Page 81 of Things We Never Said
Selfless as ever, you took a week off work, and we rented a van and left April with Mags and drove down to Margate. You tried singing that awful Chas & Dave song to cheer me up. It didn’t work.
I was useless all over again. I don’t think I did anything much except stare at objects and burst into tears. And, again, you did it all, filling the boxes and stuffing the bags and driving all Mum’s rubbish to the tip. You cooked her remaining oven chips, which we ate as if it was a memorial service – I remember that. After I’d eaten the last one, you held me and I wept for the umpteenth time that day.
And then, while clearing out the bookshelf, you found the photo.
I was sitting in the garden having a ‘moment’ by smoking one of Mum’s cigarettes when you came rushing out waving it at me. You were so excited. You looked about the same age as you are in the photo.
‘This photo!’ you said. ‘Look what I’ve found! This photo. I have the same photo at home. Look!’
You sat down next to me on that damp, mouldy sofa and put your arm around me. ‘Look!’ you said again. ‘Your mum’s got the same photo I’ve got at home.’
You were back. For the first time in months, you were back, but I didn’t understand yet what was happening because I was only just realising that you had been gone. Yes, you’d been there to love and cherish and support me. But that magical thing of being in love was a distant memory for both of us. It was only then that I understood that perhaps this was what I had been looking for from Jake. So I must have just frowned at you, I think. I frowned at you and looked at the photo, and looked at your face. I noticed how happy you were. I looked at how beautiful you were. There was love in your eyes, deep, painful, bewildered love – like back at the beginning. For the first time in years.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ you said, pointing at the little girl hiding behind her hair. ‘Look, it’s you and me. Christ, I’ve known you since I was seven. My Mum told me about it too, but it was you! On holiday. In Cornwall. The inseparables. It was you! Was it? Was it you? Look, your mum’s got the same bloody photo. Say something!’
And then you squeezed me excitedly and snatched the cigarette from my fingers and took a drag. ‘That’s just ... Wow,’ you said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you understand how mind-blowing this is?’
At that moment there was nothing in the world that I wanted more than to reconnect with you, and I could see that there was nothing in the world that you wanted more, either. I nodded and smiled. And when you tried to get me to speak again, I kissed you.
Snapshot #25
35mm format, colour. Two women and a tall, skinny man look up at the photographer. They are lying on yellow sunbeds next to a turquoise swimming pool in which a young girl is floating on an orange airbed. All three adults are raising one hand to shield their eyes from the sun, and all three are smiling.
The second Sean flips the photo over, his eyes mist with tears of confusion. Because, of course, their relationship had continued after Wendy’s death. Things hadn’t just ended after Catherine’s secretive fling. And at the moment Sean had found that photo, at the moment he had discovered that there was a reason he had fallen in love with Catherine at first sight – namely, that it wasn’t first sight at all – they still had eleven more years ahead of them.
Though Sean had never quite understood just how far away Catherine had drifted from him, he had understood that summer, in Valencia, that she was back. And he had thanked the gods for that.
Cassette #25
Hello Sean.
How heavenly was Valencia? I found a whole package of Spanish photos, but I thought this one summed it up the best: the long sweltering days lying around the pool, the endless gin and tonics, the fresh fish on the barbecue ... But best of all were those sultry siestas we all used to have, the scorching Leveche breeze blowing those long white curtains in and out as if a giant was breathing outside the window. I used to wake up feeling as if I had been drugged.
The whole thing had been Craig’s idea. He was a wine taster or wholesaler or negotiator. Whatever it was, he put half the cost of the villa and most of the meals we had at restaurants down on expenses.
Do you remember the way they used to wake us up at nights, the way their bedhead used to bash against the wall and that little wobbling tremolo that Maggie used to make as they reached the end? The first time it happened, you nudged me in the ribs and whispered, ‘At least this one isn’t gay, huh?’ And we both fell about laughing.
There was something inherently sexy about the Valencian sun though, wasn’t there? Because Maggie and Craig weren’t the only two people burning midnight calories ... We were so in love on that holiday. I felt like I was eighteen all over again. I felt amazing.
April made friends with the gardener guy’s daughter, Marina or Marisa or something like that. They hung out together for the full two weeks without ever, I don’t think, exchanging a single word of conversation. Actually, they conversed plenty, they conversed constantly. It’s just that April was doing it in English and Marisa was doing it in Spanish. But somehow they got along fine.
Anyway, everyone was happy and relaxed and sunburnt. Craig, whom we hadn’t really known that well, turned out to be generous and easy-going and funny. And Maggie was so utterly, utterly relaxed that I finally convinced myself that I had made your whole affair thing up in my own head. And so I felt even more guilty about my own.
That said, I was never that comfortable about leaving you two alone together. It’s funny how our brains can hold multiple truths, isn’t it? Because, I mean, I really did believe both that you two had had a fling together and that you hadn’t.
I read a thing about Schrödinger’s cat the other day. According to our cleverest scientists, this theoretical cat is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box to check. It’s in a sort of suspended halfway state for some reason that I didn’t quite grasp. But I think your affair is a bit like Schrödinger’s cat in that it neither existed nor didn’t exist, essentially because I decided to never look inside that box. That makes me, I suspect, something of a coward.
I actually intended to open the box while we were in Valencia – I fully intended to have a showdown with Maggie and find out once and for all. But we were having so much fun together that the moment never seemed right. And by the end of it, as I say, I’d pretty much convinced myself that it hadn’t happened and that I would come over as an idiot if I asked her.
Do you remember that winery that Craig took us to on the final weekend? They had all of these bottles of fifty-euro Valencian wine lined up for us and Craig tried to tell us that we were meant to taste it and then spit it back out. We didn’t believe him at first – he was always joking about one thing or another, after all – but then they brought us a bowl to spit in and these little white towels to dab our lips on, and we realised that it was true.
‘This is the best wine I’ve ever had,’ you said. ‘I’m not spitting the bloody stuff out!’
Oh, we got so drunk, Sean, it was shameful. We even had to leave the hire car there and get a taxi back to the villa. You fell out of the taxi when we got home, too, and then I tripped over your legs and we ended up uncontrollably laughing in this writhing mass in the car park. That continued until Maggie arrived and yanked us upright and reminded us that we had a daughter to pick up from the gardener’s cottage down the way.
I was so ill the next day. That journey to the airport was one of the worst experiences of my entire life.
The next morning, I woke up to drizzle in Cambridge and felt as miserable as I ever have. My chest and jaw seemed to hurt, too, and it wasn’t until you got home and said that you had the same symptoms that we worked out that it was from all that laughing. I don’t think I had ever ached from laughter before, nor have since.
