by Ashley Hay
And she did laugh now, catching at his hand and kissing it. On the pavement below, a set of couples twirled and turned, dancing to music that Dan and Caro, sealed in their bubble, couldn’t hear. The brightness of the women’s skirts flared against the solid dark of their partners’ suits. Alongside, on the river, a small boat pulled away from a wharf, the white trail of its wake surging wide as it picked up speed.
“Why aren’t there more boats on your river?” Pointing down, Dan traced its path along the glass.
Caroline’s finger followed the same line. “I suppose the tubes and the buses are faster, and go where people want them to go.” She paused. “There must be some ferries, though—I remember going on one, out to Greenwich, when I was little.” She spun towards the east, as if she might see the very boat itself, still plying the Thames. “We went to the observatory, so many clocks and telescopes, and we stood with our feet on either side of the prime meridian.” She wiggled her shoes further apart, as if the line now ran through the middle of the wheel’s cabin. A playful thing, and Dan reached out, grabbed her hands, and stood with his feet opposite hers, mirroring her position.
“The east and the west,” he said. “When I was little, I could never get my head around any of those lines, the prime meridian, the dateline, how something could be one thing on one side of it and another on the other—east or west; today or tomorrow. I couldn’t imagine that it was possible to actually straddle one of those lines without fracturing yourself somehow. And the way this one little place somewhere in England dictated where everything was and what time it was there. Must have been funny in places that had just been going along before that, thinking they knew where they were and what time it was, then they found out about Greenwich.”
“I’ll take you there sometime, satisfy these touristic urges of yours,” said Caroline. “You can see if you do break in half with one foot east and one foot west.” Craning her head back, she watched the cabins above as they slid across the sky, everything turning gently towards the ground. “This reminds me of that ride at Disneyland, the Peter Pan one, when those little chairlifts sweep you up and over the streets of London.”
“That would be too touristy even for me,” said Dan. “Although I suppose I should go to the French one while I’m here—be silly to be so close and not go, wouldn’t it?”
A pause, a beat too long, then, “Sure, Dan,” said Caroline, but with that weariness, that tightness in her voice that made her sound like another person.
He looked at her quickly. He winced: there it was again. Did I say something wrong? Have I forgotten something else? He waited for her to smile, to come back, to say something light, or warm. But she stood apart on the other side of the car, rubbing the skin around her eyes, and silent.
Overhead, his cloud had changed from a glowing gold to the kind of golden-pink that belonged in an old Italian painting.
“Look at it now, Caro,” he tried, but she shook her head.
“Hopeless, Dan, you’re hopeless,” she said again, her back turned as she looked down the river towards Greenwich and its magical line of longitude.
Stepping out of the quiet bubble of glass, Dan heard shouts and laughs, horns and cars, and then the surge of a tango starting somewhere and he swung Caroline out along the length of his arm and back in again before she had time to speak. There was a stark coldness in the air: it was October, the time of year he most registered the weather. Where he came from, his birthday fell on the cusp of summer, and he’d never adjusted to these autumnal birthdays.
The music soared, and as he dipped Caroline fast and low for its finale, he heard shouts of encouragement in his own accent. There were three of them, their faces and hands brown, their backpacks scruffy, and their jackets emblazoned with the familiar slogans of surfing. Yes, he thought, he’d come to London on the easy conveyer belt of travelers like these ones, a few years out of uni, wondering what to do. Some were stayers, some were goers, and some, like me, he thought, are drifters. He liked the sound of that; it was more romantic than saying you were a banker.
It was an easy story to tell.
The music finished, and he held Caroline close for a little of the silence.
“I’m sorry I didn’t ring everyone, and I know we’re going to be late,” he said at last. “Let’s get a cab instead of rushing.” And he grabbed her hand and began to run—half a pace, and half a skip—smiling as she smiled. Saved by a tango, he thought. If he was lucky, he would think of enough things to keep her giggling. He hailed a cab with a flourish, swinging the door wide as Caroline slid inside.
“I know,” she said, “you love these things, with the true passion of a man who believes they only exist in movies.”
He breathed out. It was all right—she was laughing. And she was right: black cabs had an impossible glamour. He could ride in them every day and they’d never feel ordinary. The car sped through the dusk, across the river, and into the maze of streets that still disoriented him.
“What do you want for your birthday?” asked Caroline, tucking her hair behind her ears.
“This,” said Dan. “This’ll do.”
“Nothing else?”
“I like this, just how things are. A cab, a restaurant, the view . . . you.”
She smoothed her skirt and turned to look out the window at the lights they’d just floated above. And when she turned towards him again, her face was tight and her cheek was striped with the wet track of one tear.
The street was quiet when they left the restaurant, and Dan felt himself dozing in and out of wakefulness as their train rattled through its tunnels. Caroline was quiet, and he wondered whether he should ask her about her tears in the taxi, or whether to pretend he hadn’t noticed. He closed his eyes and saw a series of images like stills from a suite of dreams: the garden where he grew up, the stars the night he met Caro, the view of Sydney from beneath the bridge—he could feel the wind there, smell the salt coming in from the ocean. When he opened them again, he was sure he saw their station just pulling out of view and he leapt up, grabbing Caroline’s hand.
“What are you doing? We’ve got two stops to go yet.” She shook herself free from his grip.
He felt his face go hot and red; he hadn’t blushed in years. It made him feel young, and silly, and embarrassed. For a moment he disliked so much that she’d made him feel this way that he found himself disliking her. It was a new feeling, sharp and nasty, and he wanted to shake it as far away from himself as possible.
They were going to his place, a smart flat to the east—Caroline’s was a smart flat in the southwest—and as they came out from the Underground a car flicked on its headlights, dazzling them both for a second so that they fumbled for each other’s hand, warm and steadying. Dan’s eyes flared with the bright shapes left behind, and he breathed out, felt better.
“It was a nice night, Caro.”
“It was,” she said. “Your friends are nice.”
It had never occurred to him that she didn’t think of them as her friends too. Dan felt a shiver of cold, and exaggerated it, shaking his shoulders with a cartoon noise.
“Brr, what’s that thing about a goose walking over your grave?”
“Well, it’s a cold night,” said Caroline, sharp again. “Must be time for you to complain about how cold your birthday is on this side of the world. You’ve only got a few minutes left before it’s not your birthday anymore—or not in Greenwich Mean Time.” And although she smiled, she pulled away from him, shuffling her hands into her pockets.
Inside the flat, he let the door click shut behind them and crossed the room in the darkness, pulling up the blinds that had obscured the view of the river, the city, the lights.
“I brought you cake,” said Caroline suddenly. “I dropped it in this afternoon—it’s in the fridge. And there are candles. Do you want me to fix it for you? I can make some tea.”
Dan squinted as yellow light spilled from the open fridge. He sometimes felt uneasy when she’d been in hi
s flat without him, although he had nothing to hide.
“No, no, you stay there—I’ll bring it in.”
It was a gorgeous cake, rich and chocolatey, and iced on top with a blue-green globe of the world, Australia at its center.
“You’re lovely, Caro,” he said, swiping a little of the chocolate from the edge and licking his finger. “I like the decoration.”
“Had it done specially for you.” He heard her shoes thud onto the carpet, one after the other. “It seemed appropriate.”
The candlelight made their shadows bounce on the walls as he carried the cake across the room. They sat side by side on the floor, the cake and its tiny spots of light, then the view and its larger ones through the window. Neither spoke as they cut and ate, licked their fingers and drank their tea.
Finally she said, “There’s a message on your machine. Charlie rang when I was here with the cake, but I didn’t like to pick it up.”
“Charlie,” said Dan. “She never forgets a birthday.” On one of Dan’s walls was a huge print of Sydney’s harbor that Charlie had taken, all blue water and golden light. Caro and Dan turned to look at it at the same time.
“You know, for ages I thought she was your sister,” said Caro, and Dan shrugged.
“So did I, when we were little.” For years, it seemed, he’d not been sure if they were related or not. She was the closest thing he had to a sister, just as her grandfather was the closest thing he had to one of those as well. Like patchwork, as Gramps liked to say, these people without enough people around them: Charlie had needed a mother and a sibling, and there were Dan and his mum on the other side of the flimsiest of fences. “Meant to be,” said Gramps. Four palings knocked down and the union was achieved; the kids were only four or five at the time.
“The way you talked about her, and you’ve her picture on your fridge, not your mum’s. You’re lucky I’m not the jealous type.” Caro pulled her fingers through her hair, erasing what was left of the day’s style.
“She’s like a sister, Caro. You know that: I’ve told you. Charlie didn’t have a mum, and I did; I didn’t have a grandfather, and she had Gramps. Neither of us had dads. So we just sort of . . .”
“Merged,” said Caro. “I know. I like the story. But still . . .” She reached out and cut herself another slice of the cake, picking little pieces from it and eating them delicately. He’d never seen someone make a piece of cake last so long. Shaking the last of the crumbs from her hands, she patted her hair. “I just wonder sometimes, if you’re really so close to your mum, and to Gramps, why do you go on living here, and how long are you going to stay?”
Dan leaned forward, working fragments of icing free of the cake. How long are you going to stay? He felt uneasy, immediately defensive; he’d meant it in the cab when he’d said he liked things exactly how they were.
“I was thinking about it tonight,” he said at last. “I was thinking about how some people come and stay, and some people come and go, and some people come and just drift, don’t really know what they’re doing.”
“Neither here nor there,” said Caro.
“I guess. I liked the sound of drifting. It sounded . . .” But he balked at the word “romantic.” He took a deep breath. “What makes you ask?”
She shook her head. “Nothing—it’s not anything. It’s just, you know, we’ve been together five years now, and I’ve hardly even spoken to your mother. She must think I’m some figment of your imagination. We don’t live together, which is fine, fine—” She patted the air to stop his sentence, whatever it might have offered or defended. “But we don’t even talk about it. And you, you talk about your side of the world all the time—all the time, Dan—and I wonder whether that’s because you do want to be there, but something’s stopping you. And I wonder whether that something is me.”
She paused, worrying at a thread on the edge of her skirt until it came loose. “You’re still such a tourist here, you know. When I first met you, I thought you must have only just arrived, the way you spoke about everything. I thought you were always comparing things because everything here was new. But it’s not that. You say you can’t piece London together, but we go anywhere else and you’ve got it memorized in a morning. Here, I don’t know, it’s like you can’t be bothered.” She shrugged: he’d never seen her look so sad. “I just think you should work out where you want to be . . . Do you live here? Are you just visiting? Do you want to go home? We talk about going there, and then we never go . . .”
Dan closed his eyes, trying to trace the path overland between his flat and the city, his flat and Caro’s, but there were too many blanks and elisions. It was nothing—it was only because he didn’t drive here, and hardly ever walked anywhere either. Caro was making too much of it. After all, as long as he knew where she was, he didn’t mind not knowing how the city’s other bits and pieces connected. He couldn’t imagine any sort of London without her. He wondered if she knew that.
That look on her face—tired, and forlorn: the last thing he wanted was to be the cause of that. He glanced about, searching for something he might say or do to recover her brightness, and across the room, his answering machine blinked. Charlie—he’d missed her birthday again this year, and only remembered his mother’s because Charlie had reminded him. And Caro’s birthday? It was just after Christmas—was it the fourth? The fifth? His lovely Caroline.
“Sometimes,” said Caroline, when he didn’t speak, “I think that you do want to go home—you do want to go. You just don’t want to go with me.”
Charlie, his mother, and Gramps: his tiny pool of people. Caroline’s family ran away in all directions—siblings, second cousins, great aunts. They were like London; you could disappear into their numbers, and Dan liked that.
“Of course we can go home,” he said at last. “We can go this Christmas, if you want to. I didn’t know it was such a big thing for you.”
“It’s not.” Caroline was standing now, but awkward. “It’s not really anything to do with it. The point is where you want to be. Here or there. Not just for some little piece of time like Christmas.”
Her skin was almost luminous in the darkness. She was beautiful, he thought. It still astonished him sometimes.
“I don’t know,” he said. “And it’s not that I’m indifferent. It’s easy to be here because I am here, but—” He shrugged, adding too quickly, “And you’re here, Caro, of course.” She frowned. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean—”
She shook her head. “It’s all right. It’s just . . .” She took a deep breath and sat down again, close enough that their arms were touching. After a moment she took his hand, lacing her fingers between his. “Tell me a story now,” she said. “Tell me the story about the man who could fly.”
“I don’t think—it’s late, Caro. We should get some sleep.”
And then she was standing, her shoes on, feeling for her coat, her bag, almost before he’d had time to regret his refusal.
“I’ll get a cab,” she said as he began to apologize, to protest. “And you should get some sleep, you’re right. See which side of the world you dream about. I bet I can tell you that even before you close your eyes.” But she leaned down, kissed him gently on the top of his head. “I’d like to be able to think about what happens next in this story,” she said, and her voice now was wistful.
He stood up then, followed her to the door. “Stay here,” he said. “Don’t go off and get a cab—it’s too . . .”
“It’s too late,” she said, but she smiled. “Don’t worry, this isn’t the end of the world. I’ve just had enough for tonight. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And she was gone, pulling the door shut quietly behind her.
What did he want? Not this, he thought, not going off in the middle of the night. He knew he should go after her. He remembered Gramps, the last time he’d seen the old man before he came to London, saying, “You’re a good boy, Dan, but don’t be careless,” and nodding towards Charlie. Dan had smiled, and hugged him. Hi
m and Charlie together somehow, that wasn’t the story—he knew that. Nor was it what Gramps had meant.
As he turned away from the door at last, his phone began to ring.
“Caro?”
“Hey—no, Dan; it’s Charlie.”
“Charlie! Did you ring earlier? Caro said she thought she heard a message.”
“She did—I did.”
“You know it’s after midnight here—what are you doing calling?” Charlie could operate in four time zones in her head; she was not a person who accidentally rang in the middle of the night.
“I—well, it’s your birthday, and . . .” The line went so quiet Dan thought it might have dropped out until Charlie said, “It’s Gramps. When I rang before I was at the hospital with him. They’re saying it doesn’t look hopeful, Dan . . .”
“Charlie, I’m sorry—I didn’t . . . I wish I could . . . what about Mum?” A sudden fear, new and shocking, that one day Charlie would ring to tell him there was something wrong with his mother; the possibility had never occurred to him before.
“Your mum’s been with us all day—she’s worried about him too. I mean, he’s such a good age, you have to . . . But he just looks sort of small, and he’s not talking very much which, you know . . . Anyway, I said I’d ring and tell you.”
And for the first time, the world felt big: the shrunken version of phones and email and fast flights ballooning back to its thousands of kilometers of vastness.
“Do you want me to come home? Does Mum want me to come?”
“Your mother always wants you to come home, Dan. It’s been ten years, mate, and you’re terrible at even calling. But look, it’s a long way.” She was back to her pragmatic self.
“I’ll see what I can do about work, about coming. But Gramps’ll be all right, Charlie. He’ll be fine. You know, he’s the man who can fly.” And he laughed into the line’s silence before he heard Charlie take a deep breath.
“You should get some sleep,” she said. “I’m sorry I called so late—I did it without thinking.” He heard her swallow, and swallow hard again. “And I guess I’ll ring you when I know . . . when I know what’s happening.” She said goodbye then, and the line clicked.
