There was no pause, no slowing of time as Leo was thrown from the saddle and across the asphalt. Nor did his life flash before his eyes as his head collided with the windscreen of the car coming the other way. There was no accompanying song as the contents of his bag were tossed through the sky and the lens of his camera shattered on impact with the ground.
But he did have a final thought, a final picture in his mind in the moment before he was taken from the world. As always, he thought of her, of Niamh.
NIAMH
Erlebnisse (n.) – the experiences, positive or negative, that we feel most deeply
London, 2012
I am sitting at my kitchen table drinking sugary tea and staring across at the people I never thought I’d see again. But someone is missing. Leo is missing, because he’s gone and so I will most definitely not be seeing him again.
A boy who will never grow up, never grow old and grey and be given the chance to carve out a life with the girl he fell in love with. Nor will he be a father or a grandfather. His family has been torn apart in so many ways, like a ripple on a pond that stretches even further than the eye can see.
Do they even know, his parents? Do they even know about me, about Luke? What must they think of me, to simply disappear and never contact them again? But then there are the letters I sent. So many letters that I assumed he simply had no desire to respond to. Did his mother read them? No, because then she would have learnt about Luke and I cannot for one minute believe she would have abandoned him. Which means she probably threw them away, so consumed by her own grief that she had no desire to share it with me.
‘Why didn’t you write back to me?’ I am gripping my cup so tight that my knuckles have turned white, but I have to stop my hands from doing something far, far worse. If only one of them had replied. If only one of them had realised that I had no idea about Leo, then perhaps, just perhaps, I could have kept my son.
‘Who, me?’ Erika is leaning against the countertop, dunking a biscuit into her sweetened cup of coffee and looking at me with a frown.
‘Yes, you.’ Don’t fall apart. You must not fall apart; not until you know absolutely every last detail, every excuse, every possible reason as to why they never came looking. ‘I wrote to you after Luke was born.’
‘I never . . .’ Erika looks to Duncan for reassurance, but he just lifts his hands in a gesture so familiar that we could have been back in our student days, and I have to blink twice to make myself focus on the here and now.
‘I sent it to your parents’ place in Sweden. Just to make sure it didn’t get lost or ignored at college.’
‘Oh, Niamh,’ Erika says with a sigh and her whole face sags. ‘We sold the house. After my mother got sick.’
What are the odds? What are the chances that because I decided not to send the letter back to Oxford, I would lose it all? I was afraid Erika might not read it if I sent it directly to her. I was afraid she could so easily claim never to receive it, and I don’t know whether to laugh or scream at how utterly unfair all of this is.
‘Is your mother OK?’ I need her to be OK. I need something good to come out of all this crap.
‘Yes, thankfully. But everything was boxed up and shipped to the summer house, so it probably got lost in amongst all the chaos when we moved.’
‘We?’
‘After the ball . . .’ Erika’s face stills, her eyes looking at something far away. ‘After the ball,’ she says again. ‘Everything seemed to be unravelling. You were in Europe, Duncan was in Cambodia. Even when we were back in Oxford, it wasn’t the same. Duncan and I seemed to forget how to be around one another.’
‘Without you,’ Duncan says with a shy smile, ‘we sort of drifted apart.’
‘Then my mother got sick and it felt like the universe was against me, that it was all my fault. I felt that somehow I was responsible for making her sick, for Leo dying, for losing you. Just like Astrid.’ She darts a look at me and then turns her head away. It takes me a moment to realise that she’s crying, really crying, the whole of her body shaking with great heaving sobs.
‘Erika,’ I say, but I can’t move. I can’t make myself go over there to comfort her and I don’t know if it’s because part of me is still angry or if it’s simply because I’ve never seen her cry like this before.
‘So I went home. And never came back,’ she says with a laugh, wiping at her eyes, and even through the tears she is so very beautiful. ‘Seems like I was running away from the wrong thing all along.’
‘Wait, you didn’t finish your degree?’ As I say it out loud I can’t help but consider the absolute irony – or is it coincidence, or another word that I don’t seem to be able to think of right now? What are the odds that our lives could have been so very far apart, and yet also follow a similar path?
‘No,’ Erika says, sniffing loudly and giving her head a small shake. ‘For months I wasn’t capable of doing much more than getting out of bed each morning, and going for long walks around the lake with my mother. Given everything that happened, a degree just didn’t seem so important.’
‘What about you?’ I ask Duncan, although I can guess what his answer will be.
‘Oh, I stayed until the bitter end,’ he says, crossing one long limb over the other and transporting me back to 1995. ‘Never left, actually. Although I’m over the road at Magdalen College with all the deer now.’
‘Did you . . .’ I start to speak, then have to stop, take a breath, because even though I have imagined it so many times, pictured the life they shared without me, it still hurts to think that I broke them too. ‘Are you still friends?’
‘Yes,’ Erika says, looking at Duncan and then back at me. ‘But not in the way we were before.’
‘I’m so sorry, Niamh,’ Duncan says, and now he’s crying, which to be honest doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. It actually makes me smile to know he’s still as hopelessly emotional as always. ‘That stupid fight we had ruined everything.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ I say the words without even thinking and he looks at me through uncertain eyes. ‘It wasn’t anybody’s fault,’ I say again, sinking back into the chair.
‘I wish I’d done things differently,’ Erika says and it makes me laugh, because it’s the same thing that has plagued me over the years: the idea that if only I’d done or said or not said something, then life would have turned out just fine, thank you.
She’s in front of me now, clasping my hands and forcing me to look at her. ‘I thought you didn’t want to see me. That you were too angry with me to share your pain. But I never saw a letter, Niamh. I wish I had, more than anything else in the world, I wish I had known.’
‘He never read my letters.’ I gasp as the whole stinking mess comes crashing down. All this time I thought he’d abandoned me, when in fact he’d died in the middle of a street less than five minutes away. It is so painfully, agonisingly wrong, because if I’d known . . .
‘He loved you,’ Duncan says as he reaches out to take the cup from my hands. ‘He loved you so very, very deeply.’
‘Then why does it hurt so much?’
‘Because you loved him too.’ Erika wraps her arms around my shoulder and pulls me close.
It’s all a mistake. A misunderstanding, a miscomprehension. A mis-something because it shouldn’t be this way. Everything that happened to me and everything that didn’t happen to Leo, is false. All because of one stupid, irrevocable moment that spun my entire existence out of control.
Why? Why did it happen and who is to blame for what I’ve lost? Is it my fault, for deciding not to have an abortion? Plus there wouldn’t have been such a need to get married, to ‘make things right’, if I’d never fallen pregnant in the first place.
Or should I have stuck to the original plan and gone travelling with Erika, accepted the internship? More than that, I shouldn’t have allowed myself to fall so madly in love with a boy who deserved a chance at a perfect kind of life. A life that, because of me, he no longer has.<
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Pushing back my chair, I go over to the sofa and pick up the tapestry bag I bought with Erika on a daytrip to Blenheim. I open it and dump the contents on the cushions. All those memories of a given point in time were meant to keep me connected to Leo and, in turn, Luke. They were supposed to make me remember that I chose him over my friends, that I chose to give up my child because of not being worthy. It also made me careful, too careful, about falling in love again.
And now I see that it was all a lie.
‘Niamh?’ Erika moves closer to me, watching as I clench and unclench my fists. A split second later and I’ve picked up the bottle of perfume and thrown it as hard as I can against the wall. Fragments of glass are flung back towards me as the bottle shatters into tiny pieces.
He died alone. He died without me knowing that he was coming for me and I hate myself for not being there, for not being able to make it all OK.
Next, I pick up the moonstone necklace, swiftly followed by a golden monkey. Moments of happiness now forever stained with the guilt that I was even allowed to feel anything at all. I have lived, but I have wasted the life I chose. Would he have done the same? Wallowed in self-pity and loathing, believed himself unworthy of love? I doubt he would have done anything other than dive in deep, explore absolutely everything and anything that crossed his path. He might have even forgiven me, but he would never have given up the chance to be a father.
‘Niamh, stop.’ Layla grabs my arm but I shrug her off and turn my attention to the table, picking up Duncan’s cup and lobbing it at the wall.
‘Why?’ I scream at nobody and everybody at once, watching the cup break cleanly in two. ‘I’ve lost both of them now. I’ve fucked everything up – his life as well as my own.’ All because I listened to the voices in my head that told me I wasn’t deserving of Leo and the life we were supposed to have together.
‘He stole my life.’ I am roaring like a caged animal, desperately looking for a means of escape. ‘I’m not the person I’m supposed to be because he never fucking showed up. I’ve been hiding in plain sight, afraid of getting close to someone. Afraid of showing Hector who I am for fear of getting hurt. And it’s all Leo’s fault.’
‘He died, Niamh,’ Erika says, reaching out a hand to me, then taking it back when I whip round to face her, not bothering to hide the grief I am now allowed to lay bare.
‘I know that now. But I didn’t know it then and everything’ – I take a shuddering gasp, then smack my hand against the countertop, hard and fast – ‘everything that has happened since. Every tiny decision I’ve made. Every person I’ve pushed away. Every time I’ve thought it was all my fault for not being enough is because I thought he simply didn’t turn up. God, if I’d known.’
‘You would have been destroyed.’ Erika places a tentative hand on my back and I hear her let out a small sigh of relief when I don’t flinch or move away.
‘But I would have chosen differently.’ I am crying again, great vibrations of loss and remorse coursing through my soul and spilling all the contents of my heart into the room.
‘You don’t know that.’ Layla is on my other side, and together she and Erika guide me back to the sofa.
‘Except I do,’ I say, brushing some pieces of glass on to the floor and sucking at a cut on my finger when it begins to bleed. The pain is real and so much more bearable than the one that’s inside me. A pain that I’m terrified will never go away. ‘Luke is the only thing left of Leo and I would never, never have given him up if I’d known.’
‘About that,’ Duncan says, clearing his throat and shifting in his seat.
‘About what?’ I ask, seeing once again a look that passes between Duncan and Erika. This time it’s more excitement than fear, but there’s definitely a little bit of nerves in the mix. I can tell because Duncan is rubbing the end of his nose, which means he’s itching to tell me something but isn’t sure whether or not he’s supposed to.
‘How do you think we found you?’
OK, so now he’s grinning. And tapping a number into his phone as he nods across at Erika. Without telling me anything more, he walks out of the kitchen and I can hear him talking to someone as he leaves the house.
‘Where is he going?’ I ask, but I can picture it all so clearly in my head. He turns right, going along the street to where a car is parked. A car that doesn’t belong and yet is most definitely supposed to be there.
Time slows, giving me a moment to take a breath, to try and grasp on to what I think is about to happen. I feel the world tilt in an altogether new direction, one that is pushing me towards something instead of allowing me to run away. It’s a feeling that has been there ever since I woke this morning and went for a run. The dog that came up to say hello, that man in his brand-new trainers, the song that was playing on the car stereo. All of them were steering me to the café, and the person who was waiting inside. Waiting for me to notice him.
‘Duncan got an email,’ Erika says and I turn to look at her, but I am only half aware of her words. It’s like I’m looking through a frosted pane of glass, or my head is underwater and there’s someone standing over me, telling me things I cannot hear.
‘Who from?’ I ask, but my heart already knows the answer.
‘He said he was looking for his mother, and wondered if Duncan might be able to help. Apparently, he only ever discovered the letters when his adoptive parents moved from Cornwall back to London. He opened a box without knowing what was inside.’
I feel her put something in my palm and I look down to see a silver angel hanging from a chain. My mother’s necklace, the one she left behind in the convent and I in turn sent to my son.
‘He read the letters?’ I say, blinking through tears, so scared it hurts to breathe.
Erika nods and I think she’s crying too, but it’s hard to tell because I don’t feel like I’m attached to this world any more. It’s more like floating, or being at the end of a very long tunnel and unsure whether I’m supposed to walk towards the light or away from it.
‘The adoption agency had no forwarding address for you, other than the convent.’
I never gave them any other address because I stopped believing Luke would one day write back. It didn’t stop me from writing to him though. I don’t know why, perhaps I just liked telling him a little bit about my life, as well as wanting to let him know that I thought of him, always.
‘But Sister Ingrid died,’ I say and I register the touch of Layla’s hand on mine as I speak.
‘The convent told him about Oxford,’ Erika says. She’s talking to Layla over my head and it should annoy me, but I am so very overwhelmed at having the two of them here, together. Let alone being able to focus on, to make sense of, the story that Erika is trying to tell.
‘He emailed the college, who then forwarded it on to the one person still living in the city who might have a clue where his mother could be.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain . . .’ I don’t finish my sentence, because I’m trying to figure out how Duncan might have found me. I was so very careful not to leave any breadcrumbs behind.
‘He hasn’t changed,’ Erika says with a smile that transports me straight back to the very first time we met. ‘Duncan’s still capable of charming the pants off anyone, even a nun.’
‘But Sister Ingrid died.’
‘You said that already,’ she says, rolling her eyes and making me feel eighteen again. ‘Everyone leaves something behind.’
‘I wrote to her,’ I whisper. I wrote to her every single week from the day I left the convent, all through school, university and then from an end-of-terrace house in Primrose Hill where I lived with a man who was willing to lend me his name. A man who was Sister Ingrid’s next-of-kin and whose contact details would have been kept in a large, grey ledger in the office of the convent where I was born.
I can imagine the rest. Duncan would have tracked me down in less time than it once took him to roll a joint. Then he would have called Erika, demanded she be t
here when the universe brought us all together again. No doubt she was also somewhere in that café, humming along to ‘Disco 2000’ as it spilled from the radio on the shelf behind the counter. I suspect it was Duncan who called out to me as I ran, asking me to wait, because it wasn’t him, it wasn’t Leo who I saw.
I’m not really listening or paying attention to Erika any longer, because all my focus, all my energy, is being directed towards the hall, where I can hear a door being shut and two sets of footsteps heading my way.
Everything stops. Time really does stand still when he walks into the room. A boy at least a head taller than me, with dark curls, a tilt to the end of his nose and eyes as green as any emerald. He stands in front of me and we both offer up a tentative smile, pause a moment to drink in the sight of someone who should be a stranger and yet it feels like we’ve known each other our whole lives.
‘Luke,’ I whisper as I reach out a hand and trace the contours of his face.
‘Hi, Mum,’ he says in a voice so very like his father’s, warm and rich and true.
Just like that, a little piece of my heart, one that I thought would be lost forever, gets stitched back into place.
NIAMH
Ikigai (n.) – a reason for being, the thing that gets you up in the morning
London, six weeks later
The scent of damp lingers in the early morning air. I can feel the soft splat of dew against my bare calves as we walk across the lawns of Kensington Gardens towards the statue of Peter Pan. It seems impossible to believe it was only six weeks ago I came here during my morning run, somehow aware that the day would turn out to be monumental.
‘Mum?’
I turn my face up to Luke, smile at the openness of his gaze. It still surprises me every time I look at him, how much he resembles his father. There’s a lot of me in there too and, I can’t help but wonder, perhaps a little of my own mother. But that’s the crazy thing about genetics: you never know what’s going to be passed along to the next generation. Then there’s the whole nature versus nurture debate, and I have to keep reminding myself that he is still the same boy I gave birth to all those years ago. That the soft Cornish burr to his voice doesn’t matter, that his childhood was no better or worse for growing up by a different sea to the one where I once lived.
The Love We Left Behind Page 28