Page 88 of The Notecard
I get a flat white coffee then walk back to my car. I hurry across the car park, trying to stay as dry as possible. The rain is coming down in sheets. It’s been a cold, wet winter so far. I get into my car and put my coffee down. I run my hand through wet hair and attempt to make it look sort of okay. I take a sip of my coffee, feeling the soft creamy bitterness of it slide down my throat, and then I start the car.
Everything changed a few months ago. I was at home and I was thinking about Meg. About all the moments we shared. About the one night when everything seemed to fall apart for us. I’ve never been on social media. I don’t have the time or inclination, but I wanted to see Meg’s photos from her trip. I wanted to see whether she was having the time of her life. I created an Instagram account under a different name and started following her. After everything that happened, I felt too self-conscious to create an account with my own name. I didn’t want her to think I was stalking her or something. I scrolled through her photos and they were incredible. Meg on a beach in Thailand. At a market in Bangkok. The amount of colour and food was overwhelming. Photos and videos of Meg having the time of her life. She looked and sounded so different in the videos from the girl I knew from Kentish Town. It took me a moment to realise what it was. She looked happy. Her skin was glowing and tanned, her hair slightly longer and blonder, and she just looked incredible. A photo of her in a white bikini on a beach in Bali. Drinks, food, and the more I looked the more I realised why she needed to get away. I also realised that I couldn’t just give up on her.
I pull my car into the car park and stop. This is it. I turn the engine off and get the envelope from the front seat. I hold it in my hands for a moment. My future is literally in my own hands. I get out of the car and walk towards the lifts that will take me into the airport. There’s something exciting about going into an airport. Not that I’ve travelled much over the last few years, but I can feel it. The energy and smiling faces of people going on holiday. The break from life. People wandering about, dragging their suitcases behind them, not sure where they’re supposed to be going. People staring up at screens. Excited children and anxious looking parents. I walk in and look for the sign for arrivals. I have the envelope gripped in my hand. I look up at a screen that has all the arrivals listed. I search for the plane coming in from Los Angeles. Keri texted me the flight details. Meg doesn’t know I’m going to be here. I’m taking another risk. Surprise! I’ve waited six months, and now hopefully it will pay off. Or maybe it will be another wedding speech fiasco. I literally have no idea, but I know I need to try. I need to fight for her. Dotty’s husband asked her out fourteen times before she said yes. That might go down as slightly creepy and perhaps stalking these days, but I get the point.
I find arrivals and wait with all the other people who are waiting for their loved ones. The beginning of the film Love Actually shoots through my mind. Hugh Grant’s monologue about love. Love actually is all around. Another flight empties towards us and a gaggle of tired looking people wheeling their suitcases behind them, looking at the crowd, desperately trying to find a familiar face. A woman screams and runs towards a man and kisses him multiple times, and a woman is swallowed up by her family, who welcome her home with so much love. An older couple returning from a holiday, tanned and still in the clothes of a much warmer place. They’re going to be bitterly disappointed when they walk outside.
I stand and wait. The flight is landing in five minutes. After baggage claim and passport control, maybe thirty minutes. Hopefully no longer than an hour. I wait. Excited. Nervous. Timing. I’m holding the envelope. I’m worried she’s going to walk through arrivals with a gorgeous, bronzed Antipodean boyfriend on her arm. My phone beeps with a message. I reach into my pocket and take it out. It’s from Keri. It just says: ALL SET! I put my phone away and wait, eyes fixed on the arrivals door, waiting for her to walk through. Hopefully alone. The thing that matters the most, has always mattered more than anything in history, is love.
Meg
It was literally the most beautiful place I had ever been in my life. The beach in Bali where Beth took the photo of herself in a white bikini. I was finally there. I stood in the shallow water and looked around. I was quite emotional. I had looked at that photo on Beth’s Instagram so many times, it was ingrained in my memory almost as if it was my own. It finally was. A small bay with the most gorgeous sand, soft and yellow, it faded into a blue-green ocean with high rocks on either side. On the day I was there it was fairly quiet. Just a few backpackers from my hostel, a handful of locals and other tourists. I stood in the ocean, the calm, clear water just below my knees. I looked out into the sea and thought about Beth. My inspiration. The reason I was there. She was back in England now, planning another adventure. I was in the place that had inspired me to do mine. I cried for a moment. Tears of happiness and the distinct feeling I was leaving everything in England behind. That I had finally moved on.
New Year’s Eve and I was in Sydney by the harbour. They have the best fireworks show in the world. I was staying at Wake Up hostel and I was with a small group of people I’d met there. Two girls from Ireland. A boy from America. A girl from Norway and a couple from Newcastle. We had gone down early with a bunch of alcohol and food and set up camp. Every square inch of the area around the Opera House and harbour was filled with people all waiting for midnight. We ate and drank, and by midnight I was quite drunk. We stood with thousands of other people from all over the world and counted down to a new year. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1…. Happy New Year!
Fiji was incredible. I lived on a desert island for a whole week. Just twenty-five of us on a small palm fringed island in the South Pacific. We shared a large bure, bunk beds in a large room, and we ate at long benches near a bar that only opened in the evening. We had cold showers, but it was hot, and most days were long and slow. Lying on the beach, snorkelling by the reef, and one day we walked around the island to a beach on the far side. I saw a shark in the water. It was glorious and the most incredible thing was at nighttime when the sky was littered with a million stars. I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole sky was lit up and we saw shooting stars every night as we drank bottles of Fiji Bitter and talked and shared our life stories.
I’m on the plane and we’re circling over London. I have the window seat and I’m looking down at my home city. It feels like I’ve been gone for so long, and also as if no time has elapsed at all. I remember a moment with Nick. We were outside the house having one of our cigarettes together. I remember looking up and seeing a plane and thinking about the people in the plane looking down and me looking up at them. I think about how I felt then. Like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. As if the heaviness of just being down there was dragging me down even further. Now I’m up in the sky looking down at London, all the weight has been lifted. Just the act of going away has changed every fibre of my being. I can’t wait to see Nick again. I hope he feels the same as me. I want to look into his eyes, hold his hands, kiss him, and tell him exactly how I feel and that I’m sorry about the wedding. I just hope I’m not too late. I have this awful feeling that he’s probably moved on and found someone else in Nottingham. After James it felt like my life was over and that I wouldn’t ever feel happiness again. But now, looking down at London, so familiar and yet as if I’m seeing it for the first time, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. Because when you think about it, whether you’re down there looking up, or up here looking down, what matters the most is what’s happening inside yourself.
The plane stops taxing, the seatbelt signs go off, and then there’s the noise that we can unbuckle, stand up, and wait for a few moments until we can start shuffling along the plane and out to freedom. I turn my phone on and check for messages. I have three messages. One from Keri that just says, ‘WELCOME HOME!’ Another from Laura that says, ‘See you soon, Sis! Oh, we have some news!’ Of course she does. And lastly one from Mum. Mum and Dad are meeting me at the airport and driving me back to Kentish Town. It says, ‘Sorry love. We can’t make it. Something’s come up’. What?! I can’t believe it. I’ve been gone for six months, and they can’t meet me at the airport because ‘something’s come up?’ I’m livid. Now I’ll have to get the tube home. Not exactly the homecoming I was hoping for and expecting.
I stand up with everyone else and wait. I get my bag from the overhead locker and start the slow procession along the plane and then out into the airport. I’m home. I look out of a window and see rain lashing against it. This is England. Eleven hours before I was in sunny Los Angeles. I have barely seen rain in the last six months. It’s a solid grey outside. A sheer block of drabness. I go through passport control and thankfully it’s quick. I wait for my bag at the luggage carousel and I’m thinking about Mum and Dad. What could possibly have come up that they couldn’t pick me up from the airport? I would call them, but I’m too annoyed. My backpack finally appears, and I grab it and put it on my back for one last time. The last leg.
I have loved the simplicity of living out of my backpack for the last six months. One of the best things about travelling apart from the places and the people is just how wonderfully easy life is. You wake up, get some breakfast, and literally most days have nothing to do. And so you talk to people, you make plans to visit somewhere or just go to the beach. Most evenings there’s something to do, but it’s casual and easy. I have loved being a backpacker and I shall miss it terribly. I walk out towards arrivals. In my heart, I had been hoping for everyone to be waiting for me with a banner. WELCOME HOME MEG! Mum, Dad, Laura, Simon, Keri and Hugh. My people. Keri is waiting for me at home. She’s huge and couldn’t stand the thought of going to the airport. I don’t know what Laura’s doing, but she was too busy to come. Mum and Dad were supposed to come in Dad’s black cab and get me, but apparently they’re too busy. I walk out and instead of scanning the faces for my people, I walk along, slightly sad that my homecoming is a bit of a damp squib.
The arrivals area is filled with people, and someone rushes past me and I hear squeals of delight and love. The opening of Love Actually shoots through my mind. Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Apparently love is everywhere, except around me. I feel as gloomy as the weather outside. I walk on, and I’m not paying much attention to all the faces searching for someone they know. Their person. I’m thinking about getting the tube all the way home, and that I might get a coffee because I’m quite tired, or maybe a bacon sandwich or something else horribly English, when I stop dead in my tracks. My heavy backpack hits me as I stop. I stop because standing in front of me is Nick. And I have absolutely no idea what he’s doing here.
‘Hi,’ says Nick.
Time stops. I’m choking up. It’s the emotion of flying and coming home and everything all at once. I have tears in my eyes. I can’t even stop them.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘I don’t… what are you doing here?’
A tear falls out and slides down my face.
‘When someone you love comes back from a long trip away, I think it’s sort of rude not to meet them at the airport,’ says Nick with a smile.
He reaches across and with a finger wipes the tear away. And then he smiles, and I see the dimples, and I really love it. I’m crying and he helps me to the side, away from the crowds of people, and he helps me take off my backpack until we’re standing face to face.
‘Meg,’ says Nick.
‘No,’ I say, sniffing up the last of the tears.
‘No?’ says Nick, a look of confusion on his face. ‘I didn’t even do my speech or tell you how I feel, and that Dotty’s husband asked her out fourteen times before she said yes, and that…’
‘Not no,’ I say again. ‘No, it’s my turn. You came to Laura’s wedding and told me how you felt, and now it’s my turn.’
‘Oh, okay,’ says Nick.
‘I just need a moment to compose myself,’ I say, trying to stop any more tears from coming. There’s probably a reason why traditionally men do the big speeches. ‘Nick, while I was away I thought about a lot of things. I thought about my career, my life, what I wanted to do when I got back, how I wanted things to be different. But mostly I thought about you.’
I reach across and hold his hands. He smiles at me and I smile back.
‘When you told me you loved me, I wasn’t in the right place. The timing was all wrong. I knew I felt something for you, I just couldn’t trust myself to know what. That’s why I had to go away. I needed to clear my head. But while I was away, all I had was time and no matter how much I thought about it, all I could think was, I love him too. I love you, Nick. I really do fucking love you.’
‘I fucking love you too,’ says Nick.
We both have tears in our eyes, and we lean in and we kiss, and it’s magical and wonderful, and I really don’t know what happens next because all I can think about and feel is pure happiness and love. It’s the homecoming I didn’t see coming, but it’s the best one I could imagine. We finally pull apart, and I see that he has an envelope in his hands. I ask him what’s in the envelope because I imagine it’s probably for me. We have a history with notes.
