The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘Only way to travel in this city,’ she smiled, launching a leg over so she could get off too.

  Daniel took his helmet off and handed it back to Olivia, and she looped them both on the handlebars of her moped like baskets.

  ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Prego.’

  ‘I had a really lovely evening. I didn’t expect—’

  ‘So did I,’ she interrupted, halting him, making him even more lost for words. He looked at the face he loved. This was it. This was the moment. Gone half past midnight during the bustling Milan midweek.

  ‘Would you like to come up?’ he asked awkwardly.

  Olivia got lost for a second. In the hesitation of Daniel’s face. The sheepish look in his sparkling khaki eyes.

  I so want to.

  ‘You know… I won’t.’

  Daniel nodded.

  Of course she wouldn’t. This was how their evenings ended.

  She’s out of my league.

  ‘I have work tomorrow and it’s a big day for you with the match…’

  Olivia felt like she owed Daniel an explanation.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ he said, trying to sound indifferent. He was now more worried about Olivia getting back home. ‘Will you be OK—’

  Daniel didn’t have a chance to finish his question as Olivia pressed a long index finger to his lips. Blue hues of faded paint dye weaving around tanned hands.

  ‘Shhhhhh,’ she commanded.

  He obeyed, through closed lips.

  Olivia liked how Daniel’s lips felt under her finger, but lowered her hand to his chest so he could breathe.

  ‘I just don’t want to ruin a perfect evening. I feel so happy I could cry.’

  She pressed her hand onto the top of his chest, her eyes filled with fire and water.

  ‘You could come up and cry with me?’ Daniel suggested.

  ‘No, I’m going to have a little cry on my moped,’ she said, pulling her hand away.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’

  ‘We both have to work.’

  ‘I’ll ask if I can get you into the game somehow.’

  ‘I don’t want to see the game.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I want to see you. So of course I will come.’

  Daniel was flooded with relief. For the first time in the five years he had not stopped thinking about Olivia Messina, he felt assurance. A calmness. That he would see her again. Nothing would come in their way.

  ‘Plus, I need to give you our portrait. You left it at the apartment.’

  ‘Do you?’ Daniel winced, as if she really ought to keep it.

  ‘Nice try, but it’s my gift to you, you have to accept it.’

  ‘OK, well thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, before quickly pecking him on the cheek and kicking out the moped stand.

  ‘See you tomorrow?’ Daniel asked as he rubbed his temple.

  ‘I’ll meet you at the San Siro after work,’ Olivia declared, as she jumped on the moped and turned on the ignition. ‘Domani.’

  ‘Domani,’ he repeated coyly.

  As Olivia pulled away on her Vespa she started crying.

  ‘I love you,’ Daniel whispered to the space where she had been.

  ‘Dan-i-el,’ Olivia whispered to herself in breathy joy as she waited at a set of lights. And cried all the way back to the villa on Via Tiziano.

  *

  Within the spiralling concrete coils of the San Siro’s four pillars, Olivia tried to focus on the football, when all she wanted to do was watch Daniel work. The press area around them was fascinating. High tension and deadline hitting. Everyone striving to do their jobs well. Banks of commentators, writers, pundits – and beneath them, the sports photographers waiting to catch the money shot from European football’s biggest night.

  Daniel had spent all day concocting a story on how to get Olivia into the game. What rouse he could make up so she could watch the sold-out match alongside him. He thought about claiming she were his translator, and that he had forgotten to bring her credentials with him and it was all his fault. But when he went to the gate to meet her, a navy jersey dress making her bronze skin dazzle, she said something in Italian to the steward in a fluorescent yellow tabard, and he opened the gate to let her in.

  Having Olivia by his side put Daniel in his element – he was more assured and confident than she remembered him. She felt an urge to put her arm around his neck and stroke the soft hair at the nape of it, as if it was the perfectly natural thing for her to do, but she didn’t want to interrupt him, to prevent him from doing his job, so she held back and took in the atmosphere of the stadium. Looking around she reminisced about pivotal moments in her life within those pillars.

  She had seen Duran Duran there as a child, a happy privileged princess under the arm of her papa, one reassuring hand on her back, the other holding a fat cigar by his side. When she closed her eyes she could almost smell the sweet richness of his Toscano; when she opened them she could see his smoke rolling past her nose – but perhaps that was from the firecrackers the exuberant fans had let off.

  Olivia remembered repeat trips to see Vasco Rossi and Eros Ramazzotti with her mammas; the day Michael Jackson came to Milan and she and Mimi went wild. She wanted to tell Daniel all about these memories, but filed them under later. For now she was content to see him. Daniel Bleeker was the star of the San Siro, and he didn’t even know it, as Olivia watched his gaze flit between the pitch and his laptop, checking to see if she were OK, as he made notes, as he typed, as he revelled in doing a job he loved. This was much more exciting to Olivia than the football on the pitch.

  Valencia scored an early penalty, then Bayern Munich missed one, but equalised shortly after half time. Daniel didn’t want the game to go to extra time, he wanted to get to the end of the match, do the post-match interviews and hope it wasn’t too late to steal a few more hours with Olivia before his flight home in the morning.

  ‘Penalties!’ he said, half excited, half defeated. Penalties were the order of the night; the late finish would penalise him for preferring to be with Olivia.

  In a brief pause while the team managers decided on orders and outcomes, Daniel felt the urge to put his arm around Olivia. To weave it under her hair and across her shoulder, and pull her into him – but he didn’t want to ruin what was so far the best night of his life.

  Olivia’s interest in the game was piqued a little by the excitement of a penalty shoot-out. The high drama. But she felt the tension rise in Daniel as his print deadline loomed closer.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m OK. Are you? Sorry it’s such a late night.’

  She gave a half smile that Daniel couldn’t read.

  Is she about to go?

  Bayern Munich missed their first, then four went in until a Valencia shot was saved by the German keeper, who Olivia observed had hair like Mamma Una’s ginger bowlcut.

  Five more went past the keepers like bullets. Olivia wanted to hold Daniel’s hand in the suspense but he was furiously typing away, not knowing how his match report would end. Then an Italian playing for Valencia sent his penalty straight to the keeper’s gloved hands. A crowd roared and groaned. The German giants had done it.

  Daniel hammered on his keyboard, watched on by Olivia as crew and stewards built a makeshift stage in the middle of the pitch, and the photographers poised their lenses on it, waiting, waiting, waiting…

  ‘Done!’ Daniel said triumphantly, pressing return as if he had just deactivated a bomb. The relief. He so wanted to stop time. But he had more work to do.

  ‘Can we go?’ asked Olivia innocently, looking from her watch to Daniel.

  Daniel let out a sigh.

  ‘That was the match report. I’ve got a few minutes before the interviews… but they won’t take long.’

  Please don’t go.

  Defeated players stepped onto the platform to collect their runners-up medals. Dignitari
es and officials gave consolatory smiles. The Bayern Munich men filed up, the photographers raised their cameras, propping the heavy lenses on their knees.

  The captain raised an enormous trophy and under the firecrackers of the grand finale, under a sparkle and whizz of blue and red tickertape, Daniel turned to Olivia by his side, pointed at the pitch and said, ‘Exciting, hey?’

  But Olivia wasn’t looking at the hero goalkeeper lifting up the cup. She didn’t care for the crescendo of Handel’s choral harmonies and the roar of the crowd. She was looking at Daniel, her whole body turned into his, and kissed him, firmly, passionately, fully for what felt like the first time.

  *

  ‘I’m coming with you, you know.’

  Olivia looked across the back seat of the taxi at Daniel and stroked the stubble on his jaw. She was wearing yesterday’s navy dress – her hair rampant and her olive skin glowing from the exhilaration of being up all night exploring each other’s bodies. Daniel rubbed his eyes – both bloodshot and sparkling – and smiled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not right now, on this flight. I need to go to work.’ Olivia nodded to the sliding doors of Malpensa airport departures terminal through the open window of the car. The morning sunshine shone on the silver façade. ‘But I’m coming back to London.’

  Daniel paused, his hand on the door handle, his eyes locked with Olivia’s. Elation thumping in his heart.

  ‘Are you sure? I thought you hated it!’

  ‘I did. Three years ago. But then I hated me three years ago. I will love London with you there, I know it. I’m pretty sure I love—’

  ‘Sono cinquanta euro…’ interrupted the taxi driver.

  Daniel and Olivia both laughed, and got out of their respective doors while Olivia explained to the driver she wanted him to wait, before taking her to work back on Via Spartaco in the city.

  The driver nodded and put the radio on while he attacked his teeth with a toothpick. Olivia joined Daniel on the pavement.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The pavement outside the departures hall was bustling with families, businessmen and football migrants all flooding into the terminal around them, while Daniel and Olivia gazed at each other in a bubble.

  ‘Yes! I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life. I’m not letting you go again Dan-i-el.’

  Daniel opened his mouth to speak but was silenced by surprise. By happiness. By Olivia’s kiss. And by the thunderous roar of a plane taking off overhead.

  Twenty-Nine

  November 2017

  Cambridge, England

  ‘Best faggots in the Fenlands, I tell ya!’ a bald man with thick bottle-lens glasses shouted along a line of chairs. In the five seats between him and the man in a wheelchair he was talking to were five women. Women reading: two silver-haired friends hunched in towards each other, one reading Jilly Cooper, the other Woman & Home. Women scrolling: one in her sixties checked her Twitter, her adult daughter with the same face shopped for winter boots. A woman knitting: but she was the wife of the man in the wheelchair, and grateful that someone else was talking to her husband for now.

  The two men at each end of the line had realised by coincidence – when one had to give his postcode to a radiographer – that they had lived in the same street in the past, although not at the same time.

  ‘Juicy faggots, those were. My Barb would serve them with mash and peas, oooh and some really pokey mustard…’ The bald man with the thick glasses went misty-eyed.

  The man in the wheelchair said little. Ever since he had given his postcode, he had been talked at by the man who liked faggots, as he talked over the women sitting between them.

  ‘And game pie, did you ever try Allington’s game pie?’ He didn’t wait for the man in the wheelchair to answer. ‘I loved that on a Saturdee…’

  Olivia and Daniel sat on the row of chairs opposite, a small table with magazines separating them. Olivia’s hackles were rising.

  ‘You don’t get game pie – nor faggots – where I live now. I miss those I do… best faggots in all of East Anglia, I dare say.’

  For almost an hour the man had talked incessantly about pubs, potholes, window cleaners, the Friday market. And faggots.

  ‘Shut up about your fucking faggots,’ Olivia urged through gritted teeth under her breath to Daniel while he scrolled through BBC Sport and squeezed her leg.

  The man alongside her, reading Felix Francis, smiled to himself when he heard Olivia’s whisper, and let out a subtle puff of air as if to say he’s annoying me too.

  No one wanted to be in the waiting room of the radiology department at Addenbrooke’s hospital, let alone being talked at, or across or over, as they waited for their turn, their room, their machine, to blast a delivery of radiation therapy to mouths, breasts and brains. This was Olivia’s first session and she felt nervous enough as it was. All she wanted to do was flick through her copy of Vogue.

  A fortnight ago, nurses had fashioned a mesh plastic mask called a shell, in the mould of her face, that would hold her head in a precise position so she wouldn’t move during treatment. So they didn’t zap the wrong part of her brain. So memories wouldn’t be erased. So that all she would feel would be stifled and buried alive, while dressed as an Egyptian mummy.

  Olivia didn’t like the anticipation, the dread, of having to put the mask on for real, it was awful enough when it was being cast. But she knew that this was what she had to do.

  She had escaped surgery without losing any of her faculties – without forgetting who her children were, that Sofia was coming up for 8, how to speak Italian, or the lyrics to ‘Islands in the Stream’. She had got lucky. What if this was the stage now when they slipped up? One wrong blast.

  I must lie very still.

  It won’t take long.

  Shut up about your fucking faggots.

  ‘What are faggots anyway?’ she whispered to Daniel. ‘I thought that was what Americans called—’

  Daniel cut her off and whispered a quick low, ‘I’ll tell you later. He doesn’t mean that.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just shut up? Why is he talking over all of those poor women?’

  Daniel was worried that the man would hear Olivia’s griping.

  ‘He’s probably just nervous too.’

  That was a thing Olivia found both adorable and irritating about Daniel. He always saw a situation through a compassionate lens, even when someone was getting on his tits.

  Olivia accepted it and looked back at the magazine on her lap. But she couldn’t focus on fashion or her fellow style-makers. She could only think about Sofia’s birthday party and how desperate she was to be well enough for it. For Sofia to have the swimming party she wanted. To manage thirty children. To sort party bags and parents who hadn’t yet sent an RSVP. To decorate an elaborate cake – or better still carry the one Mamma Due had made, although she wasn’t coming until Christmas, dammit.

  Olivia channelled her fear by focusing on the birthday party when a radiographer with shaggy blond hair and a light beard ambled into the waiting room from the corridor with the treatment rooms beyond it.

  ‘Olivia Messina?’ he called out from behind his rectangular glasses, although he already guessed Olivia was the woman with the long red hair on account of not having seen her before. She was a fresh face. A newbie. Fairly young compared to most, although not as young as some – he treated children with cancers in the morning clinics. But hers was the only new face today, and he would definitely have remembered it, had he seen her before.

  Olivia put her hand up and went to stand.

  ‘Oh no, don’t get up,’ said the man with shaggy hair.

  He crouched on his knee by the table at Olivia’s lap and Daniel squeezed her leg tighter. She looked at his kindly face and tried to find his small eyes behind the beard, glasses and hair.

  ‘Sorry, just to let you know, we’re running a little late – one of the machines broke down this morning, so it’ll be another half an hour.’ />
  ‘Oh.’

  Olivia felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment.

  ‘How are you feeling? Are you OK?’

  I’m far from fucking OK.

  Looking around the waiting room had confirmed what Olivia had felt since her first diagnosis from the handsome Dr Lorca at the hospital in Ibiza: this was not OK. She was too young for cancer. The woman scrolling on her phone with an adult daughter was too young for cancer. Even fucking Faggots Man who must have been at least seventy was too young for cancer. This was an outrage she didn’t quite believe. But still she had to sit, in a welcoming and sterile chamber, deep in the depths of Addenbrooke’s hospital, waiting for the first of her four radiotherapy sessions, to ‘mop up’ any cancer cells from her brain. It had to be OK. She had no choice.

  ‘A belt and braces approach,’ the rather cold consultant Mr Greene had said in London.

  Olivia wasn’t OK. She didn’t want any of this. But the man with ‘Graham’ on his name badge had a face too gentle and altruistic to snap at, he was an NHS hero she was grateful for, so she nodded acceptingly, while trying to remember who would collect the girls from school if her treatment ran on. It’s OK. Henrietta said she could.

  ‘Well… I am a bit nervous actually.’ Olivia conceded, surprising herself. Daniel squeezed harder. He liked the look of Graham too.

  ‘That’s perfectly understandable, but really, you won’t feel anything at this stage.’

  Olivia nodded compliantly.

  ‘Do you have kids?’ Graham asked.

  Olivia’s eyes welled up.

  ‘Yes, two girls.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Thirteen and seven. Almost eight.’

  ‘Well, try to see treatment as lying down for twenty minutes – which I’m sure you rarely get to do with kids.’

  Olivia smiled and Graham got back up. ‘Les, you can come with me now, I’ll take you down to machine nine.’

  ‘Right you are, young Graham!’ waved Faggots Man, as he stood up and picked up his beige coat and shopper. The two men went off through the set of double doors Olivia hadn’t yet been through.