We Were On a Break Read online

  I nodded. No sign of any tall, blond men at all. David must have been seeing things.

  ‘Anyone would think it was his birthday,’ I said.

  Mum placed a hand on my forearm and smiled. We looked so much alike, it sometimes scared me. Same round blue eyes, same small, upturned nose and, thanks to the good people at Nice ’n Easy, the exact same shade of soft, ashy blonde hair. It wasn’t difficult to look at my mum and see exactly where my life could go if I let it carry on running its untended course and that wasn’t an entirely comforting thought.

  ‘Olivia,’ she said, gently squeezing my arm. ‘You do know, your father and I love you very much, don’t you?’

  I felt all the colour leave my face and the floor rushed up towards me.

  ‘Oh god,’ I whispered, steadying myself with a hand on her shoulder. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’

  ‘And of course, you know we adore Adam.’ Mum’s face brightened at the mention of my sort-of boyfriend’s name, ignoring my question and doing a good job of distracting me. They adored Adam? This was news. Even though they hadn’t exactly openly dismissed him, Mum never failed to remind me how well Darren McLachlan, my date to the Year Seven Valentine’s dance, was doing. Darren was a dentist in Australia, owned his own surgery as well as a four-bedroomed house, and flew his parents out to visit twice a year. Of course, Darren was also incredibly gay, something that seemed to have escaped their Facebook notice.

  ‘His business is going well, his dad tells me. He’s working on a big project?’

  ‘He’s designing a bar,’ I said, searching the room and still coming up empty. Why did David think he’d seen him? No one in the room topped five foot six, including himself. ‘Down in London.’

  ‘That’s …’ she rolled her gold locket around in her fingers while she searched for just the right word. ‘Nice.’

  All that effort for ‘Nice.’

  ‘It’s huge,’ I corrected. ‘It’s amazing actually.’

  Regardless of what was happening between us, I still felt defensive of him. Winning a job like this wasn’t nice, it was wonderful. He’d been up against so much competition and he’d worked so hard on his proposal. Adam had been working away on tiny projects and assisting other people for years. This was the first chance he’d had to really design something big, something impressive, and I was jump-on-the-table, shout-it-to-the-world-and-not-even-care-if-my-knickers-were-showing, proud of him.

  ‘If you say so,’ Mum said, such a mixed expression on her face. ‘I’m happy if you’re happy. Oh, Olivia. It’s all happening at once, isn’t it?’

  And the rush of pride rolled away, leaving me alone in my uncertain relationship status, standing in the middle of my dad’s birthday party, wearing a borrowed dress with a fistful of loo roll shoved down my bra, defending a man who couldn’t even bother to dump me properly.

  ‘Hello, everyone.’

  I looked up to see my dad on the stage wearing a smile and his best suit, leaning over a too short microphone stand. The last time I’d seen my dad anywhere near a microphone, he was three brandies over his Christmas limit, Abi was trying to teach him how to play SingStar and he was half-singing, half-sobbing along with a Benny and the Jets, while my mum took herself off to the kitchen with an unopened bottle of Baileys. Adam had been an absolute champion, sitting through three rounds of high-pitched ‘Bennys’ before joining in. I had rewarded him with a very quiet quickie in my childhood bedroom. My cheeks got hot at the memory and I gave myself a shake, turning my attention back to the stage.

  ‘I wanted to thank you all for coming along tonight, it’s lovely to see so many people in one place and it not be a funeral.’

  Everyone in the room laughed uncomfortably while Mum gripped my hand tightly and began to shake. Bless everyone for not realizing he wasn’t joking.

  ‘I wasn’t terribly excited about being sixty-five,’ he went on, still leaning awkwardly over the mic stand. ‘That’s nearly nine and a half in dog years and I was very worried I might have to put myself down.’

  Abi and David howled. Mum and I whimpered. The rest of the room fell silent.

  ‘Ah, bit of vet humour there,’ Dad added. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t looking forward to my birthday, wasn’t looking forward to becoming a pensioner. It’s not a sexy word, is it? Pensioner.’

  ‘Did he just say sexy?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been watching Channel Four when I go to the WI,’ she replied. ‘It’s the only possible explanation.’

  ‘But just now I was talking to some friends, I’m sure you all know Mary and Clive Floyd—’ Dad paused to flap a hand at Adam’s parents who gave regal waves to the assembled guests. ‘And they reminded me of a very good point. Life isn’t over just yet. In fact, it really is just beginning, and Lesley and I have got a lot of adventures ahead of us.’

  Adventures? Dad’s idea of being adventurous was to drive out to the big Tesco on a Saturday.

  ‘There are so many wonderful things ahead of us.’ He peered into the crowd, pushing his glasses up his nose, eyes finally settling on Mum and me. His face lit up and he straightened slightly. ‘I definitely owe Lesley a few holidays. And who knows what else, hopefully a few grandchildren eventually.’

  A murmur ran around the room and I wondered how many text messages I’d get before the end of the night to congratulate me on the baby.

  ‘But before she runs off and makes me a granddad, I’d like to ask my little Livvy up to the stage. Come on, Dr Addison, don’t be shy.’

  No one was ever going to refer to me as an attention-seeker but I’d definitely never been described as shy. I could hold my own at karaoke and that one time me and Cassie saw Helen Mirren in the street, I was the one who asked her for a selfie, but there was something decidedly terrifying about being hauled on stage unexpectedly by your dad, in front of a room full of people you’d known since birth. I’d rather be eloquently told to fuck off by any number of celebrities than stand on stage in front of my next-door neighbour, my former French teacher and the boy I’d forced my virginity upon at Abi’s eighteenth birthday party after one too many Bacardi Breezers. Or at least I was fairly certain I had, the memory was still hazy.

  ‘Go on,’ Mum said, pushing me gently towards the stage. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  ‘Get what over with?’ I asked, forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other. ‘What’s going on?’

  The crowd parted like a poorly dressed red sea as I made my way up to the stage.

  ‘Can you believe this is my little girl?’ Dad asked the crowd to a mixture of clapping, sniggering and one very inappropriate comment about my tits that came from Abi’s general direction. ‘As you all know, Olivia has been working with me at the surgery for almost, what is it now? Six years?’

  I nodded, sticking to the edge of the stage. People always said the best way to handle a crowd when you were nervous was to imagine them in their underwear. Those people had never spent a great deal of time with my neighbours.

  ‘Six years.’ My dad took a couple of short sidesteps, grabbed my hand and dragged me to the microphone. There was nowhere to hide. ‘I can hardly believe it. I took over the surgery from my dad when I was forty-two and he was sixty-six. Before him, his uncle worked as a vet on the local farms. I’ve always been so proud that Olivia followed me into the family business and I’m sure you’ll all agree, she’s a wonderful vet.’

  In the corner of the room, I saw Mrs Riley raise an eyebrow. She wouldn’t agree that I was a wonderful vet and neither would her scabby-eyed cat.

  ‘I’ve always thought of retirement as a bit of a cop out. Never saw the appeal but as my friends—’

  He paused to tip a wink to the Floyds. Adam’s mum giggled behind her hands while his dad gave her a stern nudge. ‘As my friends the Floyds reminded me, there’s a lot of life to live and, as much as I love my job, I’ve decided it’s time for me to step aside. It’s time for me to step aside and let a younger, cleverer – and if I do say so myself –
better-looking Addison take over.’

  Oh. Oh dear god.

  Polite applause rippled through the room, punctuated by David hammering on the bar and hollering his approval. Only Abi wore the same expression I felt on my own face. Complete and utter horror.

  ‘Very shortly, the only Dr Addison in Long Harrington will be Dr Olivia Addison!’ He wrapped me up in a huge hug, crushing me and my tissue boobs against his scratchy suit and peppering the top of my head with kisses, just like he did when I was five years old. ‘For as long as you are an Addison, anyway,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘My lovely Livvy.’

  ‘What?’

  I stumbled backwards as he released me, stunned by the flashes of camera phones and the rousing chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ that started somewhere near Adam’s mum and rolled around the room until everyone was singing.

  ‘I’m very proud of you,’ Dad said into the mic, feedback screeching out of the speakers. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to pass on my father’s work into my daughter’s hands and I very much hope to see the next generation of Addisons working alongside her one day.’

  The birthday chorus came to an end and the assembled guests began to clap and cheer. Dad was going to retire and I was going to have to run the entire surgery. I knew how to be a vet but I didn’t know how to run a business. I didn’t even know where the electric meter was. I couldn’t run the surgery, I didn’t want to run the surgery. Shit. Shitshitshit. Shit.

  ‘To Dr Addison!’ Dad cried into the microphone. ‘Our village vet.’

  And as the entire village chorused their approval, I saw Adam charge through the door, sweaty and red-faced and wearing a far-too-snug T-shirt with a cartoon parrot making an obscene gesture on the front.

  ‘Olivia,’ Dad whispered, waving a hand in the general direction of my cleavage. ‘There’s something, um, just there in the front of your frock.’

  I looked out into the crowd to see Abi manically grabbing her chest while David held his head in his hands before I eventually looked down to see one of my tissue boobs escaping from the front of my borrowed dress.

  Because, of course it was.

  None of this would ever have happened to James Herriot.

  9

  The drive from north London to Long Harrington should have taken two and a half hours, three at worst with the Saturday traffic going against me. But that would have been too easy. That would have left me time to go home, jump in the shower, put on something decent and arrive at Liv’s flat so we could have a proper talk, iron everything out and possibly even sneak in a make-up shag before the party.

  An hour after I’d left Tom, buzzing off my tits on the Red Bull I’d found in the glove box, I was pulled over on the hard shoulder of the A1, kneeling in six inches of mud. A flat tyre was not in my schedule, or pulling my shoulder out of its socket trying to unscrew a dozen rusted wheel nuts.

  ‘Fuck you then, you fucking piece of shit!’ I threw the wrench into the field behind me, narrowly missing a particularly judgmental-looking cow. ‘Bollocks.’

  The cow turned, pretty quickly for a cow, and carried on chewing even though she looked thoroughly scandalized.

  ‘Sorry,’ I told her, rubbing my shoulder and smearing it with five filthy oil stains. ‘I didn’t mean you. You’re not bollocks, obviously.’

  She mooed in acknowledgement before dropping a giant steaming pile of shit on top of my wrench. Apology not accepted.

  I hated calling the AA – it always felt like admitting defeat. The man who answered didn’t help, asking me a million obvious questions before finally relenting and sending someone out to save the day. I had thirty-five minutes – he’d said – to sit on the side of the road and think about what I’d done. At least it was a nice day for hanging out on the side of a motorway, choking to death on exhaust fumes and watching Middle England buzz by. Where were all the people going? What had they been doing with their day? I stared into the cars that went by slowly enough for me to make out faces.

  Almost everyone sat in the passenger seat, starring at their phones while the drivers kept one eye on the GPS, too busy listening to the match commentary or Taylor Swift to talk to each other. I watched as an elderly couple passed close to my parked Land Rover in their Volkswagen. The husband sat close to the steering wheel, his wife by his side, chattering away as they drove along at the kind of sensible speed that would drive Liv insane. Whether she liked to admit it or not, both the Nottinghamshire constabulary and myself were very familiar with her heavy left foot. I needed my Land Rover to cart around wood for work. Why on earth did she need a souped-up Fiat Punto that rattled the windows in their frames whenever she came round to mine? I couldn’t think of a single vet emergency that needed subwoofers taking up her entire boot.

  When we first started going out, we would drive out to the seaside when she got off work just to get fish and chips for our tea. I still had a video of her on my phone singing along to Adele at the top of her voice, as we cruised down the dark country roads late at night. Even though I’d washed my hands, I remembered the unmistakable stink of vinegar and coppers from the arcade games we’d played, and the smell of her conditioner which always seemed to fill the car as soon as she sat down in the driver’s seat, as I held my phone up close to my face to capture the moment. I always threatened her that I’d show it to our kids one day and she always countered by threatening to render me unable to have kids if I didn’t delete it.

  ‘WANKER.’

  I looked up to see one teenage boy hanging out the window of a Vauxhall Corsa, waving a curled palm and a bent wrist in my general direction, baseball cap on backwards while his friend in the back seat recorded the incident for posterity. Or, more likely, for the millions of people subscribed to their YouTube channel.

  ‘You’re shit! Ahhhhh!’

  ‘God, I wish I was seventeen again,’ I smiled and waved after them, instantly cheered. ‘Happy days.’

  ‘You can hardly go in dressed like that,’ announced Brian, the man from the AA, as we pulled up outside the Millstone at exactly six o’clock.

  ‘I haven’t got time to go home,’ I said. I was impossibly calm given the circumstances. An hour, I’d waited. An hour on the side of the road, followed by another hour of watching Brian try to do the exact same thing I’d spent an hour trying to do, followed by the split second it took for him to break one of the nuts and fuck my car up entirely. After that, it was an easy ninety-minute whizz up the A1 in a tow truck. I was Liv’s knight in mucky armour, arriving at the castle on my giant yellow steed. Basically, all her dreams come true.

  ‘I’ve got a T-shirt in the back,’ Brian said, cocking his head towards the shelf of a seat behind us. ‘You can have it. It’s designer.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ I replied, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs and peering into the upstairs windows of the pub. The low sun shone directly onto the glass, reflecting the tall trees back instead of giving me any sort of clue as to what was going on inside. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Going to a party, innit?’

  I stared at the tiny, bald man and tried to work out whether he was asking me a question or not.

  ‘I am going to a party,’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘You’ve gotta get changed.’ He grabbed hold of my arm as leverage, further filthying said rag, as he curled around his seat and produced a crumpled Sainsbury’s bag. ‘You can’t wear that.’

  ‘I can’t now …’ I looked down at the new black handprint on my white sleeve and frowned.

  ‘Top of the line, this is,’ Brian said proudly. ‘Too big for me, though. My cousin got it for us on holiday in Milan. Right into fashion, he is. I was going to give it to this bender what lives round the corner but you’re a big lad, it’ll fit you a treat.’

  ‘Right.’ I took the bag under my arm and gave him a tight smile in return. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘No worries, son.’ He slapped me on the back, branding me one last time. ‘Now, get in there and give her one f
rom me.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I promised, hoping against hope Brian never ever popped into my head when I was giving anyone anything, as long as I lived.

  I hadn’t felt like getting into the details with him but ninety minutes is a long time to sit in a car with someone and not talk. We exhausted his conversational offerings (football, fly fishing, the demise of FHM and why he had considered voting for UKIP in the last election but ultimately decided not to bother at all) within the first half an hour, and there’s nothing like sitting in the passenger seat to force false intimacy with a complete stranger.

  ‘Garage’ll have the car back with you on Monday, I should think,’ he said, leaning out of the cab as I clambered to the ground, screwed Sainsbury’s bag in one hand, phone in the other. ‘I can’t imagine they’ll be open tomorrow.’

  I held up a hand in as manly a farewell as I could manage before heading inside. Downstairs was fairly dead, a few young families dotted here and there, but the day drinkers had all left and the night was still young for everyone else. The room upstairs hummed with the crowd-pleasing sounds of the sixties and the staccato steps of everyone’s best shoes.

  ‘Been in the wars, lad?’

  The barman, whose name I couldn’t quite remember, gave me a nod as he polished up a tankard. I headed straight for the toilets, plastic bag in hand. Nothing like getting changed in a shitter to really set a Saturday night off to a great start.

  There weren’t any mirrors in the gents at the Millstone, save for a misty piece of shined up steel by the hand-drier but I was well aware of how bad I looked. Liv’s parents were – I suppose the most polite description I could think of was … traditional. They would not appreciate me turning up to her dad’s big birthday party covered in oil. There was every chance they might not appreciate me showing up at all and I definitely didn’t want to make matters any worse. I unbuttoned myself quickly and threw the ruined shirt in the bin, scrubbing my hands with pearlized pink soap and drying them roughly on the back of my jeans. Red raw but cleaner than before, I pulled my Italian designer T-shirt out of the plastic bag and held it up under the fluorescent yellow light.