The Day We Met (5 page)

“Okay,” Mum says, hugging Julia. “Although my adventures will have to be really local now I'm not allowed to drive anymore.”

“That's my girl.” Julia hugs her back. “I'll ring you in a couple of days, and we'll arrange a night out, yes?”

“Yes,” Mum says. She turns around, looking at the room.

“Goodbye, life,” she says.

We walk back to the car, and I find I'm almost trying to act as if it isn't there, so that maybe Mum won't notice that I am driving her lovely red car, complete with a shiny new wing. She stops at the passenger door as I climb into the driver's seat and put the key in the ignition. I wait for her to open the door, but she doesn't, so I reach across and open it for her. As she slides into the seat, she twists and retrieves the seat belt, which she clicks into place. This morning I had to do it for her, which means this is one of the things that went and then came back again. A small victory.

“So, back to the real world, tomorrow!” Mum smiles at me, out of the blue, suddenly very present. “Are you packed? You don't seem to have produced a mountain of washing like
normal. Don't tell me you've finally started to do your own! Oh, now wait, I bet Gran has done it for you, hasn't she? The thing about Gran, Caitlin, is that she'll do your washing, but you will pay for it, maybe for the next four to five years.”

Mum laughs, and I catch my breath. She's back, she's here: it's Mum, all of her. It's only in these moments that I realize how much I miss her when she goes away.

“Back to the world of hopes and dreams and futures, Caitlin,” she says happily, her departure from school forgotten. “A few months from now, you'll be a graduate. Imagine! I can't wait to see you in your cap and gown. I promise to keep sane enough, for long enough, to not think that you're Batman and I'm Catwoman. Although I quite like the idea of wearing a leather cat-suit to your graduation ceremony.”

I smile. How on earth do I tell her?

“I feel like I should be making a speech,” Mum says, pressing her palm flat against the window as if she's only just discovered glass. “Telling you what to do with your life; giving you some intensive mothering before it's too late. But I know that I don't have to. I know that all I have to do is trust you and you'll do the right thing. I know I go on about what a wretched child you are, and how I wish you'd tidy your room and stop listening to whatever the bloody awful dirge is that you insist on listening to, but I am awfully proud of you, Caitlin. There, I said it.”

I keep my eyes on the road, concentrating on the traffic, the people on the pavement, the speed camera coming up. Suddenly, I know exactly how it happened that she just forgot how to drive in the middle of driving. Sometimes I feel like the weight of everything I'm not saying out loud might push everything I think I know right out of my head too. I concentrate hard on driving, the miles running out, the car eating up this time we have together. If ever there was a time to be brave, to be
grown-up and strong, this is it. Mum is here; we are alone. But I can't. I can't.

“Ethan Grave cried,” Mum says suddenly, and her face falls a little as she remembers her last day again. “When I went to say goodbye to my class, the girls had made me a card. Oh…” She twists around in her seat. “I've left the card.”

“I'll call Julia,” I say. “She'll pick it up.”

“The girls had made me a card, and did a dance routine. It was so
girls
, you know? Like they'd written a musical called ‘We're Gonna Miss You, Miss.' And I loved it. I should thank God they hadn't penned a song called ‘Alzheimer's Ain't No Joke,' or something, and got Miss Coop to play along to it on that old out-of-tune piano in the hall. Anyway, then Ethan Grave came up, to say goodbye, I suppose, and just started crying. Right there, in front of everyone. Poor kid, he'll really pay for that with the other boys next week, when I'm a distant memory and they are all trying to look down that busty supply teacher's top.”

“He won't,” I say, and I mean it. “They all love you. Even the ones that pretended they didn't, even they love you.”

“Do you think they will remember me?” Mum asks. “When they are old and grown, do you think they'll look back and remember my name?”

“Yes!” I say. Two more roads and we will be home. “Yes, of course.”

“Esther won't remember me, will she?” Mum says so suddenly that I have to stop myself slamming down hard on the brake. It's like my body thinks we're heading for a collision.

“She will. Of course she will,” I say.

Mum shakes her head. “I don't remember being three,” she says. “Do you?”

I think about it for a moment. I remember sunshine, sitting up in my buggy that I was really far too big for, and eating a
bread roll. I might have been three, or two or five. I have no idea. “Yes,” I say. “I remember everything. I remember you.”

“She won't,” Mum says. “She might just catch glimpses of me now and then, but she won't remember me, or how much I loved her. You'll have to tell her for me, Caitlin. Don't let Gran be in charge of telling her about me. That won't do at all. Gran thinks I'm an idiot, she always has done. You have to tell Esther that I was funny, and clever and beautiful, and that I loved her and you more than…Just tell her, okay?”

“She will remember you,” I say. “No one can forget you, even if they tried. And anyway, you're not going anywhere—you're not dying any time soon. You'll be in her life for years and years.” I say it, although we both know for sure now that it is not likely.

At first, just after diagnosis, Mr. Rajapaske told us that there are basically three stages to Alzheimer's, but that it was impossible to know which stage Mum was at yet, because she has a high IQ, and may have been hiding the deterioration from everyone, including herself. Mum might have been deteriorating for a year, or years, he said, sitting in his neat little office lined with family photos and certificates. She might be at the end of the time when any part of the world makes sense to her. There was no way of telling, and I for one thought that was better than knowing for sure: it was the next best thing to hope. But the night she ran away in the rain, the night Greg gave her the memory book, Gran filled us in on the latest test results. It was the worst possible news—a complication that no one had expected, and that was virtually unprecedented. The disease was progressing more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Gran had taken notes, determined to deliver all of the information to us, as best she could. But I didn't hear any of the details, the rationale, the results of the brain scans, the schedule for several more. All I could do was
picture Mum walking blindly toward a cliff, knowing that at any moment she might just plummet into the darkness. None of us knows when that will happen, least of all her. I glance over at her. I have to talk now.

“Mum,” I say. “I want to tell you something.”

“You can have my shoes,” she says. “All of them, but especially those red heels you've always liked. And I want you to go and see your father.”

This time I do stop. We're just moments away from our house, but I pull over onto a double yellow line, and turn off the engine. I wait for a second, for my heart to still, for my breathing to even out.

“What are you talking about?” I turn and look at her, unexpected anger surging through my veins like adrenaline. “Why the hell would you want me to do that?”

Mum does not react to my anger, although she sees it. She sits calmly, her hands folded passively in her lap. “Because I won't be here soon and you need—”

“I don't,” I say, cutting across her, “I don't need a replacement parent for you, Mum, and besides, that's not how it works. He never wanted me, did he? I was a mistake, an error that he wasn't ready to face, that he wanted rubbed out in an instant. Wasn't I? Wasn't I?”

“They used to be your gran's, you know, those red shoes, before she gave up a life of dropping LSD to become a miserable old bat—”

“Mum!” I find myself slamming the heels of my hands down on the steering wheel. She knows I don't want to hear about him; she knows that the thought of him, this person who has never been anything in my life, makes me pulsate with anger—all the more because I hate the fact that I care enough
about the man who didn't want me to even feel so much fury now. “Don't tell me to go and see him. Don't!”

“Caitlin, you and me, we were always so close when it was just the two of us. Three, if you include Gran. And I always thought that was enough, and I would still think that if it weren't for…”

“No!” I am adamant, the tears springing into my eyes. “No, this doesn't make any difference.”

“It does make a difference. The difference is that it's made me see I was wrong to think you could do without knowing about him, and wrong to bring you up without your ever knowing, and…and, look, the thing is, I have to tell you something. Something you won't like.”

Mum stops midsentence—not to think or to pause; she just stops—and after several moments, I realize that whatever she was going to say has been lost over the cliff edge. She sits there quietly, oblivious to the rage grasping at my chest, the anxiety and confusion; she smiles serenely, waiting patiently for something to happen. And then I just can't hold it in anymore, and the tears come, lots of them. I rest my head against the center of the steering wheel, gripping on to it as tightly as I can. I feel my whole body shudder and shake, and I hear myself repeating, over and over again, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

I cannot imagine a time when this sobbing will stop and I will be able to turn the engine on again. It feels like we might stay here forever, just like this, and then I hear Mum release the seat belt and I feel her lean over, putting her arms around my neck.

“It's okay,” she coos softly in my ear. “Who's my big brave girl, hey? It was a shock, that's all, but you'll see in the morning that you'll have a bruise to be proud of. My big brave girl. I love you, chicken.”

I fall into her arms and let her comfort me, because whatever day it is, whichever moment of our lives she is reliving right now, I just wish I could be there with her, back there in the time when a kiss and a hug made everything okay.

When I finally pull into the drive, and open the front door for Mum, I realize I still haven't told her my secret. And there is something else: she still hasn't told me hers.

This is a letter from Caitlin's father.

He wrote the date at the top of the letter, in his bold black spirally handwriting that soared and sloped across the page. His handwriting alone showed me that he was artistic, unconventional, dangerous, and fascinating…and he had written me a letter.

Letters weren't such a rarity then: I wrote to my mum from uni, and to my uni friends in the holidays. But I'd never had a letter from a boy before, and even if it isn't exactly a love letter, that is why I kept it. I think I expected it to be the first of many, but there was only one.

I read it now, and I can see what I didn't see then. It's a snare, a trap. A carefully constructed ruse to lure me in—to make me feel clever, and as if I must be something special to be so worthy of his attention. This wasn't in the words he wrote—it
was the letter itself that was supposed to show me he was wooing me. The words were almost inconsequential.

It arrived at some point during the night. I slept on the ground floor, in what had once been a front room but was now an extra bedroom in our shared house. It was my damp little hovel, strewn with clothes, posters lining the walls. It smelled of washing that's been left in the machine too long. Whenever I smell that, I'm right back there in that room, staring at the gas fire on the wall, waiting for life to really begin.

That morning, the morning the letter came, when I pulled back my curtains I could see something that shouldn't have been there, shrouded by the mist of the nets that were slick with condensation from the inside of the window. Once I'd peeled the graying lace curtains back from the damp glass, I could see it more clearly: a long, thick, cream-colored envelope taped to the other side of the window, my name written on the front.

It was cold still—spring had yet to set in—but I danced outside in my bare feet to retrieve it anyway, diving under the covers for warmth when I came back in. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, and my first instinct was to tear it open, but I didn't. I sat very still and looked at it for a long time. For the first time in my life, I got that feeling—the one when you know something momentous, something life changing, is going to happen. I wasn't wrong.

You can see how he didn't bother with my name. No “Dear Claire.” “I enjoyed our conversation on Saturday night,” was his opening line. Our conversation. I thrilled at his turn of phrase. He'd sought me out at a party; I remember the moment exactly. I'd noticed him as soon as we'd walked in. He was taller than most of the other boys, and he had this self-assurance, like he was at ease in his long, skinny body. There was nothing about him that a girl would instantly be attracted to—nothing except
that he had that rare quality among young men: he looked like he knew what he was doing. We'd been there a couple of hours when I noticed him looking at me, and I remember glancing behind me, in case I was mistaken. When I checked again, he was still watching me. He smiled and held up a bottle of wine, summoning me to his side with a jerk of his head. Of course, I went. I didn't think twice about it. He poured me red wine in a real wine glass, and questioned me extensively about my taste in art, literature, and music. I lied about everything I could in the hope that it would impress him. He knew I was lying. I think he liked that about me. Everyone, including all of my friends, had left by the time the party finally wound down. I told him I'd better get back, and should call a minicab home, to be on the safe side. I wasn't even sure where the party was: we'd arrived in a miasma of cheap wine and a cadged lift, laughing and talking too much for any of us to take note of where we were going, only there on the say-so of a friend of a friend. It was then he revealed that this was
his
house, and asked me to stay the night. Not for sex or anything—he was very clear about that—just because it would be safer than taking a cab home alone. Hadn't I heard about that girl who'd gotten into a local cab last week, then passed out and had woken up in the middle of nowhere with the driver masturbating over her?

Of course, for all I knew, I was exchanging one danger for another, but I didn't think about it that way. I thought he was chivalrous, protective, mature. In retrospect, I think he was trying reverse psychology on me, convinced that if he denied me access to his manhood, I'd be clawing off his boxers in desperation before dawn broke. Only I wasn't that kind of girl. There had been a boy, one boy only, whom I'd had sex with before then. I hadn't told him I was a virgin. It didn't seem a very cool thing to confess, because I was eighteen, which seemed so old. It had
been a one-time thing, awkward and embarrassing. I'd decided to pretend it hadn't happened at all, except now at least I'd got “it” out of the way, and knew what to expect the next time, which wasn't very much.

For all the brash confidence I put on display, I was very inexperienced. I let him lead me upstairs to his room. He had a single bed. I lay down on it, and after a few minutes standing awkwardly in front of the electric bar heater, he lay down beside me, pressing my body against the length of the cold wall. We talked for a long time, lying side by side, fully clothed. We talked and laughed, and at some point he laced his fingers in mine. I can remember even now the quiet thrill his touch gave me—the promise, the anticipation. The sun was up when he kissed me. We kissed and talked for a few more hours after that, each kiss growing ever bolder on his part. I think he was surprised when I got up, exhausted and still lost, and said I had to go. I didn't have to go, but I wanted to. I wanted the opportunity to miss him.

There were only two occasions in what was to be our relationship that I did the right thing, played the right move, and this was one of them…a move made before I even guessed that we were involved in a game. I left before he wanted me to, and that made him want me more.

“I haven't stopped thinking about you.” The second line of the letter. A standard line, I suppose, but one that made me swoon back onto my bed, collapsing into the pillow, clutching the piece of paper to my chest. He was so funny, so clever, so important in our little world, and he couldn't stop thinking about me! “Something about the sun on the carpet this morning made me think about the smell of your hair.” I had thought this line impossibly romantic and clever. Much later, I found out he'd used it more than once: it was a line from a love poem that he'd given to several girls during the term. “I would like to see you
again. I will be in the Literature section of the library today, from midday until about six. Come and find me there if you want.”

I looked at my watch. He'd been there an hour already. If I'd been thinking straight, if I'd been older, wiser, more cynical, and less in love with his handwriting, I'd have gone—but not until after five. But I wasn't any of those things. I carefully folded his letter inside my copy of Eagleton and, after dressing hastily, I went to find him at once.

He was not surprised to see me. He smiled, but it was restrained.

“I got your letter,” I whispered, sitting down next to him.

“Evidently,” he replied.

“What shall we do?” I asked him, preparing to be whisked away on a romantic whirlwind.

“I've got about another hour to spend on this essay, then the pub?” he said, waiting for my nod of approval before he turned back to his books. Slowly, I pulled my own books from my bag, and made a show of beginning to read them. But I didn't see the words; I just sat there, trying hard to look clever, fascinating, and beautiful, waiting for him to be ready. I should have got up; I should have left. I should have kissed him on the cheek and said, “Ciao.” But I didn't, and from that moment on, I was his, right up until the moment that I wasn't anymore. And that was the second thing I did right in our relationship.