The Story of Us

by Dani Atkins

  Despite the protests from both Richard and my father, I insisted that I wanted to see Caroline that evening. I’d phoned several times during the day, but had only spoken to Nick, as Caroline had worryingly refused to come to the phone. With each call I could hear the base note of desperation growing in her partner’s voice.

  ‘If you don’t want to go then fine; I’ll drive myself,’ I said stubbornly, putting Richard in an impossible position. I knew he sided with my father, who thought the only place I should be going was back to bed, but there was a steely determination in the glare I gave my fiancé.

  ‘Caroline needs me, I have to go. And come to that, Nick could probably do with some support from you too.’ It was a winning argument. My mother had watched the three-way stand-off, as though she had a front row seat for a very interesting foreign play. ‘Are you going out?’ she asked mildly, as Richard held out my jacket and I shrugged my arms into the sleeves.

  ‘Just for a little while, Mum.’

  Caroline and Nick lived on a new housing estate on the far side of town. They were the first from our circle of friends to climb on to the property ladder. I suppose it was an inevitable outcome, what with Nick working in a bank and Caroline in an estate agents. The crescent where they lived was model-village neat and tidy, peopled with like-minded young couples. Caroline, who’d been putting things away in a ‘bottom drawer’ about a century or so after that notion had died out completely, was a natural homemaker and couldn’t understand why neither Amy nor I had shared her enthusiasm for home décor catalogues or DIY superstores.

  We pulled on to their familiar drive and Richard tucked his car neatly into the space behind Nick’s. The one Caroline’s car used to occupy. We turned to each other and shared a long regretful look before reaching for the car door handles and then walked hand in hand up the path.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more grateful to receive visitors than Nick, who answered the door almost before the pealing chime of the bell had finished echoing in the oak floored hallway. He held me gingerly in a welcoming embrace, trying very hard not to focus on the white bandage on my head as he spoke. ‘She’s in the bedroom.’ I gave a nod and a smile which I hope said I’ve got it from here, slipped off my jacket and draped it over the newel post on the stairs.

  ‘Caro, it’s me. I’m coming up.’

  As I got closer I heard music coming from the bedroom: it was a band the three of us had been obsessed with about a decade ago. Interspersed with the soundtrack of our youth were noisy gulping sobs, which were heartbreaking to hear. I gave a soft knock on the wood-panelled door and went in.

  Caroline was a mess, and even more tellingly her room was a mess, which if you knew her even a fraction as well as I did, was a definite sign that things were far from right. Her short blonde hair was sticking out at weird angles from her head, and her face was red and blotchy from crying. She was kneeling in the middle of their double bed, on a beautifully embroidered white duvet cover, only you couldn’t see the fabric at all, for the entire surface of the bed was covered in a sea of photographs. Dressed only in pyjama shorts and a strappy vest, my friend sat on an island in the duvet, surrounded by just about every snapshot that had ever been taken of the three of us.

  ‘I just can’t believe she’s gone,’ said Caroline, her voice choked with pain. She ran her hands along the mattress, sweeping over the many photos, pieces of Amy, which were all we had left now.

  I gave a cry which sounded alien and anguished. ‘I know.’

  ‘Why her? Why Amy? When there are so many terrible people in the world, why was she the one who had to go?’ Even through my tears, I could see the question in Caroline’s eyes, because it was the same one I’d been asking myself all day: Why Amy and not me? Survivor’s guilt.

  I cleared a pathway and crawled on to the bed to reach her, my arms going around her, and hers around me, like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods. We cried for a long time, clinging together but saying nothing, because sometimes the pain is just too great for words to be of use, and the only thing you can do is hold on tightly to someone you love, until it stops trying to rip your heart out through your chest.

  I groped among the photographs for a buried tissue box, which was protruding from beneath a pile of pictures of us at primary school. I plucked one up and looked at it nostalgically. It was a photograph I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, and had been taken after a school nativity play. Amy was in the middle of the frame, looking adorable in a long blue gown, the perfect Virgin Mary, until you panned down and saw she was holding the baby Jesus doll upside-down by its ankle. To her left stood Caroline, wearing a pair of large donkey ears fixed to a hairband on her head, and a goofy smile on her face. On the other side of Amy was me, bizarrely wearing a weird tinfoil contraption on my head, for if memory served me correctly I’d been cast as The Christmas Alien… I felt Caroline’s chin come to rest on my shoulder, as she too studied the photograph in my hands. Three faces, each so different, except for the undisguised look of happiness and friendship. I didn’t need to examine the hundreds of other photos I was surrounded by to know that I’d find that same look on virtually every one. It had been there too on the snaps we’d taken just the night before, at my hen party. Three heads squeezed together, while Caroline held the camera at arm’s length to take the shot. There might be make-up replacing the freckles, and styled hair instead of pigtails, but the same friendship had still shone from our eyes. And now those last photographs, which we’d thought were recording just one more milestone on the road, actually marked the final moments of Amy’s life. I reached for the tissues again.

  By my left knee a photograph I didn’t recognise caught my eye. I plucked it up and held it closer to the light. I guessed it must have been taken three or four years ago, for although Amy and Caroline looked much the same as they did now, Caroline’s hair still hung down to her shoulders, and she hadn’t worn it that way for some time. The photograph had obviously been taken in summertime, for the subjects were all in shorts and T-shirts and were sitting in what looked like a beer garden of a pub, four bicycles propped up against a tree beside them. Nick and Richard were on one side of the bench, with long draughts of lager in front of them. On the other side of the table were Amy and Caroline, laughing crazily at whoever had been taking the photo. I was not in the picture.

  ‘Where was this one taken, Caroline?’

  She took the snap from my fingers and a small smile curved her mouth at the memory. ‘Oh yes, that was the day Amy persuaded us it would be fun to cycle to Brownleigh, over fifteen miles away, on the hottest Sunday of the entire summer. I swear we nearly died from heatstroke. It must have been three, no maybe four years ago.’

  A strange feeling squirmed somewhere inside me as I took the photograph back from her. That was during the period of time when I’d temporarily lost contact with the girls. To begin with my job in London had taken up so much of my time, and weekends, that I’d hardly come back to our home town at all, except for brief family visits. Then, after two years of working in the capital, I’d been given a fantastic opportunity to transfer to the company’s Washington office for eighteen months, which I had absolutely adored. I’d never really given much thought to what had happened to the group of friends I’d walked away from. It was unsettling now to realise that they owned a past history and shared memories about which I knew absolutely nothing. It shouldn’t have bothered me – of course my friends had been entitled to be happy in the years when I’d not been around – but suddenly it did.

  Richard and I had been apart for almost five years, and in that time neither of us had found a relationship that matched the one we had left behind; the relationship we’d managed to rediscover just one year ago.

  A tentative knock on the door made us both look up, as Nick poked his head nervously around the edge of the frame. ‘You two girls okay?’ He wore the classic look of a man who was extremely uncomfortable around feminine tears.

  I looked at Caroline a
nd reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘No. But we will be.’

  I eventually persuaded Caroline to come downstairs with me and have something to eat, which according to Nick were two things she hadn’t done at all in the last twenty-four hours. If I achieved nothing else, that alone justified the visit.

  Nick and Richard had opened a bottle of wine, and when we joined them in the welcoming kitchen, Nick reached into the cupboard for two more glasses. I was still on painkillers and definitely shouldn’t be drinking alcohol, and I’d noticed a small brown bottle from the hospital pharmacy beside Caroline’s bed, so I guessed that neither should she. Both of us took the wine.

  Inevitably the conversation was unable to stray far from the event that had exploded our world into smithereens. ‘Has anyone spoken to Amy’s family yet? Has anything been said about… Do they know when the…?’ Richard was clearly struggling with the word ‘funeral’, and with good reason. That word belonged to old people, to sick people, to people who had achieved everything they had wanted to do and see in life. Not to a beautiful, funny and loving twenty-seven-year-old woman, whose life had hardly begun yet.

  ‘They phoned to speak to Caroline this afternoon,’ supplied Nick.

  ‘They did?’ Caroline queried, swivelling in her seat to look at her partner in surprise. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Nick’s face wore a look of caution, as he tried to find a reply that didn’t sound condemning. ‘I did, honey. But you wouldn’t come to the phone. In fact, you used some fairly colourful language when you sent me away.’

  Caroline got out of her seat and crawled on to Nick’s lap, and his arms went around her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into his neck, and suddenly I felt like Richard and I were intruding. I might have dragged Caroline back from the edge of an abyss, but it was Nick she needed now for the strength to get up on to her feet once again.

  ‘Shall I call them tomorrow?’ I suggested, and Caroline gave a small nod of thanks, as a task she hadn’t felt strong enough to face was lifted from her shoulders. ‘Where are they staying?’

  Nick gave me both the name of a hotel in town and an extremely grateful smile. We left a short while later, and I was grateful for Richard’s supporting arm around me as we walked to the car. Apparently there’s a very good reason why they tell you not to drink while on medication.

  CHAPTER 4

  As soon as I gave their name at the reception desk of the country house hotel, I sensed a shift in attitude. The professional demeanour of the black-suited receptionist softened, and a look of empathy replaced the diamond-hard glaze in her eyes. ‘They’re in our Garden Suite,’ she said, and I noticed that even the tone of her voice had softened when she realised that I was a player in the tragic drama being enacted in their establishment. ‘Are they expecting you?’ I saw her glance down at a pad on the desk and run a perfectly manicured fingernail down a list of names. My own sat in the middle, below that of one of the town’s undertaker firms and above a local florist.

  ‘Yes, they are. Emma Marshall. That’s me.’

  Their suite was on the ground floor, in a wing which overlooked the impressively kept hotel grounds. I didn’t suppose either of Amy’s parents had so much as glanced out of a window since their arrival. Although I’d known them for almost my entire life, Caroline was actually closer to Amy’s family than I was, so it was startling to be enveloped in an all-encompassing embrace by Amy’s father the moment the door had opened. He had always seemed a rather distant and aloof figure, and Amy had never fully explained what he did for a living, other than to say it was ‘something in the City’. It was obviously time-consuming and demanding, as he had frequently been absent from school events and even from some of her birthday parties. Consequently, I’d always thought of him as a rather cold and remote individual. So it was a shock to see the tears running down his face when Donald Travis eventually relinquished his hold on me. That was what did it. To see his open and unashamed heartbreak, and know there was nothing I could ever do or say that could possibly lessen his pain, was like a stiletto stab wound in my chest. He gripped my hands so hard it hurt, and still his tears kept falling, and he did nothing to brush them away. A torrent like that was going to have to run its course, and it was nowhere near spent yet. I found myself thinking of all those times when teenage Amy would berate her absent father, who she claimed always prioritised his job over his family. Can you see him now, Amy? Can you see how he’s grieving? I really, really hoped that she could.

  Linda Travis was in pieces. She was one of those women who always looked as though she had just stepped out of the beauty salon or the hairdressers. Among the jeans- and trainers-wearing mothers at the school gates, she had stood out like a diamond in a jumble sale, with her immaculate clothes and designer heels. Amy was the child who had always appeared to have it all: the big house, the fancy cars and the glamorous parents. But beneath the TV-advert-perfect mum was a woman who had clearly doted on her only child. It was hard to recognise her in the dishevelled woman curled up on the chintz-covered settee of the suite. For a start she looked about thirty years too old to be Amy’s mum, and broken, in a way I didn’t think would ever be fixed. I went to her side, and could find no words that could offer even a moment’s solace. Instead I just picked up her hand and held it, much as I had held her daughter’s two nights earlier.

  When I had phoned that morning, to arrange this meeting, I’d been unsure of how they would receive me. They had, after all, contacted Caroline and not me in the first instance. Was it possible that they blamed me in some way for Amy’s death?

  ‘If there’s anything I can do to help… with the arrangements…’ My voice trailed away. It seemed I was just as inept as my fiancé at getting the words out. Fortunately organisation was Donald Travis’s forte, and in a strange way I sensed that having a funeral to arrange would carry him through the next ten days, until the time came to bury his child.

  ‘There is just one thing…’ Linda began hesitantly.

  ‘Anything. Please name it.’

  She gave a sad ghost of a smile. ‘The undertaker has asked us to pick out an outfit, and I really don’t think I could—’ The words were lost in an avalanche of tears. Amy needed something to wear for the burial, and Linda, who had accompanied her daughter on countless shopping trips for the perfect dress, couldn’t bear the thought of choosing this final outfit. What mother could?

  Planning our wedding had been joyous and uplifting, so it really wasn’t surprising that having to pull it apart piece by piece was depressing, demoralising, and also incredibly sad. Of course I could have made the cancellations by phone or email, but there was something fittingly sombre in physically retracing the footsteps I had taken a couple of months earlier when I’d booked the venue, the church, the florist and the caterer. Also, I felt driven by a burning need to keep busy and active, as though if I kept moving fast enough I would somehow be able to outrun the pain.

  Many of the establishments I visited had been expecting my call to cancel. It’s a curious phenomenon that bad news seems to travel so much more effectively than good, but at least it saved me from the necessity of having to explain the reasons for the cancellation many times over.

  As I drove home from my final appointment it occurred to me that unpicking our wedding plans was just one more example of how my life was moving backwards instead of forwards. Nine years earlier I’d left my home town, family and boyfriend for university and then a career and life in London, yet here I was at twenty-seven, living back at home with my parents, working in the very same place where I’d been employed as a Saturday girl. Even resuming my relationship with Richard could be seen as a retrograde step. I honestly believed our relationship had run its course when I had broken up with him many years ago. Yet now we were getting married, or had been about to, if I hadn’t just spent the best part of the day undoing those plans.

  I was feeling tired and miserable as I let myself into the house. I could smell the flowers even before the front
door was fully open. Their fragrance filled the hallway, and as I shut the door behind me my mouth opened in surprise when I saw the display propped up on the hall table. The exotic blooms were artfully gathered together beneath a clear cellophane sleeve, in a stunning bouquet. ‘Richard,’ I said with a smile, as I crossed over to the delivery and prised the small white envelope with my name on it from the corner of the packaging. He’d only sent me flowers twice before this, and both times they’d been small bunches of white freesias, his favourite flowers. I was genuinely touched by the thoughtfulness of his unexpected gesture. I pulled the small white card from its envelope, and felt my smile freeze, then thaw and widen. There were just eight handwritten words in bold black ink on the card: With deepest sympathy for your loss. Jack Monroe.

  I was still transferring the flowers into the tallest vase I could find, when Richard arrived. ‘Are these yours?’ he asked, kissing me briefly, his attention focused on the display. Just for one moment I considered lying, but decided instead to be honest. With hindsight, I should have followed my first instinct.

  ‘Yes. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘Hmm. Yes,’ he replied distractedly, looking around for something, which, you didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out, was the gift card. ‘Who are they from?’

  I took a deep breath before replying, ‘Jack Monroe.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jack Monroe. The American guy, from the other night… the one who pulled me out of the car.’

  The blank look on his face cleared, to be replaced by a small frown of displeasure.

  ‘Why is he sending you flowers?’

  ‘I don’t know. As a gesture of condolence? Because it’s a nice thing to do? Who knows?’ Perhaps it was Richard’s look of undisguised irritation that made me add, ‘Actually, I thought they were from you.’ He had the grace to look a little embarrassed and uncomfortable, but not enough good sense to know when to drop the subject.