The Day We Met (10 page)

I go to the bottom of my street, where the main road is and where the buses come along. I get there, and I could wait for a bus, but I never take a bus. I'm not really a bus sort of person, at least not since I saw the other side of thirty. It is a matter of principle: I might not have access to a car right now, but I have, or at least had not so long ago, the means to own a brand-new one. Also, I don't want to be that person on the bus in her nightclothes, the one other people pretend not to see, and that makes me think how awful it must be for people who really are mad. It's bad enough feeling so low, and lost, or hearing voices in your head, without the rest of the world refusing to notice you. Of course, soon you would start to wonder if you were real at all, wouldn't you? I would. I'd start to wonder if I was real. So, no thank you, I don't want to be that invisible person, because I am certain that at the moment everything is present and correct
in my head, and that I am not some poor demented woman wandering the streets but a rational, clear-headed warrior queen, making a break for freedom so that she can save the day. That's what this is…isn't it?

I can't stop to think about it—if I dither, I will lose the moment—so I decide to walk. March purposefully, so that everyone can see I know where I am going. It's not far, where I'm going. It's an easy walk, but I will admit I'm cold, even with this massive coat on. And I wish I'd run away with a bra on: there is something far less assertive about running away knowing that your breasts are bobbing up and down and completely out of control, flapping around like a pair of kippers. But there you go. When you are forced to break out of prison, you don't always have time to consider your underwear options. I clutch Mum's bag to my side, and scrunch my toes up in the ends of her boots. At the end of the road, I turn left—that's the hand I don't write with—and then follow this big wide road all the way until I get to the train station. I'll get to the station in the end if I keep walking along the big wide road. It's like that hotel lobby somewhere or other, where if you sit in it for long enough you will meet everyone you ever knew.

I'm not going to a hotel, though.

No one is looking at me, which is a good thing. I thought I might look like a mental-home escapee, but I suppose my gray cotton PJ bottoms, while not ideal in this biting weather, aren't stand-out conspicuous; and thanks to this fat coat, only I know that I am out in the world commando style. I giggle to myself, and for a second I forget what I am doing and why, and then I wonder whether people aren't looking at me because they can't see me.

Head up, chin up, shoulders back, remember the warrior
queen. I'm outside, I have taken myself out, and I am my own person again. Mistress of my own destiny. It's exciting. Thrilling. The sense of freedom is immense. No one knows me—I could be anyone—and if it wasn't for the fact that I have to keep a low profile, I'd sing, or skip or something, or run. I'd love to run if I were appropriately attired, but instead I content myself with marching and knowing that I could just be any normal woman out for a walk in her mother's boots and no bra.

“Hello there?” I hear a vaguely familiar voice, and I march a little more quickly. If it is someone I know, then I can't take the chance they might try to stop me—might try to take me back.

“Hey, Claire? It's Ryan, do you remember me from the café?”

I stop and look at him. Ryan. For a moment I am blank: what café, when? I take a couple of steps back from him.

“Do you remember? It rained a lot, and you were wet through. I said you looked like a very pretty drowned rat?”

And then I remember that curious collection of words, and the moment that came with them. It had been a happy moment, a moment when I'd felt like me. Ryan, the man from the café. And here I was out and about without a bra.

“Um…hello,” I say, suddenly also aware that I didn't tidy my hair, or wash my face, or clean my teeth this morning. I turn my face from him, because I don't want him to look at me. “I'm just…going for a quick walk.”

“I was hoping I'd bump into you again,” he says. He has a nice voice: it's gentle, kind, kind enough for me to wonder if perhaps it doesn't matter that my hair is a tangle of snakes, and my eyes are naked. “Thought you might call.”

“Sorry,” I say airily. “I've just been really busy.”

This is a lie. I have not been really busy. I have been lying
on the carpet in the living room being bandaged in toilet paper by Esther, writing in my book and worrying about Caitlin.
Caitlin
. “Actually, I have to go somewhere….”

“Where are you off to?” he asks me, falling into step next to me. I thrust my hands into the pocket of the coat, and find a packet of those round mints in there. Greg's been sucking mints. What does that mean? Does that mean he's planning to kiss someone, perhaps—someone other than me? I remembered him today, or at least my heart did, but it was too late. He didn't see me; he'd stopped caring and he left me. I stop my fingers circling round the mints as I think of the time when I won't be anything to my husband anymore—other than a memory of a difficult time.

“Where did you say you were going?” Ryan repeats the question, nudging me into responding.

“To the…” I stop talking. I feel hurt, and sad, and I don't know why. The sky is bright and golden, the air crisp and pure, but still the fog has rolled in and I am lost again. “I'm just going for a walk.”

“Can I walk with you?” he asks me.

“I don't really know where I'm going,” I warn him. “Just wandering around aimlessly!” There's a hint of anxiety in my voice. I know I came out for Caitlin, but why? Where am I meeting her? Am I picking her up from something? Is it school? I picked her up from school late, once, and when I got there, her face was pinched and white, her eyes swollen with tears. The bus had been late, that was why. I am not a bus person anymore. If I'm late, she'll be scared; I don't want her to be scared.

“I have to find my daughter,” I say.

“You've got a daughter?” he asks me, and I realize I didn't mention her last time.

“Yes, she's at university.” I listen to the words form in my mouth, and double-check them. Yes, Caitlin is at university; she's not waiting for me in a school playground somewhere. She's twenty years old and safe at university.

“You don't look old enough to have a daughter in college,” he says, and I can't help grinning.

“It is a modern miracle, isn't it?” I push my web of hair off my face, and smile at him.

“Can I suggest we turn around,” he says pleasantly. “That way is just the town center and shops and traffic. If we walk the other way, we might even get to hear a bird singing.”

We walk in silence for a few minutes, and as we do, I steal sideways looks at him. The man I remember meeting in the café is younger in my head, but then again I thought I was younger too. For all I know, that meeting might have been ten or twenty years ago, except that the way he talks to me, shyly, hesitantly, suggests that we are recent and vague acquaintances. He must have liked me, though: if he hadn't liked me, he wouldn't have stopped to talk to me in the street.

Now I look at him, I see he is around my age, and nicely dressed in a suit and tie. He looks like the sort of man I should have married; the sort of man who would have a pension plan and probably Bupa health insurance. I bet it's better being demented on Bupa. Like NHS dementia, but with nicer food and Sky TV, probably.

“Did we really just bump into each other?” I ask him, feeling suddenly a little wary. “Or are you stalking me?”

He laughs. “No, I'm not stalking you. I will admit I have hoped that we would get to talk again. No, I am a lonely, sad man who saw you in a café a few weeks ago and thought that you looked…lovely, and like you needed taking care of, and…
Well, look, I hope you don't mind my pointing it out, but you're outside now, and you're still in your PJs, so I just thought…maybe you might like a friend?”

“So you're lonely and sad,” I say, liking the fact that he's noticed my outfit (why am I out in my PJs?) yet he's not instantly marching me off to the asylum. “And obviously not a marketing professional. Tell me something about yourself, like why you are lonely and sad?”

“If you tell me why you don't bother getting dressed for walks,” he says.

“I…” I am about to tell him, but I stop. I'm not quite ready yet. “I am a free spirit,” I say, and he laughs. “Now it's your turn.”

He doesn't know that he can tell me what he likes, and I will probably forget it any minute now; although I didn't forget him, or our first meeting, not from the moment he said the words “pretty drowned rat.” I mean, I hadn't thought about him until then, but as soon as I heard those words, I knew him, and that's something to hold on to, something good. And I remember…I remember his eyes. He doesn't know what he can and can't tell me, and I am amazed and, yes, touched as he tells me, well, everything.

“I'm a pathetic case,” he admits. “My wife…she just stopped loving me and she left me. And I'm heartbroken. I miss her like crazy. And some days I don't see the point of going on, but then I remember that I have to, because people depend on me. I used to like being the strong one, but not now. Now, I don't know how I will ever be happy again, and it terrifies me.”

“Wow, that really is sad and pathetic,” I say, but I understand. He feels lost just like me, just like I am, both literally and figuratively. I reach out and pick up his hand. He is surprised for
a second, and then pleased, I think. He doesn't pull away from me, anyway.

“Glad you find my pain amusing.” He smiles, and glances sideways at me.

“I'm not laughing at you,” I say. “I'm just laughing at us. Look at us, lost souls out for a walk on the streets of Guildford. We need a heath, really, or a forest. We need a landscape with some proper metaphor in it. Lampposts and bus stops don't really cut it.” I am pleased with myself: I'm pretty sure I was just clever and funny all in one go. The people back at home, they think I'm already a write-off. I wonder if they are looking for me—whether they are freaking out? I must have been gone a while, now. Mum has surely discovered that I have absconded in her boots. That's right, I ran away. But I can't remember why, and when I'm holding hands with Ryan, it seems less pressing.

“We'll have to make do with leafy suburbia,” he says as we climb the hill, which is lined along each side with houses, 1930s semis that all look almost exactly the same. Once, these houses were paradise, Utopia. Now they seem like they were built specifically to trick me: a cruel joke, a maze with only dead ends and double bluffs, and no way out. I know I live in one of them, but I have no idea which one. There is something to do with curtains, but I forget what, and anyway I don't want to go back to where they will be waiting to lock me in.

“What about you?” he asks me, as we turn from one identical avenue into another. “Tell me your story.”

“I'm not well, Ryan,” I confess regretfully. “I didn't want to tell you, because I think when you know, you won't look at me the same way, or talk to me in the same way. There are only two people in the whole world who don't treat me any differently now I am sick, and you are one of them. The other is my little
girl, my second daughter, Esther. She is only three and a half. I've been married to her father for a year and a bit. He's a very good man, a decent man. He deserves so much better than this.”

Ryan falls silent for a moment or two, taking it all in. “Can we just assume,” he says at last, “that as I'm very happy to walk hand in hand with a married woman who is wearing her pajamas in public, I won't change the way I see you, or talk to you, if you tell me what your illness is?”