by Sophie Hayes
My mother hadn’t met Erion before that day when he came to guide us to the dentist, but as she got to know him, she became very fond of him. So, when I phoned her one day and told her I was unsure about our relationship and asked, ‘What shall I do? I don’t know if I love him. I don’t know what I want,’ she said, ‘You can’t keep pushing and pulling the poor boy. If you aren’t certain you want to be with him, you have to tell him. It isn’t fair to keep him hanging on if you don’t really love him.’
I wished I could simply ‘live in the moment’, but when we’d been together for almost two years, I told Erion, ‘I want to be on my own. I don’t know if it’s right for us to be together, so I think we should stop seeing each other.’ Finally, I’d stretched the bond between us so far that I’d found its breaking point and the sadness in his eyes almost broke my heart as he sighed and said, ‘Okay, Sophie. I can’t do this anymore either.’
This time, though, something seemed to have changed for me, and when he phoned the next day to say, ‘Where are you? I need to talk to you,’ my heart barely missed a beat the way it normally did.
‘I don’t want to see you,’ I told him. ‘I’m with some friends and I just want to go out tonight and have a good time. I’m sorry, Erion.’
Later, at a club in town, I was dancing with my friend Natasha, who was jigging around in front of me with her arms in the air, when I noticed her glance over my shoulder and look suddenly anxious. ‘What? What is it?’ I asked her. But before I had time to turn around, two hands had covered my eyes and Erion said, ‘Surprise!’
He dropped his hands on to my shoulders and spun me round so that I was facing him, and for a moment I wished I could return his smile, wrap my arms around him and tell him I’d made a mistake and was happy to see him. But, instead, I took a step away from him as I said, ‘No, Erion. What are you doing here? I told you I didn’t want to see you. You’re just making this harder for both of us.’
He looked at me steadily for a moment, his eyes full of hurt and bewilderment, and then he turned abruptly on his heels and walked away.
For the next few days, he didn’t try to contact me again and I told myself I didn’t miss him and that it was for the best. And then, a couple of weeks later, I had a phone call from a girl called Lucy, who was the English girlfriend of Erion’s best friend, Besmir. The four of us often spent time together, but I hadn’t seen her since before Erion and I split up, and as soon as I heard her voice on the phone, I knew something bad had happened to him.
‘He’s in a holding cell at the airport,’ she told me. ‘He’s going to be deported. He wants to talk to you.’
It felt as though something was being tightened around my stomach and I had to swallow several times to stop myself being sick. I knew Erion had come to England as an illegal immigrant 10 years previously, when he was just 14, but he’d recently applied for permission to stay. Although he still had family in Albania, he didn’t want to go back there – not least because England had become his home and he’d made a good life for himself here.
‘I don’t understand,’ I told Lucy. ‘That can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense. I went with him to the solicitor and she told him everything was going ahead and he’d been granted permission to remain here while all the paperwork was sorted out to make everything legal.’
Suddenly, it was as though I could see the future like a dark, empty tunnel ahead of me and I couldn’t bear the thought of having to spend the rest of my life without Erion. Despite the way I’d sometimes behaved towards him, I think, deep down, I’d always believed he’d be there, waiting for me, if I ever needed him, and now it looked as though I might lose him forever.
‘He’s allowed to have one phone call,’ Lucy told me. ‘And he wants to talk to you. Please don’t let him down, Sophie. He really loves you, you know.’
I was crying as I rang the number she gave me, and when he heard my voice, Erion cried too.
A couple of weeks previously, after we’d split up, he’d moved in to stay with an Albanian family who had already had their request to remain in England refused and were waiting to be told when they were going to be sent back to Albania. They hadn’t realised that the immigration officers might simply turn up at their front door one day and they certainly hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Erion was out when the officers arrived, and when his friend phoned him to tell him what was happening and to say goodbye, he’d insisted on seeing the family one last time before they left the country.
Another friend who was with Erion when he received the call begged him not to go. But Erion told him, ‘It’ll be fine. I’m quite safe – I’m here legally at last. And I must say goodbye to them. They’ve been good to me, like my own family. I’ve got to go and see them.’ And then he’d raced to the house, and had no reason not to give his name and details to the immigration officers when they asked for them. But, when they checked his status, they told him he had not been granted leave to stay and that he, too, would be deported back to Albania – a country he had not set foot in for 10 years, since he was a boy.
‘I don’t want you to worry about me,’ Erion told me on the phone that day. ‘I’ll be all right. I have my family and …’ He covered the phone with his hand, muffling the sound of a sob, and I cried as I told him I loved him and would never forgive myself for all the pain I’d caused him.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said again. ‘I love you too, Sophie. And don’t be sad – you haven’t done anything wrong.’
But I knew I’d let him down – just as I used to let my brother down when I made him late for school – and I was devastated when, the next day, Erion’s life was packed into a suitcase and he was deported.
When Lucy rang me again, she told me, ‘Besmir and I have been talking, and if you really want to do something to help Erion, you could marry him.’
At first I didn’t take the suggestion seriously, and then the more I thought about it, the more I realised Lucy and Besmir were probably right: if I married Erion, he’d be able to return to his life in England. But it was a decision that would affect my own life forever, and I still didn’t know if I really loved him the way I wanted to love the man I married and who would become the father of my children. My mother had loved my father when she married him – although I’d never been able to understand why – and it had turned out to be a mistake that had caused her enormous unhappiness for many years. And that was part of the reason why I doubted my own feelings about Erion and why I wasn’t sure whether what I felt for him was really love.
Eventually, I rang one of Erion’s friends and told him what Lucy had suggested. He asked me to meet him for a coffee in town and later, when we were sitting opposite each other on leather armchairs in the coffee shop, Adnan sighed and said, ‘Of course it would help Erion, and of course it would solve this huge problem for him, but you mustn’t feel pressured into doing it if it isn’t what you want to do.’
I did feel pressured though, for all sorts of reasons, and I still felt that way after I’d spoken to Erion on the phone and he’d insisted, ‘Don’t do this, Sophie. I don’t want you to do it. It isn’t the right thing for you and I don’t want you to think I’ve only been with you for this reason.’
I laughed as I told him, ‘I know you haven’t. Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘But I don’t want you to do it,’ he persisted. ‘Because then, if you regret it, you’ll resent me. I’ll find another way.’
But we both knew he wouldn’t, and that marrying me was the only way.
Over the next few days, I felt as though I was being pulled physically from both sides. On one side were Erion’s friends, most of whom were begging me to help bring him back to England and telling me, ‘You’ve got to do this for him. He has no one else.’ And on the other side was my mother, who, although she’d grown fond of Erion, was distraught at the idea of my going to Albania to marry him.
‘How do you think I feel?’ she said. ‘How would any mother feel to see her daughter go off on her own to
somewhere she knows nothing about? Please, Sophie. I don’t want you to do this. I don’t want you to go.’
I felt as though my head was spinning and although I tried to focus my mind on the pros and cons so that I could make a sensible decision, all I could think was, Oh my God, what am I going to do?
When my parents’ marriage broke down, unhappiness spread like ripples in a pond to engulf us all, and I made a promise to myself then that I wouldn’t ever get divorced. It was a promise I wanted to keep – for my own sake as well as for the sake of anyone who might get caught up in the misery – but I simply couldn’t see any other way of helping Erion. One minute I’d be thinking, I have to do this. I have to fly out to Albania, marry Erion and give him the chance to live his life here, where he really wants to be. And the next I’d hear the little voice of caution in my head saying, But what if it doesn’t work out and you get divorced, and then you meet someone else and have to tell them, ‘I’ve been married before, to a guy who needed a British passport’? How would I ever be able to explain that to someone else, when even to me – who knew all the ins and outs of the situation – it sounded so awful?
While I was trying to decide what to do, I was still talking to Kas and he was vehement in his attempts to influence my decision.
‘You can’t do this,’ he kept telling me. ‘You don’t have any idea what you’d be getting involved in. You’re not thinking straight, Sophie. You don’t love this man enough to make such a huge sacrifice for him.’
I understood the logic of what he was saying, but helping Erion seemed to be something I had to do – if not because I loved him enough to spend the rest of my life with him, then at least out of loyalty and because of what we’d had together for almost two years. I knew he was a good person and that, ultimately, I couldn’t let him down and just walk away when he needed me. So I applied for a copy of my birth certificate, booked a flight to Albania and tried to close my mind to the fears and anxieties that kept crowding in on me. And I often wonder what would have happened if fate hadn’t chosen that moment to step in and change the course of my life forever.
Chapter 4
I could hear the emotion in Erion’s voice when I told him I’d made my decision. I don’t think I quite managed to hide the fact that I was still anxious about what I was planning to do, but at least I no longer felt as though I was being buffeted on all sides by everyone’s advice and opinions. I’d had stomach pains for a few days, which was gradually getting worse, and I was sure it was due to the stress I’d been under and that it would get better now that everything was settled. And then, four days before I was due to fly to Albania, I was rushed into hospital.
I’d woken up in the morning with a terrible pain and when I tried to get out of bed it felt as though a thousand knives were cutting into my stomach. I couldn’t stand upright, and after stumbling to the bathroom, I rang my mother, who told me, ‘Stay in bed till I get there. I’ll be right over.’
When she arrived, she took one look at me and said, ‘We’re going to the hospital.’ I began to argue, but she raised a hand to stop me and said firmly, ‘This isn’t a discussion, Sophie. Just do what I say.’
The young doctor who examined me had pallid, grey-white skin and a serious expression that did nothing to calm my anxiety. After he’d prodded and poked and asked me some questions, his voice was almost gloomy as he told me, ‘We need to keep you in overnight.’ Then, in a halfhearted attempt at reassurance, he gave a wan smile and added, ‘Just so that we can do some tests to find out what the problem is.’
‘Well, okay,’ I said, glancing quickly at my mother, who nodded her head encouragingly. ‘As long as it’s just for tonight – I can’t stay longer than that. I’m going away in a few days.’
The doctor shrugged – whether to signify agreement or an unwillingness to make any promises wasn’t clear – and the next day I was examined again, scanned and slid into an MRI machine that made me feel sick and claustrophobic.
‘It’s likely that you’ve got a small twist in your intestine,’ an older, more sympathetic doctor told me. ‘Although it probably isn’t too bad at the moment, it’s a potentially dangerous condition if it isn’t sorted out, so you need to have an operation as soon as possible.’
‘How long will I have to be in hospital?’ I asked him, rubbing the back of my hand across the hot tears that were rolling down my cheeks.
‘About a week,’ he answered. He looked at my mother, who was standing with her hands clasped tightly around the white metal rail at the foot of my bed, and smiled as he said, ‘I’ll leave you to talk things over. To be honest though, I don’t think you really have any choice.’ He turned, pushed aside the curtain that had been drawn around the bed and disappeared. Mum and I listened for a moment to the sound of his receding footsteps and then she sat down on the chair beside me and covered my hand with her own as I began to sob.
I had agonised for so long about going to Albania to marry Erion, and now that I’d finally made a decision, it seemed as though some unseen force was determined to snatch away the future I’d come to accept. My mother squeezed my hand, then she opened her handbag, handed me a tissue and stood up so that she could lean across the bed and hug me.
‘Oh Mum,’ I whispered into her shoulder. ‘What am I going to do? I can’t let Erion down. He’s waiting for me.’
For a moment, she just stood there, hugging me silently. Then she sat down, took hold of my hand again and said, ‘It’s fate, Sophie. It’s your angel looking over your shoulder. This has happened for a reason, and I’m certain it’s a sign that you’re not supposed to go. I’ve had a terrible feeling about it all along and now I’m convinced that it would have been the wrong thing for you to do. If you and Erion are meant to be together, there’ll be some other way. But you weren’t meant to go to Albania to marry him. I’m sure of that now.’
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ I felt suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness and unable to think about anything anymore. Convincing myself that marrying Erion so that he would be able to return to live in England had involved so much heart-searching and so much mental effort that it was difficult simply to do a complete about-turn and believe the decision I’d made had been wrong. But I knew I had to have the operation – quite apart from anything else, my mother wouldn’t have allowed me not to. So, the very next day, when I should have been packing my bags and getting ready to fly out to Albania, I was being wheeled into the operating theatre.
During the few days I was in hospital after the operation, I often lay in bed thinking, I’d be boarding the plane now; now, I’d be with Erion; this morning I’d be getting ready to be married. But there was nothing I could do about any of it, which, in some ways, was a kind of relief. Even today though, I sometimes wish I had caught that plane and married Erion, although, at the time, I don’t think I fully understood exactly what it was I was intending to do. I’d just got swept up in it all, without ever imagining the reality of what would be involved. Perhaps I’d wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t like my father, that I was someone who could care deeply about other people and was prepared to risk everything for someone I loved.
As soon as I was able to leave the hospital, I went to stay with my nan and granddad, where I could recuperate in peace and quiet, and where my mother could visit me every day. I was in regular contact with Erion, too. He’d been desperately worried when I’d told him I’d been admitted to hospital for surgery, and every time he rang me he told me how frustrated and useless he felt because he couldn’t be with me and take care of me when I needed him.
My mother, on the other hand, was trying to hide her relief. Although sympathetic to my confusion and disappointment, she was also determined to keep me cocooned and safe for as long as she possibly could, which is why, three weeks after I came out of hospital, Mum, Steve, Nan, Granddad, Emily, Mark, Jamie and I boarded a plane for a two-week holiday in Malta.
Only Jason couldn’t come, because he was worki
ng, and at any other time, I would have loved being away with my family, but I couldn’t relax. I felt sad because I’d let Erion down and guilty because I sometimes felt as though I’d been given a reprieve. He continued to phone me, to ask how I was and to tell me how much he missed me, but his calls made me feel even worse because I knew he felt the same as he’d always done, whereas I was afraid that the moment had passed and it was all over between us. He talked about the future and about the time when we would finally be together again, and as I listened to him, I felt as though my heart was going to break.
Eventually, I started to dread his calls and when my mother saw how unhappy I was and realised I was struggling to deal with the way I felt, she told me, ‘You need to cut him off, Sophie. You can’t go on hurting him like this, dragging things out so that he still has hope, when deep in your heart you know it’s never really going to happen now. You have to tell him.’
I knew she was right, but I simply didn’t have the courage to do it. So, instead, I took the coward’s way out and stopped answering the phone when he rang. His voice-mails were heartbreaking. If there’s some natural order in the world that requires people to be punished for being cowardly, those messages restored the balance in my case. As I sat listening to them, with tears streaming down my face, there was no mistaking the pain in Erion’s voice as he pleaded with me to phone him, or even just to text him, so that he could understand what had happened and why I had decided I didn’t love him anymore.
‘I don’t care that you didn’t come,’ he would say. ‘I don’t even care if you’re never going to come. But I can’t bear it if you don’t talk to me. Please, Sophie, just pick up the phone and speak to me. I won’t try to make you change your mind. You know I won’t do that. But I love you and I just want to hear your voice.’
There were many, many times when I came close to snatching up the phone and telling Erion I was sorry and that I was going to book a seat on the next flight to Albania. Anything would have been better than having to listen to his bewildered unhappiness. But, somehow, something always stopped me from taking that step towards what I saw as an irrevocable commitment.
