‘Do you really mean that?’ I ask her, finding her hand across the table. ‘About me? About us?’
She gets up from the table to compose herself and, when she walks past my way, I stop her and pull her close,wrapping my arms around her waist. I lean my face on her belly and close my eyes.
‘I can’t help what I feel, David,’ she tells me, and I hold her tighter. Then I stand up and cup her face in my hands.
‘And I can’t help how I feel,’ I say as I drink in her soul.
Then, I lean in and kiss her lips so tenderly that the room spins around us. She brings out a hunger in me and a passion that runs deeper than I’ve ever known and yet I’m also terrified of this. I’m so afraid of getting it wrong. I’m vulnerable to this and so is Kate, and I want to make sure this is absolutely perfect because if we get it wrong, we are so raw and so attached that I know it will damage us both so deeply, like no other wound we’ve ever suffered, not even those from a bomb.
We kiss and tug and hold each other so tightly here in her kitchen, breathing faster and faster and out of control. She puts her hand under my T-shirt, sending sparks of electricity through me at our first intimate skin-on-skin contact, and I do the same to her, feeling the velvet-soft skin of her back on my hand.
Her slender waist pushes into mine, our bodies throbbing and thirsty for more, until Kate pulls away just like she did before.
My heart skips a beat with fear of what might be going through her mind right now.
‘I can’t – I just don’t think we should do this today, David,’ she says, her beautiful face crumpled up in despair as sheshakes her head, breathless and flushed. ‘Out of respect to Lesley and also to ourselves, let’s wait a while. If you hurt me or if I hurt you, David, even if we don’t mean to, I know it will destroy what we have for ever.’
I nod, totally understanding what she means and glad that she is stronger than I am, able to resist the one thing we’ve wanted for so long.
‘You’re right,’ I tell her, feeling my heart rate slow down. ‘You’re so right.’
‘Can I just hold you?’ she asks. ‘I’d love to just hold you for now.’
She reaches out her arms for me and we stand there, locked in a comforting embrace. For this moment I know that it’s all I needed and was worth every devastating step of today and every single mile of the journey that brought me here to find her.
JULY 2009
14.
KATE
‘Ah, that is so cute! Look at the gorillas! I can’t believe you got so close, Kate!’
Shannon is in my mother’s kitchen, eagerly looking through the photos from my Republic of Congo trip. My father is sitting across the table from me, staring at me with pride. It’s been almost a year since I was in the same room as him, but I’ve come to accept that’s just the way it is, as he battles his internal demons that stop him from doing the things he’d sometimes like to do – like seeing his own daughter.
Now, though, he is showing great interest in the extraordinary experience that Sinead and I have just undergone over the past two weeks: in the wildlife I’ve encountered, the amazing rainforests we walked through, in the intensity of the jungle. Deep down, though, I know that all he really wants to know is how my job is going, if I’ve found the love of my life yet and if I’m going to ‘settle down’ and give him a grandchild one day soon.
He flicks a cigarette into a home-made ashtray and I can smell beer on his breath from where I sit but, as always, beneath his devilment and periods of absence that sometimes last for years, I always find his charm so endearing and his humour tickling and contagious, even if he sometimes annoys the hell out of me with his flippant ways.
‘You’re the image of your mother when she was your age, Kate. God help you,’ he says as he sniffs, a habit that again I associate only with him. ‘I’m joking, you know that, pet. Your mum was a cracker and still is.’
‘She’ll crack you if she finds you smoking in her kitchen,’ says Shannon, always one step ahead of all of us. ‘Try and compliment your way out of that one, you old charmer.’
Shannon may not be related to my dad through blood, but they have always had a great bond and banter that entertains me every time we’re all together, which isn’t as often as I wish it could be.
‘Jesus, Peter, put the fag out,’ says Mo when she breezes through with a stack of washing in a basket. ‘Mum will freak out if she doesn’t smell washing powder and fresh linen when she comes back here. You’re pushing it and you know you are!’
Dad does what he is told and sheepishly goes out to the garden to finish his cigarette, while Shannon and Maureen open windows and do their best with air fresheners to disguise his bad habit which makes me sneeze uncontrollably.
I’ve had a really bad headache since I landed into Belfast Airport, having taken the opportunity to pop home for the evening while Sinead made her way back to Dublin for a shift in the hospital, but I haven’t been feeling myself at all.
‘So how’s lover boy been coping with you away trekking in the jungle?’ Mo asks me as she loads the washing machine.
I stutter, trying to find my response. After my mum’s subtle but stern warning about our very different backgrounds, I try not to talk about David to my family, though I did let it slip before I left for Africa that he’d called his wedding off, and Mo put two and two together and suggested it might have been something to do with me.
‘What?’ asks Shannon, while I eyeball her directly, pleading for her to be quiet. ‘Kate, are you and the ice-cream shop boy an item?’
‘No!’ I say, giving her a look to quickly zip it.
