The Last Time I Saw You (6 page)
Something in his voice, in the way it catches, reminds me of me, the way my thoughts are catching on the jagged edges of impossible questions. Fear begins to thrum through my body, a fear that I can’t put a name to but I know could engulf me if I let it. I feel rooted to the spot, words frozen in my throat. I can see the page in my diary, see its blankness, but something in me can’t say yes.
“I’m really sorry, but tomorrow’s . . . I can’t do tomorrow,” I say, hating how alien my voice sounds. It’s the voice of a liar, a bad one at that, high-pitched and tinny.
“Of course,” he says, “I knew it would be a big ask at such short notice.”
I’m a horrible person. A hypocrite. I made him a promise, after all. Perhaps in a couple of days I’ll feel less fragmented, more capable of giving him what it is that he needs. Although my truth surely cannot be what that is.
“Will you be here later in the week?”
“Perhaps.” He pauses, his voice dropping to something more gruff. “Everything’s very much in flux.”
As he says it, I feel a stab of deep, illogical empathy. Flux, chaos, confusion—they’re all words that could add up to a dictionary definition of Sally.
“Please try me again once you know,” I say, emphatic. Surely I can do this if I put my mind to it?
“I will. Goodbye, Olivia and . . . thank you.”
Thank you—like yesterday, I can hear something in that one little word that speaks to something bigger. Something that’s just as overwhelming as the fear that stalks me every time I teeter on the verge of opening the door back to the past.
There was distance between us, I knew that, but it was shadowy and insubstantial, hard to name. Sally still offered me lifts to campus, afforded me the odd Friday night out, but we didn’t have that Galaxy-munching intimacy of term one. I tried to reassure myself it was nothing more than the fact that we’d met people—my romance with Matt was spluttering into life, and I knew that her fling with Dr. Roberts was still happening, even though she was hazy about the details every time I fired a clumsy question at her. I’d find her and Lola sloshing back wine in the kitchen, snorting it down their noses as they creased up about the “Nutty Professor,” and I’d somehow feel like the fun police. “What?” I’d say, and they’d try to fill me in, but the joke always fell pancake flat once they tried to translate it.
The fact that they didn’t try very hard made me guiltily aware how blasé I’d been when it was Lola making the bed
sag in the middle. Insights crept up on me unbidden, like an evening tide making its slow progress up the beach. The truth was that when you were cosseted inside Sally’s warm, seductive inner sanctum there was no advantage to looking at the shadow that it cast, but now, condemned to stand outside in the cold, my nose pressed against the glass like a Victorian urchin, I could see how she kept the furnace burning so fiercely. It needed someone to be wrong, to be the stooge: it was the intense, silent conflict that kept the energy fizzing and spitting. What frightens me is that the realization didn’t make me run for my life like a cat with a burned tail. Instead I resisted applying my brain too closely to the problem, trusted my instincts, which told me that before too long the merry-go-round would come full circle and deliver me back to my rightful place. I was like an addict, only capable of thinking about the next fix, not where that fix would ultimately leave me.
The wilderness had its own charms; it was far enough away from Sally’s all-seeing eye to give my new relationship a fighting chance of survival. I’d never had a proper boyfriend before, only a crippling crush on James, and I had no idea what it was supposed to feel like. Most of my ideas about love came from books—Nancy Mitford and Jane Austen—so poor old Matt was subjected to quite a few dates that lacked much action. Obviously none of the Bennetts got taken out for crispy potato wedges with a ten percent student discount, but the sentiment was the same: I wanted to be wooed. We’d kiss on my bed, almost fully clothed, but if Matt tried to take it any further a bolt of fear would strike me and I’d roll away. Was it really fear? When I track back to those emotions now, they feel more like misplaced loyalty—something far more destructive and complicated, much harder to decode. Eventually his patience started to wear thin.
“Are you just not that into it?” he asked, trying to mask his wounded pride. “You can just say it if you’re not. I’d prefer it if you did, to be honest.”
“No I am . . .” I said, clutching his arm, suddenly frightened I would lose him. Here was fear, real fear, and it told me what we had was worth fighting for. His face automatically melted and softened, transformed by his relief, and I saw in that moment what he felt for me. I’d felt my own face do that in the past, had hidden it behind my A-level textbooks so it wouldn’t give me away. I really liked Matt, really liked having a boyfriend, but I knew my heart had some catching up to do in this particular race.
“Then . . .”
“I just, it’s just I haven’t actually . . .”
“That’s okay,” he said, smiling down at me, and I knew that with him it would be. There was never an agenda with Matt, never a complicated subtext lying beneath what he told me. It was something I should have held dearer for longer, but I was too young to know how rare and special it was.
I lost my virginity to the strains of
Tapestry,
worried that otherwise someone might hear. I don’t know what I expected—perhaps I thought he’d howl like Heathcliff on the wilds of the moors—but it was totally unnecessary. I lay there afterward, my head on his pigeon chest, wondering what the fuss was about (does everyone think that the first time?) and yet deeply relieved that the deed had finally been done. I wasn’t a virgin anymore! He hadn’t run screaming from my clumsy attempts at foreplay! He hadn’t screamed at all, and maybe that was a bad thing, but the way he was stroking my hair told me that he was happy to be here with me.
I spent the whole of the next day reveling in the idea of how womanly and sophisticated I now was—I bought
my fair-trade common room coffee with a flirtatious smile, I pulled out my library card with a Gallic flourish—the world had a different complexion now I was part of its secret conversation. I couldn’t help wondering if Sally would sense the change in me, even if she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
My newfound confidence made me risk finding out. Matt had practice for swimming team, so I had a night to myself, and I gingerly approached her door, tapping on it lightly with the neck of the bottle of wine I held trapped between two glasses. I could hear noises from inside, but she didn’t invite me in.
“Sally?”
“I can’t deal with you now,” she shouted, voice shrill, and I felt like she’d hit me.
“Okay, I’ll just be next door if—”
At that moment she flung the door open, her face a mess of mascara, her hair a tangled mop. I’d never seen her like this; there was something genuinely frightening about the rawness of her, the lack of veneer.
“Livvy,” she sobbed, flinging her arms around me so hard she almost winded me. I dropped the bottle, hugged her close, following her into her chaotic room. She was clad in a ratty old sweatshirt, far removed from the polished kind of outfits I was used to seeing her in. I rubbed her back through the fabric, waiting for her gulping sobs to subside.
“Sally, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“He doesn’t love me,” she wailed.
“The Nutty Professor?”
“Don’t call him that! Gabriel. He doesn’t love me.”
I hadn’t really thought about it as a love affair. Sally seemed so blithe and knowing when she talked about men,
and I guess I thought she was living out a rite of passage—the passionate affair with an older man—rather than risking her heart.
“Did he actually say that?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t be saying it if he hadn’t! He said that I was very beguiling”—she put this in angry quotation marks that she drew in the air—“but he can’t leave Monica.”
“What, he’s married?”
“No. He lives with her, but they sleep in separate rooms.”
Even I, a virgin twenty-four hours earlier, could smell the whiff of bullshit. How could someone as worldly as Sally have fallen for it?
“Did you know? I mean, that he was living with someone when it started.”
“He told me like, the second time, but he cried.” She turned to look at me, big eyes as wide and vulnerable as Bambi’s. “He cried in my arms.” In that moment my heart went out to her, my bruised heart that knew all too well what it felt like to love someone who felt for you, but not in the way that would make sense of everything, that would turn a jumble of notes into a symphony. I put my arm around her shoulder, poured a glass of wine with my free hand.
“He’s a bastard, Sally. He’s got no right . . .” I felt myself puffing up with outrage at the thought of this smug manipulator taking advantage of my amazing friend. “You’re better off without him.” Unfortunately my lack of life experience meant that most of my advice sounded like a direct steal from the
Just Seventeen
agony column.
“But I love him,” she said, a fresh sob erupting from the depths.
“I know you love him now, but it’ll change,” I said, painfully aware of my own feelings for James. I forced myself to
think of Matt, his mottled arms slicing determinedly through the water, his belief in the importance of committing to everything he signed up to. “It’s got to.”
“It won’t,” she said, a bleakness about her that made me feel helpless. I could sense she’d gone into terrain that I didn’t recognize, a place where my upbeat appeals to the essential rightness of the world would fall on stony ground.
“When did you fall in love with him?” I thought of her giggling in the kitchen, her salacious stories about him. It must be recent, easy to unpick.
“That night he cried. That’s when I knew.”
She must have been hiding it all along, trying her best to fight it off because she knew it was wrong. How lonely she must have been: I berated myself for not barging into her room weeks ago and grabbing our closeness back with both hands. Perhaps it was me who had abandoned her.
“You poor thing. I’m so sorry.”
She collapsed on me, put her head in my lap and sobbed for what felt like hours. It was unnerving but also oddly exciting; there was something so unbridled about her. I felt like the scales had balanced, like I had become vital, and it made me brave. I stroked her arm and tentatively spoke.
“I do get it. At least a bit.” I always felt a tinge of shame back then, a slight sense of wrongness, for reasons so hazy and nonspecific that I could never grab hold of them and beat them into submission.
“How come?” she said, rolling onto her back and looking up at me through those mascara-laden lashes. Sally always wore layer upon layer of the stuff, the blackest she could find.
“He’s called James,” I started, gaining confidence as I took in her rapt expression. I told her all of it; how long I’d loved him, how I’d waited for him, and now, how I’d finally given
up the wait. Tears came as I described it, and now it was her turn to comfort me. It was the closest I’d ever felt to anyone, that sense of wrongness vanquished by the fact that I could pour out all my secrets and she could simply hear them without flinching. They were schoolgirl secrets, I see that now, but back then they were the map of me, and I guarded them fiercely. She must have known how it made me feel, because she transformed herself, her teasing insouciance replaced by a quiet intensity that banished all the questions and doubts of the weeks just passed. I was hers now, my trust and devotion absolute.
If only I’d known then what a precious commodity trust really is—that once it’s broken the scars can take more than a lifetime to heal.
Maybe it’s guilt that propels me over to Jules’s house the next night, a desire to make my claim I was busy retrospectively true. I’ve been worrying about the lie all day, trying to make myself pick up the phone, but a force as strong as gravity seems to pull me back.
I stand on the doorstep for a full seven minutes stomping from foot to foot, too scared to give the doorbell another push in case I wake four-month-old Nathaniel from his hard-won sleep. Eventually she appears, a glob of pureed carrot stuck in her bangs.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she cries, enveloping me in a hug. “You haven’t been here long, have you?”
“No,” I lie, a white lie this time, trying to prevent my teeth from chattering in her ear like a pair of maracas. “Here, I brought this,” I say, handing her a bottle of wine.
“Ooh, thank you!” she says, leading me downstairs to the kitchen. “But don’t let me have more than a glass.”
The thing is, even with the carrot and the sleep deprivation, my sister looks lovely. There’s an infectious warmth about Jules, an aliveness, that means she’s always seemed prettier than the sum of her parts. Not that her parts aren’t pretty, but she’s got an extra sparkle that comes from somewhere else. She’s four years older than me, and we seem to have sectioned off our parents, with me looking more like Dad’s side and her more like Mom’s. She’s got dirty blond hair with a bit of a curl to it, a small, curvy body and the kind of gappy teeth that look cute rather than like a dental emergency. Boys always fancied her, and in the best possible way—not because they thought she was a femme fatale, but because they couldn’t find a reason not to. She took it in her stride, didn’t let it go to her head, then took herself off the market pretty early, marrying her university boyfriend soon after they’d graduated. When she’s not on maternity leave she’s an architect, a partner in a small local practice.
“Where’s Phil?”
“Parents’ Night,” she says, pouring the wine. “He’s been practicing different analogies for ‘your son’s a psychopath’ all weekend.”
Much as I love my brother-in-law, I love it even more when I get Jules to myself. I look around her married-lady kitchen, which always seems so much more grown up than mine. It’s tidy, for starters, with carefully selected fixtures and fittings, as opposed to the dingy MDF that our landlady installed sometime last century. The four years that separates Jules and me sometimes seems more like four decades. Maybe older-sister years are a bit like dog years.
“Cheers,” I say. There’s a cozy sitting area that Jules designed to open off from the kitchen, and I tuck my feet under my bottom and sink into the soft squidge of the sofa.
She clinks my glass, then crosses the room to peer inside the stove.
“I’m afraid everything comes out of a carton and the only vegetable is mash. If you get scurvy, don’t tell Mom. Oh, and she’s popping around at some point. She says she’s forgotten what you look like. And she left her Kindle behind when she was babysitting.”
It has been nearly a month, it’s true. My visiting rotation somehow always tilts toward Dad, and as I went to an interminable Czech art-house movie with him last Wednesday, I felt I’d done my duty for a couple of weeks.
Jules sits down next to me, and rubs my arm with long, comforting strokes.
“So tell me about it properly,” she says.
“It was . . .”
And I try and describe it, but it’s so hard to translate the feeling of it into words, the sense of collective fear that permeated it. We’re so unconscious, we humans, until we can’t be anymore: what is global warming if not a cheerful collective middle finger to the truth of our own mortality? I almost don’t want to tell Jules how it felt. She’s an optimist, my sister, and I don’t see why she should have to do battle with this one.
“He sounds like a lovely bloke,” she says, after I describe William delivering his eulogy.
I think of him pacing up and down around the back of the house, pulling sharply on that cigarette. He probably is, but “tortured” is the word that shouts the loudest. I tell her about what Lola said, the fragment of his call that I overheard.
“Can’t stop thinking about it,” I say, dipping my fingers distractedly into the hot wax of the scented candle that is burning. “Though it’s not really even my business.”
“Well he’s kind of making it your business,” she says. “At least if you see him you might find out what the truth is.” The weird thing is, I feel the opposite—like the closer I get to him, the more elusive it will become. “Christ, I wonder how he . . .” Jules trails off. “Sorry, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
“No you shouldn’t,” I say, sounding sharper than I feel: why is it that even now there’s a part of me that surges up in her defense? “If you saw her little girl . . .”
“Calm down, Livvy, I’m not saying I’m glad she’s dead. I just—she must’ve been hard to be married to.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say, suddenly desperate to change the subject. It’s not just the bare facts of Sally’s death that are obsessing me, it’s also that gap. The gap between the loving, vivacious woman he described, and the woman who seemed to haunt him as he paced obsessively up and down that strip of concrete like a man held prisoner. “Don’t hate me, but I think the chicken kievs might be burning.”
When we’ve finished them, Jules reaches into a stack of recipe books, and extracts a brown envelope that she’s hidden there.
“Look at these,” she pulls out a couple of black and white photos, slapping them down on the table, “and tell me, honestly, who my celebrity doppelganger is.”
They’re professional four by eights, of her and a wriggly-looking Nathaniel. Jules is wearing a gray shift dress that has been her go-to outfit for years, and is admittedly looking a little too snug post-pregnancy. She’s smiling, but the smile’s gotten lost in translation—it’s gone crooked and toothy—and her hair is welded against her head in an odd pudding-bowl. For a very attractive woman she does look—I don’t know, but she doesn’t look like Jules.
“Um . . . Angelina Jolie on the way back from a smash and grab?”
“Martin Clunes, that’s who I look like, Martin bloody Clunes.”
“Oh Jules, you don’t!” I say, snorting with laughter, despite myself.
“I bloody do! This is what Phil asked for for his birthday: a professional photo of the two of us. I can’t give him this.”
“Have it done again! I’ll come with you, do your makeup, hold Nathaniel between shots.”
“Maybe,” she says, ruminative. “I dunno, I just blew it really out of proportion, like it was symbolic of everything.”
Jules doesn’t normally go in for things like symbolism.
“Everything?”
“Like I’ll never be me again.”
“You are you!”
“I’m not though, Livvy. You’re not ever quite the same after you’ve had a baby.” She looks at me, searching for the right translation for what it is she wants to tell me—I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t think I’ll understand, or because she doesn’t want to hurt me, but it makes her feel very far away for a second. “I swear to you I’ll never be one of those smug freaks who elevate motherhood to some kind of religious experience, but it does move the pieces around inside.”
Maybe I’m a bit in denial about this fact, about the part of Jules that’s gone to a country I don’t have a visa for yet, that I might never get a visa for. Don’t get me wrong, I adore being an aunt—the rush of love I felt when I first set eyes on Nathaniel almost frightened me with its ferocity—but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss the way it used to be. The way we could dip casually in and out of each other’s lives without
needing to make a plan, every piece of them a titbit in an ongoing conversation.
“You’ll be back at work in two months, that’ll be a massive dose of normality.”
“I know, but . . . Livvy, it takes me ninety minutes to get to the shop and buy a packet of butter. I’ve timed it. It doesn’t really seem possible at the moment.”
“It’s only been four months, of course you’re still adjusting.”
“It’s not just stuff. I feel like I’m still working out who my people are, you know? They’re not those awful uber-mommies going on about Boden discount codes on Facebook, but I’m not going to be in the office until eight o’clock anymore either.” She waves a dismissive hand, tops up my glass. “I’m being ridiculous, ignore me.”
But it doesn’t sound ridiculous to me. That was one of the reasons I treasured Sally’s friendship for so long—when I was with her I felt like I’d found my tribe, it was a small tribe admittedly, but it didn’t matter, because it was small and perfectly formed. To me it felt a bit like we were cymbals, like we struck against each other and all of the parts of myself that I’d never let reverberate suddenly became colorful and noisy and worthy of notice. We all need someone who holds up a mirror, we just need to make damn sure it’s not the distorting kind.
“You’re not being ridiculous.”
“I am, I’m just tired. The most important headline is that it’s amazing.” Her eyes dart to me quickly, guilt crossing her face. “Not that you couldn’t . . . they’re not compulsory.”
I don’t want to think about that. I want to hold onto my childish certainty that eventually, if you listen hard enough and long enough, fate whispers in your ear who you should be with.
“Besides, Phil’s your person.”
“Hopefully. He might have a rethink when he sees these,” she says, shoving the photos deep in the envelope, and wiping down the table.
He is, he most definitely is, but I don’t think it’s ever been a grand passion, more a comfortable pair of slipper socks. Maybe that’s what she needs, after the simmering, silent resentment of our parents’ marriage, but I know for me it would never be enough—although life would probably be simpler if it was. I think fleetingly of William, his face when he talked about Sally. Is there really a person for everyone? I hope so. But what happens if your person is your person, but you don’t happen to be theirs? Now it’s James I think of, even though I was trying with all my might not to.
Once it gets to nine thirty I can see Jules swallowing down the yawns of a person who hasn’t had more than three hours’ sleep on the trot for four months. I’m making my excuses, shrugging my coat on, when the doorbell goes.
Mom comes sweeping into the kitchen, a red velvet shawl flung around her shoulders, lips painted a similar shade, white-blond hair blown about by the windy night. She’s not glamorous per se, but she’s got enormous presence.
“All the girls together! What a treat. I’ll have a glass of red please, Julia.”
Jules waggles the bottle at me and I shrug my assent. She puts on the kettle for a peppermint tea, politely stifling another gigantic yawn.
“I’m sorry to be so late. I was at my Zumba class, and it ran on. It’s so freeing! I really think it would do you good, Livvy, get you out of your head and into your body.”
“I’m quite happy with yoga, Mom.”
“But darling it’s so controlled. The liberation of Zumba, I can hardly put it into words . . .”
“So you were Zumba-ing until nine?” I say.
“No, no. I went for a bite to eat afterward, the most delicious
tor-tel-loni
,” she says, adopting a ridiculous Italian accent, “smothered in the most exquisite
pes-to
. Meals like that make you glad to be alive.”
Jules and I roll our eyes, very very slightly. We’re good like that; we can communicate, at least about our parents, with a mere tremor.
“Who’d you go with, Mom?” she asks. “Was it a class thing?”
“In a sense. Kevin is in the class.” Oh God, here we go. “Don’t give me that owlish look, Livvy, Kevin’s just a friend. How’s your electronic dating going anyway? You haven’t told me anything for weeks.”
“Yeah, what’s going on?” asks Jules. “And also, have you sent your story in?”
Mom looks at her questioningly. “She’s been working on this short story for a competition. It’s brilliant, of course, but she’s too much of a bloody perfectionist—”
I stop her midflow.
“It’s only okay, and anyway it’s not finished. To be honest, I haven’t been able to think about anything very much the last couple of weeks.”
“Oh darling,” says Mom, coming over and enveloping me in a hug. The smell of her—Pears soap with an underlying hint of garlic—is familiar and comforting. “I was just waiting for the right moment to ask.”
So I try and describe it, all over again, finding it even harder than I did with Jules. “It was just so sad,” I say,
leaning back into her, grateful to stop searching for words that won’t come to me. She holds me close, and I sink into that familiar breast.
“We just can’t know . . .” she says, rocking me a little.
“Can’t know?”
“The mysteries of the universe. When our time is.”
I pull away.
“How can it possibly have been her time? She’s got—she had”—I correct myself, anger increasing exponentially—“a seven-year-old child. She was only thirty-five!”
Mom gives me the sage nod of a wise elder in a remote African village.
“Precisely. There’s no logic to it, and yet in some cosmic sense there must be.”
I stand up, glowering at her.
“So here’s your Kindle!” says Jules, brightly.
I treat myself to a cab home, still fuming. How could she be so insensitive? As I get nearer home the guilt starts: is my resistance to seeing William any better? Mom, in her infuriating Mom way, is refusing to engage with the bleak horror of what’s happened, trying to make it somehow justifiable. And me, I’m burying my head in the sand, waiting for time to restore a sense of internal order and allow life to pick up where it left off. I dig my phone out of my cavernous leather handbag and dial quickly, cheating the devil inside me that’s urging me to hang up. He picks up on the third ring, classical music playing in the background.
“Hello, it’s Olivia.” My voice is shaking. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No, not at all. Wait a second, let me turn this down.”
There’s a warmth to his tone that instantly makes my heart, which is beating like the wings of a trapped bird, slow to a pace close to normal. The music is oddly soothing too—it’s something slow and melancholic, played on a cello. He comes back to the phone and I find myself gabbling, trying to get my words out before I overthink them.