‘Just one more drink.'
‘You can flirt with me all you like, but I'm still not serving you.'
‘I feel woozy,' said Dan. He paused to consider the word: Whoozy? Whoozie? ‘How do you spell woozy?'
‘I spell it p-i-s-s-e-d.' Sean said sympathetically, ‘You're not yourself tonight. What's going on?'
‘I don't know. I think I'm having an out-of-body experience. Am I floating? I feel as if I'm floating. Don't look at me like that,' said Dan. ‘I'm going through a horrible, horrible time.'
‘You mean not being able to work?' Sean indicated the sling around his neck and the aluminium crutch hooked over the side of the bar.
‘Not that. Worse than that.' He really did feel as if he were floating now.
‘Girl problems?'
‘Kind of.' Dan paused, suddenly overcome with the need to confide the truth. ‘Honestly? It's killing me, and there's nothing in the world I can do about it.'
‘Something to do with Patsy?' Sean suddenly looked really concerned.
Dan shook his head – whoa, more fuzziness – and said, ‘Not Patsy. Someone else. I want to tell you but I can't. Because that's the thing,' he went on helplessly. ‘I can't tell anyone. It's the biggest secret of my life.'
‘We have a guest,' Sean announced thirty minutes later.
Dan nodded and pointed to his own chest. ‘It's me.'
‘So I see.' Amused, Will cleared the slew of boxing magazines out of the way, then jumped up and helped him on to the sofa. ‘Hello, guest, how are you doing? What's going on?'
‘Hi, Will. Sorry about this. Sean thinks I need looking after.'
‘He took some of Patsy's prescription painkillers, then came down to the pub and had a few drinks. Because he's a complete idiot.' Sean shook his head good-naturedly. ‘Patsy'll be asleep by now, so I think it's best if we just keep an eye on him here.'
‘Like a homeless dog.' Dan pulled an appropriately mournful face.
‘Like an overmedicated homeless dog with a broken foot and a smashed-up shoulder.' Will grinned. ‘So, are you ready to crash out or can I get you a coffee?'
‘I don't want to sleep. I can't sleep.' Dan considered the limited options; they were unlikely to offer him a glass of red wine. ‘Coffee, please. Coffee would be good. We can just chat, can't we?' He was oh so in the mood to talk.
‘We'll all have coffee.' Sean nodded soothingly and looked at Will. ‘Dan's been going through a hard time recently.'
‘I have.' Dan nodded too and felt his head do that swimmy thing again. ‘I am.'
‘Oh no. Girlfriend trouble?' said Will.
‘He can't tell us what it's about,' said Sean.
‘I'd really like to.' Dan shrugged, forgetting how much it would hurt. ‘Ow, dammit.' He gazed helplessly at the pair of them; they'd been through difficult times themselves, hadn't they? Yet his dilemma was different.
‘That's fine,' Will reassured him. ‘I'll make the coffee.'
‘I want to talk about it, more than anything. But I mustn't,' said Dan. ‘I just mustn't.' He held the index finger of his left hand up to his mouth to show how discreet he was. ‘It's a great big secret.'
Chapter 28
‘ … I don't know what to do, I wish I didn't feel like this but there isn't any way to make it stop.' Dan rubbed his good hand over his stubbly jawline. ‘I love her, I just really and truly love her. And the thing is, I love her too much to risk ever doing anything about it.'
There, he could hardly believe he'd said them, but the words were out. It had been like jamming a nail into a car tyre and hearing the hiss of air escaping under pressure, except instead of air it had been his deepest, darkest and most personal confession spilling out.
Oh God, though, the anguish it had caused him over the years.
Sean and Will were looking pretty startled too. As well they might.
‘Seriously?' said Sean.
‘I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true.'
‘And you just suddenly realised this … what, last week?'
Ha, if only. Dan shook his head. ‘Longer ago than that. Much longer.'
‘How much longer?' said Will.
‘Ooh, give or take a few days, it'll be nine years now.'
‘What?'
Dan even knew the day; he could pin it down to the exact moment. He'd replayed it in his mind a thousand times. ‘Remember the week in St Ives? That holiday we all went on together after I'd finished my A levels and Lily had just taken her GCSEs?'
Dan watched Sean nod in agreement. Of course Sean remembered; he'd still been married to Patsy at the time. The three of them had gone down to Cornwall with Coral, Nick and Lily, staying in a fantastic hotel overlooking the main surfing beach. The weather had been kind to them, hot sunny days melting into balmy nights. He'd met a girl whose name he'd long forgotten, and Lily had teased him because the girl had this way of gazing at him as if he were some kind of superstar. And he'd laughed about it because Lily was forever teasing him. They'd grown up together making merciless fun of each other. It was just what they did.
The change had happened on the last but one night of the holiday, surging out of nowhere with no warning at all. The adults – he might have been eighteen, but he wasn't one of the grown-ups – were starting a barbecue on the beach. He and Lily had been exploring the rocks over to the left of the bay …
‘Um, hello, are you actually going to tell us?' said Sean. ‘Or were you just going to sit there picturing the scene in your head?'
‘Sorry.' It was exactly what he'd been doing. ‘The evening of the barbecue. Lily was wearing a loose pink cotton sweater and jeans. I was wearing a denim shirt and orange board shorts. Lily found a baby crab in one of the rock pools. Then she spotted a bigger crab in the sea below us and said it must be the baby's mum. So I scooped up the baby crab, climbed down and slipped it back into the water. Except then another big crab crawled out from under one of the rocks in the pool and Lily said we hadn't reunited mother and baby at all, we'd actually separated them.' Was this too much detail? Dan found he couldn't bear to miss any of it out. ‘So I called her a dipstick and she called me a murderer because the baby crab would probably die without its mum. And that was when I dived off the rocks into the sea.'
‘I remember now.' Sean was nodding.
‘Well I couldn't find the baby crab. But I managed to slice my knee open on the edge of a rock underwater and came up swearing. Lily thought it was hilarious and said, ‘Is there blood? Oh look, and there's a shark heading straight for you!' Then the next moment she saw the blood spreading in the water like a cloud and jumped in with me.'
Will's eyes were wide. ‘Was there a shark?'
‘No.' Reliving the moment, Dan smiled and shook his head. ‘She just jumped in for the hell of it. With all her clothes on. We swam all the way around the rocks and made our way back to the shore. My knee was still pouring with blood and Lily called me a liability and a hopeless case. Then I sat on the beach and she rinsed all the sand out of the cut. And I looked down at the back of her head with her wet hair rippling over her shoulders and suddenly out of nowhere I realised I loved her. With all my heart. And that was when she turned to look at me and said, ‘You know what you are, don't you? A crab-murderer with an attention-seeking knee.'
For a couple of seconds the cottage was silent.
‘What happened next?' prompted Will.
‘Nothing. I couldn't do anything. Or say anything. I couldn't tell her.' Dan marvelled at the very idea. ‘She'd have laughed her head off. I'd never have lived it down. I needed time to get used to the idea, work out what I was going to do.'
‘I took you back to the hotel to get your knee bandaged up,' Sean remembered. ‘And you were meant to be spending the next day – the last day of the holiday – with that pretty girl you'd been seeing. What was her name?'
‘Can't remember.'
‘Maeve, that was it. She was from Coventry. But you called and told her you couldn't meet up after all. None of us understood why.'
‘Well now you know,' said Dan.
The light-headedness was still there, along with a sense of freedom. At long last he'd bared his soul.