The Day We Met

by Rowan Coleman

  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.

  5

  claire

  “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.”

  “W
ell, 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?”

  She still asks me, if I go upstairs, or to the bathroom: “You’re not workings, are you, Mummy?” And now I can always say that I am not. Instead, I let her draw me into her imaginary worlds—of tiny creatures with tiny voices, tea parties, deep-sea adventures, road races, and hospital, where I am always the patient and she is always making me completely and totally better with a bandage made out of toilet roll. At least I still make Esther happy. I may even make her happier the way I am now than I did before, and that’s something.

  I pick up the waste bin and empty it onto the floor, bracing myself to find something I don’t particularly want to know about, but at first glance it looks innocuous, apart from a still mostly full packet of cigarettes, which surprises me because I don’t think Caitlin smokes. And if she does, why would she throw them away? I begin to gather up rubbish again, and then I see it: a long white plastic thing. I pick it up and look at it. I know that, once, I would have known what it is, but now I don’t. I only know that it tells me something very, very important, because my heart has responded to it with sickening speed.

  “Mum!” I call down the stairs, but there is no answer, just the drone of the Hoover. Standing at the top of the stairs, I look at the thing again. I stare hard at it, trying to discern its mysteries. The bathroom door opens and Greg is there, and at once I hide it behind my back. I don’t know why, but I feel like it’s a secret.

  “I thought you’d gone,” I say.

  “I had, but then I came back,” he says. “I forgot something.”

  “Story of my life.”
I smile weakly but he doesn’t smile back.

  “What’s that?” he asks me, nodding at the arm folded behind my back.

  “I don’t know.” After a moment’s hesitation, I hold it out for him to look at. His eyes widen when he sees it, and gingerly he takes it from my hand.

  “What is it?” I ask him, resisting the impulse to grab it back.

  “It’s a pregnancy-test kit,” Greg tells me. “It’s Caitlin’s?”

  “It was in her room—is it used?”

  Greg nods. “Yes.”

  “Well, what does it say?” I exclaim, frustrated.

  “Nothing.” He shakes his head. “The results don’t stay forever.”

  His smile is warm, his face sweet, and just for a second I recognize him, and it’s wonderful. Like seeing a lover at the end of a very long station platform, emerging from the steam. For one second, I am so happy, so full of lost love, and I am going to run to him, when all the ill-fitting, scrambled-up mosaic pieces that make up the world around me fall into place and I see everything. That’s what’s wrong with Caitlin’s wardrobes: they are still stuffed full of clothes. The mainly black clothes she loves to wear—she’s left them all behind and taken only a few things with her. Her textbooks are sitting on the windowsill; her word book is still folded neatly on her desk. Wherever Caitlin went that night, two weeks ago, it wasn’t back to university. She didn’t take anything with her.

  “I need to go and find her,” I say, stumbling down the stairs in my urgency to be with her. I hurry to the table by the door where the keys to my car are normally kept in a cranberry-colored glass bowl. Greg trots down the stairs behind me.

  “Where are my car keys?” I ask him, loud enough for my mother to switch off the vacuum cleaner and come into the hallway. “I need my car keys.” I hold my hand out while Greg and my mother just look at me.