I laugh, almost against my will. He is joking. Mostly.
‘All right,’ I say, grateful for his words, for the break in the tension. ‘Thanks, Harry.’
I look back at my laptop, at the email from Em. I hit reply.
Hi Em, I type.Okay – you win. We can meet for a coffee at least.
As I finish off and hit send before I can change my mind, I wonder if I’ve done the right thing. Or if I’ve just triggered a whole new tremor; a chain of events that might swallow me into another gaping black hole.
I have a tall cupboard in here, so tall it just about sneaks in under the ceiling, so tall that I have to stand on a chair to reach the top. I have never suspected that Harry goes sneaking around snooping in my stuff, but if I was to have a paranoid moment, I would keep any deep, dark secrets in this cupboard. Harry has come a long way, but climbing on a spinny chair is beyond him.
I clamber up, and open the door. I pull out a neatly folded bundle of faded yellow fabric.
I sit back down, and gently take myself for a mild spin, tapping my foot to rotate my body in slow circles, all the while cuddling the treasure on my lap.
I stop abruptly, enjoy the tiny head rush of dizziness, and lift the T-shirt to my face.I Heart Tequila, and I Heart this T-shirt.
It’s been washed, quite a few times. It has not touched him for years. It has even been sneakily worn to bed by me when Harry has been away, and washed some more. It could not possibly still smell of him.
And yet, it does. And still, all these years on, it comforts me.
Chapter 18
Ten days later I am sitting in a small café in South Kensington, wondering why I agreed to meet Em at all. And why I chose London, rather than a place nearer to home.
Perhaps it’s because I remember coming here when I was a young teen, on trips to the Natural History Museum, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the dinosaur skeletons.
The firstJurassic Parkmovies had been out for a while by then, and a lot of the other kids were unimpressed at the lack of teeth and blood and screaming. I, on the other hand, was amazed – and a tiny bit scared. I mean, if theydidcome to life, they’d be even more terrifying than the ones in the films. We’d be getting chased around by raging, rattling bones, wouldn’t we?
Perhaps it’s because I wanted to keep the two worlds separate – the life I have now, back at home, and the past that Em wants to discuss.
The café has an Italian-sounding name, and everything is painted in dusty shades of matte grey and black, like a giant chalkboard. The background noise is a pleasant mix of jazzy music and the hissing and spitting of a giant coffee machine. The staff are all stupidly young and stupidly beautiful, as though they are off-duty actors slumming it to gain life experience.
Outside, the sky is a relentlessly dull shroud. It looks like a lid made of dark clouds, held oppressively flat over the city in a way that says ‘the sun will never shine here again’.
It is early November, and several shops and bars have already swathed themselves and their picture windows in pretty Christmas lights. I have a seat at a table for two right by the café window, watching the world go by.
Several groups of schoolchildren are snaking through the streets in lines as they tour the museums with tired-looking teachers. There’s a busker wearing a duffel coat and a floppy red hat that makes him look like Paddington Bear, and a man who looks about a hundred and fifty years old, swathed entirely in neon-green skin-tight Lycra, promenading with a miniature poodle. Couriers and food-delivery people swish in and out of traffic on bikes; cars blare and bully their way along the congested roads.
Even at a quiet time of day, it is busy, alive, flowing with other people’s stories. Every lit-up window, every face looking down from the top deck of a bus, every set of feet that carries its owner away into the long tunnel to the Tube, is a story. Not that I’ll ever know any of them, because this is London.
Today, I am enjoying the anonymity of it all. I feel invisible, and it is liberating. With the anonymity, and perhaps simply the distance from my home and my real life, also comes a sense of recklessness that I haven’t felt for years. I am nervous about meeting Em, about discussing the past, about being away from home – but it also feels delicious.
Harry would have come with me if I’d asked, but I felt like this was something I needed to do on my own. Em says she has a story of her own to tell, and I get the feeling she wants to tell it to me. She has reached out to me, not Harry, and I have to assume there is a reason for that.
I arrived an hour early, and have been casing the joint like a paranoid agent in a spy thriller. There is no reason for me to feel cornered, anxious, or like I should be planning an escape route – but I often feel all of those things whenever I am out in public, especially in big cities, or busy restaurants, or when surrounded by lots of tall buildings.
Pretty much every waking moment involves some kind of risk assessment – every action has a potential reaction, every kerb can be tripped over, every full kettle can be a scald, every room below street level can be a dungeon.
I remind myself to concentrate on the here, the now. The smell of the almond croissant that sits untouched on a plate in front of me. The Christmas lights in the shops outside. The laughter of the children as they stream past. The busy crowds that I could just disappear off into and not meet Em at all …
As I consider doing exactly that, I see a young woman standing still on the pavement outside, staring through the clear patch I have wiped on the steamy window.
She is dressed in different clothes – smart trousers and a jacket that make her look a lot more business-like than I expected – but it is definitely her. The cropped hair is distinctive and impossible to disguise. She makes direct eye contact with me, and waves before she heads towards the door.
She makes the universal tipping-your-hand-up-and-down-by-your-mouth move that means ‘do you want a drink?’ as she heads to the counter.
I shake my head. If I have more coffee, I will possibly be awake and energised long enough to walk home, and it’s over two hundred miles away. I could make a playlist all about walking, and listen to the Proclaimers and Katrina and the Waves and Nancy Sinatra for days on end.
