The Day We Met

by Rowan Coleman

  “Claire, dear.” Mum is talking to me cautiously, like I might be a bomb about to go off. “Where do you want to go? I’ll drive you….”

  “I don’t need you to drive me.” I feel my voice rising. Esther appears in the doorway under my mother’s arm. They don’t realize that now, right at this moment, I know everything, just like I did before, and I need to go now before the fog rolls in again. I need to go now, while I can see and think. “I can drive. I know what the steering wheel is for, and the difference between the brake and the accelerator, and I need to go and find Caitlin. She might be pregnant!”

  No one answers; no one comes to my aid, fetches my keys, or sees how serious I am. Even Esther just stares at me, bemused. Am I saying the words I think I am out loud, or are they hearing something else entirely?

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I shout, finding my face suddenly wet with tears. “Why are you trying to keep me prisoner in here? Do you hate me so much? Caitlin needs me, don’t you understand? And I need to go to her. Give me my car keys!”

  “Babe, look…just take a breath, let’s think this through….” Greg touches my arm.

  “She needs me,” I tell him. “I let her down. She thinks I can’t be her mum anymore, and maybe she’s going through this huge thing, this thing I know about, but all she can think about is how I did it wrong. And she can’t think like that because I do know, and I know exactly what she is going through, and she needs me now, before…it all goes again. Greg, please, please, I do love you. I’m here; I’m here now. I love you so much, and you know that. Please, please don’t keep me from her!”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Mum says, as I keep looking into Greg’s eyes, willing him to see that it’s me—that I am here now. Me, the me he knows. Willing him to see before I go again.

  “Caitlin is pregnant,” I tell her. “Of course she is. I don’t know how I missed it. She looks so tired all the time, and so worried. And she hasn’t taken anything with her, nothing that she usually takes back to a new term at university. Why didn’t I remember that? She’s barely packed a bag. She’s just gone, and she’s not answering her phone or emails, she’s not on…Twitter or the other thing. Where has she gone? Mum, I need to go to her. You have to let me. You can’t keep me from my daughter!”

  “But you don’t know where to look,” Mum says, and it is she who steps forward, who hooks an arm around my waist and talks to me, her voice low and soft, guiding me into the living room. Greg does not move. I look at him over my shoulder, and his whole body is clenched like a fist.

  “I know, why don’t you sit down and we can call the university and find out where she is living. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that before.”

  “I don’t want to sit down,” I say. “I want to go to my daughter.”

  “Come on, now.” Mum soothes me like I have a cut knee. “Come and sit in the kitchen, and we’ll have a think.”

  “I have to go,” Greg says from the hallway. “I’m already late for the job. Look, Claire, you don’t need to worry. We don’t even know the test result. Sit tight. Ruth and I will find out what’s going on.”

  I say nothing, and he leaves without ever seeing that it’s me, that I am here. And I’m not sure if I can forgive him for that.

  Esther climbs onto my lap, holding on to the hem of my pajama top.

  “Is that show on that you like?” I whisper to Esther, as Mum fills the kettle in the kitchen. “The one with the talking vegetables?”

  “I want telly on, I want telly on, I want telly on!” Esther wails at once. Mum turns round, tuts, and rolls her eyes as she heads to the living room, Esther trotting behind her.

  “In my day, we read books,” she says, forgetting that Esther has yet to learn to read.

  Seizing my moment, I go to the back door and pull on the only coat that is there: it’s Greg’s, and it’s big, thick, and warm, spattered in mud from working on-site. There is a pair of boots I think are my mother’s; I put them on. They are a little too small, but I don’t have any socks on, so it’s not too bad. I’ll need money, so I take her handbag from the kitchen worktop and I let myself out of the back door, down the path, out of the gate. I stop. I remember everything I’ve just learned. I remind myself again, and it’s all still there. Right now, at this moment in time, I am me—I am me, and I know everything. I start walking toward the town center and the train station. I have broken free.

  sunday, august 8, 1993

  ruth

  This is the four-leaf-clover bookmark I gave to Claire on the day she left home, again, to start her life again. Caitlin was a little over one, and for the whole of that first year of Caitlin’s life, they had lived with me. It was one of the happiest years of my life.

  When Claire came to me, all those months earlier, and told me she was leaving university to have a baby, I didn’t fight her or try to change her mind. I knew there was no point. Claire has always been like me: she makes up her mind to do something, and she does it, no matter what anyone else thinks. Like the day I decided to marry a much older man who had never even heard of the Beatles and the Stones. A man who the outside world could never see fitting perfectly with me. But I knew he did, and that was all I ever needed to know, right up until the day he died. And so I didn’t try to change Claire’s mind or prepare her for parenthood: I just took her back in, and let her build a wall around herself, cutting herself off from her old life and friends, waiting to be a mother. I thought—I hoped—that perhaps it had a little bit to do with me, her determination to bring a child into the world. We used to be very close.

  One day my strident, brazen, and brave daughter was conquering the English Department at Leeds with the confidence of Boudicca, and the next she was undone. Just like the heroines of the novels she was studying. She’d succumbed to what she’d thought was love, and got lost in the middle of the whirlwind. When it was over, and the storm had set her down, somewhere very far from anything she recognized, Caitlin was already there, secreted away inside her, a tiny black pearl of life waiting to bloom into existence. Those early days, the days when she first came home, we stayed up all hours talking, about love and life, and ambition and the future, and about how sometimes what you planned for just isn’t what happens, or even what you want to happen. Claire got a part-time job in the library, and I remember it as a happy time—reading books, swapping them, talking about them. Painting the spare bedroom for the baby, trying to put together a cot one evening. We nearly killed each other, but we laughed a lot too.

  When Caitlin arrived, I couldn’t have been more proud of Claire: she was hardly more than a child herself, but instantly she was in love with her baby. I suppose that, back then, at that moment in time when it was just the two of them, Caitlin’s father didn’t seem very important at all. I should have told her then that one day he would matter, but I didn’t. I saw the two of them cocooned together, and I wanted to keep them safe and pure. That first year flew by, Claire sitting in the kitchen singing to Caitlin while we talked and laughed.

  I knew they wouldn’t be there forever, and I was right. Claire is not a person to just sit and wait for life to happen to her: she goes and finds it, grabs on to it with all of her might. Just like the father she barely got to know.

  The day she left home again was for her first job, the only job she could get without a completed degree and no work experience: a receptionist at a science park on the campus of the local further education college. She said she liked being with the other students, who were around her age, and although the job was dull, and she wasn’t very good at it, she liked the boss.

  She’d found a bedsit for Caitlin and herself, over a chip shop near the campus. I didn’t want her to move there. I wanted her to stay at home with me, in the safe and the warm, where I could continue to protect them, but she was determined to get back to life. Even if it wasn’t the life she’d planned, or I’d hoped for—her glittering career as a member of the literati, prizewinning novelist, famous
wit, and raconteur. She wasn’t bitter about it. About the abrupt halt that Caitlin’s arrival brought to her life. If anything, I think she was relieved. Now she only had to worry about taking care of her; she didn’t have to worry about fulfilling promises, or failing. There were no more great expectations. And sometimes I think it was only then, when she didn’t have to burden herself with the responsibility of trying to be successful, that she started to do things right.

  On the day she left, I watched her pack the last of her things into her backpack while I held Caitlin in my arms.

  “You’ll phone?” I asked.

  “Mum, I’m down the road. Like, five minutes away.”

  “You don’t look like you’ve got enough in that one bag. Why don’t you let me drive you? You can take more stuff. Not that I mind you having things here. I’d like you to leave all your things here and let me look after you both.”

  “I’ve just got to do this, Mum,” she said. “I’ve got be a grown-up.”

  That was when I gave her the laminated bookmark, with the four-leaf clover pressed flat beneath the plastic, one leaf slightly separated from the other three. Underneath it, in italic print, are the words: “For each leaf of this clover, this brings a wish your way. Good luck, good health and happiness for today and every day.”

  She must have thought I’d gone mad, because she looked puzzled when I gave it to her, an object so far removed from our lives that it seemed like it might have appeared from another universe entirely. When I’d gone out to get milk that morning from the corner shop, I’d seen it on a stand, and it had just seemed right, somehow.

  “It’s to remind you of all the books we’ve read together,” I explained. “I know it’s silly, it’s just a token.”

  “I love it, actually.” She grinned. “I love you, Mum.”

  “It sort of spoke to me,” I told her. I remember putting my arms around Caitlin, the backpack, and Claire all in one go, and kissing them both on each cheek before I could let them go.

  “Gran’s hearing voices again!” Claire said to Caitlin.

  She tucked the bookmark inside a copy of Like Water for Chocolate that was resting on top of her bag, and she’s kept it ever since, giving it back to me when it was my turn to write in her memory book, and asking me to remember the day I gave it to her and to write about what it means.

  I don’t think I knew what this silly little token meant until I saw it again twenty years later, but now I think I do. I believe in luck and good fortune; I believe in fate and that nothing is arbitrary or random. I find that comforting now, because I am sure that everything happens for a reason, even losing, more than once, the people you love—even that. And I know Claire better than anyone, and I know that she will burn brighter than any star in the sky for as long as she can: she will shine, no matter what. And I know that soon, very soon, I’ll need to stop being so angry and just tell her that I love her too.

  6

  claire

  I go to the bottom of my street, where the main road is and where the buses come along. I get there, and I could wait for a bus, but I never take a bus. I’m not really a bus sort of person, at least not since I saw the other side of thirty. It is a matter of principle: I might not have access to a car right now, but I have, or at least had not so long ago, the means to own a brand-new one. Also, I don’t want to be that person on the bus in her nightclothes, the one other people pretend not to see, and that makes me think how awful it must be for people who really are mad. It’s bad enough feeling so low, and lost, or hearing voices in your head, without the rest of the world refusing to notice you. Of course, soon you would start to wonder if you were real at all, wouldn’t you? I would. I’d start to wonder if I was real. So, no thank you, I don’t want to be that invisible person, because I am certain that at the moment everything is present and correct in my head, and that I am not some poor demented woman wandering the streets but a rational, clear-headed warrior queen, making a break for freedom so that she can save the day. That’s what this is…isn’t it?

  I can’t stop to think about it—if I dither, I will lose the moment—so I decide to walk. March purposefully, so that everyone can see I know where I am going. It’s not far, where I’m going. It’s an easy walk, but I will admit I’m cold, even with this massive coat on. And I wish I’d run away with a bra on: there is something far less assertive about running away knowing that your breasts are bobbing up and down and completely out of control, flapping around like a pair of kippers. But there you go. When you are forced to break out of prison, you don’t always have time to consider your underwear options. I clutch Mum’s bag to my side, and scrunch my toes up in the ends of her boots. At the end of the road, I turn left—that’s the hand I don’t write with—and then follow this big wide road all the way until I get to the train station. I’ll get to the station in the end if I keep walking along the big wide road. It’s like that hotel lobby somewhere or other, where if you sit in it for long enough you will meet everyone you ever knew.

  I’m not going to a hotel, though.

  No one is looking at me, which is a good thing. I thought I might look like a mental-home escapee, but I suppose my gray cotton PJ bottoms, while not ideal in this biting weather, aren’t stand-out conspicuous; and thanks to this fat coat, only I know that I am out in the world commando style. I giggle to myself, and for a second I forget what I am doing and why, and then I wonder whether people aren’t looking at me because they can’t see me.

  Head up, chin up, shoulders back, remember the warrior queen. I’m outside, I have taken myself out, and I am my own person again. Mistress of my own destiny. It’s exciting. Thrilling. The sense of freedom is immense. No one knows me—I could be anyone—and if it wasn’t for the fact that I have to keep a low profile, I’d sing, or skip or something, or run. I’d love to run if I were appropriately attired, but instead I content myself with marching and knowing that I could just be any normal woman out for a walk in her mother’s boots and no bra.

  “Hello there?” I hear a vaguely familiar voice, and I march a little more quickly. If it is someone I know, then I can’t take the chance they might try to stop me—might try to take me back.

  “Hey, Claire? It’s Ryan, do you remember me from the café?”

  I stop and look at him. Ryan. For a moment I am blank: what café, when? I take a couple of steps back from him.

  “Do you remember? It rained a lot, and you were wet through. I said you looked like a very pretty drowned rat?”

  And then I remember that curious collection of words, and the moment that came with them. It had been a happy moment, a moment when I’d felt like me. Ryan, the man from the café. And here I was out and about without a bra.

  “Um…hello,” I say, suddenly also aware that I didn’t tidy my hair, or wash my face, or clean my teeth this morning. I turn my face from him, because I don’t want him to look at me. “I’m just…going for a quick walk.”

  “I was hoping I’d bump into you again,” he says. He has a nice voice: it’s gentle, kind, kind enough for me to wonder if perhaps it doesn’t matter that my hair is a tangle of snakes, and my eyes are naked. “Thought you might call.”

  “Sorry,” I say airily. “I’ve just been really busy.”

  This is a lie. I have not been really busy. I have been lying on the carpet in the living room being bandaged in toilet paper by Esther, writing in my book and worrying about Caitlin. Caitlin. “Actually, I have to go somewhere….”

  “Where are you off to?” he asks me, falling into step next to me. I thrust my hands into the pocket of the coat, and find a packet of those round mints in there. Greg’s been sucking mints. What does that mean? Does that mean he’s planning to kiss someone, perhaps—someone other than me? I remembered him today, or at least my heart did, but it was too late. He didn’t see me; he’d stopped caring and he left me. I stop my fingers circling round the mints as I think of the time when I won’t be anything to my husband anymore—other than a memory of a dif
ficult time.

  “Where did you say you were going?” Ryan repeats the question, nudging me into responding.

  “To the…” I stop talking. I feel hurt, and sad, and I don’t know why. The sky is bright and golden, the air crisp and pure, but still the fog has rolled in and I am lost again. “I’m just going for a walk.”

  “Can I walk with you?” he asks me.

  “I don’t really know where I’m going,” I warn him. “Just wandering around aimlessly!” There’s a hint of anxiety in my voice. I know I came out for Caitlin, but why? Where am I meeting her? Am I picking her up from something? Is it school? I picked her up from school late, once, and when I got there, her face was pinched and white, her eyes swollen with tears. The bus had been late, that was why. I am not a bus person anymore. If I’m late, she’ll be scared; I don’t want her to be scared.

  “I have to find my daughter,” I say.

  “You’ve got a daughter?” he asks me, and I realize I didn’t mention her last time.

  “Yes, she’s at university.” I listen to the words form in my mouth, and double-check them. Yes, Caitlin is at university; she’s not waiting for me in a school playground somewhere. She’s twenty years old and safe at university.

  “You don’t look old enough to have a daughter in college,” he says, and I can’t help grinning.

  “It is a modern miracle, isn’t it?” I push my web of hair off my face, and smile at him.

  “Can I suggest we turn around,” he says pleasantly. “That way is just the town center and shops and traffic. If we walk the other way, we might even get to hear a bird singing.”

  We walk in silence for a few minutes, and as we do, I steal sideways looks at him. The man I remember meeting in the café is younger in my head, but then again I thought I was younger too. For all I know, that meeting might have been ten or twenty years ago, except that the way he talks to me, shyly, hesitantly, suggests that we are recent and vague acquaintances. He must have liked me, though: if he hadn’t liked me, he wouldn’t have stopped to talk to me in the street.