The Distance

by Zoë Folbigg

  The door slams.

  Get real.

  Cecilie wraps her coat around her and tramples in the first thick snow of the season. She is drawn by the twinkly lights of the harbour, pulling her to the bridge. Crunch crunch underfoot, as Cecilie’s eyes fill with each step she takes in the virgin snow. At the quiet junction, she hears the slow hum of the Fjellheisen down the road to her left; organ pipes blow a haunting soundtrack from the white concertina of the Arctic cathedral to her right. She walks towards it.

  Why hasn’t he called?

  Where has he gone?

  Did she take his phone?

  A gap peeps through the clouds and Cecilie spies the green whisper waving like a theatrical curtain overhead, ridiculing her from the heavens. She walks up the footpath to the bridge, not knowing where to go or why she’s going there, with tears streaming down her cheeks, and marches on. She stops at the point she said goodbye to Andreas, the place where her father jumped, and looks over the edge. Suicide railings stop at eye level; Cecilie rises on tiptoes to see what it would look like to jump.

  Where was he?

  How cold is that water?

  What does it feel like to drown?

  So many questions Cecilie has pondered, every time she walks the bridge, every time she plays her harp. Questions her twin has never bothered his busy brain with.

  ‘It happened, there’s nothing we can do about it,’ he once said when they were eleven. And Karin thought Espen was the one who questioned everything; that Cecilie was blind.

  The Northern lights above have disappeared and a blanket of thick dark cloud starts shedding another layer of snow.

  You said you’d come.

  Cecilie punches the metal barrier in front of her with two fists, frantically banging until her knuckles start to bleed.

  Through her tears she can just about see the water beneath her, and in it she sees a familiar face swirling in a pattern of the strait below her. Telling her to go home.

  *

  Cecilie closes the front door and drops her coat and boots on the floor with unusual disregard. The fire in the hearth is reduced to a final smoulder in the dark living room. All but the hall lights are off. She climbs the stairs quietly and looks through the crack in the door to her mother’s bedroom. Karin Wiig is in bed but can’t sleep. She is fidgeting under her eye mask with her back to the door, which is slightly ajar. Cecilie gently pushes it wider so as not to alarm an already troubled woman, and climbs into her mother’s bed, for the first time since she was a little girl, hugging her mother from behind.

  ‘I feel like I’m drowning, Mamma,’ Cecilie sobs, as she holds on tight to her mother’s arms, the pads of the fingers on her bloodied hands gripping Karin’s shoulders. ‘At the library, at the Hjornekafé, in Espen’s stupid hotel, every time I look at my phone…’

  Karin pushes her eye mask into her hair and rolls over to face her daughter, her silk nightdress twisting slightly out of place. She strokes Cecilie’s hair and tucks her sweeping fringe behind a cold red ear.

  ‘He said he would leave her, Mamma, he said he would come to me. He said he was going to come to Europe for Christmas.’

  ‘Shhh, Cecilie,’ Karin whispers, taking her daughter in her arms, her tears tumbling onto silk.

  ‘I believed it. I thought he was coming. His face was so sincere, so beautiful… I thought he was coming.’ And for the first time in her life, Cecilie lets out a sob that makes her entire body shake as she clings to her mother. She has never felt so broken.

  ‘Oh, my darling Cecilie. Beautiful beautiful girl.’ Karin holds Cecilie to her chest, then lets her go, the heat of their bodies is too much under the fifteen-tog Hungarian goose down. She looks into her daughter’s eyes, lit by the light of the open bedroom door bouncing off Karin’s dressing-table mirror. Green flashes mottled by tears. ‘Don’t rely on any man to pull your strings; to make you happy. Not The Mexican, not even Espen. You have to find your own way. Men don’t make women happy. You’re the only person who can make you happy.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘Hush now, Cecilie. There’s nothing you can do about him. There are things you can do to affect your future though. Quit the hotel if it’s upsetting you this much. Make choices that will bring you happiness. Come travelling with me, we’ll take wonderful trips together.’

  The prospect seems all too awful, so Cecilie sobs loudly into her mother’s silk nightie, heartbroken and baffled – but blind no more. She is determined not to sit and wait; not to shed another tear, not to dwell on Hector Herrera, for a minute longer.

  Thirty-Eight

  November 2018, London, England

  Kate swirls her teaspoon into a mug of tepid Earl Grey and wishes she had ordered coffee. She needs to feel alert for the showdown she’s about to have. She looks up towards the cafe entrance and tries to remember exactly what Bethany Henderson looked like. All she can remember is that she was young and blonde. And so unlike Kate.

  Kate refused to let Bethany’s phone call ruin her big night, so she cut the conversation short by arranging to meet her on Monday. She was grateful that the chaos and candy floss and fun and fireworks enabled her to bury the news, for now. Being chair of the PTA was a timely distraction from the phone call from hell. She didn’t need to address it, nor even mention it to George until fireworks’ night was over, and she was finally armed and ready with facts, not suspicions. Besides, this was Kate’s moment. It was the PTA’s most successful family firework party in history – Kate’s event raised £6,000 to go towards an outdoor classroom; last year Melissa Cox had only just scraped four – she was not going to let the weekend be ruined by a phone call. Not when, deep down, she’d known something was coming all along.

  As Kate collected empty firework cartridges from the school playground the next morning, and had space and fresh air to think, she worked out her strategy. She would keep schtum. Not give George an inkling that she was about to finally rumble him, because that would be showing her hand. She wanted to feel prepared. Ready for anything George might try to come up with this time. She agreed to meet his slut of a secretary on Monday lunchtime and hear her out – to ask why, now – and then plan her next course of action. Since she received the phone call on Saturday, that sick feeling Kate felt twenty years ago in a bar in Mexico, when Hector Herrera cheated on her right before her very eyes, came back to wind her like a Catherine wheel doing loops in her stomach. As Kate’s muddy hands threw plastic cartridges into plastic bags, she realised that knowing the truth didn’t in fact make it better. She thought it would be preferable – at least Hector Herrera had drawn a neat line under their summer of fun – there was no grey area, no element of doubt, no unknown. The unknown had eaten Kate up for the past eight months. But drawing a line under marriage is a different matter, and knowing didn’t make it any easier to take.

  Now, in a busy coffee shop near Liverpool Street Station, where Kate made the mistake of ordering an Earl Grey instead of a coffee, she twists the scrunchie clasping her low ponytail tight and tries to remember what Bethany Henderson looks like. She remembers the hair on George’s scarf; that mass of long blonde hair swishing down her back as she leaned into George that day Kate walked in on them and George said he was in the middle of firing her.

  Kate shudders.

  A young woman with blonde hair and a circular, passive face walks in. She is wrapped in a white puffa jacket belted at the waist with a white faux-fur-trimmed collar. Not all that dissimilar to Kate’s navy parka. Kate remembers her now and is surprised by how plain she is.

  Bethany recognises Kate from the awkward family portrait that sat in a thin silver frame on George’s desk. She feels guilt rise up inside her under her marshmallow of a coat but powers on, through her nerves, to walk across the cafe.

  ‘Hi,’ Bethany says, defiantly, and pulls out the seat at the little square table.

  Kate is so used to being polite, to smiling, to apologising, that it feels so uncomfortable to her that the
lines of her mouth are staying straight.

  Bethany pulls a bottle of water out of her bag as if to explain why she isn’t going to the counter to get a drink. It’s obvious she wants to make this as quick and as painless as possible.

  ‘Why did you call me?’ Kate asks, with a wan expression. ‘I was getting used to the idea, you know, “what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you”? We were getting to a happy place again.’ Kate can barely look at Bethany’s face, but she does, and sees her blue eyes are sad and cold. She looks like the one who’s been betrayed.

  ‘I thought you should know.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to know now.’

  ‘I think you do – that’s why you came to the office that day. The day…’

  ‘The day I caught you and my husband at it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The day I walked in on you… you… going “down” on him, and you made it look like he was firing you. Very clever.’ Kate is horrified to have to spell it out, and her voice cracks in the loud cafe.

  ‘The day he fired me,’ Bethany’s passive face suddenly becomes animated, as if there is some substance to her, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I just told him I thought what he was doing was wrong.’

  Kate feels rage in her hot face.

  The cheek of the woman!

  She lowers her voice to an angry hush. ‘Let me tell you, whether you’re single or not, however despicably George has behaved, you have done something wrong. George is a married man. We have children. Why would you want to break up a family? My family is everything to me!’ Kate’s wobbly voice breaks as she looks down at her off-white tea mug and tries to hold herself together. She blinks rapidly, to shoo away the tears, then looks out at the lunchtime bustle, at the worker bees around Bishopsgate, and wonders how George looked as he sauntered through it on his way to work this morning.

  Cocksure.

  ‘Look it’s not me he’s having an affair with.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not the one you should be angry with. I’m trying to help you out here.’

  Kate is baffled. ‘Help me out?’

  ‘It stressed me out so much, I hated covering for them. For their filthy lunches, making lame excuses for him. I told Freya I didn’t like it at all.’

  ‘Freya? He’s having an affair with Freya?’

  Kate thinks back to the girl with the glossy poker-straight hair and pert bottom.

  ‘No! Freya reckoned I should talk to him, let him know I felt uncomfortable with it. Then he fired me and gave Freya my job.’

  ‘So, hang on a minute…’

  ‘But me and Freya are mates and we still meet up. It’s not her fault. Poor thing now has to do his dirty work for him…’

  Kate can’t keep up, and is struggling to take it all in.

  ‘So who is it? Who’s George having an affair with? And why are you telling me now, when you’ve known for ages?’

  ‘’Cause Freya hates covering for him as much as I did. She doesn’t want to lose her job – but me, I’ve got nothing to lose now, so I thought “sod it”.’ Bethany gives a nervous laugh.

  ‘“Sod it” – you’re crushing me – breaking my heart and telling me out of spite?’ Kate squeezes the handle of her mug of tea.

  ‘Hang on a minute – me and my fiancé had just put an offer on a duplex in Chigwell. We’d been waiting for them to come up for months. We had to pull out when your dirty husband fired me unfairly. He’s screwing you over, but he screwed me over too.’

  Kate looks at Bethany’s young joyless face and feels bad for her, for reading her wrong, for reading the situation wrong. ‘I’m sorry. Look, this is all a bit hard for me to process. First I thought he was having an affair with you, then he made out that I was going mad, and now this,’ Kate shakes two hands with fanned fingers out in despair. ‘I’m just a bit all over the shop at the moment.’ She tries to compose herself by drinking a sip of tepid tea and inhales a deep breath to steady her nerves. ‘I’m sorry for you, I really am.’

  Bethany shrugs.

  ‘Have you found another job?’

  Chit-chat steers Kate away from the question she really needs answering.

  ‘I had to threaten him for a good reference, said I’d tell you if he didn’t help me get another one. He’s lucky I didn’t make a case for unfair dismissal, but Mick told me it wasn’t worth the hassle. Slimy bosses always win.’

  Kate feels very uncomfortable with George being referred to as a slimy boss, even though she knows that’s exactly what he is.

  ‘So is that why you’re telling me, for your reference?’

  ‘No – I got another job in September, so I let it go.’ Bethany gives her rose gold Michael Kors watch a quick glance. ‘Actually I can’t be long…’

  ‘So why are you telling me now? Why all these crank calls?’

  ‘Yeah sorry about the calls – every time you answered I was scared to say it. But I just knew I had to. For Freya. For Mick. For the flat we lost. We can’t get on the property ladder now, prices have gone up even more since June… Anyway, it’s wrong. He’s been mugging you off for over a year, I reckon. Maybe two. I tried to go back over it all last night, but I couldn’t access my old work diary.’

  ‘Who is she?’ Kate bursts, before taking a deep breath and holding it.

  ‘He didn’t let on for a while – he’d just get me to book hotels and block out lunches.’

  ‘Which hotels?’ Kate gasps for air after she says it.

  ‘Sometimes The Rosewood, sometimes The Shard… she likes her luxuries…’

  He took me to a dusty old hotel in Bloomsbury for my fortieth.

  ‘He’d get me to block out a couple of hours, once a week, sometimes twice a week. Said to put in the diary that he was having lunch with B. Sometimes Barry.’

  ‘Baz Brocklebank from the Sydney office?’

  ‘No, Barry was her last name.’

  Kate suppresses a dry wretch.

  Amber Barrie. I saw how he was all over her at the PTA summer social.

  ‘It wasn’t until he started getting me to send her flowers that I found out her full name and address. She lives in the same village as you.’

  Kate’s ashen face falls.

  ‘I know,’ she says with a defeated sigh. ‘Amber Barrie. She lives at the Manor.’

  ‘I laughed cause Barry Manor sounded like Barry Manilow.’

  Kate doesn’t laugh.

  ‘But her name isn’t Amber. It’s Antonia.’

  Thirty-Nine

  November 2018, Xalapa, Mexico

  In a private room on the sixth floor of the Hospital Ángeles, Hector sits in a wooden chair, leaning stiffly on low rectangular armrests. He has sat in this chair for too long now and still can’t find a comfortable position. His forearm bends and slightly bulges. On his bicep is the tattoo of a hand with elegant fingers mid click, a flame igniting from the index finger at the top. Hector had the tattoo done years ago, after he stopped working in Jugo’s California, to remind him of the brilliant ideas and decisions he is capable of making: choosing the newspaper over shady deliveries; deciding to further his education and go to university; to stay in the back of the car when he’d probably been tempted to sit alongside his mother up front. Now he can add to his mental list: quitting drinking and smoking to be a better husband; sending samples of his drawings to the children’s author in Mexico City; shelving his dreams of running away to Europe to answer his phone and rescue Pilar.

  Cramped into the low wooden chair for another day, the clicking fingers don’t make him feel triumphant; instead he is empty; void of good ideas, his creative mind feels barren, his body is a tired shell. He pulls his military cap down over his eyes and reads The Psychopath Test, hoping to fill in the blanks of his brain, waiting for Pilar to wake from an induced coma. Tubes and wires weave in and out of his wife, connecting her to machines, where monotonous beeps punctuate every line that Hector reads, disturbing him so that all he can think of is death.


  Are you coming?

  Hector’s parents died on the Day Of The Dead, a day on which they were out honouring lives lost: Victor’s mother Maria, Lupe’s grandfather in Monterrey, their friend Ariel, who they had watched unravel to brain cancer in the Hospital Ángeles earlier that autumn. That Day Of The Dead was a sombre celebration for Victor and Lupe Herrera, raw from the loss of their friend; excited to be expecting another baby – if it was a boy they would call him Ariel. They’d taken a basket of pan de muertos to the festival in Ariel’s home village of Las Vigas, an hour down the road. They ate tamales and corn on the cob. Hector remembers tiny flashes of it. A large bottle of fizzy orange pop left with the pan de muertos at Ariel’s family home. The smell of tamales. How a thick rain cloud made night-time come early, and soaked the colourful cut-out papel picado hanging across the cobbled streets of the village. The sudden jerk as their Beetle skidded off the bend and tumbled over itself like the drum of a washing machine, down into the ravine.

  This year, Day Of The Dead came and went while Hector was waiting for Pilar. Alejandro brought him pozole in a flask; they drank a tequila shot each to the memory of his parents, of his unborn brother, of Abuela. Pilar didn’t die, but she didn’t wake up either. Doctors thought she was too weak to wake up for now; she had stopped breathing for a little while, in the time it took Hector to find her, and they didn’t know what her brain would be like. So they waited. Still Hector waits. For his family. For his future.

  Every few minutes, tangled in another line of his book, Hector looks up to see if anything has changed. Whether Pilar’s mouth moved, or an eyelid flickered. But still she lies, as she has for the past sixteen days and sixteen nights. All the time and all the coffee Alejandro brings Hector, and all the space for reflection doesn’t change how he feels in the pit of his hollow stomach: he desperately wants Pilar to wake up. This isn’t the girl he fell in love with.

  Hector met Pilar more than six years ago, when she walked into the orphanage under the weight of a ring-bound folder and a pile of books. Hector had popped into see Sister Miriam, Sister Juana, Sister Virginia and the kids during his lunch break from the newspaper, as Sister Miriam had asked him to put up a shelf. Hector was a handy man to have nearby. Many of the past inhabitants of the Villa Infantil never came back to see the women who had brought them up. Benny never bothered to help out, but Hector always loved to drop in, to see the children who were staying. The first thing he noticed about the birdlike girl with the red lips and the pencil skirt was her accent. She wasn’t from round here, and Hector was instantly hooked.