The Day We Met

by Rowan Coleman

  Now I look at him, I see he is around my age, and nicely dressed in a suit and tie. He looks like the sort of man I should have married; the sort of man who would have a pension plan and probably Bupa health insurance. I bet it’s better being demented on Bupa. Like NHS dementia, but with nicer food and Sky TV, probably.

  “Did we really just bump into each other?” I ask him, feeling suddenly a little wary. “Or are you stalking me?”

  He laughs. “No, I’m not stalking you. I will admit I have hoped that we would get to talk again. No, I am a lonely, sad man who saw you in a café a few weeks ago and thought that you looked…lovely, and like you needed taking care of, and…Well, look, I hope you don’t mind my pointing it out, but you’re outside now, and you’re still in your PJs, so I just thought…maybe you might like a friend?”

  “So you’re lonely and sad,” I say, liking the fact that he’s noticed my outfit (why am I out in my PJs?) yet he’s not instantly marching me off to the asylum. “And obviously not a marketing professional. Tell me something about yourself, like why you are lonely and sad?”

  “If you tell me why you don’t bother getting dressed for walks,” he says.

  “I…” I am about to tell him, but I stop. I’m not quite ready yet. “I am a free spirit,” I say, and he laughs. “Now it’s your turn.”

  He doesn’t know that he can tell me what he likes, and I will probably forget it any minute now; although I didn’t forget him, or our first meeting, not from the moment he said the words “pretty drowned rat.” I mean, I hadn’t thought about him until then, but as soon as I heard those words, I knew him, and that’s something to hold on to, something good. And I remember…I remember his eyes. He doesn’t know what he can and can’t tell me, and I am amazed and, yes, touched as he tells me, well, everything.

  “I’m a pathetic case,” he admits. “My wife…she just stopped loving me and she left me. And I’m heartbroken. I miss her like crazy. And some days I don’t see the point of going on, but then I remember that I have to, because people depend on me. I used to like being the strong one, but not now. Now, I don’t know how I will ever be happy again, and it terrifies me.”

  “Wow, that really is sad and pathetic,” I say, but I understand. He feels lost just like me, just like I am, both literally and figuratively. I reach out and pick up his hand. He is surprised for a second, and then pleased, I think. He doesn’t pull away from me, anyway.

  “Glad you find my pain amusing.” He smiles, and glances sideways at me.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” I say. “I’m just laughing at us. Look at us, lost souls out for a walk on the streets of Guildford. We need a heath, really, or a forest. We need a landscape with some proper metaphor in it. Lampposts and bus stops don’t really cut it.” I am pleased with myself: I’m pretty sure I was just clever and funny all in one go. The people back at home, they think I’m already a write-off. I wonder if they are looking for me—whether they are freaking out? I must have been gone a while, now. Mum has surely discovered that I have absconded in her boots. That’s right, I ran away. But I can’t remember why, and when I’m holding hands with Ryan, it seems less pressing.

  “We’ll have to make do with leafy suburbia,” he says as we climb the hill, which is lined along each side with houses, 1930s semis that all look almost exactly the same. Once, these houses were paradise, Utopia. Now they seem like they were built specifically to trick me: a cruel joke, a maze with only dead ends and double bluffs, and no way out. I know I live in one of them, but I have no idea which one. There is something to do with curtains, but I forget what, and anyway I don’t want to go back to where they will be waiting to lock me in.

  “What about you?” he asks me, as we turn from one identical avenue into another. “Tell me your story.”

  “I’m not well, Ryan,” I confess regretfully. “I didn’t want to tell you, because I think when you know, you won’t look at me the same way, or talk to me in the same way. There are only two people in the whole world who don’t treat me any differently now I am sick, and you are one of them. The other is my little girl, my second daughter, Esther. She is only three and a half. I’ve been married to her father for a year and a bit. He’s a very good man, a decent man. He deserves so much better than this.”

  Ryan falls silent for a moment or two, taking it all in. “Can we just assume,” he says at last, “that as I’m very happy to walk hand in hand with a married woman who is wearing her pajamas in public, I won’t change the way I see you, or talk to you, if you tell me what your illness is?”

  “I…” I don’t know how to tell him the truth without frightening him away, so I tell him a version of it. “Let’s just say, I don’t have very long left.”

  Ryan’s slow, steady pace falters, and I feel sorry for him. I keep forgetting how frightening any serious illness is for other people. It’s as if Death has just tapped them on the shoulder, and reminded them it’s coming for them one day too.

  “It’s not fair,” he says quietly, taking in the news.

  “No.” I can only agree. “This part is the worst part. The part when I know what I am losing. This part hurts me. More than I know how to say, to anyone. Not that I’ve ever tried to explain it to anyone…except you. This is the part I never want to end, and the part I want over now.”

  Ryan looks, what? Mortified, I think. Horrified. His face is white as a sheet.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I’ve picked on you to confess my inner thoughts to. Look, it’s okay. Don’t feel obliged to talk to me. I’ll be fine from here.”

  I look around me, and realize I have no idea where I am, or even when. I don’t want to let go of his hand, but I tell myself that if he loosens his grip on my fingers, even a little, then I must.

  “Do you love your husband?” he asks me. I look down and see he is still holding my hand, firmly. I look at it, my hand in his, my wedding ring shimmering in the morning sun.

  “Sometimes I remember what it felt like,” I say. “And I know that I was so lucky to have it, even for a little while.”

  Chewing my lip as we walk on, I wonder what I’m doing, and why. Why am I telling this perfect stranger, who quite possibly has more mental health issues than I do, the secrets I can’t tell my family? By now, I should have scared him off—he should be making his polite excuses, and finding a way to leave—but he is still walking next to me, still holding my hand. And it doesn’t feel wrong, my hand in his. It feels…comforting.

  “Love is a funny thing,” he says, breaking the silence. “Sometimes, I’d like to be better with words, so that I could talk about it more. It seems so wrong to me that there is this condition that affects all of us, more than anything else in our lives ever will, and only the poets and song writers get to talk about it with any sort of authority.”

  “You can talk about it to me,” I say. “It doesn’t matter what words you use.”

  “I suppose I think it’s more than just words and sentiment,” he says. “I suppose that, actually, I’d really like to be your friend, if you feel you need one, even though I’m missing my wife, who I still love, and even though you are so ill. And even though we can’t be friends forever, I’d like us to be friends now. If you don’t mind?”

  “But why?” I ask him. “Why would you want to have anything to do with me?”

  “Our paths crossed at exactly the right time, don’t you think?” He draws to a stop, turning to face me. “When I think about love, I suppose I think it’s something outside of us. Something that’s about more than just sex or romance. I suppose I think that when we are gone, all that will be left of us is love.”

  “That reminds me of something,” I say. “I can’t think what.”

  I try to push back the fold of fog in my memory as I glance around, spotting a house with red curtains at the window. It’s my house; somehow we have stopped outside my house.

  “I live here,” I say, surprised. “You’ve brought me home.”

  “Mor
e likely that you just knew the way, and led us here because you weren’t thinking about it too much,” he says, looking a little sad, perhaps because our walk is over. “Either that or I’m your guardian angel.”

  “I hope not,” I say. “I’ve always thought guardian angels sound like right party poopers.”

  Something moves in my peripheral vision, probably my mum releasing the curtains, which means she’s heading for the door. I don’t want to have to explain Ryan to Mum—or worse, to Greg—so I guide him back a step or two behind our neighbor’s stupidly tall privet hedge.

  “I think my mum might ground me,” I whisper to Ryan, smiling ruefully.

  “Oh, shall I…?” But before he can offer to say hello to my mother, I stop him.

  “No, it’s fine,” I say. “Thank you for the walk. Thank you for bringing me back. I’d better go.”

  “Do you still have my number?” he asks me, catching my wrist.

  “Yes,” I say. But the truth is, I don’t know.

  “If you need me,” he says, “if you need a friend who doesn’t care what you are wearing, then you can reach me. Promise.”

  “And you too,” I say. “You reach me too, when you are missing your wife more than you want to.”

  “Remember me,” he says.

  “I will,” I say, and I don’t know why, but I know that it’s true.

  —

  “I’m sorry,” Mum says, as soon as I walk in the door, my head tipped back, preparing to be grounded.

  I turn around slowly and look at her. “Pardon?”

  “I’m not doing a very good job of seeing what this is like for you,” she says, wringing her hands over and over. “I just want to look after you—that’s all I want to do. And sometimes I think I try too hard, or not hard enough, to understand how frustrating this all is, for you. I suppose I’m not listening to you enough. I was worried sick, and Greg’s out looking for you. I’d better ring him.”

  Greg doesn’t answer, and Mum leaves a message. Her voice is trembling, and I realize I’ve scared her. It seems so stupid to me that, just by going out of the door, I frighten my mother so much. It seems so stupid that this is my life now.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t do things to frighten you. I do things because I honestly think it’s fine…. This is all happening too fast for me to keep up with, that’s the trouble.”

  Mum nods, and letting go of the hem of her sweater, which she was holding on to for dear life, she comes toward me and puts her arms around me. It’s an awkward embrace, all elbows and shoulders. At first we are out of practice, but then I remember sitting on her lap. I let myself be hugged by her, and we stand in the hallway holding each other. I am glad to be home.

  “Look,” Mum says gently when we finally part. “While Greg was out looking for you, I was thinking about what to do about Caitlin….”

  It comes back in a rush of worry—the reason I went out; the reason I escaped. I have to be with her. “Where are my car keys?” I ask her.

  “Greg’s coming home,” she says, holding up the thing that messages come on. “He’s glad you are back. He’s coming home to look after Esther.”

  “I need my car keys,” I say, lost in the mosaic of information.

  “When Greg gets here, we can go, you and me.”

  The pieces slide and reassemble, and then I realize exactly what she is saying.

  “You and me.” She smiles. “We’re going to London together, to find Caitlin.”

  thursday, november 19, 1981

  claire

  This is a photo of my dad in his army uniform. It was taken long before he met Mum, maybe even before she was born. He is just eighteen in this photo, so handsome, and even in this posed, formal image, I always think there is a little twinkle in his eye: a sense of a life beginning. This is how I like to remember him. He served in the last two years of the Second World War, and he never talked about it, not once; but whatever happened to him in France changed him. The only times I ever saw that twinkle in his eye was in this photo and on the day he died, when he thought I was his sister.

  I wasn’t allowed to see him much at the end; if I’m honest, I didn’t really want to. He’d always been something of a stranger to me anyway, an old-school sort of dad who usually came home after work when I was already in bed. I remember the earliest parts of my childhood as playing all day with Mum, and then at night trying to stay awake until I heard the click of the front door, hoping that tonight would be one of the rare nights that Dad came into my room and kissed me on the forehead. He only ever did that, though, if he thought I was properly asleep. The merest twitch of an eyelash, and he would not enter the room. As I grew up, I resented that. I thought he was very cold, very remote. It took me years to realize that was just the way he was. He was all about the stiff upper lip, a pat on the back; no hugs or kisses, he wasn’t that sort of father. He was the sort of dad who might make polite enquiries as to how my day had been at school. Like we were acquaintances who’d met in the street and discussed the weather. I loved him, and I am sure that he loved me, but I didn’t really know him, especially not by the age of ten, which is how old I was when he died. I remember quite a lot about being ten, but very little about my dad. I wonder whether, had he lived longer, he would have meant more to me as a person. Would I remember him for the things he meant to me, instead of the things he didn’t? I worry so much about how Esther will remember me, or whether she will remember me at all.

  I only have two really clear memories of my dad, and one is of the last time I saw him before he died, when he thought I was his sister, Hattie.

  Mum was in the kitchen, talking to the doctor, and I was in the hallway, sitting on the stairs. I spent a lot of Dad’s last days on the stairs, trying to hear what was happening. Dad was in bed in what used to be the dining room. I could hear him calling. I listened to him calling for a long time, sitting on the stairs, reluctant to go in, waiting for Mum to respond to him like she always did, shutting the door behind her, and her soft voice, murmuring, soothing. But Mum was still talking to the doctor in the kitchen, and Dad sounded upset, so I went in. I didn’t like to hear him sounding scared: it scared me too. He was weak, then, with advanced pneumonia, so he couldn’t sit up. I went over to him, right up to the bed so that he could see me.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Tell Mother it wasn’t me. Tell her it wasn’t me who broke your stupid doll, stinkers.”

  I didn’t understand, so I leaned closer. “What do you mean, Dad? What doll?”

  “You’re such a crybaby, Hattie,” he said. “Just a tattletale crybaby.”

  He pulled my hair, really hard, gripping on to it and yanking it down, so that for a moment my head was pinned to the bed, inhaling the scent of sweat and urine, and I couldn’t move or breathe. Then he let me go, and I stumbled back from the bed, rubbing my sore scalp, horrified. There were tears, although I hated to cry and prided myself on not doing it. Hot tears flowed down my face. He looked at me from the bed, those pale blue eyes that had once sparkled now looking at some other time, some other world, some other girl.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said, his voice gentle now. “I didn’t mean to make you blub. Tell you what, after lunch we’ll go down to the stream and paddle till our toes turn blue, okay? I’ll help you catch some tadpoles; we’ll keep ’em in a bucket until they grow legs.”

  My mum came in then, and seeing me crying, ushered me out of the room, closing the door behind me, and then all I could hear was her voice, soft and soothing as she comforted him. Dad died sometime later that afternoon.

  7

  claire

  The tube train rattles from side to side with a tick, tick, marking the passing of time as it bumps and judders along the tracks. I have been concentrating very hard on the map that’s positioned above the seats opposite me—so that I don’t lose myself, not only in this huge sprawling labyrinth but also in time. I need to remember what I am doing; I need to remember why. Whatever else happens, I must not
forget those two things.

  I’m in London; I’m looking for Caitlin.

  I’ve thought about it, since my walk—my expedition to rescue Caitlin that didn’t make it past the zebra crossing. I’m like a learner driver: I need to keep my eye on exactly where I am going, at any given moment. Any lapse in concentration will result in me veering off, lost in some off-roading adventure that I don’t have the skill to navigate. I’m attempting to relearn basic life skills quicker than I am losing them. It’s a bit like walking up the down escalator, which I’ll take; if working hard at concentrating keeps me in the same place, that’s good enough for me. It’s better than going down.

  Only two more stops to go. I am pleased with myself for knowing that. And yet, looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life—if the more the disease advanced, the more “see-through” I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically. I have no idea if that thought makes sense, but I like that I remember the word “metaphysical.”

  Mum sits on one side of my ghostly reflection, reading a paper, her arm aligned carefully with mine, thus maintaining contact while appearing not to. On my other side sits a girl with multiple piercings just above her top lip. I turn and look directly at her, and see that there are five of them, jeweled metal studs piercing her white skin, echoing her perfect cupid’s bow. She is wearing a white, fake-fur jacket over a deep-red shirt that is unbuttoned to reveal a scar in the center of her chest, perhaps from heart surgery. In each little dimple that once represented a stitch, she has placed a tiny sparkling jewel. It makes me smile.