrified. But in a good way.
    And he had run. Without a word of
     explanation.
    ‘Will you buy me Super Mario Smash
     Bros for my Nintendo?’
    ‘Don’t push your luck,’ he
     says.
    The weekend stretches, is weighed down by
     silence. Mo comes and goes. Her new verdict on Paul: ‘Divorced Toxic Bachelor.
     Worst variety of species.’ She makes Liv alittle clay model of
     him, and urges her to stick things in it.
    Liv has to admit that Mini Paul’s hair
     is alarmingly accurate. ‘You think this will give him stomach ache?’
    ‘I can’t guarantee it. But
     it’ll make you feel better.’
    Liv picks up a cocktail stick and
     tentatively gives Mini Paul a belly button, then feels immediately guilty and smoothes
     it over with her thumb. She can’t quite reconcile this version of Paul with what
     she knows, but she is smart enough to grasp that some things are not worth dwelling on,
     so she has taken Mo’s advice and run until she has given herself shin splints. She
     has cleaned the Glass House from top to bottom. She has binned the shoes with
     butterflies. She has checked her phone four times, then turned it off, hating herself
     for caring.
    ‘That’s feeble. You
     haven’t even broken his toes. You want me to have a go for you?’ says Mo,
     inspecting the little model on Monday morning.
    ‘No. It’s fine.
     Really.’
    ‘You’re too soft. Tell you what,
     when I get home we’ll ball him up and turn him into an ashtray.’ When Liv
     returns to the kitchen Mo has stuck fifteen matches into the top of his head.
    Two pieces of work come in on Monday. One,
     some catalogue copy for a direct-marketing company, is littered with grammatical and
     spelling errors. By six o’clock Liv has altered so much of it that she has pretty
     much written the whole thing. The word rate is terrible. She doesn’t care. She is
     so relieved to be working instead of thinking that she might well write Forbex Solutions
     a whole extra catalogue for free.
    The doorbell rings. Mo will have left her
     keys at work.She unfolds herself from the desk, stretches, and heads
     for the entryphone.
    ‘You left them on the side.’
    ‘It’s Paul.’
    She freezes. ‘Oh. Hi.’
    ‘Can I come up?’
    ‘You really don’t have to. I
     –’
    ‘Please? We need to talk.’
    There is no time to check her face or brush
     her hair. She stands, one finger on the door button, hesitating. She depresses it, then
     moves back, like someone bracing themselves for an explosion.
    The lift rattles its way up, and she feels
     her stomach constrict as the sound grows louder. And then