The Day We Met (19 page)

“What you doing here, then?” the boy asks me, leaning his elbows on the bar.

Boys shouldn't have such nicely proportioned noses; they should have noses that are either too big or too thin, but his is perfect. It's hard to concentrate while looking at it, but marginally easier than trying to engage in conversation while looking at those green eyes fringed with thick lashes. He looks like he should star in a musical, for Christ's sake.

“I'm visiting someone,” I say to the tip of his nose. “A friend, sort of.”

“Boyfriend?” he asks, just like that, and for a second I think he might be interested. And then I decide it's probably just that he's northern, and northern people are always very frank and nosy, at least according to Gran, who thinks she knows everything because she retired to the Pennines. Not anymore, though. Now she is out of retirement, for one last job.

“No,” I say, as if the very idea of such a thing appalls me. I feel myself color, which he notices, and that makes him smile, which makes me want to give him a dead arm. “My boyfriend's in London.”

His smile wavers—maybe—just a little bit, perhaps? At any rate, he's not so cocky now. I've met boys like him before—fashionable boys who dress like they are in a band, and who own more pairs of shoes than I do. They usually turn out to be dicks. Well, Sebastian did, anyway. Sebastian, who I will quite soon have to talk to again; I'll have to explain to him that he is actually going to be a father, because I never want my child to be sitting in some bar twenty years from now working up the courage to explain to him who they are.

“So, what's your name, then?” he asks me. “I can ask you that, right?”

“Caitlin,” I say.

“Zach.” He holds out a hand with a wide silver ring on the forefinger, and I take it and shake it. He looks into my eyes, just for an extra moment longer than maybe he should, and once again I have to remember who I am, why I am here. I am not here to flirt with pretty barmen. My days of flirting with boys are over.

“Zach is perfect for you,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Why's that?” he asks me.

“Because it's all cheerful and zipp-a-dee-doo-dah,” I say, which makes him laugh again. He laughs a lot. He must be awfully happy.

“Caitlin.” He says my name again, and it sounds familiar on his lips. “Your boyfriend is a very lucky man.”

Whoa. Again he just says it, just like that. Like he's not a pretty boy in a tie, and I'm not a girl dressed entirely in black with the sort of makeup that makes me look like I might want to take a chunk out of his neck. I am not his type, and he is not mine, and we both know it.

“You think you're such a smooth operator, don't you?” I say.

“Nope.” He shrugs. “Nope, I just say what I'm thinking. It's a curse and probably the reason I don't have a girlfriend at the moment. And I meant it. Your boyfriend is a lucky man. You're extremely interesting….”

The moment is broken by voices, and I recognize one of them. It's my father's. My shoulders hunch up around my ears as Paul Sumner walks in with a group of three students, two girls and a boy. I can't stop myself staring at him in the mirror behind the bar while Zach leaves me and goes to take orders from one of the girl students. I watch my dad, half conscious that the girl is giggling like a loon as Zach serves her. He must have smiled at her. Paul sits at a table opposite the bar, locked in animated conversation with the other two students, and then he must feel my gaze because suddenly he looks up and sees me watching him. It's all I can do to tear my eyes away from his face. And I know he is getting up and coming over.

“You left before the end,” he says.

“I…I had to go somewhere,” I stutter. I am sitting at the bar, with an almost finished cup of machine coffee. We both know that was a lie.

“It's fine,” he says. “I can't get rave reviews all the time.”

His smile is cool and short, over in a flash. He nods, picks up the tray of drinks that the girl student ordered, and prepares to go back to his table.

“Wait,” I say, standing up abruptly. A drink sloshes over his hands. He sighs and puts the tray down. “What?”

“I…” I wait for him to look at me and notice my black eyes, which are just like his, and for him just to
know
. But he doesn't. He just stands there for what seems like eons, his irritation growing. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I'm really sorry I left early.”

“It's fine.” He smiles, and again it's gone in a flash. I watch him walk away.

“Are you okay?” Zach asks me. He looks concerned.

“No,” I say. I realize I am shaking, and I feel like I want to be sick. I stumble out of the bar to where there is a flight of steps rising upwards. I sit on the bottom stair, rubbing my hands across my face. I just want to go home.

“What happened?” Zach is suddenly in front of me, crouching down so that his eyes are level with mine. “You look terrible, and you're shaking. What can I do?”

“I'm fine, just go away,” I say. “I'm fine.”

“No, you are not.” He is adamant. “And no, I am not going to go away and leave you sitting here, looking so frightened. Was it him? That lecturer guy? Has he done something to you?”

“No!” I say, appalled. “No, he has no idea who I am. Please, go away.”

But Zach doesn't move. He sits on his heels looking at me, his hands resting on the same step as my feet.

“I can't,” he said. “I'm sorry, I just…I can't leave you looking so unhappy. My mum would kill me.”

“What? What has this got to do with your mum?” I ask him.

“She brought me up to be chivalrous,” Zach says seriously. “It's hard when you're living on a council estate in Leeds, but my mum had a lot of ideas about the way a person should behave toward other people, even ones they've only just met. Especially women.”

“Yeah, well,” I say. “I'm a feminist, so…go away.”

“I'm a feminist too,” Zach says, quite seriously, the hint of a smile playing around his lips. “I really am. That was another thing my mum was keen on: me learning to respect and admire women.”

“What the hell are you going on about?” I ask him, though I have to admit I am distracted.

“You've stopped shaking,” he says, and he lifts one hand from the bottom step and touches my knee, just briefly. “Maybe you need to eat something.”

“Maybe,” I say. “I am four months pregnant, after all.”

It's the killer blow—the one that is guaranteed to stop his juggernaut of charm in its tracks. His hands fall to his sides, and he is visibly shocked.

“Whoa,” he says, sitting back on the ground. “I did not see that coming.”

“So, anyway.” I get up, and my legs are still a little bit unsteady. “I need to get going.” I carefully walk around him.

“Caitlin.” He calls my name and I stop and turn around.

“What?” I ask him. “What can you possibly want from me now?”

He's still sitting on the ground, looking at me.

“Nothing,” he says, and it sounds like an apology. “Just, take care, okay?”

This is a photograph of Claire in her favorite dress when she was coming up to sixteen. It's funny, when I got the call, and I knew that I had to come back down here, I was getting ready to pack a bag and as I pulled my bag down out of the wardrobe, this photo came with it, or rather just before, fluttering down onto the carpet like a sycamore seed. I don't know how it got there, of all places, tucked under my overnight bag, in the top of my wardrobe, but I put it into my pocket and brought it down with me. It's only now when I look at it that I can see this dress, although it's made of cotton and not silk, is almost the same cut and style as Claire's wedding dress. She's always loved red from the moment I told her, when she was a very tiny little girl, that redheads don't normally wear red. From that moment on, she always insisted on wearing it as much as possible.

Here she is, standing next to Rob Richards, her first ever
boyfriend, on their way to the Fifth Years' Leavers' Party. I took this photo, and as I stood on the other side of the camera, looking at Rob's arm around her neck, I thought he looked like he was going to strangle her.

I didn't like Rob Richards, and that was no secret. First of all, I don't like people whose names are alliterative. But that's just me. I think it's needlessly showy, that's all. Second of all, he was totally charmless. Claire liked him, though; she liked him for a long time. He used to walk past the front of our house on the way to school, and she'd be there in the hallway, peering out of the window, waiting for the top of his head to go bobbing by just above the privet hedge, and then she would go out. One day, I said to her, “You're better off going out a few seconds before he passes. Better that he's following you, rather than the other way round.”

Claire was furious with me for noticing her ploy, but the next morning, she left for school precisely twenty-four seconds earlier, before Rob's very high quiff passed the top of the hedge. Claire has always been many things: headstrong and stubborn, yes, but also determined. She got that from her father. Simon was a man who never, ever backed down. A quiet man, and a gentle one, even despite everything he'd seen in the war. But once he had a cause, a fight, he would battle until the very last. I met him—wearing his three-piece suit, with his coat tucked over his arm—on an anti-nuclear-weapons march. No one knew why the hippie girl, with her bare feet and flowers in her hair, fell for a man so much older than her and who looked like an accountant. But that was because no one else bothered to talk to Simon, to listen to the stories he had to tell about war, and why he battled so hard for peace. And I never guessed, not in a million years, that the quiet middle-aged veteran that used to come and take me out for tea was in love with me, until the moment
when, one afternoon, he asked me very politely if he could kiss me, and I let him; and from that moment on I never wanted not to be near him. He was a determined man, and Claire was a determined girl. It was what I loved about them both.

I don't know how many weeks Claire walked to school just ahead of, or just behind, Rob Richards, or how she'd initiated a friendship with a boy in the Upper Sixth in the first place, but one afternoon she brought him home from school with her.

“All right, Mrs. Armstrong?” he said, as he came in through the back door, his ridiculous hair bobbing like a separate entity all of its own.

“This is Rob.” Claire was trying really hard not to look like the cat that had got the cream. “He's my boyfriend now.”

“Well…” Rob Richards said, and then clearly thought better of protesting anymore, because from that moment on, he
was
her boyfriend, at least in Claire's eyes. When I say boyfriend, I think they enthusiastically exchanged a good deal of saliva, but I don't think they talked to each other, or even spent much time together, apart from standing on my doorstep engaged in public displays of affection that were mainly designed to annoy Claire's friends, who also liked Rob Richards.

Claire had it all arranged. She saw the dress in Miss Selfridge in town, and begged me to buy it for her for the leavers' party. I tried to tell her that most of the other girls wouldn't be going in massive fifties-style dresses, and that it wasn't like an American prom, it was a party. But Claire knew exactly what she wanted to look like, and when she put on the dress, she looked amazing, there was no denying it—like Rita Hayworth, only with big hoop earrings. The big night came, and Rob arrived to pick Claire up…dressed in jeans and a shirt. As I'd suspected, Claire was very overdressed; still, she swept down the
stairs like she was Scarlett O'Hara. But instead of telling her how beautiful she was, Rob Richards just look surprised and embarrassed. I wanted to punch him, but I didn't. I just stood there with my camera, as instructed, while Claire draped herself over Rob Richards' stonewashed denim shirt, and he reluctantly put his arm around her neck. I took the photo—I took three or four, and waited for them to leave—but Rob Richards looked sheepish, and asked if he could have a word with Claire alone. I went into the kitchen and listened at the door. Rob told Claire that he was finishing with her, and that he was taking her friend, Amy Castle, to the dance, and so probably it would be best if she didn't go. And no hard feelings. I waited for a moment until I heard the front door shut, and then I went into the hallway, where Claire was standing alone, looking into the mirror.

“Claire, I'm so sorry,” I said. “How about we rent a video, and eat ice cream?”

Claire looked me up and down like I was delusional. When she turned around, I realized she'd been applying lipstick, in exactly the same shade as her dress.

“Are you nuts? I'm not wasting this dress. I'm bloody going,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked her, thinking how beautiful she was, and how I didn't want her to walk into the bloody school disco in her ball gown and for everyone to laugh at her. “Shall I come with you?”

“Mother!” She planted a big lipstick-kiss on my cheek. “Don't be mental. Who cares about Rob Richards, anyway? I've had more interesting conversations with a pot plant.”

And off she went, putting on a brave face, determined to have a good time, or at least look like it. And I'm sure that she did; I'm sure of it. But that night when Claire got in, she cried
in her bedroom for hours. I waited until it was almost two in the morning to go in, expecting her to order me out of the room right away, but she didn't.

“It's okay to cry,” I told her.

“It's all right—none of them saw me cry,” she said. “I never let any one of them know that I cared even one little bit.”

Mum cannot see an alternative to taking Esther and me with her when she goes to the supermarket. So we wait by the door, hand in hand, ready for our coats to be zipped up against the cold. While we wait, I ponder how very mysterious zips are. For so many years, they seemed like such a simple invention: fast, convenient—zippy, even. And then, sometime recently, they became a mechanical wonder that I find impossible to fathom, or interpret. I feel the same way about the gate that has appeared at the bottom of the stairs, presumably to contain me on one floor only. Esther and I cannot make it undo, and we have tried extensively under the cover of watching
Peppa Pig
very loudly while Mum does things in the kitchen. At first it annoyed us, this newfound imposition on our civil liberties, but then Esther and I worked out that we do not have to undo the stair gate. We can simply climb over it. One nil to Esther and me.

I have been retelling myself the story of my phone call over and over again since the policeman brought us home, determined not to lose it. I'm not completely sure that it isn't just that—just a story I've told myself—but even if it is, I've repeated it so many times now, I have to try and go. To the library, at midday, to meet the man from the café and the road who is so…I don't know why my urge to see him again is so strong, except that I remember him; I remember him enough to think about him. I think about Ryan who talks to me like I am
me
.

Mum is very irritated about having to go to the supermarket and take us with her.

The supermarket used to be my job. I used to like it, spending Saturday mornings alone while Greg and Esther watched TV in bed. I found it restful, floating around with the thing with the wheels, thinking and choosing. I'm not sure when it stopped being my job exactly, but I do know that the last time I went on my own, I came home with fourteen bottles of wine and the notion that we should have a party. Greg laughed. He used to think I was so funny and spontaneous. I used to think I was so funny and spontaneous, but I am not sure anymore if that was ever what I was, or whether it was just the disease disjointing me by slight degrees.

So now Greg arranges for the food to come to the house in a van. And yet despite his care in ordering in advance, we have run out of milk, mostly because I tipped it all down the hole in the kitchen this morning, while Esther demanded that Gran take her to the loo and talk to her while she had a poo, because pooing is so boring unless there is someone to chat to. Esther is a great accomplice. Ever since our late-night trip to the park, we are far more than mother and daughter: we are coconspirators and joint keepers of secrets.

We have also run out of bread, which I threw from the upstairs window (after climbing over the stair gate), over the fence into the garden of the people in the next house along. They've got a lot of birds now. On my way back, creeping past the bathroom, I winked at Esther—who was regaling Mum with stories of her top ten best ever poos—to let her know the coast was clear.

Mum was outraged about the demise of the milk and bread, and said if she had to go out with all of us, then it might as well be to the town, since the prices at the corner shop were daylight robbery. And so we are all going to town. My carefully constructed escape plan is going incredibly smoothly so far, which makes me wonder if the disease is actually making me more brilliant, in ways I would never have imagined before. Perhaps this is like a flame, flaring briefly, burning brighter and more intensely than it ever has in the moments before it is finally snuffed out.

Mum shepherds us to the car. I'm half expecting her to attempt to strap me into a car seat too, but she doesn't.

I can't read the time on my watch anymore, although I still wear it, because I am used to the feel of it on my skin, like I am used to the feel of my wedding ring on my finger. So I listen to the radio, which Mum has tuned to Radio Four, and I know that it's eleven-thirty when we go out, and I know where the library is, and I feel exactly like I used to, before parts of my brain started filming up. I am in total control of my destiny. Today I'm doing something a married mother of two, and grandma-to-be, should absolutely not do…but can. I'm going to meet a man in secret. Alzheimer's me can do this—Alzheimer's me can have a clandestine liaison in a library with the man from the café—because it's only with him, and with Esther, that I am not debilitated by my disease: I am freed by it.

There was guilt when Greg went to work this morning. He seemed tense and upset, which isn't surprising because the police brought his daughter and me home last night in a car with the lights flashing. Mum just shouted at me a lot, wanting to know why I didn't understand, which I thought should have been obvious, I have a degenerative brain disease, but he just stood there, with arms crossed and looking so downtrodden, and so depressed, so defeated. Esther had had the time of her life, especially the part when she rode in a police car. But it wasn't the things that had happened that mattered: it was the things that could have happened. And I felt sorry that I had made him feel that way. Esther loves him very much, and he loves her, and me….

I think he still loves me too, which is why he didn't shout at me. I wish I knew who he was.

He knocked on my bedroom door, just as I was about to go to sleep. He opened it and stuck his head through the gap. “Claire, are you okay?” he asked. I shrugged. “I just want you to know that I understand why you did what you did. You just wanted to take Esther to the park. I get that. It's just that, next time, will you tell one of us? So we can remind you about it being wet or cold, or dark?”

I rolled over and turned my back on him, and I said, “This is hell. This is hell. This life, where I can't even decide to take my daughter to the park for reasons that are entirely sensible, is hell on earth.” I heard him close the door and walk away.

The first thing I did this morning was to pour the milk down the hole in the kitchen.

“Do you want to sit in the trolley?” Mum asks.

“I don't think I'll fit,” I say, which makes Esther laugh and Mum purse her lips.

She lectures us both before we enter the maze of food. “Stay with me. Don't wander off, okay?”

Esther and I nod in unison, and Esther takes my hand, squeezing my fingers as if she already knows a secret. For a few minutes, we trail around after my mother, who loads up the trolley with milk and fruit that no one will eat, and I tell myself over and over again what I am doing, where I am going. What my secret plan is. I don't know if now is any time near midday or past it, but I do know it will have to be now or never. I pick Esther up and, kissing her, slot her into the wheelie thing seat. She protests for a little while, but only until I take a packet of crisps off the shelf and hand it to her. I trail behind, studiously looking at labels that I cannot read anymore, up and down the lines of food, and then up and down the next one until I am as near to where the outside door is as I can be. While Mum and Esther head up the next aisle, I continue down and out of the outside door, and into the world. I am becoming quite an expert at this.

The world is large, noisy, and different from how I remember it. The town I'm walking through today is different from the one I remember. I don't know which version it is I am remembering, whether it is one from last week, last year, or last decade: I don't know. But it's different from this version I am walking in now. It's rather like walking in a dream, where everything isn't quite right. It could be frightening to be out here, but I am not frightened: I am free.

The library hasn't changed, though. It's a great big old building with spires and turrets, and looks like it should feature in a book of its own. I can see it, at least its tower with the time on it, over the roofs of the buildings in between, and so I just keep heading toward it, my eyes fixed constantly up, wondering what the time is. I am forced to divert, turn down streets I don't
remember being there, but I am not worried, because when I look up I can still see the tower, getting closer. I just think about getting to the library and nothing else, and it works. Eventually, I come into a part of the town that has no cars, like a square, and I have reached the library. I did it!

I look up at the stone steps that lead to a room full of books, and to Ryan, and it occurs to me what I am doing. I'm throwing myself off a precipice from which there is no way back. I am a married woman, married to a man who could not have loved me more, and who does his best every day to try and show me that this hasn't changed, even though I'm slowly ebbing away. I should take comfort in his steadfast love; it should make me feel better, but it doesn't, because I do not know him. He is nothing to me, and all his words and kindness feel like lies, because I do not know him. Even his face is becoming a meaningless blur whenever I try to recall him. And as for the precipice, soon I will be falling from it, anyway. Maybe it's better to jump rather than be pushed. I want to see this man, who wants to see me. That's all. Not to have an affair or hurt anyone, or try to run away. I just want to see this man who wants to see me. Me and not the disease.

It's cold and the inside of my neck hurts when I go from the cold air into the hot air of the library. He said he'd meet me in the reading room, and for a while I am afraid that I won't know what he looks like now. But then he is there. He turns around when I come in and smiles. It's the eyes I don't forget—the eyes that are so full of words.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hello,” I say.

“I'm so pleased to see you. I thought you might not come,” he says all at once in a rush, as though there is more to say, but then no more words come.

“I'm pleased to see you too,” I say. “I have thought about nothing else but coming.”

We stand there looking at each other for a long time, and it's not about who looks like what, I just know that. It's not about the color of eyes, or hair, or the angle of a chin or the set of a mouth. It's just about looking, being there with another person who somehow knows you, and sees you. We just look at each other, and it's the strangest feeling to look at a person I barely know and feel that somehow I'm looking at a reflection.

“Shall we walk?” he says, and he takes my fingers and leads me deep into the walls of books. I breathe in the scent of dusty paper and, as I follow him, the pulse in the tips of my fingers ticks against the palm of his hand. For a moment, I am a little girl, a very little girl following my father to the romance section, where he secretly picks out romantic novels to read. I had forgotten that, until this very moment. My dad used to love to read romance. Sitting on a Sunday morning in the sunshine in the living room, he'd read a book cover to cover. I gasp in a quiet breath of warm air and close my eyes. For a second it feels like he is here with me again, and I am choosing books for him based on how pretty the lady on the cover is.

We stop in the darkest corner of the walls of books, our backs against a mosaic of spines.

“How are you?” he asks me in a whisper, even though there is no one else here and we are far from the front desk.

“I am complicated,” I say out loud, because I don't know how to lie to him or how to whisper.

“Was it hard to get away?” he asks, smiling at me as if I am very marvelous. I like the idea that he thinks I am very marvelous.

“No, I hatched a brilliant escape plan,” I tell him, and he laughs. When he looks at me, there is this light in his eyes: it is
pure joy. I never expected to give anyone that intensity of happiness ever again. I can't resist it.

“I've been thinking about you a lot,” he says. “The whole time, wondering how I could see you again.”

“Why?” I ask him. “Why have you been thinking about me?”

“Who knows why?” His fingers trace along the ledge toward mine. Our hands touch, fingertip to fingertip. “Does it matter why? Isn't it enough just that I do think about you? All the time. Do you think about me?”