The Day We Met (8 page)

“Caitlin, please,” I say, reaching out for her, but she withdraws her hand from under mine.

“I just need some time,” she says. She won't look at me, but I know her well enough to know what she is thinking, and why her eyes are glazed with unshed tears. She can't be angry with her poor diseased mother, and it's not fair. “I just…I need to work out what to do. Away from you…all.”

It's such a simple sentence, but the way she says it, her gaze turned away from me…

“Caitlin, don't go now,” her gran says. “Have dinner at least. Things will seem better when you've eaten.”

Caitlin looks at the food, cooling rapidly on the table.

“I'm going back tonight. I'll call a taxi to take me to the station.”

“I'll take you to the station,” Greg says, rising from his chair.

“No, thank you,” Caitlin says very formally. “You'd better stay here with Mum. I just…I think I just need to go.”

“She just didn't want to talk about it,” Greg says, as he watches me untangling my hair with the hedgehog-looking thing. I don't like him watching me. It makes it harder somehow, more difficult to concentrate, like trying to clasp a necklace when you are looking in the mirror: everything is going backwards. And I am annoyed that I can remember that a hedgehog is a spiky
little mammal indigenous to the British Isles, yet not what the name of the spiky-backed thing is. I'm sure Greg watching me makes it worse.

“You've tried,” he goes on, standing close to me with the sort of easy familiarity that I simply don't feel. He's wearing only his boxers. I don't know where to look, so I turn my face from him and look at the wall. “You owned up, and that took guts. Caitlin will get that, eventually.”

“I owned up?” I say, concentrating on the smooth, empty wall. “I suppose I did. Sometimes, it's never the right time to say something, do you know what I mean? I've hurt her, and she's holding it all in because I'm sick. Thing is, I'd feel so much better if she'd only shout and scream, and tell me how I've cocked up her whole life. I could take it.”

“You haven't cocked up her whole life.” Greg sits down next to me on the bed, and I tense, concentrating hard on not showing that the thought of his bare thigh so close to mine makes me want to bolt for the door. This is my husband; this is the man that I should never want to stop looking at. I know that, and yet he feels like a stranger. A total stranger who somehow has access to my family and my bedroom. He feels like an impostor.

“Caitlin is a sensible girl, a lovely girl, she's just shocked,” the stranger says now. “Give her some space. A few days and you'll get it straightened out.”

I sit awkwardly on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to go clean his teeth so that I can undress, put on my nightshirt, and wriggle under the covers. After a moment—I know he is debating whether or not to touch me—he gets up and goes into the bathroom. Changing quickly, I dive under the duvet, tucking the cover around me and under my legs and arms, creating a sort of pocket, so that when he climbs into bed, his body won't actually
touch mine—and even if he puts his arms around me, they won't touch my skin. It's easier than having to explain to him that he frightens me, and that getting into bed with him feels alien and disjointed. I can't remember how to touch him, or how to react when he touches me. And so I wrap up my body, buffering it from his. Not just to protect me, but also to protect him from being hurt by me any more than I know he is every day. He seems like such a nice man. What did he ever do to deserve me? As I lie there waiting for him to return, his breath smelling of peppermint, I think that the saddest thing about this disease is that it makes me feel like a less nice person. I always used to feel like I was pretty nice. This time, I will be the first one to talk, I decide.

“What I'm worried about is that we don't make it up in time. I worry that in a few days' time, I'll think my name is Suzanne, and I'll bark like a dog,” I say, smiling shyly at him as he climbs into bed. He doesn't laugh, because he can't: he doesn't find AD even the slightest bit funny, and it's not really fair of me to expect him to, just because black humor makes it more bearable for me. He thought he was going to have one kind of life, and look what he's been lumbered with: a wife that likes him increasingly less and soon will mostly just drool.

He rolls over and puts an arm across my insulated body. It feels heavy. “A couple of days and it will have all blown over,” he says, kissing me on the ear, making me shudder. “She'll be back at uni with her friends, in the swing of it all, getting some perspective, and it will be fine. You'll see. I mean, it's like you say, there was never going to be a good time to tell her that, but you did it. You told her.”

“I hope you're right,” I say. There is something off with Caitlin—something more than her thinness, her exhaustion, her quiet sadness—that I have, of course, put down to my diagnosis,
because it's all about me, right? A few months ago, I would have been able to decipher it, but now that time is gone. Decoding the subtleties of people's expressions is lost to me: I have to guess, or hope they will say something really obvious. There is something else, though—something that Caitlin is hiding to protect me—something more.

Greg stretches over me and presses something that makes the room go dark. I feel his hand snake its way under the covers, breaching my defenses and resting on my belly. There is nothing sexual in it. We haven't…not for ages. The last time was on the day of the diagnosis, before we'd told anyone. And even then it had more to do with grief than passion—we just clung to each other, willing everything to be different. Greg is still wishing it, and willing it. I always thought I'd fight it until my last breath, but sometimes I wonder if I've given up already.

“I love you, Claire,” he says, ever so quietly.

I want to ask him how that is even possible when I am so broken, but I don't. “I do know that I've loved you,” I say instead. “I do know that.”

Greg's arm pinions me for a few moments more, and then he rolls over onto his side, and I feel cold. He doesn't understand that from the moment the disease became a reality, I started to withdraw from him. And I don't know if it's the disease that is driving this wedge between us, or if it is me, the real me, trying to save us both from the pain of separation. But whatever the reason is, it comes from me. I close my eyes, and see the lights contorting behind my lids. I remember the love I had for him; I remember how it feels. But when I look back on those times, it's as if it happened to another person. If I chase him away now, then perhaps in the long run all this will hurt less.

This is the parking ticket I got for parking on a double yellow line the first evening I went out for a drink with Greg. I was late, of course. I'd spent a stupid amount of time, perhaps the most time ever before a date, working out what to wear, and even whether I should I go. He'd asked me earlier that day, a blazing hot day, and I'd said yes more because I didn't know how to say no than because I wanted to go. I took everything out of my wardrobe, and tried it on. And everything I had made me look fat and old—or at least that's what I thought. And then I found this chiffon tea dress, and I thought it showed too much cleavage; and then I put on this tie-dyed maxi sundress, and I thought that made me look my age; and then I went into Caitlin's room, where she was lying on her bed pretending to read, and asked her what to wear on a date, and she picked out an outfit that made me look like a librarian—a librarian who is also a part-time
nun. So I went back to my bedroom and found a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, which made me look like I should be in some sort of skincare advert, but at that point it was all I had. I turned around and around, looking at myself in the jeans, wondering if I could really carry them off, sitting down to check for folds of fat surging up over the waistband, wondering about the little apron of loose skin that had never bounced back after Caitlin was born, wondering if Greg knew he was asking a woman with stretch marks out for a drink.

“It's just a drink.” That's what I told my reflection. It was just a drink, but as I ran a red light in order to get to the pub on time, bringing the car to a screeching halt on a set of double yellows, my heart was racing, my skin tingling in a way I'd never felt before, or at least not for a long time.

He'd said he would be in the garden, at the back. I walked through the pub feeling like everyone was looking at me, a woman in her midthirties wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. All around me there were younger women dressed in skimpy tops and tiny shorts, boasting their summer wardrobe with the kind of certain beauty that youth and firmness gives you. I felt so old, so much older than almost thirty-six, so foolish for agreeing to meet Greg, more foolish still for allowing myself even to think it was a date. I was sure that, after a little stilted conversation, he'd bring the topic round to how he could do some more work on the house, make some more money out of me. Or perhaps it would be like those stories you hear about on TV, or read in a magazine, in which some poor woman falls for a con artist and he takes away all of her money. I didn't really have any money, but as I spotted Greg, sitting right at the back of the garden under a tree, I thought that perhaps I'd give him the key to my house in exchange for five minutes to simply look at him.

As I approached, Greg rose from the bench, still straddling it like a cowboy. That's what I thought when I saw him there: he's like a cowboy. A cowboy builder.

“I got you a glass of white,” he said, nodding at the perspiring glass on the table. “I didn't know if it was right, but you have a lot of empty bottles of white wine in your recycling, so…It's pinot grigio. I don't know much about wine, but there were three available by the glass and this was the most expensive.”

I laughed, he blushed; I blushed, he laughed. There were moments of not looking at each other, not knowing whether to kiss or touch in some way, and so after some awkward bobbing, left to right, missing each other every time, we did neither.

I couldn't decide whether to sit opposite him, on the other side of the table, or on the same bench, the one he was straddling like a cowboy. In the end, I circled round the edge of the table to sit on the other side, in the full glare of sunshine. It was evening but the heat was still intense, and almost immediately, as a bead of sweat formed at the base of my neck and trickled down my spine, I wished I'd joined him in the shade. But by then it was too late to move.

I don't remember what we talked about, because I remember everything else: the sense of him being near me; the heat on the back of my neck, and feeling the backs of my arms beginning to burn and my cheeks glaze with perspiration; the longing for another drink and a visit to the ladies', but feeling unable to get up again so soon after I had arrived.

“You look hot,” Greg said.

“Oh, thank you,” I said, lowering my eyes, feeling a sudden frisson at the unexpectedly frank compliment.

“No, I mean you look hot, from the sun.”

For a moment I just stared at him, mortified, horrified,
and then I laughed. And then he laughed. I buried my face in my hands, feeling the blood rushing to the surface of my skin all over my body.

Then Greg suggested we have another drink inside, out of the sun. He offered me his hand to help me up from the bench, but I declined and he waited for me as I somehow got my leg stuck under the picnic table, eventually staggering to my feet and falling against him. He held the tops of my arms to steady me, and then let me go. As we walked inside, I felt that every pair of eyes was upon us, wondering what he could be doing with me. He looked like the sort of man who'd feature on a calendar, whose usual date would be a twenty-something like him with a taut body and bright blond hair. What was he doing with me?

We stood inside at the bar, and I remember the first moment he touched me on purpose. I remember it exactly—the thrill, the jolt, the longing when he ran his forefinger along the back of my hand as it rested on the bar. We looked at each other, and didn't say anything about it: we just kept on talking, his fingers coming to rest on the back of my hand.

The sun was finally going down when he walked me back to the car and I found my parking ticket. Greg apologized, and I told him it wasn't his fault. He peeled it off the windscreen for me, and I folded it into my purse.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“But I can call you?” he asked, brushing aside goodbyes.

“Of course,” I said, half of me still wondering if he was touting for more work.

“Tomorrow, then. I'll phone you tomorrow.”

“Greg…” I paused for ages, not knowing how to say what I needed to say. “Fine,” I said at last. I stood there awkwardly, with my hand on the car door, feeling uncertain exactly how to make my exit. Greg opened the door for me and waited until I
got in. He waited while I turned on the ignition and pulled out into the traffic. It was only when I'd gone through a set of lights and turned right that he disappeared from my rearview mirror.

And in the days that followed, I forgot about my parking ticket, folded neatly in the bottom of my bag. I had far too much else to think about. No, that's not true: I could only think about one thing. I could only think about Greg.

“I'm sorry, the number you are calling is currently unavailable,” the polite female voice tells me again. I look at the thing, the shiny black slab in my hand, and give it back to Greg. The device for making calls. I know what it does, but I've lost what it is called and how to make it work. It's the same with numbers: I know what they do, but I don't know how. “Try again?”

He nods stoically, even though I suspect he thinks I am wasting his time, stopping him leaving to go to work. I don't know what he's thinking, though, because since the night Caitlin left, we've more or less stopped talking altogether. Once, we were like a tangle, two threads so intricately entwined they could never be separated…until the disease began to unravel me, to extricate me from my connection to him. Something I did or said has made him stop trying to make things the same as they
were. I can't remember what it was, but I find that I am grateful he is avoiding me.

I watch him perform some mysterious ritual with the calling thing, his thumb sliding across its glassy surface, as he tries to reach Caitlin again. He listens to it for a moment, and the female voice comes again, from a distance this time: “I'm sorry, the number you are calling is currently unavailable.”

“It's been a long time with no contact, hasn't it?” I say, sitting on the floor of Caitlin's bedroom. I came in here as soon as I woke up, to look for something that might tell me where she is, and knowing that, however long it has been, it is too long. Fear racks me from the second I wake, until I come into her room and begin to look for clues again. I say “again” because before I asked him to try and connect to her, on the talking thing, Greg told me that I have been doing exactly this for several days in a row. Perhaps I have, but the fear is intense, and new. It's the fear that twenty years have gone by while I was asleep. The fear that Caitlin's grown up and gone away, and I haven't noticed. The fear that I imagined her, and that she has never been real.

I look around. This is real—Caitlin is real—and it's been too long.

I'm still wearing my gray cotton pajamas and bed socks, and I feel uncomfortable being in the same room as Greg without a bra on. I don't want him to look at me, so I pull my knees up to my chin, wrap my arms around my legs, and fold myself in. But it's okay because he hardly ever looks directly at me since the night Caitlin left, however long ago that was.

“It's not
that
long,” he says, laying the thing down on the cover of Caitlin's neatly made bed, and I wonder if I can trust him. “She's a grown woman, don't forget. She said she wanted some space. Some time to think.”

I used to have a number that connected to a place, an actual building instead of the device Caitlin keeps glued to the palm of her hand. When she came home in the summer, she had brought all of her belongings with her for the first time in two years, because in her final year she was going to be living somewhere else. Greg had gone to pick her up in the van, and I'd sat and watched while they unloaded it and she carried armfuls and armfuls of her life back up the stairs to her bedroom. She'd said they were all getting a better place close to campus, but she never gave us the address. I'd gotten so used to always being able to reach her that I suppose I thought we were somehow permanently connected, and could always be in touch within moments. But that was when I was still able to use the object that I don't know the name for anymore—and when she used to compulsively respond to it.

Something is wrong—more wrong than hurt feelings and anger.

“It feels like too long a time.” I dig my feet into the carpet. I don't know exactly how long it has been. One of the fears I have when I wake up every day is that time might have vanished while I wasn't concentrating. She might have been gone a day, a week, a year, or a decade. Have I lost years in the fog? Is she older now with her own children, and I've missed a lifetime, lying unconscious in my own sleepy hollow?

“Two weeks and a bit,” he says, staring at his hands clasped between his knees. “It's not that long, really.”

“It's not long at all when you are twenty and living it up at university.” My mum appears, standing in the doorway, her arms folded. She looks like she is on the point of telling me to tidy up after myself, even though this is Caitlin's room. “Remember when you went InterRailing or whatever it was with that girl? What was her name?”

“Laura Bolsover,” I say, at once picturing Laura's face, round and shiny, dimples in her cheeks, her left eyebrow pierced several times. Names from the distant past come freakishly easily, because quite often I feel as though I am there, and this
here
, this
now
, is simply an intermission from reality. I met her at a party when I was seventeen. We instantly became inseparable friends and remained so for about a year, until our lives took us in separate directions, and the promises we'd made to always stay in touch were forgotten within days, possibly hours.

“Yes.” Mum nods. “That was her. Cocky little thing, she was, always grinning like she was in on some joke. Anyway, you went off with her, across Europe, and for the best part of three months I never heard from you. Every day I was worried sick about you, but what could I do? I had to trust that you would turn up again, and you did. Like a bad penny.”

“Well, that was before…” I gesture at the thing, lying maddeningly dormant on the bed. “It was harder then to be in touch. Now there's calling and emails.” I remember emails. I smile, feeling quite proud of the way I've remembered emailing, and spoken about it. I've tried that too—or had Mum and Greg do it for me, at least, standing over the word book, telling them what to say. Still no reply.

Mum looks around at Caitlin's room, the tiny-pink-rosebud paper all but obliterated by posters of depressed-looking rock bands. “Two weeks isn't that long.”

“Two weeks and a bit,” I say, trying to highlight that piece of information in my mind, to stick it down somewhere so it will stay. “That is long for Caitlin. She's never done this before. We always talk, every few days.”

“Her life has never been like
this
before,” Mum says. “She's facing all this too, your…” She gestures in a way that I am assuming is meant to mean Alzheimer's Disease, because she
doesn't like to say the words out loud. “And she's just found out she was fathered by a man who never knew of her existence. It's no wonder she feels like she needs to escape.”

“Yes, but I am not
you
,” I hear myself say. “Caitlin doesn't feel the need to try and escape from
me
.”

Mum stands in the doorway for a moment longer, and then turns on her heel. I have been cruel again. I suppose everybody knows that the reason I am cruel is because the AD makes me stop knowing what and how to say things, and also because a lot of the time I feel scared. I suppose everyone knows that, but it doesn't stop them being hurt by me—and beginning to be wary of me, and I think perhaps even to resent me—and why should it? And it must be harder when I am almost like me, but not quite me. At the moment I am enough like me for Esther not to know the difference. It will be easier for them when more of me is gone.

“I'll Hoover downstairs,” Mum calls out from the safety of the landing.

“There was no need for that,” Greg admonishes me. “Ruth's trying her best to help. To be here for you, for all of us. You keep acting like she's deliberately trying to make your life worse, not better.” I shrug and I know it maddens him. “I have to go out to work, Claire. Someone's got to be here to…take care of things…and we're lucky Ruth is willing to be that person. Try to remember that.”

It's such an inappropriate thing to say to me, of all people, that I want to laugh. I
would
laugh if I weren't so afraid for Caitlin.

“Something's wrong, I know it.” I clamber to my feet, hunching my shoulders to hide my breasts. “Whatever else is gone, I still know my daughter. I still know that this is about more than just telling her about her father. If it were just that,
she'd have had it out with me. There would have been screaming and shouting and crying, but not this. Not silence.” I pull open her drawers, looking for something amidst the bundle of dark clothes, screwed up and thrown in without thought of a system or order. “I know when something is wrong with my daughter.”

“Claire.” Greg says my name, but nothing else for a while as I pull open Caitlin's wardrobe doors. Something about her wardrobe—packed full of hanger after hanger of dark garments—is wrong. But I can't place what it is. “Claire, I understand you are frightened and angry, but I miss you, Claire. I miss you so much. Please…I don't know what to do…. Can't you just come back to me, for a little while? Please. Before it's too late.”

I turn around slowly and look at him. I see his face, which looks faded somehow, worn away, and his shoulders have dropped.

“The trouble is,” I tell him in a very quiet voice, “I don't remember how to.”

Greg gets up very slowly, tilting his face away from me. “I've got to go to work.”

“It's okay to be angry with me,” I tell him. “Shout at me, tell me I'm a bitch and a cow. I'd prefer it, honestly I would.”

But he doesn't answer me. I hear him go down the stairs, and I wait for a few beats longer until the front door shuts behind him, and then suddenly I am alone in Caitlin's room, the drone of the Hoover drifting up from downstairs. I close her door and breathe in the heated air, dust motes circling in the stream of morning sunlight that warms the bedclothes, and I wonder what time of year it is. Caitlin went back to college, so it has to be October. Or February. Or May.

I look around for a clue, anything to tell me why she isn't answering my calls. There is no secret diary, no stash of letters. I go and sit down at her desk, and slowly open the top part of her
word book. There is something about it being there that unsettles me: sitting so neatly on the desk, it looks like a relic. I look at the buttons, and run my fingers over them, feeling them dip and click beneath my touch. My hands used to fly over these buttons, reeling out words quicker than I could think them, sometimes. Not now, though. Now, if I try to type, it's clunky and slow, and wrong. I know the letters in my head, but my fingers won't make them. Greg spent a lot of money getting me voice-recognition software for the computer downstairs, because I can still think far better than I can articulate in words. But I haven't used it yet. The bright-pink, blue-ink fountain pen that Esther gave me for my last birthday still works well, connecting what is left of my mind to my fingers, and the words come out okay in the memory book. I want to keep writing with my hands for as long as I can, until I forget what my fingers are for, anyway.

I close the word book and run a finger along the row of books that Caitlin has lined up on her windowsill, looking for something, perhaps a slip of paper acting as a page marker, something that will tell me what is wrong. But even the books sitting dormant on her windowsill seem wrong to me, although I don't know why. I sit there for a long time, looking at her things all around me, and then I notice that her waste bin, tucked quietly under the desk, is still full of paper, tissues, and makeup-remover wipes, smeared in black. I'm amazed Mum hasn't been here already to empty it out—she seems to clean the house on a perpetual loop, going around and around and around with a duster, keeping herself busy while pretending that she's not just making sure I don't let myself out of the front door or accidentally burn the house down. I don't seem to go out much anymore; I don't seem to want to very much. The outside world is full of clues I can't decipher. The only person who is pleased about my house arrest is Esther, who always complained that I didn't spend
enough time with her. “You're not workings,” she'd tell me, as I tried to leave for school. “You stay in and you play with me, yes, yes, I think so?”