You Then, Me Now

by Nick Alexander

  ‘You’re going to spend a week putting things in order, then book a flight back out. That’s what he thinks you’re going to do, anyway.’

  ‘But it’s all so distant now,’ Mum said, her voice wobbling. ‘It’s like a dream that can’t really happen. And what about my life here? What do I do with that?’

  ‘What life here?’ I asked. ‘This flat? The job centre? Boarded-up Margate High Street?’

  ‘There’s you,’ Mum said. ‘You’re here.’

  ‘Me?’ I laughed. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m all grown up, Mum. I need to find a job somewhere. And then I need to get on with my life. And I don’t care where you are as long as you’re happy. You were so happy out there, Mum. I’ve never seen you so happy.’

  She started to cry properly, so I moved to her side and crouched down so I could take her in my arms. ‘I’m scared, I think,’ she breathed through her tears. ‘It’s silly, but I’m too scared to be that person again.’

  ‘What person, Mum? Who are you scared to be?’

  She shrugged. ‘The one who believes in it all, I suppose,’ she said through tears, her voice all over the place. ‘The one who dares to hope. Because it just hurts so much when that gets taken away. I don’t think I could take it again.’

  After a fair bit of pushing from my end, and a lot of pulling by Leif, Mum flew back out at the end of October.

  Leif had rented a house for the two of them on the coast somewhere north of Oia, and he’d been sending photos to Mum’s phone two or three times a day. They were always accompanied by the same sentence. ‘Come!’ he said every time. ‘I’m waiting for you.’

  And now, it’s late November, and the rain’s still drumming down.

  Mum and I speak on the phone weekly. She’s gone back to sounding normal again. Well, the new normal. The relaxed, funny, honest normal that had been missing for most of my childhood.

  She sounds totally in love with Leif, and in love with Santorini too. She’s even trying to learn Greek, if you can believe that.

  As for me? Well, I’ve got a part-time job in a cupcake shop in the newly hipsterised centre of Margate. I’m not earning enough to live on, and am slowly eating into the money that Gran left me, but for now it’s something, I suppose.

  I’ve looked up a couple of old school friends and met a few new people too, so my evenings and weekends go by in a pleasant-enough way.

  I’ve not yet found where I need to be in life, but I’m OK with that. As Mum has demonstrated, that can take quite some time.

  It has been an emotional summer and I’m allowing myself time for the dust to settle before I decide what happens next, I think. That’s how it feels, anyway.

  I’ve had occasional WhatsApp messages from Baruch, and we’re going to meet in December in Athens as I travel out to Santorini for Christmas. So who knows? Maybe he’s my destiny. Perhaps that will still happen.

  As for ‘Dad’? Well, the word still feels strange to me, but I suppose it’s starting to feel less so. And as it does, it seems as if the ground beneath my feet becomes less unstable, or maybe as if, having spent my childhood learning to stand perfectly adequately on one foot, I’m suddenly allowed to use both – maybe I can stand on both of their shoulders from here on in.

  It’s hard to explain, really, but it’s made me feel a bit more solid – a tad surer of exactly who I am. And it’s opened up fresh possibilities for how I see myself, too.

  Maybe I don’t have to become the brittle, nervous mother I grew up with, after all. Perhaps I can be relaxed and open, the way Mum is now. Perhaps, if I nurture it, I’ll even find that I’ve inherited my father’s superpower for being nice and calm and helpful to others, and I’ll end up being a life-enhancing presence for all the friends I make along the way.

  I think that would be a pretty good inheritance, don’t you?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Carole for getting me thinking about romance while I was in Santorini. This novel came, if somewhat indirectly, from the conversation we had there!

  Thanks to Rosemary – without your constant encouragement nothing would ever get finished and without your friendship this planet would be a much darker place.

  Thanks to Lolo for being my touchstone and for talking these stories through with me long before they exist on paper.

  Thanks to Apple for making such reliable work tools. Thanks to everyone at Amazon for all their hard work on this novel, and for turning writing back into something one can actually make a living at. Finally, a big thank you to all my readers for sticking with me and showing so much enthusiasm for every new project – you make it all worthwhile.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2017 Rosey Aston-Snow

  Nick Alexander was born in 1964 in the UK. He has travelled widely and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France, where he resides today. You Then, Me Now is his fifteenth fictional work. His 2015 novel The Other Son was named by Amazon as one of the best fiction titles of the year; The Photographer’s Wife, published in 2014, was a number-one hit in both the UK and France; while The Half-Life of Hannah is the fourth-bestselling independently published Kindle title of all time. Nick’s novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Turkish and Croatian. Nick lives in the South of France with his partner, three friendly cats (plus one mean one) and a few trout.