‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry for everything that happened and I’m so sorry that I’ve been too ashamed since to let you in. I’ve been an utter idiot. You came back to me, you offered me your friendship again, but I couldn’t cope with it, after what I’d done. The shame … it just possessed me. I couldn’t see beyond it. I couldn’t be beyond it. I just don’t know what to say, really, except I’m so very, very sorry and I hope you can forgive me.’
I wait, searching her face for a response. I can be a proper person again now, can’t I, because of Mac? For Mac. Through Mac. I can be a friend, a confidante, someone to believe in. I hope Becky can see it; I hope she can believe in me again.
‘Becky?’
I am terrified, I am waiting.
‘You’ve been an absolute nightmare, but, yes, I can forgive you,’ she says, finally, my lovely Becky, and she smiles at me; a smile I just want to swim in. ‘I don’t want to be angry any more. I want us to get back to how we were. To be honest, I’ve just bloody well missed you.’
‘Oh God, me too – so much – and we can!’ I urge. ‘We really can.’ Relief fills me like welcome air into a deflated balloon. ‘I’ve been so stupid. So incredibly stupid.’ The relief is making me gabble. ‘I’m even more stupid for not letting you back into my life than I was for marrying Christian!’
‘Oh, I hardly think that’s true,’ says Becky and she is still smiling but her eyes are glinting now in a very ‘Becky’ way, so I know she is joking. ‘Look, Christian was a con man of the worst kind, a manipulator and an abuser. He targeted you and he made your life a misery, but it was you who took charge and made him leave. You’re stronger than you think, Ardie.’
‘I’m not strong at all,’ I say and I know I am on the verge of collapse if I think about Mac and the fact he has died. I still can’t think about it; I don’t have room in my brain – the crash that is coming will have to wait. Wait until I get home, like Fran said.
‘You have to forgive yourself for getting into that relationship,’ Becky says, munching now on her chocolate muffin – is she relieved too? Crumbs litter the table like confetti. ‘You survived it but now you have to let go of the guilt. All of it. None of this was your fault, you know. It’s not your fault.’
I smile. I am Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. And Becky is wise, lovely Robin Williams.
‘What happened to you is not your fault either,’ I say.
‘Oh God,’ she groans, slapping herself on the forehead, ‘we’re victims.’
And because the way she says it is really funny and so, so Becky, I laugh, and then to my horror my face sort of collapses and I realize that crash cannot be put off – it is here, it is now – and before I can think anything else at all, I say, ‘Mac has died,’ and Becky says, ‘Oh, Arden, I’m so, so sorry,’ and I have an urge to do a kind of flop across the table, laying my arms in parentheses round the empty cups and the muffin crumbs, and sob and sob and sob, but I don’t as I know that as I have lost one person from my life – and it is a great, great loss – I have regained another, and she is alive and she is here in front of me, in a pink coat and a purple snood, so I haul my face up into a smile and lean across the table to let her hug me, and I hug her back like I never want to let her go.
NOW
Chapter 29
What would I have said to Mac, had he regained consciousness, got better, recovered his speech? What would he have said to me? Would he have said, ‘Come in!’ as I knocked on the door of his new private room at St Katherine’s and found him sitting up in bed, his head all wrapped in bandages like Jack and his vinegar and brown paper, after he fell down that hill, his eyes underscored by two heavy black shadows, but twinkling at me nonetheless.
Would he say, ‘Hello, Arden,’ croaky but clear. ‘I guess I’ve come back.’
Would I reply, ‘I look a mess!’ with a little, nervous laugh, and would he say he hardly looks picture perfect, that he feels as rough as a dog, ‘a medical term’? Would I give him water and would he say, ‘Why don’t you sit down, Ardie?’ making me feel weird as it’s the first time he’s said my name in almost thirty years. Would we try to make small talk, although we never did it, as everything we said to each other was big, and had a purpose – to shock or seduce, impress or amaze? Everything had to mean something.
‘Thanks for coming to see me, Arden, I really appreciate it,’ he would say, with tears in his eyes, and I wouldn’t know if he meant now or then, all those evenings I had sat by his bed in Ward 10, on my chair. ‘Thanks for finding me.’
‘I wasn’t looking for you,’ I would teasingly reply – the old Arden, ‘I wasn’t ever looking for you,’ which we’d both know was a lie, as wasn’t he once exactly what I was looking for? And I would smile and he would smile and then he would look sad, suddenly, and I would ask ‘Why?’ and he would shake his head and say he would be in a wheelchair now as he had lost the use of his legs, as a result of the coma, the haemorrhage – that he would be Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, Luke Martin in Coming Home, Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.
‘Are you just going to name every character in a wheelchair in every bloody movie since the beginning of time?’ I would enquire. Then I would suggest he would make a better Daryl Van Horne, if only we could get him the dressing gown, and that he watches too many movies.
He’d chuckle – a throaty one – and say I must go on with my life without him, that he wouldn’t want to be a burden, a Norman Maine to my Vicki Lester, and the old Arden would say, ‘Bit presumptuous, really, Mac. Who says that I want you?’ And I would not be sure if I did or not, as he was still a hero, but he was a flawed one, and I didn’t know. But he would laugh because he had loved the old Arden, and I had loved the old Mac.
He would say sorry for betraying me, all those years ago. That he was young, morally reprehensible and full of ego. I would say I was a selfish, infuriating, annoying brat, that nobody was perfect. But also that I wasn’t like that now, I hoped, as I had experienced so much since him – that those experiences had made me dull and colourless and empty, uninspired, but he had fired me back up with the memory of us, brought colour into my life and made me want to live – properly – again; to fulfil all those promises he had for me. And I would be tempted to get in that bed with him, my flawed hero, and stow my chin in his armpit, although really I knew we would have a bitter-sweet parting, but remain close friends until the end of our lives …
None of that script would be followed.
He isn’t here.
He didn’t make it.
He is gone.
It’s an unexpected morning, the morning of Mac’s memorial service. It’s the first morning it has snowed for a long, long time, certainly the first time this winter. When I pull back the curtains I am so surprised to see that glaring, blinding whiteness everywhere, as snow hasn’t been forecast. There’s a flat royal icing loaf of about three inches squatting on my car, scattered arrows of bird prints across my tiny front garden and the trees spaced along the road have white piping on their branches and half of their trunks coated in white shadow.
As I stand at the window, I remember a day Mac and I had when he’d watched all afternoon at his flat for snow, like a child, and when it finally came, at midnight, alighting softly on that winter-spindly branch at his bedroom window, he dressed me up in his coat and took me outside on to the patch of grass behind his building at Westwood and made me stand there as he flapped himself into a snow angel. I had laughed – a bit – but mostly I had scowled and been a miserable so-and-so because I hated the cold. And he had hugged me, back in his flat, and made me a hot-water bottle that had a fluffy mock-cowhide cover before wrapping me up so tight in so many of his prairie blankets I had formed a startled tepee, with a tiny head sticking out of the top.
‘Are you OK? Shall I make us a cup of tea?’
I smile at my best friend Becky and close my bedroom curtain again, trying not to feel desperately sad that Mac and I can’t remember that day
together, or any of the days and the nights we spent, in love and lust. That I will never speak to Mac again.
‘Yes, please.’
Becky stayed here last night. She said she wants to support me as much as she can today and I thank her with all my heart and continually try to swallow down the thought that threatens to derail me, that I wasn’t there to support her when she needed me, but I will now, every single day.
‘A cup of tea sounds amazing,’ I add. Becky is in fleecy pyjamas with a polar bear on the front and looks like she did in the mornings at Warwick – hair sticking up, blinking and slightly dazed, like a newly hatched chick.
There will be no more secrets between us – she will get sick of me telling her absolutely everything in my life; and I hope she can tell me everything in hers, like we once did. She knows for a week after Mac died I walked to the hospital every night but didn’t go in, that I loitered, outside the automatic doors, watching people get swallowed up into the warmth and light within and wishing I could follow them to Ward 10, to sit with Mac. She knows how on a few occasions I walked further still and stood outside Mac’s house, staring up at the windows he wouldn’t look out of any more, imagining him pottering round the house and garden, loping through the rooms practising his lectures out loud, employing all those emphatic hand and arm gestures he used to make; wondering if he ever slid our photo from between the pages of his book and stared at it, remembering … She knows how after a few moments I turned and went home again. ‘And I’ll do us a bacon sandwich.’
We didn’t go to the short service at the crematorium as it was family members only – Lloyd, basically, and two nieces of Helen’s I knew nothing about, who live in Ireland and were apparently combining the funeral with a trip to see Michael Bublé at the O2, and I was relieved not to go as I couldn’t bear the whole shuntingly, sub-gothic curtain thing – but Lloyd and James and I met up in Costa a few days later to discuss the details of Mac’s memorial service.
I was surprised and gladdened that Lloyd asked me to contribute – the former harlot, the wanton affair-igniter – but maybe he has forgiven me, or maybe he likes me enough to bear to have me involved. At least he’s still in the country. And it was good to see James, although at that stage, nothing really felt good. Apparently he called round to see me when I was at the airport with Becky, and he turned up at my house the evening after that, but I had been crying and I looked awful, so I didn’t open the door. Hiding again; it seems I will never learn. But what would have been the point, really? In seeing him? Yes, we have shared a couple of semi-confessions and he helped me see how simple it could be to free myself from my mother, but we are not friends. We have never even exchanged mobile phone numbers. We’re just two people who met through wildly disparate connections to a man in a hospital bed. And without Mac, what reason would we have to stay in touch? When I met James at Costa, when we sat with Lloyd and talked through plans and logistics, I knew that today, at the memorial service, will be the last time I see him.
Becky and I have our tea and our bacon sandwiches, shower and get dressed in warm hats and coats and walk to Larkspur Hill. As we step in the snow-grooves already made by others, I wonder how I would feel if I had read somewhere Mac had died, having not seen him for so many years; would I feel the same choking grief I feel now, having seen him every day for three weeks? I know the answer is ‘no’. I would have been shocked to read it, and tearful, probably, and I would have spent a few days feeling sad and looking back and feeling sentimental, but I have had such an intense few weeks remembering everything, with Mac’s prompting: The List, the laughter, the love – all so immediate and so real – that now he is gone I feel utterly bereft. Yet, I am glad we had these days. And I’m glad he prompted me to bathe in the golden nostalgic glow of our affair. To long, once more, for how he made me feel.
The movie references he spoke to me – our movie references – will have to be his last will and testament. His will that I remember him, his testament that what we had together is something worth remembering.
We are the first here and it is bitterly cold. There is no sun and the sky is low and dove grey. There is a slanting soft blizzard of snow; if you stare at the swirling snowflakes too long – like dust from a projector in a dark screening room – you start to feel you might lose your balance and fall into a parallel, wreathing universe. Varying icing-sugar flakes make a soft landing on Becky’s black coat and fade one by one to a wet nothing.
I’m not wearing a black coat, but a camel-coloured wool one, self-tied at the waist, over a black polo-neck sweater dress. Plus brown seventies boots; I’ve got to be practical, in all this snow. I know Mac will appreciate it, as I say goodbye to him. That I am here to figuratively smooth the hair from his face and hold him tight for the very last time.
‘The Way We Were?’ says James, and I am surprised at how pleased I am to see him, as he walks up to me, his shoes making long commas in the snow. It’s been two weeks or so since I have. Last time, in the coffee shop, I couldn’t even really focus on him; today he is bundled up in a long grey wool coat, leather gloves and an unflattering deerstalker hat with a furry lining, which really makes me smile.
‘Bloody hell, you’re good,’ I say, as Mac once did to me.
‘Seen it fifty times,’ he says. ‘The perfect Saturday-afternoon movie. You look great, actually.’
‘Is that appropriate?’ I tease. ‘Compliments at a memorial service?’ I’m really quite amazed he got the reference, actually, but I know, as I’ve pinned my curls up at the back, that I’ve also given myself a blonde version of Katie’s shorty curly hairstyle. Still, he’s good and his compliment makes me feel … well, I don’t know.
James shrugs and smiles. A snowflake lands on his chin and he laughs and flicks at it with one of his leathery fingers. His eyes look really intense, I think, in the almost fairy-tale, blizzardy gloom. Almost petrol blue. It’s like they have been lit from behind. ‘How are you doing?’ he asks and I realize I’ve missed him. I like his earnest easy-going nature and his little quirks. I like his face. I hope, suddenly – and it’s a strange little hope that sparks within me like a pilot light – this is not the last time I see him.
‘I’m OK. You?’
‘I’m OK. It’s so quiet, next door. I mean, it was while he was in hospital, but now I know he’s not coming back …’
‘I went there,’ I say. ‘To Mac’s house. I stood outside like a bloody idiot. More than once, actually.’
‘You should have knocked,’ said James, ‘come in for a cup of tea.’
‘You don’t drink tea.’
‘I keep it in for guests.’
I smile; I enjoy the light dancing in his grey eyes, but they are also making me feel strangely shy. ‘Oh, you were probably out, doing the estate agency thing. And I wouldn’t have wanted to disturb you.’ The truth was, when I’d stood outside, my eyes had been red raw and my emotions all over the place; I hadn’t dared knock.
‘You wouldn’t have disturbed me.’ He looks at me, holds his gaze. I need to look away.
‘Hello, Arden.’ It’s Lloyd. He’s finally got socks on and is bundled up in a massive black overcoat and a brown beanie hat. There are two women standing with him, twenty-somethings. ‘This is Kelly and Scarlett,’ he says. They must be Mac’s nieces, I think, still in London somehow, the Bublé fans who went to the service at the crematorium. I wonder how the concert went and scour their faces for resemblances to their aunt. Lloyd told me that Helen sent flowers to that service, from her home in Paris; that she didn’t want to attend then or today as she wasn’t sure what she could ‘contribute’. I’d smiled and thought, Sounds like Helen. I wish her well – so well – but I’m relieved she’s not here. There are only so many emotions a person can feel in one day.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Kelly and Scarlett – in unison – say politely. They are wearing a lot of make-up.
‘I’ll just go and set up,’ says Lloyd. He has a large carrier bag dangling from one gloved han
d. In the other he holds a folded-up stripy camping chair. He wanders off with his kit and the nieces stand staring at James, despite his ridiculous hat.
‘Fran’s here,’ says James.
I turn around and she is in front of me, looking smart in a grey wool coat and a red scarf, her hair tucked under a matching woolly hat with a big faux-fur bobble on it. I’m surprised to see her as I didn’t think she’d make it.
‘Fran! Thanks so much for coming!’
‘I swapped shifts,’ she says. ‘I really wanted to come.’ She squeezes my arm. ‘He was quite a guy. I’ll miss him.’
Julian, who has brought Sam – all wide-eyed and excited, but trying to hide it, as a blissfully unaffected onlooker on such an occasion might – walks up the hill. I smile as I look down at them, a snow-globed London behind them. There is certainly something epic about being up here, I think. Cinematic. I can see why Mac loved the view from here.
I’m beginning to not be able to feel my toes in my boots. Becky is hopping from side to side slightly, to keep warm. And the snow continues to come down, soft and unrelenting.
‘All right?’ I ask her.
‘Cold,’ she says with a smile, and she takes my hand. She has woolly gloves on, I have leather; I give her hand a squeeze.
A burly man, elderly, and like a bear in a huge black overcoat and a fedora, approaches and shakes my hand. ‘Stewart Whittaker,’ he says, his voice more gruff and tremulous than I recall it. ‘Thank you for letting me know about today. I’m glad you found Lloyd.’ There are two middle-aged women with him, in hats and scarves – I wonder if one of them is the woman who answered my phone call at the London Film School – and a couple of young men around Julian’s age, who may be current students.
You, Me and The Movies Page 32