‘Yeah but that’s just the point,’ Joel said, his voice devoid of emotion. ‘The thing that made your life better has ruined mine. Your happiness is my pain, because I still love her.’ He pointed to me even though he couldn’t bring his eyes to look my way. ‘But I don’t get to do that anymore – that’s your job now.’
‘Joel,’ I said stepping forward. ‘I just got off the phone with your mum. She’s in hell thinking that she’s gonna lose you.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said, brushing it off with a passive swipe of his hand.
‘I know that you’re hurting and that I said some things last night that I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry for anything I did to hurt you.’ I felt myself on the verge of crying and in the distance, I heard the sound of not too far-off sirens. My spirits lifted a little and I took a step closer.
Joel looked from me to Charlie and then back again. ‘I can see why you love him, I really can. He’s, like, physically perfect and exotic and seems to have his shit together. He’s everything I’m not.’
‘I wouldn’t call Westport, County Mayo, exotic.’ Charlie chuckled nervously. ‘And believe me, I’m not as together as you seem to think I am. I’m unemployed, widowed, completely lost. The world doesn’t give a feck what I’m doin’,’ he said, holding his arms aloft. ‘I have no person in this world who needs me and yet, I decided to stay because I found a glimmer of hope.’ The sirens were close now and Joel was beginning to notice them too.
I watched Charlie as he spoke the words. It was as if he was looking at a mirror image, telling himself exactly what he had needed to hear on that night he’d called me. ‘You seen Castaway?’ he asked. ‘Tom Hanks. Plane Crash. WILSON!’ The sound of sirens was right below us now. From the sound of it, there was more than one car down there.
‘Yeah I’ve seen it,’ Joel replied, glancing over his shoulder at the drop and flinching as if filled with a sudden fear.
‘Well, there’s this bit at the end, where he’s been rescued and he’s talkin’ to his mate about a time when he planned to throw himself from the cliffs instead of be lonely for one more day and he says that he’s got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will come up, and who knows what the tide will bring along.’
‘But what if the tide brings nothing?’ Joel asked.
‘Then it brings nothing and you ask yourself the same question another day. But for now, you give the tide a chance to come up with somethin’.’
I couldn’t help it now. The tears were dripping from my chin onto the bird-mess-spattered floor.
‘Please, Joel,’ I sobbed and, finally, he turned his eyes to me. ‘Please, don’t do this. In time you’ll see that this was the best thing for both of us. We couldn’t have carried on the way we were. I was miserable and so were you.’ I swallowed hard and stepped forward. ‘Just because it didn’t work for us doesn’t mean it won’t with someone else.’
Joel looked me dead in the eyes, his face draining of emotion, and Charlie inched forward. ‘I don’t want anyone else.’
His foot moved so slightly that I didn’t even see it, as he stepped from the ledge and the bottom fell out of my stomach.
‘Joel!’ I screamed as he fell. Charlie had moved before Joel had even inched his foot backwards, his hands reaching out and grabbing at his shirt. He flung himself down at the edge, his body flat against the brickwork and the momentum of Joel’s weight carrying him towards the edge. I ran forward, flinging myself down onto the floor as well and grabbing Charlie’s legs as a counterweight.
‘I got him!’ Charlie shouted back to me. ‘I got him!’
There was a sound behind me as a police officer appeared.
‘Hello, miss,’ the police officer said. I looked up and saw a young woman’s face, round and familiar in some way, although my brain wasn’t capable of figuring out from where right now. ‘I need you to hold on while the officers get him, okay?’ she asked as two police officers moved either side of Charlie and began taking Joel’s weight. I listened as she used a calm voice to reassure me, my fingernails still digging into the denim of Charlie’s jeans as I felt the physical weight of everything I was holding in my two hands. I held the only two men I had ever loved. I held my future and my past and I didn’t want to let go of either of them.
It was midnight before Charlie and I arrived home. Ned and Mum had come to pick us up and, unbeknownst to us, had been waiting at hospital for us for hours. Rachel had gone off with Joel, I assume to check him in to somewhere he couldn’t hurt himself. I’d tried to talk to him afterwards, but he didn’t want to see me and so Rachel had just told me to go home.
Mum made us tea and tried to
