When I wake up on Saturday morning, feeling almost but not quite hungover, and remember getting that email from Tadhg’s employee the night before, I can’t reach out and read it on my phone.
Ever since Dave and I broke up – that’s how I describe it to other people, because it sounds better than ‘ever since Dave dumped me’, as if it might have been a mutual decision rather than something he did purely of his own volition, a horrific and initially utterly incomprehensible shock – anyway, ever sincethathappened, I’ve stopped having my phone in my bedroom at night.
Dave had been a bit distant for a while before that evening last year, but we’d had a stressful few months.It never crossed mymind for a second that he would end things.Until I came home from work one Friday and found him sitting on the couch with a small suitcase at his feet.
‘Laura.’He cleared his throat.
‘What’s this?’I pointed at the suitcase and smiled.‘Oh wow, did you book that spa hotel again?’
I seriously thought he was going to whisk me off on a surprise weekend away.God, I was so stupid.
Dave looked really uncomfortable.
‘Um, no,’ he said.‘Laura, I don’t … I can’t …’ He stared at his hands.‘We need to talk.’
‘About what?’He was scaring me now.‘Are you all right?’
Dave stood up, walked to the window and then walked back to the sofa.I’d never seen him so agitated before.‘Okay.Okay, I have to just say it.’He took a deep breath.‘I don’t think this is working.’
I stared at him.He wasn’t making sense.‘What are you talking about?What’s not working?’
He looked at the ceiling.At the floor.Anywhere except at me.
And eventually he said, ‘Us.’
‘What?’
He couldn’t be saying what I thought he was saying.Could he?
‘But … but we’re getting married in three months!’I said.
Dave looked like he was on the verge of tears, but he didn’t say anything.
And in that moment I could feel my life begin to fall apart.
The weeks after the break-up are still kind of a blur.I don’t think I quite believed Dave was doing this to me, even when he went to stay with a friend for a few days and then came back to assure me he wasn’t seeing anyone else and it was agreed – by which I mean Dave suggested it and I nodded mutely, because I had stopped crying and begging him to stay by then – that because he earned just about enough from his design job at a tech giant to cover the rent and I didn’t, he would stay in our nice flat and I would move into Katie and Jeanne’s spare room.So I left the home I had made with the man I thought I was going to marry, and I haven’t talked to him since.
After I moved out I was determined that Dave would not see any signs of sadness or weakness in me ever again.From now on, he would think I was totally fine.Better than fine.He would think I was having the time of my fucking life.For some inexplicable reason, I decided that, as part of me showing Dave that I was doing brilliantly, I wouldn’t unfollow him or block him on social media.Why would I need to?I was fine with seeing his life!I didn’t care that most of our mutual friends turned out to be his friends and I now only saw them in the photos of nights out he posted on his Instagram stories.And if he was going out with a girl called Lizwho had appeared in lots of those stories over the last six months, and I was pretty sure he was, then I was fine with that too!
But although I continued to follow him, I was afraid of accidentally liking a photo or story or, worse, leaving a soon-to-be-regretted comment during late-night or early-morning doomscrolling.So I started leaving my phone in the kitchen at night, and now I sleep much better as a result.
And so when I wake up, instead of rereading Tadhg’s assistant’s message, I get up, wrap myself in my dressing gown and reach under my bed.Then I pull out the dusty case containing my acoustic guitar from where it’s been lying ever since I moved into this room eight months ago.I take the guitar out of its case, sit down on the bed and then – I do nothing.It’s been so long since I’ve played the guitar, I can’t even bring myself to touch the strings.But I think about playing it.And playing the song Tadhg wants to talk about.
We always called it ‘our song’ but that was just because I never got round to writing proper lyrics for it so it never got a proper name.It was my song, really.We both knew that, or at least I thought we did.My chords, my melody, my lyrics (such as they were).But I, or we, never finished it.We both knew it needed something else, something neither of us could quite capture back when we were twenty-one.A lead guitar line.A ‘middle eight’ – the bit of a song after the second chorus that has a different melody to the chorus and verses.We both suggested a few chords and guitar lines, but they never worked, somehow.So the song remained unfinished.
And now Tadhg wants us to finish it.Or at least he wants to make sure I don’t cause a stink if he claims it, bangs a few extra chords into it and presents it as his own.Well, we’ll see about that.He might be a megastar who can usually have whatever he wants, but this ismysong.I’m struck by how protective I suddenly feel about it, about those chords I wrote in my bedroom when I was twenty-one, on a day when my emotions were too big to fit into any song lyrics.The idea of him claiming it, of it being praised or criticised as another Tadhg Hennessy song, maybe just an album track, its true authorship unknown to everyone … it feels like just another thing being taken away from me.And way too many things have been taken away from me over the last year.
God, I really am a bit hungover.I need some tea.That first pre-breakfast cup of the day is like a sacred ritual for me, and I’m very particular about the tea itself.Strong but lots of milk, and a tiny bit of sugar – I hate other people making tea for me because even when I say ‘Just a quarter of a teaspoon!’they put in way too much.I put the guitar back in its case and go downstairs to put the kettle on.My phone is next to it on the kitchen counter, and while the kettle boils I read Tara Kelleher’s mail again.
Tadhg is currently in Dublin, and ideally we would set up a meeting and resolve this as soon as possible.If this is amenable to you, please contact me at this email address or at the number below.
I’m not sure it is particularly amenable, but I do know that I’m going to contact Tara Kelleher.I think I knew it the minute I read the email.
When my tea is ready I sit down at the kitchen table and then, without quite realising what I’m doing, I pick up my phone again, open the browser and google the words ‘Tadhg Hennessy’.I’m just about to click on ‘News’ when a cheery voice behind me cries, ‘Morning!’
I drop my phone.
‘Oh God, what are you up to?’Katie’s platinum locks are sporting a serious case of bedhead and she’s wearing a dressing gown and Ugg boots, but she still looks a lot more sprightly than I do this morning.‘You’re not thinking of texting Dave, are you?Don’t make me hide your phone again …’
