It was Isaac Cahn’s idea that I should go Israel. ‘If you want to experience a really different way of life, then you should apply to work on a kibbutz.’
He helped me apply from Paris for the visa and permit so that I was able to travel straight there.
I wrote to Abe. I said it wasn’t fair to ask him to wait. In my mind, it was a break not a split. But we were both young, too young to be tied to each other. I missed him, maybe less than I would have done if I’d been the one stuck at home while he went off travelling. But I did miss him.
I’d push him to the back of my mind, especially when I was with Nathan in Israel, but he was always there.
I could tell that Nathan wished he’d said goodbye at the entrance. Now that we were in the check-in queue, and looked likely to be in it for some time, he was twitchy. The time between being about to say goodbye and saying it was stretching out. Making him irritable.
‘Jeez, are they going to take everything out of every single bag?’
‘I don’t care if they do. I’d rather stand in line for a little longer than be …’
A week previously a TWA Boeing 707 had crashed into the sea en route from Tel Aviv to New York. It was flying via Athens and Rome and went down in the Ionian Sea half an hour after leaving the Greek capital. Everyone on board was killed. News reports said a young Palestinian boy had brought the bomb onto the aircraft: the first time an Arab would board a plane in an apparent suicide mission.
I scanned the passengers around me. People looked nervous.
‘They’re not going to pull the same stunt twice in a fortnight,’ Nathan muttered.
‘Well, it’s still reassuring that they’re making checks. For everyone.’
‘Sorry. Sorry, Ivy. I hate goodbyes and all this.’ He nodded to the Israeli gun-toting soldiers patrolling the airport.
‘Look, I’m fine. You can go now, if you like.’
‘No. No. Sorry. I didn’t want it to be like this.’
The news was a week old but it had made us jumpy with each other ever since. A vague plan we’d had to fly to Athens and visit the Greek islands before I went home added a what-if to the various things the bomb had triggered for Nathan. What if we had decided to go to Greece? What if the bomb had gone off before the plane landed at Athens? What if we’d been on that flight?
There’d been a sense of shock among everyone at the kibbutz, a prevailing notion that the attack was somehow personal. It was a notion that I couldn’t quite accept. Yes, it was a targeted act of violence but the target was impersonal and random. There’s a huge gulf between ‘almost’ and ‘actually’, between the possibility of something happening to you and it happening.
I didn’t understand why Nathan needed to feel he could have been caught up in it any more than he understood my detachment.
Perhaps it was my naivety about the political situation in the Middle East that had begun to get to him. The way he started talking about Fatah and the proximity of the kibbutz to the border with Lebanon showed up my ignorance. He was irritated if I asked questions to which he felt I should know the answers. And, out of the blue, the fact that I was not Jewish seemed to matter too.
‘You’ve no idea what it’s like to be hated,’ Nathan said, as if he resented me for not feeling whatever it was that he felt so keenly.
I didn’t understand him any more than I understood the mechanics by which bananas and avocados, like the ones I’d spent so much time picking, would in the future be manipulated. ‘It will make them bigger and better and more resistant to disease.’ Nathan tried to explain the process and its potential application. ‘Genetic modification will help eradicate famine and hunger. It could even be used to prevent disease in humans.’
He was going to study biochemistry at Harvard. He wanted to be at the forefront of gene technology. My inability to grasp the subject had frustrated him as much as my ignorance about Middle Eastern history appeared to now. The tension between us, which had been brewing, made our parting something to be got out of the way, not quite the sweet, sorrowful closing that the romantic in me might have imagined.
I’d had a wonderful year and Nathan had been part of it. He was everything that had been exotic and exciting in male form, but I was ready to go home now, to the people I was missing and the familiar comfort.
‘Smoking or non-smoking?’ the girl at the checkout desk asked, as her colleague opened my rucksack and began pulling out its filthy contents.
‘Non-smoking, please.’
‘Window or aisle?’
‘Aisle.’
She handed me a boarding card and I walked in silence past the security officers.
‘So, this is it,’ Nathan said, and kissed me, a kiss laden with various emotions none of which I could accurately describe.
‘Bye, Nathan,’ I said, heading towards the departure lounge.
When I turned around, he was walking away. He never looked back.
I watched him, wondering what I was feeling. Loss, yes. But for the place where we’d been and the time we’d spent together more than the man. As I watched his departing back, it was Abe I really missed.
‘Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.’ I’d read that somewhere and I wondered if it was true. Would I spend the rest of my life looking for someone who reminded me of someone I’d loved only fleetingly but first?
‘Was he Jewish?’ Nathan was quizzing me about Abe.
What seemed to define my relationship with Abe was that someone was always asking me questions about it: Lisa, my parents and now Nathan.
‘No.’
‘Abraham’s a very Jewish name.’
‘His dad’s a professor of American history. He named him after Lincoln.’
‘So how did you two meet?’
‘At school. We were in the same maths class.’
We were on the beach at Rosh HaNikra, at the foot of the white cliffs that reminded me of England, and Nathan was taking me back to a time and a place that sometimes seemed much further away than just last year and the far end of the Mediterranean.
I was a different person here. I hardly thought about home. The days were too preoccupying, the people too new and too different. Nathan was unlike anyone I had met before and exciting to be with. Our relationship was new enough for him to be jealous of my ex – for him to need to know about him. ‘So he hadn’t been at the same school as you before, then?’
‘No. He went to another school in a different town.’
I’d had this conversation with Abe too. ‘How come you went there?’ I’d asked him. He lived in the country, midway between two villages, stuck between two schools.
‘I don’t know. My parents decided.’
It was just one of those things, but it seemed important for us to wonder at it.
‘Imagine if they’d decided otherwise. We’d have met when we were kids.’
When we reached the sixth form we thought we were adult.
‘And maybe had nothing to do with each other. I was very shy when I was little.’
‘I’m sure I’d have liked you.’ I was. But then you are, aren’t you?
When you first meet someone, you imagine you’d have liked them whenever you met, and that you’ll always find them as compelling as you do at the start. You think it will go on for ever. Even though you know it never quite works out that way.
‘What if we’d met on our first day at primary school?’ I said to him. ‘Do you think we would have been friends?’
Abe had this look. He’d say something and look momentarily sad, then catch himself and smile, a big, wide, inviting smile. The look and the smile always made me want to kiss him. This time I just arched my eyebrows.
‘What?’
‘That what-if thing.’
I suspected I knew what he was thinking. That if they’d all gone to a different school, then maybe Tessa would not have been walking there at that particular time on that particular day. And then she’d be
okay.
‘Sorry.’
We’d talk about something else, or occasionally we’d talk about the way things were. Maybe that was what drew us to each other – the fact that our home lives were a little odd. We weren’t typical teenagers. We didn’t have responsibilities, but our worlds were slightly out of kilter.
‘When did he ask you out?’
That was Lisa, miffed that I hadn’t filled her in on every twist and turn.
‘He didn’t exactly.’ We were lounging on the floor of her living room, which was so much better for lounging on than ours. They had floor cushions from Habitat, four times the size of normal ones. They were covered with a kind of thick brown corduroy.
‘Corde-du-roi,’ Lisa’s dad said. ‘The cloth of kings.’
‘Nouveau.’ My dad threw another French word into the mix when I repeated the phrase.
I didn’t know what he meant, any more than I understood why he thought having a colour TV was ‘vulgar’.
‘So how did you get together?’ Lisa turned down Ziggy Stardust.
‘It just sort of happened.’
‘Where? What? When?’
‘Oh, you know.’
‘No. So tell me.’
I didn’t really want to. ‘Going out’ was something private, between two people, and the world should not be privy to every detail.
Abe often got the same train to school and sometimes we’d walk halfway home together, occasionally taking the path through the woods. ‘Stop a minute,’ he’d said one day, pausing by a log that rested alongside a stream.
We sat and he told me about his sister, about what had happened and how that made life difficult for his mother.
And I told him about my mother, as much as I understood, and how her condition made me feel.
It was an exchange. We’d revealed a little of ourselves to each other. It was enough to make kissing inevitable, as we sat on the log, and again, when we stood up to go.
‘We walked home through the woods and he kissed me.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’
‘Girls!’ Lisa’s mum called from the kitchen.
‘Spaghetti bolognese is on the table.’
‘What did he look like?’ Nathan asked me now.
‘Tall, dark and incredibly good-looking! Like a film star. Like Sean Connery.’
‘Seriously?’
‘No, Nathan. I’m teasing you. He was nice looking. Ordinary. Unruly hair, thick glasses, badly dressed.’
‘No, but seriously.’
‘I’m being serious. That’s what he looked like. Ordinary.’
Should we be having this conversation? It didn’t feel right.
‘So what was it about him?’
‘He was nice.’
‘Nice?’
‘Yes, nice! Jesus, Nathan, what do you want me to say?’
‘That he was a bastard and you hated him!’
‘He was a bastard and I hated him.’
‘Is that true?’
‘No.’ He was a lovely bloke and I loved him.
‘You went out with him for over two years. It’s a long time, Ivy, when you’re sixteen.’
I ran my hands through the sand, pushing it into a little hillock at my side, ignoring Nathan’s question.
‘I’m interested.’ His tone was less challenging. ‘I want to know all about you.’
‘He was funny. He made me laugh. And he was kind and interesting, and interested in the world and people around him. A bit like you.’ Deflection by flattery.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Sorry, Ivy.’ He put his arm around my shoulders, which were warm from the evening sun, and kissed me. ‘You’re so …’
‘What?’
‘Lovely, sweet, funny, intoxicating. I’m a little bit jealous of Abraham Lincoln.’
We lay back in the sand and did things that should have pushed Abe from my mind. They did for a bit, until Nathan patted the top pocket of his shirt. He had a johnny there. ‘Ben and Josh are going to the cinema tonight,’ he said.
Nathan had an understanding with his dorm mates and there was a lock on the door. It was always a rush to get dressed and vacate the room before anyone came back. It made the lovemaking lack intimacy, somehow. It made me feel strangely detached from Nathan. Maybe I was. Maybe I was chasing a closeness I’d experienced before that wasn’t going to happen – not here, not now, not with Nathan.
Abe and I had always found it easy to talk about things. He had told me, not long after I’d first encountered him, a little about his family as we walked between classes: two older brothers – one just finished university, the other in his final year. His older sister, Kirsty, was training to be a nurse in London. And then there was Tessa, who’d been about to go and work abroad in America when the accident happened.
If it hadn’t I might never have met him. His father had just been offered a professorship at Oxford. During the summer they were going to move and Abe would have gone to school there.
But Tessa had been walking home from a friend’s house one evening when a lorry travelling down the lane began to shed its load: hay bales piled in a tower that was as precarious as it looked. The driver of the car behind swerved instinctively, to avoid the bales, and veered up onto the verge, hitting Tessa.
A moment later.
A moment earlier.
Had Tessa been walking on the other side of the road, had she stayed five minutes more at the house of the friend she’d just been to see, things would have been different. But she was where she was and the car hit her. Her back was broken in several places.
She was lucky to be alive but she couldn’t move, not yet. She’d lie immobilized in the hospital for nearly six months before she was allowed home with her back in a brace. She would learn slowly to walk again, with some difficulty and considerable pain, which doctors told her might remain for the rest of her life.
But she was lucky to be alive.
Abe’s father took the job anyway. He was too far down the line not to. He stayed in Oxford four nights a week, returning at weekends and during the holidays. Mrs McFadden and Abe stayed where they were. Abe gave up his place at an Oxford school and applied to the one I went to. Mrs McFadden visited Tessa daily, with Abe when he had time.
I’d been to meet her too. I liked her. How could anyone not when she was so full of smiles and laughter, despite the pain and the traction?
‘She always seems to be happy,’ I’d said to Mum accusingly.
Mum had shaken her head and said nothing.
‘Abe really likes you,’ Tessa said to me once, in hospital, when he went to get drinks.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘You make him happy.’ She took my hand and held it.
I guessed she was lonely lying there, out of touch, lacking much human contact, but there was something about what she’d said and the gesture. It made me feel included, part of the family, not just Abe’s girlfriend, a little more.
His mother made me feel the same way. I liked her easy company and her calmness. I liked standing next to her at the sink, doing the dishes in companionable silence, not feeling on edge as I did with Mum, wondering if she was going to get angry or tearful, or have one of the peculiar spasms that made her drop things. Mrs McFadden didn’t seem to feel a need to talk to me, even though I was a guest, which I liked too.
And I liked it when, on Tessa’s birthday, Mrs McFadden asked if I’d come to the hospital with her, Abe, Mr McFadden, who was home, and Kirsty, who was down from London. I felt included as we sat round Tessa’s bed, chatting as she opened presents and talked excitedly about her plans for next year. Maybe I felt it more because my own family seemed bizarrely fractured by something I did not understand, and my mother was often angry and upset with me.
‘Ivy, come downstairs now.’
‘Why? What have I done?’
Mum was furious. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding on to the bani
sters to steady herself, as she often did these days, losing her balance and her temper at the same time.
‘What?’ I came out of my room.
‘In the kitchen.’ She jerked her head to the left, a deliberate gesture.
‘I know it’s not easy, Ivy,’ Dad would say to me, ‘but your mother’s nerves are not quite right.’
What exactly did that mean?
‘I know she seems unreasonable sometimes, but try to be patient. Try not to react. It doesn’t help.’ Dad was affectionate when we had these chats in a way he was not normally. He’d pat my arm, sometimes stroke my hair or tell me I was a good girl.
‘Dad, is there something wrong with Mum? I mean seriously?’
He’d close off again. ‘It’s just her nerves. You’re cooking tonight, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I said so. Is it okay if Abe stays for dinner?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Abi says her mum was really weird for about a year when she went through the change and then she was okay again.’ Lisa had tried to make me feel better after one of Mum’s irrational outbursts.
I hated confrontation so I tried not to get into arguments, to wait for whatever was making Mum tense to pass.
‘What’s up?’ I said now, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table.
‘This.’ She slapped something on the table.
‘Oh.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘It’s not mine.’
‘Then whose is it?’
‘I found it.’
‘You found it?’
‘Yes. Really. Have you been going through my pockets?’
‘I was going to wash your jacket, Ivy. Where did you find it?’
‘On the train.’
Why had I picked it up? What had induced me to slip the waxed paper and cellophane package into my pocket? Curiosity. I wanted to see what they looked like. I wanted to know what they felt like. I wanted to see how they worked.
‘You found a contraceptive on the train?’
Mum didn’t believe me.
‘Yes, really. It was just there tucked down the side of the seat. I thought it was litter.’ I’d known exactly what it was. ‘I was just going to throw it away.’
Ivy and Abe Page 25
