Stunned, I said, ‘You absolutely did. You hired a van, packed your stuff, moved to Denver –’
‘Rachel, you left me.’
‘Luke, are you … okay?’ I was confused. ‘You sound a bit …’
‘You were already long gone,’ he said. ‘You and your sleeping tablets. Off in a place where I couldn’t reach you.’
‘But …’ I didn’t know where to start. ‘You know why I had to take them. And why are you ringing about this, two days later? Why didn’t you say anything on Sunday?’
‘Because …’ He paused. ‘Because I feel – felt – bad about, yeah, the end, how we … ended. But I woke in the night, like a bomb had gone off in my head. Rachel, you can’t put all the blame on me. We need a serious conversation.’
‘We needed a serious conversation six years ago but –’
‘I had a lot of serious conversations with you, Rachel, back then, plenty, and you know how much good it did me? None. So I’ll be finished with Dad in about an hour, I can come to –’
‘I can’t this evening.’ In the morning Quin was going back to New Mexico for a few days. Tonight we had plans for a movie. ‘Tomorrow night?’
‘No.’ Then, ‘What time? I’m taking Kal to the airport –’
‘She’s leaving?’
‘She’s got a gig on Friday night. I could be with you by eight-thirty, nine-ish? Too late?’
‘It’s fine. The Huntsman?’
‘A pub?’
‘It’s halfway between both of us.’
What I didn’t say was that I could get up and walk away if it got too much. This – Luke’s rage, his conviction that events had been different to the way I remembered them – had shot a swirl of dread through me, making the whole world seem inky and ominous.
The movie was no multiplex blockbuster but a documentary about a young mountaineer who climbed giant rock-faces without any safety gear.
Hurrying into the Irish Film Centre, the calibre of tonight’s patrons almost made me laugh – mostly men, they were sinewy and serious, sharing tales of high-altitude bravado. As I looked for Quin, fragments of conversation reached me: ‘The weather came in, we decided not to push it …’ ‘… carrying forty K of kit …’ ‘… massive whipper, but it held …’
There he was, with Murph and Golden, the three of them dressed to the nines in their technical clothing. It was probably subconscious, the way Anna and I had got labelled up to see The Devil Wears Prada.
Quin’s arm shot out and he pulled me to him for a kiss, then I said hello to the other two – Murph （a man） and Golden （a woman）。 Along with two other men, they’d all been friends since junior school. Together, they’d been on countless climbs.
Golden openly disliked me and, uncharacteristically, it caused me no angst whatsoever.
For at least ten years, she’d been in an epic on-again-off-again with one of the other men, Prosser. In the off-again phases, she slept with Embury, the fourth man in the group. But at various stages, over the years, she’d slept with all of them – Prosser, Embury, Murph, even Quin, before his marriage to Shiv. I suspected she thought of them as her personal property.
‘Would you like anything?’ Quin nodded towards the café. ‘We had carrot cake.’
There was no popcorn or pick-n-mix, it wasn’t that sort of cinema. And it wasn’t that sort of night. The clientele were serious about their climbing, serious about their nutrition.
… Except for cake. I’d noticed that climbers liked cake. Although they only seemed to eat it with other climbers.
To my surprise, the movie was great.
‘Did you really like it?’ Golden asked, afterwards, in the Nepalese restaurant. ‘Or are you just saying it? To make us feel okay about you taking Embury’s ticket?’
I looked at Quin. ‘Did I …？’
‘This was booked weeks ago.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m away tomorrow until Saturday, I wanted to see you tonight. He did me a favour.’
‘So obliging of Embury.’ I smiled at Golden, who sent daggers from her pale blue eyes. ‘Things off again with Prosser?’
Her face reddened. Although it was fairly red to begin with.
She looked like a weatherbeaten cat.
‘Fuck you,’ she muttered, which made me laugh.
Next to me, Quin shifted. ‘Don’t blame Rachel,’ he told Golden. ‘Blame me.’