Chapter Thirteen
Auckland, 1997
By the late nineties, I had lost my way so thoroughly that I was beginning to think I would never find it again. I was still in New Zealand, which I had neither planned on nor could account for, and the longer I stayed there, the more remote and unreachable London seemed. Partly it was the plane fare, too princely a sum for my meager restaurant wages, and partly it was a state of mind. After that first nonreunion with my father, I had simply hung about in Auckland, found a flat and drifted through university, then become too useless to save up enough to leave the country. I understood what everyone meant about being stranded in paradise, that if you couldn’t get out, it turned into a prison.
At twenty-two, I was working in a faux-French restaurant on Christmas Eve when Scott, my first love and nemesis, walked back into my life and asked me to marry him.
The evening had not begun well. When I arrived at six for my shift, the place was packed with red-faced office workers who’d been drinking buckets of chardonnay and eating nothing since lunchtime. Anton, the maitre d’, was already in a state of high agitation—too much speed, too early on, I supposed—and the second I appeared in the kitchen, he threw an apron at me and told me to get straight out on the floor.
“But I’m early,” I protested. “Can I at least have breakfast?”
“Babe,” he said, tossing the remains of a steak béarnaise into the scraps bin, “it isn’t my fault you fucking just got out of bed.”
Lately, I had been keeping vampire hours, going to bed sometime around dawn and getting up a few hours before work started at five or six. That afternoon, I’d slept in and had had just enough time to shower, dress in my waiter’s uniform, and race down to a department store on the main street to pick up Lily’s Christmas present. Rowan had already paid for the present and had given me detailed instructions on where to pick it up. The next day, she was expecting me to arrive in Hamilton with the gift in time for Christmas lunch. It was the first time in years that I’d been invited—the year before they had flown to Rarotonga without telling me—and I was trying not to believe it was only because they’d needed a courier.
For dinner I had two short black coffees and a sneaky cigarette on the kitchen fire escape, where I hoped Anton wouldn’t find me. I was still out there, sneaking a second, when I glanced into the restaurant and saw a familiar figure heading for the men’s toilet: Scott. The scoop of his neck, the quiff at the front of his hair, the slope of his nose—his features were as familiar to me as my own, maybe more so. And that brief sighting was all it took for my mood and confidence to plummet.
The last time I’d seen Scott was a few weeks after we broke up, at least a month before. He had summoned me to his flat on a Sunday morning with no explanation other than that he had something to tell me. I had gone eagerly—I still wasn’t over him—and had stood on the porch with a swelling of hope in my heart. With barely a greeting, he had guided me to the living room, and told me to sit down on a wooden dining chair that had been placed in front of the stereo.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Scott kneeled on the floor next to my chair and pressed play. “Listen carefully to the lyrics,” he said, then put his head in my lap.
I recognized the opening bars immediately. It was Elvis, his favorite, my least, and a track that was slow and saccharine.
The first line, “Maybe I didn’t treat you . . . quite as good as I should have,” had been a doozie. But as the song went on, I became confused. When Elvis pleaded, “Tell me that your sweet love hasn’t died,” I wondered, did Scott want me back? Or did he just want me to want him back? I wasn’t even sure, now that it seemed to be on the table, if that’s what I wanted. Which had been the problem all along. When I wasn’t with Scott, I pined for him, like a lost limb, but when he was in the same room, as he was now, I felt nothing—not just for him but full stop. My emotions went blank, along with my mind. The longing was gone but his being there erased me, turned me into a cipher, and I didn’t know which of those two things was worse.
At the end of the song, Scott had stood up and I saw that he had been crying. “Now you know exactly how I feel,” he’d said, apparently proud of having expressed himself so clearly. But I was baffled. I had been about to ask him what he wanted to do about these feelings he had, when he announced that he had to go into the office, but he could give me a lift somewhere seeing as it was raining. That was it, and that was Scott: chivalrous and cold in equal measure.