The Day We Met (17 page)

“How many?” Esther asks me.

“All of 'em,” I say, because although I know they are eggs, I don't know how many there are.

“Can I do the smashing?”

I nod, even though I don't want to break the beautiful, round, friendly eggs. But Esther does, slamming the first one whole into what might be flour, so that the shell explodes, the clear insides oozing out between her fingers, puffs of powder rising up to greet our noses.

“This is fun,” she says, her fingers dripping as she reaches for the second egg, and, smash, in it goes. Esther's laughter is raucous, like an old man's who smokes forty a day, rather than a little girl's, which makes me laugh all the harder, setting her off again. Her eyes sparkle as she looks at me.

“Again? Yes?” Her face is a picture of such joy.

“Yes,” I say, gulping in air between giggles.

She reaches for the third egg, then climbs up onto the worktop, clearly with a plan in mind that she finds hilarious.
Her shoulders shudder with giggles. And then she drops it from standing height into the bowl. There is a dull thud as the egg meets it fate, and a puff of white in the air, and Esther does a little dance of joy. This is a perfect moment, and I do my best to cling on to it.

“What the…” Mum walks into the room. “That's gas,” she says. “Oh my God, you're filling the room with gas!”

She goes to the back door and throws it open, letting a rush of cold wet air fill the kitchen, drenching mine and Esther's fun in health and safety. Going over to the cooker, she twists the knob I'd turned in the other direction.

“Get off there at once, young lady,” Mum says, not giving Esther a chance to climb down, lifting her up by hooking her hands under her armpits. “Outside, now, the pair of you!” She looks at the mess on the table. “Outside now, until it's clear!”

She orders us out into the wet and cold, like we are a couple of errant dogs who've been caught chewing a favorite table leg, or something. Holding her breath, Mum goes back inside while Esther and I stand on the patio. Esther's hands are still sticky with the innards of the eggs.

“Is baking finished?” Esther asks me, miserably. “I want it to be baking again.”

“You mustn't touch the cooker!” Mum says to me when she returns with warm stuff. She hands me a jacket as she slips Esther's on for her, holding it out so Esther can put her arms in. I stare at the garment she's brought me. It's not the jacket I want, and she knows that. I think she's brought this contraption as a punishment. I like to wear a hoody now, because it is simple: I know where my head goes, and can work out where the arms go from there. And there aren't any things to fix together, which I hate doing. I am still chasing it round and round, trying to get
an arm in a hole, like a dog after its tail, when Mum steps in. She puts it on me like I am a little child, just like she did for Esther. I pout just like Esther.

“How many times have we told you? You just can't do things like that anymore!” Mum admonishes me.

“I don't know,” I say, sullen. “I've got this short-term memory thing….”

Mum's eyes narrow, and I can see that, this time, she is angry, really angry with me. Like the time I got very drunk in the Fifth Year, and came home from school and threw up on her bed, which she was asleep in.

“Why not?” Esther asks her, as Mum furiously wipes at her hands with an antibacterial hand wipe. “Why can't me and Mummy do fun things?”

“I mean,” Mum says, “what if you'd lit something, or the pilot light on the boiler went on, or there was a spark from the light switch? We all could have been killed!”

“Killed!” Esther looks alarmed. “Like deads?”

“I didn't do it on purpose,” I say unhappily, as Mum puts a scarf around my neck. “It was fine. It was…a mistake. We were having a lovely time. I didn't do it on purpose.”

“No, you never do,” Mum says. It's her stock response, one she's been giving me since the very first time I said I didn't mean to spray her entire bottle of perfume on the dog, drink all of her Christmas sherry and then need two days off school, have sex with the builder and then marry him. Only this time, I actually mean that I didn't mean it.

She finishes buttoning up my coat. “Wait there,” she says. “I'm going back in to make sure it's safe.”

Esther tugs at my hand in a gesture of solidarity. “We were only making a cake.”

I look around for something for us to do while we are
waiting—a ball, perhaps, or Esther's little wheelie thing that she likes to whiz around on, especially downhill—and I see the back gate is slightly ajar. I'd imagined that it would be double-locked and bolted, but it isn't: it's actually open, revealing a slash of freedom beyond.

“Shall we go to the park?” I ask Esther.

“I should think so,” Esther says, and leads me out of the gate.

Esther knows the way to the park, even in the near dark, which it suddenly becomes, quite soon after we begin our expedition. That's winter afternoons for you: they are over before they have begun, and suddenly the night is rolling in, pressing down. I hold her hand and let her lead me, chatting away happily as she skips along, not remotely daunted by the fact that the sun has sunk almost all the way behind the black, tightly laced horizon of trees—or that the lights of the cars whiz toward us, a procession of eyes.

Esther is excited when we stop at a crossing, and she pushes the button. “We wait for the green man,” she tells me with authority.

Across the street I see a telephone box, and it seems to shine out to me like a beacon. It reminds me of a warm summer's evening. Of going out of the house with a pocketful of
twenty-pence pieces to talk to this boy I was seeing when I was a girl. We only had one phone in the house and it was in the hallway, so if I wanted to talk in private, I had to go to the bottom of the road and make a call from the box. It became a sort of a haven for me, that little box, with the graffiti etched into the glass and the cards offering sexual favors Blu-Tacked to the sides. It was where I organized my life, whispered sweet nothings and had them whispered in return into my ear, pressed against that receiver like it was a seashell and I was listening for the sea.

A while back, I stopped noticing telephone boxes—they are surplus to requirements these days—but now here is one. A thought comes to me from nowhere: it just materializes into an empty space, and underneath my tightly buttoned coat I reach into my cardigan pocket and pull out a piece of paper. Seeing it makes me remember the man in the café. The stubby pencil. The walk. Ryan. This is the piece of paper he gave to me in the café; this is the cardigan I was wearing that day, and somehow the slip of paper is still there.

“Esther, what's this?” I say, handing the piece of paper to her. She squints at it under a streetlight that flickers on above our heads.

“Numbers,” Esther says. “Lot of them in a row. There is zero and seven and four and nine and…” In my jeans pocket, there are still a few types of money. Hard, shiny, silver money—remnants of independence.

“Shall we try this box out? It looks like a TARDIS, doesn't it?”

“A bit!” she says. I open the door and we squeeze inside. “Sames,” she says, looking around, and I realize she is disappointed that it is not bigger on the inside. I lift her onto my hip and push the money into the hole, remembering exactly what I used to do when I was a girl. I lift the receiver and I can hear the
comforting familiarity of a dial tone. Funny how the little thing that I used to carry around with me all day every day is now a mystery to me, but this…this all makes perfect sense, apart from the numbers.

“Now, Esther,” I say, carefully laying out the scrap of paper across the top of the fixture. “Can you press the number buttons here, just like they are on the paper, in the same order? Yes? It's very important that you press them all in a row, just like they are on the paper, yes?”

Esther nods, and carefully presses the keys. I have no idea if she is doing it right, or how long my money will last, or even whether anyone will answer, but as I stand there with Esther on my hip, I feel excited and full of possibility, just like I did all those years ago when boys I liked whispered sweet nothings down the line into my ear.

There is a ringing tone, but only twice, and then I hear his voice.

“Hello?” That's all he says, but I know it is him.

“It's me,” I say. “From the café, and the road.”

I know they are foolish things to say, but I say them anyway.

“Claire, you rang,” he says, and he sounds glad. “I'd given up hoping that you would. It's been a while.”

“Has it?” I say. “I don't know when my money will run out.”

“Who is it, Mummy, can I say hello?” Esther asks me. “Is it The Doctor?”

He laughs. “You're not alone.”

“No, that's my little girl. Esther. We are going to the park.”

“The park? Bit late, isn't it?”

“No, we like having adventures, Esther and me,” I say. “Will you meet me tomorrow and we can have another talk?” I say it all at once, before I lose courage.

He hesitates. I wait, agonized.

“Yes,” he says eventually. “Where? When?”

The only location and time that I can think are the ones that I say. “I'll meet you in the town library, at midday.”

“I'll be there and…” The line goes dead.

“I wanted to say hello!” Esther says. “Was that The Doctor?”

“How about we go on a really fast roundabout instead,” I say, feeling elated by the prospect of my meeting. How I am going to get there, of course, is another matter entirely.

Esther starts trotting as she leads me off the main road and into the dark of the park, behind the railings that edge the large expanse of grass. The children's play park is ensconced deep in the shadows. We follow a barely lit path into dense nothing, and I can hear calling, kids shouting at one another, their voices echoing in the cold air. And yet I don't feel afraid, and neither does Esther when the swings and slide come into view.

“Oh, there are big kids on the swings,” she announces loudly, as she pushes open the heavy gate that breaks the thick steel fence surrounding the park. “Mummy! I want the swings!”

I approach the girls, who glance our way and then ignore us, going back to their conversation, smoking in earnest. “Excuse me,” I say. They look cold and bored, like they'd be far better off at home with their parents than out here, probably waiting for five minutes of attention from the boys we can still hear shouting in the dark. “Can my little girl have a go on the swings?”

“Bit late,” one girl says, her face full of resentment, even though she promptly gets off the swing.

“It is—you should go home,” I say. “And stop smoking, it will make you old and dead before you know it. We're okay to play out late. We're ghosts.”

The girls look at us like we are mad, which obviously helps
our cause because they make their way quickly out of the park, muttering to one another under their breath about the crazy bitch.

“It's all yours,” I say to Esther.

Esther is thrilled by the park in the dark. She whizzes and spins around and around on the roundabout, her little face glistening in the dark, illuminated with joy. Her teeth catch the streetlights as she laughs; round and round, she sparkles. I push her faster, as fast as I can, and then I jump on and hold on tight, flinging my head back so that the dark world of the park wraps around us—brake lights in the distance, the streetlights, the white shining circle in the sky…each stretching out and turning to bright ribbons whipping around us, surrounding us as we laugh and laugh. I feel like the world is turning faster, just for us.

“Are you okay, miss?” A voice anchors our orbit, and I feel something, slow and steady, weighing me down, pulling us back to earth. The roundabout slows, and for a moment the world spins on without me. Esther falls onto her back on the ground and groans.

“I feel dizzy in the head,” she says. “Ugh, I feel poorly in the tummy.”

“Claire?”

I blink. The voice is heavy and unfamiliar. It belongs to a man, a youngish man, in a suit. How does he know my name? I don't have a son, do I?

“Are you Claire and Esther?” the man asks us in a friendly tone, and I realize it's not a suit he's wearing: it's a uniform. He's a policeman. For a second, I wonder what I have done, and then I realize. I committed the cardinal sin: I escaped.

“I'm Esther.” Esther clambers unsteadily to her feet. “That's Mummy, not Claire!”

“Your mum and husband were worried about you,” the policeman says. “They called us. We've been looking for you.”

“Why?” I ask him. “Why are you looking for us? I took my daughter to the park, that's all!” I'm defensive, angry. We are fine. Completely fine. This is a step too far.

“It's quite late for a little girl to be out, and they were worried about you, Claire.”

I do not look at him. I do not want to go. I want to be lost again with Esther in the ribbons of color, the whole world standing still because we are the ones who are turning.

“Esther,” he says. “Would you like a ride in a police car?”

“Will there be a nee-naw?” Esther asks him, very seriously.

“No, sorry,” he tells her.

“No thanks, then,” Esther says.

“Well, maybe one or two nee-naws,” he says. “Just very quickly. Come on, Esther. Let's get your mum and take you home. It's time for bed.”

“It can't be,” Esther tells him confidently. “I haven't even had tea yet.”