The Distance

by Zoë Folbigg

  Hector gathered himself. He smiled, and his face made Cecilie feel happy. As she smiled back, her cheeks rose into a loveheart shape and her eyes shone, a dart of green flashing into the camera. Hector sat back in his chair, his arms dropping down by his sides in defeat, and sighed. All English escaped him and he paused for a few seconds while he remembered his vocab.

  ‘You are not from this planet,’ Hector said, marvelling at his cracked screen. Cecilie didn’t know how to react. She tugged on her dreadlocks, pulling them over to one shoulder, and her pale eyes creased into laughter. ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Yours is the most beautiful face I have ever seen in all my life.’

  You look like home, Cecilie thought, and smiled.

  Nine

  March 2018, Tromsø, Norway

  Cecilie rubs the fuzz of her short white-blonde hair.

  ‘I feel like an animal!’ she laughs, looking up at Morten through his reflection in the mirror.

  ‘You look like a forest sprite!’

  ‘I feel as light as one,’ she says, with a shake of her head.

  Morten sweeps up the heavy blonde locks, turned a dull shade of grey from eight years of matted life.

  ‘You definitely dropped a few kilos,’ Morten says as he sweeps methodically.

  The door of the salon opens and Espen walks in, the front of his white-blond quiff swept up, forming a perfect arc that falls to one shorn temple.

  ‘It’s true! Hallelujah!’ he exclaims, tucking his phone into his suit pocket. ‘You look so pretty with all that grubby hair gone!’

  ‘Doesn’t she?’ nods Morten, leaning on his brush and gazing adoringly. Cecilie’s exposed face is even more beautiful without the distraction of hair.

  ‘You could come work at the hotel now!’ Espen claps, before giving it some thought. ‘Maybe in a few weeks, give it a little growth time to look a bit less… severe.’

  Cecilie thumps Espen on the arm as she stands to pull her coat off the stool. She is almost as tall as her twin.

  ‘I don’t want to work at the i-Scand, I don’t want to wear a uniform, I’m happy at the Hjornekafé.’

  Cecilie remembers a no-uniform pact she once made with Hector, and feels wretched and sad.

  ‘What with batty old Gjertrud bickering with Ole over cake every day?’

  ‘Don’t be mean, Espen. Gjertrud and Ole are lovely. Just because they’re enjoying life at a slower pace. All birds cannot be hawks, brother. Some of us are cuckoos.’ Cecilie gives a sarcastic smile and throws on her coat. She rubs her soft shorn hair again and realises she’s going to have a cold head.

  ‘Here, take this,’ Morten says, throwing her his yellow and turquoise hat with a red bobble on top.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But you could speak English all day at the i-Scand. And with me as your boss, I’d give you the best shifts.’

  Cecilie’s arched brows meet in the middle. ‘I’m not bothered about my English any more.’

  She thinks back to that first sighting of Hector, scrutinising her through his computer lens. It made Cecilie want to know everything about him; about his life, his body, his smell, his country; to make her English even better so there were no misunderstandings. Better still, she could learn his language.

  Soon they were chatting through little green boxes on their phones, punctuating everything they did with a photo. At first, it was always in the safe parameter of pen pals learning about each other’s culture. For months they never mentioned Pilar unless it was a place Hector had been with her; Hector didn’t ask if Cecilie had a boyfriend, even though she secretly wished he would so she could tell him, ‘No.’

  She so desperately wanted to touch the newspaper Hector was holding in his hand; inhale the corn and coriander of his lunch; stroke the raw skin of his latest tattoo; be able to converse fluently with him, some way or another. So Cecilie embraced any chance to improve her English: she read Time and Newsweek in the library; spoke to the British, American, Australian and Canadian customers who faithfully walked through the door of the Hjornekafé, flocking to Tromsø in winter in search of the lights, or in summer to marvel at the midnight sun. But she doesn’t need to learn new ways to say bollocks any more now that Hector is married, and she doesn’t need the heavy hair that’s dragged her down for so long.

  ‘I love your hair,’ Hector had said, once he’d recovered from the shock of her beauty.

  Now the hair is gone, and with it, in a pile on the floor, the hope Cecilie felt as they grew to know each other, as they fell for each other, as they admitted they loved each other.

  ‘Why so sad?’ asks Espen, looking at his watch to get back to the afternoon bustle of check-ins, chambermaids and restaurant bookings.

  Cecilie’s face crumples as she puts on Morten’s bobble hat.

  ‘You don’t like it? Oh gosh, that’s what I was worried about!’ Morten drops his broom and rushes over to put an arm around Cecilie’s shoulder while Espen looks on awkwardly. ‘But I think you look divine. Only you could pull this look off, Cecilie. Perhaps when it grows a bit I’ll shape it into an edgy sweep that…’ Morten doesn’t finish, he is winded by the emotion of Cecilie slumping her face into his chest and sobbing into his checked shirt.

  Morten wraps both arms around Cecilie and gives Espen a look of trepidation. Espen shrugs, he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t know what goes on inside his sister’s head. She is the half of him he will never understand.

  ‘It’s not the hair…’ Cecilie sniffs, as tears tumble down her cheekbones and into the red and blue fabric of Morten’s shirt. ‘It’s my heart.’

  Ten

  May 2018, Suffolk, England

  Kate stands on the driveway of number five The Finches, her arms folded, her back to the white door of the garage. She cranes her neck and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She’s too angry to appreciate the neatness of their front garden. The polite foliage. The recycling bins hidden tidily away in the bespoke timber cubby. She looks at her watch.

  He said he’d be home by seven.

  It is ten past, and Kate is panicking that the meeting at Claresham Church of England Primary School will start without her. She needs to be there because she has agreed to be chair of the PTA from September, so it won’t look good if she is late for the summer fair planning meeting, which starts in five minutes. After the family fireworks night, the summer fair is the biggest fundraiser of the school calendar, where coconut shies and teddy-bear tombolas take over Claresham village green on the first (hopefully sunny) Saturday of every July. Tonight, Kate needs to watch outgoing chair Melissa Cox closely, to see how this meeting runs, because next summer’s fair, and all of the events, will be on her watch.

  ‘Argh,’ Kate rages to herself, quietly and with restraint, as she watches lights go on in the cul-de-sac’s prim houses.

  Kate looks to the sky as she waits for George’s little red car, his train station runaround, to turn into The Finches from the left, and notices it’s lighter than it has been at this time lately, although the warm bounce of spring from earlier in the day has subsided and her arms feel chilly.

  Kate wraps her cardigan around her spongey middle and lets out a sigh. She rushed the kids through teatime so she could leave George with as little of the bedtime responsibility as possible. And he’s late anyway.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. He could have cleared up their tea.

  A small red Aygo swerves into the road, heading towards their house.

  Her harangued-looking husband gets out of the car, leaving the engine running, and raises his palms passively but doesn’t apologise.

  ‘You’re late, I’m cold!’ wobbles Kate in anaemic anger.

  ‘Why didn’t you grab a jacket?’ George snaps.

  ‘I didn’t want to go back in, I’ve had to shout at the girls too many times tonight. George, they were so vile, I just don’t want to look at them right now.’

  George rolls his eyes and then does a double take as he looks at Kate’s face
. ‘Are you wearing lipstick?’

  ‘Yes. I sometimes do,’ Kate counters, defensively.

  Baby steps.

  George’s small grey-blue eyes contain both mistrust and mockery.

  ‘Here,’ he says, unwrapping a stripy scarf in three shades of blue from his neck and stuffing it in Kate’s hands. A chivalrous gesture ruined by the execution.

  ‘Thanks,’ Kate says, sarcastically, and winds it around her neck, wondering when the last time he might have done that for her was.

  Never mind.

  She doesn’t dwell on it for too long before getting in the car.

  ‘Your dinner is in the oven, make sure Jack has finished his times tables.’

  George nods. ‘Don’t sign me up for running “splat the…’

  Kate doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence amid the rise of the engine. She’s late, and heads off down the road, wiping her heather shimmer lipstick off her mouth, onto the back of her left hand, before changing gear with a sharp grunt.

  *

  ‘Right, so we’ve got Mr Horsley’s Punch & Judy show at the north end of the green, bouncy castle on the east flank, and retro games to the south. I’m thinking coconut shy, pin the tail on the donkey, that kind of thing. That means refreshments can go along… here.’ PTA chair Melissa Cox marks an X on the A4 printout of a poorly reproduced map with a black Sharpie. ‘I’m thinking retro refreshments like fondant fancies, coconut macaroons, ginger beer, elderflower cordial…’

  ‘Ooh, the site manager’s wife makes a wonderful elderflower cordial,’ interjects headteacher Hilary Smith.

  ‘Does it have to be Punch & Judy?’ asks Venetia Appleyard, mum of Millie, the most precocious girl in Year 6.

  Melissa Cox’s bright pink cheeks flush in the warmth of the overheated staffroom. ‘Sorry, Venetia, you’ve lost me.’

  ‘Well, Punch & Judy will encourage the children to laugh at a man whose only interaction with his wife and child is based on violence. It’s misogynistic.’

  Kate, still smarting from Chloe and Izzy’s attitude, and George’s careless comment about her lipstick, starts paying attention. She even stops the click click clicking of her pen, which she would have felt terrible about had she known how much it was annoying the school business manager sitting to her right.

  ‘Is Punch & Judy not a thing these days?’ asks Melissa, turning even pinker. In fact, Melissa’s yellow hair and pink cheeks make her look like the colour of a retro sweet herself.

  Kate widens her kind eyes. It was news to her, but this meeting has just got a bit controversial.

  ‘It’s so politically incorrect,’ sighs Venetia with vehemence. ‘It doesn’t really sit with the school’s ethos… And it’s saying domestic violence is OK.’

  Melissa looks politely inconvenienced. ‘Well I’m not sure how to tell Mr Horsley that he needs to change the entire content of his much-loved puppet show,’ she grimaces – he is the deputy head’s husband after all.

  ‘I’m afraid Venetia does have a point,’ winces Hilary.

  ‘I don’t mind talking to him,’ says Kate, signing herself up for something she will only regret; hearing George’s voice in her head, moaning about her moaning about the tricky conversation she’s dreading. ‘He and I worked on the eggshell painting stall together at the Easter disco and we had a nice chat, I’m sure I can think of a way to say it without insulting his work.’ Kate gives a hopeful smile. Always trying. Always people-pleasing. Always taking on the shitty jobs everyone else avoids.

  ‘Brilliant,’ says Venetia. ‘Surely he must have some animal puppets or something, the little ones will like that.’

  Hilary Smith knows Mr and Mrs Horsley best, and she knows it won’t go down well, but is relieved that Kate volunteered to take on this one.

  Kate clicks her pen and writes ‘speak to Mr Horsley’ on her list of actions and draws some stars on the line next to it.

  ‘So back to the refreshments table. Last year, do you remember, we had those little lucky dip bags of sweets…?’ Melissa continues and Kate’s mind trails off again.

  She wonders how she can build up to red lipstick when she doesn’t dare to wear heather shimmer. She wonders how her daughters are so much more sassy and spirited than she was at their age – or still is really. Chloe already knows she wants to be a vet; she has gone off to Brownie camps and coped perfectly well with being away from home thankyouverymuch. Kate had never been further than France when she did the most daring thing she ever did the summer she graduated, going to a third-world country to volunteer in an orphanage, and even then it felt as if she had scaled Everest.

  I wouldn’t have dreamed of talking to my mother like that when I was eleven.

  Kate’s neck gets hot and she loosens the shackles of George’s stripy blue scarf from around her neck and slides it out from under her ponytail and onto her lap. She looks down. A long, blonde hair sparkles under the stark strip lighting of the staffroom, too long and too blonde to belong to either Chloe or Izzy. Kate pulls at the hair, unravelling it as it goads her. A misogynistic and belittling shrill, that no one else can hear, rings inside Kate’s hot ears as she instinctively puts a hand to her own brown ponytail.

  Eleven

  September 2013, Day 94

  Who was your first lover?

  Cecilie sat in the library after closing on a Thursday night. She’d worked the morning shift, singing lullabies and lending books; spent an afternoon at the Hjornekafé, with just Gjertrud and Ole for company, and had come back to the library to help Fredrik lock up. Cecilie increasingly offered to help Fredrik lock up so she could talk to Hector on his lunch break. Now Fredrik had gone home to mindfulness and vegan Malbec with his girlfriend, so Cecilie sat in silence, staring at her screen.

  Why do you ask?

  She typed.

  She was shocked by Hector’s forthright question and looked around her to check no one could see over her shoulder in the empty library.

  I want to know. It helps me draw you.

  Draw me?

  Yet again Cecilie was disarmed by Hector’s honesty, and surprised by how relaxed she felt about answering his question. It had been a forbidden subject in her past. Talking about current relationships seemed to be forbidden too. But a wave of liberation made sparks fly as her fingers danced across the computer keypad.

  Cecilie thought back to the music room at school. The sensation of hands brushing against each other as she sat next to him at a keyboard. Accusative looks from boys in registration. Envious glares from girls at the bus stop. An obsessed ex-girlfriend with a determined face. His ashen expression when he walked out of the principal’s office, as Cecilie was summoned in. The shame her mother felt when the story went national.

  His name was Mr Lind. Jonas. He was my music teacher at school.

  Hector tried not to spit guacamole onto his sketching pad at his desk.

  Your teacher? Wow.

  Cecilie thought about her first time with her first lover. They’d been to see Walk The Line at the picture house and had walked back to his apartment with their hands in their pockets. He had so wanted to put his arm around her. She wanted to tear his jacket off. As soon as they closed the door behind them, Cecilie ran her fingers through Mr Lind’s messy quiff and kissed his thin lips frantically.

  He was a good teacher. Passionate about music. Passionate about his job. As first lovers go, he was pretty wonderful.

  Hector felt a stab of jealousy like he’d never known.

  Did you fall in love with him?

  Of course I did. It was a big deal. It got us both into a lot of trouble, so I wouldn’t have slept with him if I hadn’t loved him. I was a good girl, always reading, always playing my harp. Mr Lind was my first lover.

  And my last.

  Hector imagined a man with grey hair putting his hands on Cecilie, and wished he hadn’t asked. She continued typing.

  He was 34, I was 17.

  About the same age as me now. Puta madre…

  Hec
tor reimagined Mr Lind to look a little less grey, and let Cecilie carry on, glad for once that they weren’t talking on FaceTime.

  But you can’t choose who you fall in love with can you? We just had a connection. I felt it. In the music room, when he took me dancing. In his bed…

  Cecilie wondered what Hector would make of this.

  Hector pushed his lunch away and wiped his mouth on his arm.

  What happened to him?

  He lost his job. Had to leave. He was disgraced. The story made the newspapers because my mum is kinda famous…

  She wondered what Hector would make of that too, but carried on.

  So he went travelling. To Thailand. To Cambodia. To Indonesia. I got the odd postcard, but it broke my heart.

  Wow, I’m sorry.

  Don’t be sorry, I’m glad it happened. And he’s married with little ones now and teaching in Oslo, so it’s all good.

  Cecilie thought of the faded postcard in her harp case. A Buddhist temple with perforated stupas. A message saying she was worth losing his job for and he would love her for ever.

  What about you?

  She typed.

  Hector couldn’t shake the feeling of nausea, he so wished he hadn’t asked. So he pretended he had a meeting to go to; he wasn’t as honest as Cecilie thought.

  Cecilie felt maybe it was best she didn’t know anyway, it was hard enough trying to imagine the current girlfriend he barely talked about.

  Hector didn’t tell Cecilie about the English girl who volunteered at the orphanage. How he had given the impression of being so much more worldly, but actually it was she who took his virginity, just before he broke her heart. How he feels bad when he remembers it. How he sometimes thinks about how the English girl’s life turned out.