The Day We Met (20 page)

“When I remember to,” I say.

I look at him, and try to make sense of what I see in his face, but it overwhelms me. I put my palm against his cheek to still us both.

“I'm married,” I tell him. “And I have two daughters, and one is having a baby. I'm going to be a grandmother.” I say the last few words in a tone of wonder, because the information has just come back to me in that second.

“And I'm married too.” He covers my hand with his, keeping it in place. “I'm still very much in love with my wife. I really am.”

“So we can't…this can't be an affair,” I say. “I can't run away with you. We aren't the sort of people who would do that, are we?”

I wonder if I should tell him about the nature of my illness, but I can't. I'm perfect to him at the moment. I want to be perfect to him, for as many moments as I can be.

“No,” he says. “You don't have to run away with me. You just have to be here with me now. That's all I want. I just want now. Nothing else has to happen.”

It's not until he says the words that I realize that is all I want too. I just want now. I am not sure which of us draws closer
to the other, or when I know that we are going to kiss, here in the library among the racks of sedate hardbacks, but it happens effortlessly, beautifully. All I want is now, this warmth, the closeness, his smell, his lips, his touch, all I want is now, until it is not now anymore. This kiss isn't about sex, desire, or passion, or anything other than just knowing each other, just being close to each other: it's a kiss made only of love.

There's a cough from the other side of the wall of books, and we break apart. I lean my face against his, and we stand cheek to cheek, our heads slightly bowed, breathing each other in, the toes of our feet interlocked.

“I have to go,” I say. “Mum must be tired of losing me by now.”

“Don't go yet,” he says. “Stay here a little longer.”

“My mum will kill me,” I say, and that makes him laugh, too loudly.

“Excuse me.” A voice comes from behind the book wall. “If you want to talk, go outside.”

There's a noise, a loud screeching, and I think it might be a fire alarm, but then I realize it's the thing in my pocket that my mother gave me. I take it out and look at it. He takes it from me and finds a way to make it quiet, so that it just chirrups silently in my hand. It doesn't stop, though.

“Quick, answer it!” he says, stifling a giggle, as the person on the other side of the books marches off, probably to get reinforcements.

“I don't know how to,” I say, shrugging. “It's new.”

He takes it, presses something and hands it back to me. I hear a tiny, tinny voice repeating my name over and over again. Slowly, uncertainly, I bring the thing to my ear as if it is a seashell. I hear Mum's voice.

“Where are you?”

“The library,” I say.

“Why?” is all she says.

“I wanted to come to the library,” I say, looking at him, smiling. “So I did.”

Then the sound of my mother sighing, crying, growling…or something.

“Claire, will you wait there until Esther and I come to get you?”

“Yes.” My smile falters when I hear the sadness in her voice, and so does his as he watches my face. “I'll wait here.”

“Promise me,” she says. “Wait on the steps. Don't go anywhere. Remember it, Claire. Pin it down. Wait on the front steps.”

“I'll wait,” I say. There is quiet and I don't know what to do with the thing so I put it back in my pocket.

“Excuse me.” A cross-looking woman is marching toward us. “We've had complaints.”

Ryan takes my hand and we walk quickly through the books, our footsteps echoing off them, right into the hall to the great big giants' door. Cold air gushes in and out as people come and go.

“I have to wait on the steps to meet my mum,” I say, and then, “You must think I am very stupid to have to wait to be collected by my mum, but she's old, she's very needy.”

“Not at all.” We stand for a moment longer. It's like the lengths of our bodies are bonded together by some kind of magnetic force: we are simply drawn to each other, as though we're meant to be connected. “It's nice.”

“I wonder how I will see you again,” I say, knowing that the second I step outside, this moment will be over forever, and that in any one of the seconds that follow, I might forget him.

“There will be a time,” he says. “I know it.”

“I have to wait on the steps,” I say.

“I'll wait here. I'll watch you until she comes.”

“Will you?” I ask him. He squeezes my fingers one last time, and I walk out into the cold and stand on the steps, and breathe in the color and the life, and the rush of the traffic, and the smell of the air, full of dirt. I like now.

“Mummy!” Esther hops up the steps, two at a time. “Is it story time?”

“You can't go out anymore,” Mum says. She takes my arm and tries to drag me away.

“Get off me!” I shout, and people turn and look. “Get off me!”

Mum lets go. Her face is white, and her eyes are red and swollen. She's been crying, and suddenly I feel her pain, like a hammer blow in the center of my chest. I shouldn't have done this.

“I'm sorry, Mum,” I say.

“You can't go anywhere anymore,” she says, standing there quaking, shaking, on the library steps. “I can't do it. I thought I could, but I can't. I can't take care of you anymore. I've let you down.”

Mum is crying, her whole body trembling, the tears running and running. I put my arms around her, and Esther too, and I hold her while she cries. We stand like that for a long time, while the people of the town walk up and down the library steps around us. And then Mum breaks the embrace and wipes her face with a hanky.

“If we don't get the freezer stuff packed away soon it will defrost.”

This is a photo of my dad and me on the beach in St Ives, Cornwall. It was blazing hot, but Dad still has full-length trousers on, and his shirtsleeves buttoned at his wrists. He's sitting awkwardly in the deck chair, as though it were the enemy, with me at his feet. I remember Mum squinting through the camera lens, her feet buried in the sand, the wind coming off the water, blowing her cotton skirt up around her knees, while I kneeled at Dad's feet, my hands buried in the hot, dry sand. I'm scowling in the photo, wishing she'd hurry up and get on with it, because I didn't want to be still for a moment longer. I look at it now, and I see that my dad and I have exactly the same scowl.

Dad hated being on holiday; he hated leisure time, I think. He was a man who always liked to have a purpose. Nothing he did was ever just to pass the time, or designed to be recreational, except for reading his books, and even then he only allowed
himself that pleasure when there was absolutely nothing else that could be done with that time. How my mother got him to accompany us on this, our one and only family holiday, I do not know. I imagine a conversation about being part of the family, building a relationship with his daughter, taking part in life. My mum, with her bare feet and long hair, the freckles on her nose, and nails that were never painted, and my dad, standing in the heat of the day in a suit and tie, eyeing her as if she were a creature from another planet, not merely another generation, arguing about going on holiday. I wonder, sometimes, how they fell in love. I tried to ask Mum once, a few years ago, just as I was getting together with Greg. But she turned my question away with a simple shake of her head, and I never asked again. She did love him, though. I don't doubt that. I don't doubt that he loved her too—the way he used to watch her, as though she were miraculous.

That day, just after the photo was taken, Mum went off in search of ice cream and left us alone, Dad sitting uncomfortably in his rented chair, watching me aimlessly shift the sand around.

“Shall we build something?” he said. I paused and looked over my shoulder, uncertain whether he was talking to me—he rarely talked to me directly. “A sandcastle,” he clarified. “We'll need to dig down deeper, or go nearer to the water, to reach firmer sand.”

I stood up and followed him as he walked, shoes and socks still on, down toward the shoreline, me trailing after him in my swimming costume. He picked his way in and out of the holidaymakers, through a patchwork of brightly colored towels occupied by people who seemed at ease with their near nakedness, whatever their size and shape. It was my father, a dark patch of sweat flowering between his shoulder blades, who looked incongruous and out of place. When we were a few feet from the
gentle rush of the tide, he kneeled down on the damp sand and began to dig. I watched him for a while, and then I began to dig too, copying him as—without a bucket—he built a trench, a moat, and then from the excavated sand began to mold an incredibly intricate building, so delicate, so carefully constructed, that after a while I stopped trying to join in and simply sat on my heels and watched while he worked. Every now and then he'd glance up, as though he'd remembered I was there, but we didn't talk. Mum must have come back from her ice-cream hunt and spotted us there, playing together at the water's edge, and decided not to interrupt us, because I never did get that ice cream. We weren't playing, either: nothing about the process of creating that castle, with its fanciful turrets and ramparts, was about play. It was about making the best possible sandcastle. And even then, even at six years old, I understood that: I understood my dad, and I wanted to be like him.

When it was done, he rubbed the palms of his hands together, and climbed to his feet. I stood up and took up my position next to him, feeling awfully privileged to be there in that moment.

“The secret,” he told me, taking my hand, “is to know when to stop. And now, I think, is the right time to stop.” And as if he had commanded it, which when I was six years old I believed that he had, the sea rushed in, filling the moat with water. We stood, side by side, hand in hand, and watched the rushing water gradually rise over our toes and ankles, taking a little piece of the castle each time it went back out, until finally the foundations were washed away and it crumbled into nothing.

And then, without another word, we walked back to where Mum was sitting, and nothing more was said about ice cream. Later that night, in our little B&B, when Dad tucked me into the
camp bed that had been put up at the bottom of their bed, I pretended to be asleep so I could listen to them talking about me.

“It looked like you really connected with her today,” Mum said, using a word that my father would have disparagingly described as “Californian.”

“She's a great girl, you know, full of ideas and thoughts, so creative. You should get her to tell you a story sometime. I don't know where she gets that imagination from. I know it's not me.”

“She is a very nice child,” my dad had said, climbing into bed and switching off the light, although it couldn't have been later than nine. And then, a long time later (I can't be sure whether it was hours or minutes), I heard him say—although I've never been sure if it was a dream or real, but I think I heard him say, “She gets her imagination from me.”

And when I think of that castle, with its asymmetrical spires and arches, doorways and steps, all created for just a few moments of beauty, I think perhaps I did.

Gran sounds strained on the other end of the phone. Mum went AWOL again for the second time in two days, and Gran is shaken, frightened. I need to go home. I try to insist on coming home right then, but Gran won't let me.

“What difference will it make if you come home now?” she says. “I've got Greg and Esther, who is such a little ray of sunshine in the middle of all of this. And since the last ‘escapade' at the library, she's been calmer, more peaceful. Happy to be at home.”

“Maybe we could take her to the library, now and then,” I say. “Remember how she used to take me there three or four times a week when I was a little girl? Remember that time we went after school, and she started reading
A Christmas Carol
out loud to me, doing all the voices, scaring the crap out of me?
Other people started to listen too. They all thought it was some sort of event. And then the librarian threw us out for being disruptive. It's a special place for her, and maybe it will help if we take her there.”

“Yes,” Gran said. “Although I wouldn't put it past her to give me the slip in True Crime. You know, part of me is glad she's fighting everything around her, even me. If she wasn't fighting until the bitter end, she wouldn't be my Claire. And she's been writing in the memory book a lot. Page after page, like she's on a deadline.”

“When I get home, I'm going to get her novel out of the drawer and read it,” I say. “Maybe it's really good, Gran. Maybe we could get it published before she…Imagine how much she would love that!”

“I don't know, darling.” Gran pauses. She only ever uses terms of endearment when she is about to say something sad. “If your mum had ever wanted it to be read, it would have been. The memory book, that's the book that matters—that's her life's work.”

“I'm glad it helps her,” I say.

“Her handwriting is unraveling, and it's not always easy to tell what she is writing, but perhaps that doesn't matter as long as she knows,” Gran says.

“And Greg, how is he?” I ask.

“Coping, working a lot, staying out of the house, because Claire is calmer when he's not there.”

Before I spoke to Gran, I tried his mobile phone, but he didn't answer. Sometimes I wish I had taken the trouble to make better friends with him, more quickly, so that now it would be easier to talk to him. I thought I had all the time in the world—everyone always does. It's a cliché, isn't it, to suddenly become
aware of your own mortality. I look out of the hotel window, and the life passing below me on the street. I feel very far away from home.

“So, do you know what you are going to say?” Gran asks me.

I haven't told her about my failed first attempt, or about Zach from the bar sitting at my feet, apologizing for something he has got nothing to do with. I'm embarrassed at how inept I am at this, even though this is a unique situation. All I can think about is that I am going to be a mother myself, and a really important big sister: a lynchpin. I have to go through with this, be that person, the person I need to be, whatever the outcome. Not some crappy girl who can't string two sentences together. If I were my long-lost daughter, I'd tell myself to get lost.

“You'll be fine,” Gran says, answering her own question when I don't respond. “I bet the words will just come to you. Look at how clever you are.”

“Gran, I'm an accidentally pregnant college dropout,” I tell her.

“Well, yes,” she says. “Maybe, but an awfully clever one.”

When Gran has hung up, I finish breakfast in my room. I decided as soon as I arrived that I didn't want to go down to breakfast and be the person sitting on her own in a corner of the restaurant. I don't want to go out at all, really—not back to the campus, or back to Paul Sumner. Today I know that he is taking tutorials in his office in the English Department. I'm not sure where his office is, but I am sure that I will more than likely be able to find it easily, and then it is just a matter of biding my time. I take care with how I look. After a shower, I dry my hair ever so slowly with the hotel dryer, so that it falls in smooth waves. Putting on just a little makeup, I leave my eyeliner untouched on the glass shelf in the bathroom. I look into my own eyes, for once
bare of the outline I have painted on them for the last five years at least. I used to look in the mirror and wonder who I looked like—what mystery person made this face—but I see it now as clear as day. Her nose, her chin, her mouth. And even though her eyes are blue, and mine are almost black, I have her eyes too. It's got nothing to do with the pigment, only what's behind them. It's thanks to her I know I can do what seems impossible.

I smile as the lift takes me down, imagining Mum breaking out and running away to the library. I know it's been hard on Gran, what with Mum scaling fences and sneaking under tripwires and laser beams. But somehow it makes me feel invincible too.

As the doors slide open I see Zach sitting opposite the lift, reading a paper. I press the
CLOSE DOORS
button again several times, and the person who is standing outside waiting to go up in the lift repeatedly presses the
CALL LIFT
button. As our thumbs battle it out for maybe fifteen seconds, Zach looks up and sees me.

“Caitlin!” He calls out my name as though we are old friends. Short of going back upstairs with the man I have already annoyed, there is nothing I can do to avoid him.

Reluctantly, I concede defeat, stepping out of the lift as the victor barges past me, muttering under his breath. I stay where I am and let Zach, if that is even really his name, come to me, because there is a CCTV camera pointing right at the lift doors.

“Are you stalking me?” I ask him, although admittedly it does seem preposterous that a man wearing black-and-white-checked skinny jeans, a wine-colored shirt and yet another waistcoat would try to stalk anyone, apart from maybe the person who told him those trousers were a good idea. All he's missing is an ill-advised trilby.

“No! Well, a bit.” He offers me a small folded-up square of paper. “I found this. You left it on the bar. I'm sorry, but I read it.”

I take the piece of paper. I don't need to look at it to know that it is my list.

“So, now you know a little more about a complete stranger who means nothing to you, so what?” I say. “You just turn up at my hotel, in a textbook example of extreme weirdness?”

“I wanted to make sure you are okay,” Zach says. “I mean, yesterday, it must have been hard for you, to see your father that way, without him knowing about you. Especially…you know, in…um…”

“In my condition? Why is it that men just can't say the word ‘pregnant'?” I raise an eyebrow. I cannot work him out. What is he doing here? What on earth is in it for him? “Look, are you some sort of religious nutter?” I ask him. “Is this about getting me into a cult, or something? Because I've read about it, how they get good-looking people to go and flirt with the vulnerable, and the next thing you know you're living in the middle of Kansas married to a man with a beard and sixteen sister-wives.”

“So, you think I'm good-looking, then?” Zach grins and I blush at once, which infuriates me, because despite the fact that he dresses like a popstar who shops at Topman, he is undeniably attractive—which makes me even more cross, because I am quite obviously not in any position to be finding boys attractive, especially strange boys who turn up unannounced, for no apparent reason.

“Oh my God, what are you doing here?” I ask him again, exasperated with myself as much as with him. “What business of yours can it possibly be?”

“It's not, I suppose,” Zach says. He looks awkward and embarrassed. “I thought…you know, you're far away from home and pregnant, and you've never met your dad. I just thought that…you maybe could use a friend.”

“You're a pervert,” I say. “You are one of those perverts that fancies pregnant women. You're a cult-joining, pregnant-woman-fancying pervert.”

“You don't meet a lot of nice people, do you?” Zach frowns and smiles at the same time.

“Don't feel sorry for me!” I order him, with one outstretched finger, raising my voice so that the people on the front desk look up.

“Look, why don't we have a coffee, in there.” He nods toward the bar. “And, as an ice-breaker, you can tell me your other theories on my psychosis, and maybe neither of us will get arrested or thrown out for causing a commotion, and you'll see I'm just a bloke who is, oddly, pretty decent.”

He seems so easy, so happy in his own skin, as though turning up unannounced at the hotel of a person you have only met fleetingly, with some unasked-for offer of solidarity, is the most normal thing in the whole wide world. I can't make sense of his being here, apparently just for me.

“You don't understand it, do you?” he says, thinking for a moment. “Look, I'm not from a cult, I'm not a pervert who's only into pregnant women—although I would say that finding pregnant women attractive isn't necessarily intrinsically wrong. But my mum brought me up to be really, really nice. She had this crazy obsession with turning me into a decent sort of person, one who gives a damn about the world and the people in it. I went through a rebellious phase when I was fifteen, and for about four years did exactly the opposite of everything she'd taught me to, and lost a lot of people who cared about me, did some stuff I shouldn't have, and then I realized that life was miserable—that it sucked. I finally got that my mum was right. The world is a nicer place when you care about people. Which is kind of sappy, but there you go. I'm a sappy bloke.”

“Is your mum Mother Teresa?” I ask him.

“No.” He smiles. “She died, actually. When I was fifteen. Lung cancer. She never smoked, but she worked in pubs most of her life, so…”

“My mum is dying,” I say. “Well, not dying, exactly. She has early-onset familial Alzheimer's, and there's a fifty percent chance that one day I might get it too.”

There's silence—just a beat when nothing happens, except the chatter in the hotel lobby and the dim rush of traffic outside the building.

“You're having a really stressful time,” he says. And it's not a question, or a platitude: it's just a statement of fact and, for some reason, hearing someone else say the words out loud is quite calming. Yes, it helps: to acknowledge that I am having a really stressful time. I feel better.

“So, do you want a coffee?” I ask him. “You can help me plan how I introduce myself to my dad.”

“Does this mean you've stopped thinking I am either going to induct you into a cult or try to abduct you?” Zach asks me cheerfully.

“No,” I say. “But I've got no one else to talk to, so I'll chance it.”

It was not as easy as I first assumed it was going to be to get into the English Department building. You needed to scan your ID card electronically, or have a staff ID pass.

“Well,” I say to Zach, “give me yours, and I'll use that to whiz in before anyone notices I'm not in a boy band.”

Zach grins. “My card won't work in there. I'm only in catering.”

“Your student card, then?” I demand, holding the palm of my hand out flat.

“I'm not a student,” he says.

“Yes, you are!” I'm brought up short by this. I mean, why would anyone my age be hanging around a university campus, working in a university bar, if he's not a student? “You said you were a photography student?”

“A photographer, not a student of photography. And I'm a skint one, so I work in the bar to help me pay the bills. I'm not ready to do weddings yet. Not quite yet. Maybe this time next year, if I haven't had my big break.”

“Where do photographers get big breaks?” I ask him, diverted from my real purpose.

“Well, I've yet to quite work that out,” he says. “But I'm sure there are big breaks for photographers. Somewhere out there.”