Can't Let Go Read Online Free Page B

someone who lived just a stone's throw
from the public-transport hub that was King's Cross:
because, if all else failed, if I got discovered, I could just
throw my life into my car and drive away. I could go to
Cornwall, or to Scotland, or to the wild west of Ireland, or
I could drive to Kent and catch the shuttle and head
anywhere in Europe. My trusty little Polo could one day
be my best friend.
    The third heading on my list, my third great fear, was
that I would tell someone what I had done. Of all my
fears, this was, I thought, the most likely to come true. It
ought to have been the easiest to control but sometimes it
felt like the most difficult. I usually subdivided this section
into three sub-headings, three circumstances under which
I might have spilled the beans. The first was when an
apparently innocent conversation skirted too close to the
subject: the chat at my sister's house about my summer in
San Francisco, for example. Any casual chats in the pub
with friends or in the staff room at work that touched on
subjects like student life, or memories of past summers, or
favourite songs from the late 1980s could be risky. I would
walk away from those conversations, using a variety of
excuses. 'Marking' worked well, but only with non-teachers.
I had lost count of the times that I had suddenly
remembered somewhere else I had to be. People expected
it of me now.
    And then there was the risk of big emotional heart-to-hearts,
the sort you had in relationships and in close
female friendships. There was a simple solution to the
problem: I didn't do relationships. It was that old cliche: I
had a skeleton in the closet. I supposed in my case that it
was close to being literally true. I imagined sometimes
that it was. Rivers Carillo's skeleton was there, in my
wardrobe, stuffed into an old suitcase that was pushed to
the back, behind the winter coat that I hardly ever wore.
Something it was just about possible to ignore, even
though I could see part of the suitcase every time I opened
the door. But sometimes, when I was sorting through my
clothes, I would have to get it out. And then sometimes I'd
open the suitcase, hoping that I had made a mistake, that I
had dreamt the whole thing and that there was nothing
there at all. But there always was. And to push an already
overstretched metaphor even further, my fear was that if I
were to get involved with someone, sooner or later they
were going to want to go rooting around in my stuff, and
one day I would find them sitting on the bed with the open
suitcase in front of them and a horrified look on their face
– a look that said, 'Oh my God, I'm in a relationship with
Bluebeard.'
    So I didn't do relationships. And I was particularly
cautious about close female friendships, too. Guys were
okay. You could be great friends with a bloke and yet
know almost nothing about each other. I had that kind of
friendship with Danny. Sometimes I'd go round to his
place and we'd have evenings of playing CDs and
watching D V D s , and exchanging names of favourite films
and bands, the kind of night that I enjoyed because it
represented warmth and friendship rather than intimacy
and involvement. That was something I really didn't want
to spoil. But I steered clear of close women friends
usually, because they would always ask questions about
my personal life. Because I was scared that if I let myself
get close to people, then one day there would be the
inevitable exchange of innermost secrets after a few too
many drinks and out it would come: I would reveal the
whole, terrible truth. Blokes were safer. They weren't
interested in that kind of conversation. They just wanted
to know what sort of music you liked.
    And, finally, there was the fear that one day I would just
blurt it out. That perverse desire to confess was perhaps the
thing that scared me most. 'Blurt' – what a strange and
specific word that was. The dictionary definition was 'to
utter suddenly or unadvisedly'. The word had no roots,
nothing