If Harry Met Sally Again Read online

  ‘Friends? I can’t believe it. He always made such a thing about saying men and women couldn’t be friends,’ says Astrid, after I’ve recounted the events of last night to her.

  ‘Right, I know. I can’t believe it either,’ I say, watching her in the shop window, stacking books into the shape of a bonfire for her ‘autumn garden’ display. ‘How could he possibly think we could be friends after he’s obliterated all trust between us?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him he was a bastard and to get the hell out of my life.’ In the heat of the moment I didn’t find anything more nuanced.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nina. Everyone thought you were the couple destined for a happy ending – friends then lovers. Just like Harry and Sally. It should have been so perfect.’

  ‘According to Will, we’ve been drifting apart. Apparently, the passion has gone.’

  ‘That’s such a male thing to say. Doesn’t he realise the initial passion of a relationship can’t be maintained? Doesn’t he know something better and stronger grows from commitment?’

  ‘I guess not; he thinks I’d settled.’

  Astrid scatters autumn leaves over the floor of the window then I step outside to indicate what need repositioning. As she moves things around I glance up at the sign, LOVE BOOKS, which is covered in years’ worth of grime from the passing buses of the Brixton Road. I think how nice the place would look with a fresh lick of paint and a striped awning, maybe a bench and a pot of flowers too. As it is, it’s just a dingy little shop, its paint peeling, sandwiched between a pawnbroker and Poundland. Most people hurry past on their way to the Tube without even noticing Astrid’s beautiful window displays.

  ‘The more I think about it, the more I figure I’m better off without him,’ I say, as I re-enter the shop.

  ‘That’s what Sally said when she broke up with Joe, remember?’

  ‘True, but Sally was in denial.’ My tone implies that I am not.

  For all my vehemence I know I can’t be over him because what I really want is for him to come back and say he’s made a mistake. I want him to say he never loved her, and that he always has, and always will, love me. But even if that did happen, I know we couldn’t carry on as before, so I suppose I have to be better off without him.

  ‘I know it’s impossible to believe right now,’ Astrid begins, tentatively, as I hand her a basket of apples she’s gathered from her garden. ‘But, there may be someone out there who’s more perfect for you than Will.’

  I laugh pitifully. ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

  ‘This may be your chance to find your very own Ephron hero.’

  I can’t help but admire Astrid’s positivity, even if it is currently wasted on me.

  ‘You know, I don’t believe in romantic heroes, as much as I’d love to. Whether I like it or not, Ephron’s classic hero – romantic, smart, funny and kind – just isn’t a reality.’

  ‘I found all those qualities in Aidan.’

  It’s true, Astrid did. Her husband Aidan is as near to a real-life Ephron hero as it is possible to be. ‘You and Aidan are the exception that proves the rule.’

  ‘If I can’t persuade you on that, at the very least you should know it’s okay to feel a bit choked, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet. The bloke is a complete twonk and has treated you horribly, but he has been part of your life for a very long time, so a little wound licking isn’t out of order.’

  ‘Thanks, Astrid.’ It feels good to have her support. I can’t imagine going through this without her. ‘But what’s the point in pining for someone who loves someone else?’

  ‘True.’ She steps down from the window and goes outside to check her work.

  From inside, I watch her tilt her head from one side to the other, fiddling with her Indian bracelets and fixing a comb in her long, brown hair. I think how lucky she is to have a Middle Eastern father and Scandinavian mother, with her dark hair, light eyes, enviable cheekbones, long neck and legs. As teenagers, Astrid was the human equivalent of a newborn giraffe, her limbs were so spindly and her features so large, that I sometimes thought she’d topple over, particularly in her four-inch-heel-wearing stage. The boys called her Sophie, after the French giraffe, and me, Dumbo, thanks to the baby elephant shape I inherited from my mother. Will used to tease me about the nickname. At the time it seemed cute, now I can’t help wondering if it was just a bit cruel.

  On her return, Astrid wipes her feet on the blue nylon carpet, which is so hard and worn you could strike matches on it but which the owner, Mr Love, refuses to replace. She hitches up her kaftan and steps back into the window where she positions a small robin, which she’s made out of old socks, its head at a jaunty angle, on top of an old garden fork.

  ‘Finished,’ she says, wiping her hands in a gesture of a job well done. Astrid has a flair for design that I do not, everything she touches looks incredible. I swear she should be working for Ideal Homes, or whatever the hippy equivalent might be.

  ‘Oh, and get this, he also said I’m not ambitious, that I never finish things. But I do, don’t I?’ It occurs to me that this detail is irking me more than it probably should be, and that I can’t pinpoint the last thing I actually did complete. I didn’t even finish the McDonald’s I bought last night, it’s still sitting on the hall table.

  ‘You sure do,’ says Astrid. ‘You finished that incredible den in your parents’ garden in the pouring rain when the rest of us had gone inside to dunk Viscount biscuits in hot chocolate.’

  ‘We were eight!’

  ‘I know, but you were also the only one to finish making a pavlova in the shape of a swan in Home Ec. You got the end-of-year prize for that.’

  ‘I’m not sure teenage pavlova-making really counts either.’

  ‘You finished your degree – many people don’t – and those radio plays,’ she says, tailing off, realising these things were also quite a long time ago. ‘You’re always finishing stuff around here – you arrange the bookmarks when I give up – I’d be lost without you.’

  We both know neither the bookshop nor the bookmarks count, but I go with it anyway.

  She crosses to the counter, its dark wood a match shelves that line the shop, a back-to-front, E-shaped space. The shelving was probably fashionable when it was fitted thirty years ago but now I can’t even call it retro, it’s just oppressive. Sagging boxes of old paperwork, tired book posters and unsold stock shoved on top of the shelving does nothing to fight the feeling of claustrophobia. Astrid is desperate to transform the place but Mr Love is entirely resistant to change.

  ‘You know what you should do?’ Astrid says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should do something proactive to stop yourself from getting the blues.’

  ‘Like what?’ I give the table of latest fiction paperbacks in the centre of the shop a quick tidy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, warming milk at the coffee machine. ‘Something that proves to Will that you haven’t settled, that you’re better than that Carmen any day of the week. Something that allows you to take the lead in your own life again.’

  I draw up a stool at the counter and fiddle with a digestive biscuit. Perhaps, to a small extent, Will was right, perhaps I was putting my relationship with him ahead of my own dreams and ambitions. Not that this realisation in any way justifies his actions. ‘You mean like finishing my script?’

  ‘Precisely!’ she says, clicking her fingers at me. ‘You should finish your script and sell it! That would bloody well show him.’

  ‘The script? The one without an ending?’ I look at her doubtfully. Astrid knows I’m in the writer’s equivalent of a cul-de-sac; I have been for years. ‘You do know the idea of that sequel has been stymied by Hollywood endless times? The probability of me selling it and having it made is about the same as you being struck by lightning, winning the Euro Millions and snogging Ryan Gosling all at the same time.’

  ‘I know it’s a long shot,’ she says, with a lau
gh. ‘But you have to try, it’s your dream.’

  ‘Dreams rarely become a reality.’

  ‘Then if for no other reason than as a big fuck-you to Will.’

  I know Will has moved his stuff out before I’ve even entered the flat – even the rattle of the key in the lock seems louder than usual. Opening the front door, I’m hit square in the jaw with the fact that he’s gone, he’s really left. I’m on my own.

  In the hallway his keys are not on the hook, his shoes are no longer paired together on the floor, and his trainers, caked in mud from runs on the common, have gone. Even the tennis racquet he never used, and I nagged him to get rid of, is no longer there. It feels as if he’s taken a piece of my heart with him.

  His giant telly is gone from above the fireplace; in its place is a hole with a nasty cable jutting out. A rectangular outline remains where the sage green paint we chose together hasn’t faded. And on the Ikea cube shelves, which we built when we moved in, I have to reposition my sister’s wedding photograph, which Will has knocked over while removing his books and DVDs.

  I trace a finger over the picture of my niece holding her new baby brother then pick up the frame with a head shot of Will and me at Astrid and Aidan’s wedding. I gave it to Will two Christmases ago. I barely recognise the two of us, heads tilted together, beaming at the camera. We look so carefree, happy, so far from now. Putting it back I can’t decide what hurts more – the pain of Will leaving or the pain of Will choosing to leave the photo behind, not wanting to take the memory of me with him.

  Trying to push the thought out of my mind I put the kettle on. The work surface of the kitchen is almost bare. The coffee machine, juicer and toaster are gone – the items that Will bought that I couldn’t afford. He has taken pretty much everything bar the kettle, and the pumpkin I carved for Halloween.

  ‘Bastard,’ I mutter, when I realise that he’s taken the waffle maker too – a birthday gift I gave him that only I have used. In its place is a green Post-it note that reads:

  Gone to Mum & Dad’s. Will call soon. W.

  I stare at the Post-it, festering over the fact he hasn’t put a kiss after his initial. Five years together and not even a sodding X! I can’t help feeling a little cheered by the fact that he’s been forced back to his parents’ house in Bedfordshire.

  After I’ve made myself a cup of tea and sat for a while adjusting to the space without Will or his things – I’ve never noticed the sound of the wall clock ticking before – fragments of last night’s conversation seep back.

  When I asked him how long he’d been sleeping with her he told me ‘not long’. But then I remember, back in April, Will saying he’d been given ‘more responsibility at work’, which meant extra hours at the office. At the time I thought nothing of it but now…

  In June he told me a colleague, ‘in a position to get him a sub-editor position’, had asked him to be his tennis partner. When I asked him why he never took his racquet, he said he was, ‘using the club’s’. I remember thinking that he must be really keen to get promoted because the Will I knew mocked people who belonged to tennis clubs. I even told him how proud I was of him, working so hard, and compromising his ideals to make it up the ladder. But April was months ago and still be hasn’t been promoted.

  ‘It was all a pack of lies,’ I mutter, trembling. ‘The extra hours, the tennis matches, none of it was real, he was with Carmen.’

  The realisation of just how long he’s been lying to me ignites a small fire inside of me. If it had happened once, I might have been able to get over it, even a dalliance of a couple of weeks, but six months?! Six months confirms that the lie has been protracted, and it’s a lie that casts a shadow of doubt over every part of our relationship. I should have realised when he told me he loved her that this wasn’t a casual fling. I should have realised I’d been taken for a fool.

  ‘Come on, Nina, you must have realised something was up – when did we last have sex?’ I hear him ask; it now sounds more like a jeer.

  In the first two years we were all about the sex; in the third year less so, but I put that down to moving in together. Year four, it was always me who instigated it; Will always had some excuse as to why he didn’t want to: he’d eaten too much pizza, he didn’t like my perfume; he was tired from work. And year five, well, as Will implied, who knows? It seems obvious now that this is when Carmen came into his life.

  ‘Astrid was right, fuck him!’ I say, reaching for my laptop and opening the file entitled If Harry Met Sally Again. I begin to read.

  IF HARRY MET SALLY AGAIN

  Treatment 1/11/14

  Nina Gillespie

  Harry and Sally, thirty years on and acrimoniously divorced, attend their only son’s wedding weekend in New York. When their son, Truman, disappears the night before the wedding, Harry and Sally must find him before his bride finds out he’s missing.

  Characters

  Harry – depressed, funny, caring.

  Sally – cheerful, optimistic, controlling.

  Marie – Sally’s best friend. Widowed, early-sixties. Neurotic. Kind.

  Truman – Harry and Sally’s son. Truman is like his father: pessimistic, straight-talking, dry sense of humour.

  Anna – Truman’s fiancé. Beautiful, educated.

  George – Truman’s best man. A good guy. Slightly naïve.

  Jules – Anna’s bridesmaid. Less refined than Anna.

  ACT 1 – DAY

  Opening titles:

  Harry and Sally putting the final touches to their wedding outfits and leaving their separate homes.

  Scene 1:

  Harry and Sally arrive at Truman’s wedding weekend. They greet each other awkwardly. Truman and Anna ask Harry and Sally to meet the minister.

  Scene 2:

  During the discussion Harry announces he is to divorce for a third time. Sally is not surprised; Truman is devastated and leaves.

  Scene 3:

  Before leaving the hotel, Truman asks George, who is comforting Jules, whom he broke up with the night before, to take charge of the preparations.

  Scene 4:

  Anna, unaware of Truman going AWOL takes Jules for a final dress-fitting in the city.

  Scene 5:

  Sally sits in the bar with Marie, discussing Harry’s divorce. Marie tells Sally she should get back with Harry. Sally dismisses the idea.

  Scene 6:

  Harry persuades George to go off for a drink; they head to a neighbourhood bar.

  ACT 2 – EVENING

  Scene 7:

  That evening, before the rehearsal supper, Truman hasn’t returned. Sally decides she and Harry must set out to find Truman before Anna finds out what has happened.

  Scene 8:

  Marie is trying to comfort Jules, who is drowning her sorrows at the hotel bar.

  Scenes 9–11:

  Harry and Sally scour the city to find Truman. They find themselves bickering under Washington Arch, outside Katz Diner and across Central Park, but not without recognising where they are (flashback scenes) and the significance of it all. They resolve to try harder, for Truman’s sake.

  Scenes 12–15:

  They stop to pick up coffee at the café where Sally told Harry she was pregnant. Concerned that Truman might have hurt himself, they visit the local hospital and reminisce about his birth, and then wind up having a meal at the Italian restaurant they went to every Sunday for brunch as a family. This trip down memory road softens both of them and by the time they have finished the meal they are seemingly good friends again. As they are paying the bill it occurs to them that Truman is most likely to be at the Met Museum, the place he always went to as a child for good times and bad.

  Scenes 16–18:

  On the way to the museum, Harry and Sally pass the bar where Sally first saw Harry with Isabelle – with whom he cheated on Sally – their family apartment, and the court where the divorce was finalised. Sally’s defences are up again.

  Scene 19:

  Inside the museum
Harry and Sally find Truman in the Temple of Dendur. It occurs to Sally, as Harry tries to talk Truman round, that this is the first place Harry made it clear that he found her attractive and tried to ask her out on a date. Warmed by this memory, Sally allows herself feelings for Harry once more.

  I sit back, eating jelly beans, and study the outline, trying to figure out how the second act finishes and what happens in the third.

  ‘Does Harry succeed in talking Truman round in time for the wedding?’ I scrunch up my nose unhappily at this idea.

  ‘Or do Harry and Sally, during the course of the film, realise they’ve made a mistake in divorcing and wind up getting remarried?’ I shake my head. ‘Never going to happen.’

  I’m determined to remain true to Ephron’s vision. Ephron never wanted Harry and Sally to marry, the ending was changed when Rob Reiner, the director, fell in love during filming, thus rewriting the ending and creating one of the greatest films ever made. Not only do I want to write Ephron’s intended ending but I also want to write something that’s true to the characters of Harry and Sally. Both characters, in my opinion, were far too strong-willed and opinionated to possibly have circumnavigated a successful marriage together.

  ‘But leaving them divorced could prove unpopular and divisive…’ I muse, thumbing the Post-it notes, self-doubt creeping in. ‘And I can’t have neither couple marry. If that were to happen there would be no happy ending, and without a happy ending the film won’t sell. If the film doesn’t sell,’ I feel myself spiral into a vortex of anxiety. ‘I won’t prove Will wrong, and I have to prove Will wrong, if it’s the last thing I do, I have to prove Will Masterson wrong!’

  3

  ‘That shit!’ says Mum after I’ve told her about Will.

  ‘I know,’ I say, absently throwing another piece of wood on the bonfire.

  ‘If I see him in Marksies I’ll chop his thing off!’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘He took you for a ride.’

  I nod, acknowledging that yes, he did take me for a ride, but the initial hurt has already subsided and has been replaced with a keen determination to show him just what he let go.