The Distance

by Zoë Folbigg

  She’s at work.

  Hector didn’t say anything. He couldn’t believe that this was the last time they were going to talk. He didn’t want to say anything heartfelt or final, because he didn’t want this conversation to be more significant than any other. So Cecilie carried on.

  And you’re getting married. Give your marriage a chance. Embrace it! My mother always says I should get out of my dreamland and embrace reality, so I’m going to embrace what’s in front of me – and you should too. And I think the best way for us to give our lives the best shot is if we make this our last conversation.

  Hector broke.

  I don’t want that.

  Parents and their toddlers started to gather in the basement of the library, untangling themselves from coats, scarves and papooses. On the top floor, ensconced between two rows of white bookshelves, a tear rolled down Cecilie’s cheek as she looked at her phone and typed furiously in silence. She didn’t want that either.

  Well I’m afraid you don’t have the choice now.

  But we’re friends.

  You might think that, Hector, but my heart breaks every time I think of her stroking your face; that I can’t…

  But you told me you can, how your daydreams take you to me, that you can see me and touch me. Well I can too now. You taught me how.

  Cecilie’s shaky hands struggled to type as she wavered, but she carried on, knowing this was for the best. That she had to be brave and steel herself once more.

  You’re getting married, Hector. You say we’re friends but this isn’t how friends talk. We must stop talking, it’ll free us both. I’m sure you want me to be free.

  As Hector lay in the dark, his schoolteacher fiancée snoring next to him, her wedding dress hanging on the wardrobe door like a ghost watching over them, he pictured Cecilie’s eyes, and wondered what shade of green they were at that moment; what the light was like under Candela’s curved roof.

  Please, mi amor…

  he punched back into his phone.

  Farvel, Hector.

  Te quiero, Cecilie.

  And with that, Cecilie swiped right to switch the power off her phone, shut down the conversation, and ran down three flights of stairs to the library basement, ready to rouse the little ones with So, ro, lillemann…

  ‘No mames…’ Hector cursed quietly, looking at his screen in the darkened room. Pilar rolled over in her sleep. The dress on the wardrobe fluttered eerily in the breeze of an open window.

  Forty-Nine

  January 2019, Tromsø, Norway

  ‘Remember our party last year?’ smiles Grethe, sitting a bouncy Ahyana on her knee at the end table in the empty Hjornekafé, marvelling at her daughter.

  Cecilie stands wistfully over them. Her strongest memory of last New Year was of Hector breaking her heart. For the first time. And a wash of sadness sprinkles over her like the snow in the dark daytime of the street outside. But she knows what Grethe is referring to.

  ‘Of course, you told me the stork was bringing this little miss,’ Cecilie says, bending down to stroke Ahyana’s creamy brown cheek.

  ‘Amazing, huh?’ Grethe’s long blonde hair is flattened under the bow of a colourful headscarf. She doesn’t take her eyes off Ahyana as she picks up her coffee cup.

  ‘Can’t believe it,’ smiles Cecilie, who’s so in love with her best friend’s baby. Some people feel distanced when a friend becomes a mother first; unable to understand the sleep deprivation, the jargon, or frustrated by the fact that friends can no longer finish a conversation, but Cecilie doesn’t mind. She’s so besotted with edible Ahyana, she doesn’t mind the chaotic conversations that bounce from one subject to the next. ‘Look at her, sitting up! Clever girl.’

  ‘Abdi’s coconut and cardamom is our bestseller now…’ flits Grethe with a wry smile, referring to its debut last New Year’s Eve, as if they’d been talking about ice cream the whole time.

  ‘Do you want another coffee?’ asks Cecilie, looking around the empty cafe. ‘Or a hot chocolate? I’m going to make myself one.’

  Cecilie walks back around the counter. It’s New Year’s Day. The library is closed and Henrik is visiting his family over the border in Kiruna, so Cecilie was happy to work, to take her mind off the noise in her head.

  ‘Not sure why my mother told you to open up,’ says Grethe, as Ahyana starts to fidget on her lap.

  Cecilie takes the biggest cup she can find.

  ‘It might get busy later. I saw loads of lights chasers heading out last night, they’ll wake up soon. They better had or you and I are eating cloudberry cake all afternoon! Did you want one?’ Cecilie lifts a cup, gesturing to Grethe.

  ‘Ooh yes please, I’d better have a hot chocolate. Milk milk milk, help production for this little Milkychops huh?’ Grethe coos and Ahyana fidgets some more. ‘Actually, I’d better feed her,’ she says, lifting Ahyana up under her cheesecloth top. Grethe finds a comfortable position and leans back. A few minutes’ peace. ‘So how are you doing?’ she asks candidly.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I know Christmas has been rough for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t rough. It was fine. Uncle Hakon and Aunt Tove were here, they’re always a laugh – I think Svalbard turned them crazy.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember them…’

  ‘And Morten was the best sous-chef, and always kept everyone’s glasses topped up.’

  ‘Of course…’

  Cecilie wonders why Grethe is looking at her expectantly, but she keeps talking all the same.

  ‘And Espen was his usual self – always had one eye on the i-Scand even though it was his day off. And Mamma, well you know Mamma…’

  ‘Well that’s great, but I didn’t mean Karin or Aunt Tove. Or Morten. Or Espen. I meant how are you? What’s going on with The Mexican?’

  ‘Oh.’

  Cecilie puts a metal jug to the stainless-steel spout and turns cold milk into comforting warm foam. She inhales the sweet scent to galvanise herself.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asks Grethe, as she repositions and reattaches Ahyana. ‘You said he was leaving his wife.’

  ‘He said he was leaving his wife. But then he didn’t. So I blocked him. And then unblocked him. Oh it’s all a mess, Grethe.’ Cecilie pours the milk into syrupy chocolate sitting at the bottom of two large mismatched teacups. Grethe’s blue eyes look sad.

  ‘Oh no! But is it all doomed? Can you salvage it? He must have had the intention of leaving her. Maybe something happened?’

  Cecilie seems conflicted, like she’s holding something back. She thinks of the message Hector sent her this morning, pleading her to meet him under the Eiffel Tower, saying he’ll wait for her forever, and decides to confess.

  ‘He’s flying to Paris. He wants to meet me.’

  ‘Wow! He’s coming to see you?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, he might be going to Spain. His wife is Spanish. I don’t even know whether he left her or not. Paris could be en route to Madrid… I think he’s a man of grand gestures but not much else.’

  ‘Did you ask what happened with the wife?’

  Cecilie carries the tray from behind the bar to the table at the end of the empty cafe and sits on the wooden chair facing her friend.

  ‘Look at me, Grethe! I’m thirty. I’ve spent more than five years wasting my time on him, look at how your life has progressed. I can’t drag my heels waiting for something that isn’t going to happen. Not any more.’

  ‘But aren’t I the poster girl for overcoming those hurdles?! Look at Abdi! He’s a refugee. “Too brown” for our country. “Probably a criminal in his homeland”. Remember my mum’s reaction?’

  Cecilie remembers. And laughs. Grethe’s mother Mette is not as progressive as Karin. When she first met Abdi, she inspected his faraway face as if he were an alien. For the first time in weeks a beautiful burst of a laughter lights up Cecilie’s face.

  ‘Abdi crossed continents to make a life here, with me, despite the hurdles we had to jump. It
can work. And look at the fruits of it!’ she says, patting her feeding baby on her swaddled bottom. ‘The Mexican – Hector – is coming to Europe and he wants to meet you?’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow. Apparently. It could be bullshit.’

  ‘It could be amazing, Cecilie. Go to Paris. Meet him.’

  Cecilie feels hot and terrified at the prospect of an impromptu trip to another country. She’s spent thirty contented years in Norway, her imagination has always provided her with escapades and adventures. The thought of going on one in real life makes her freeze at the table, her eyes glaze over.

  ‘Cecilie? Cecilie?’

  The bell above the door rings as a tourist couple enter, bringing Cecilie back into the room. Grethe feels relieved.

  ‘At least meet him, so you can look into his eyes. Touch him. Hear him out.’

  The thin fair hairs on Cecilie’s arms stand on end.

  Cecilie nods, then takes a big sip from her cup of hot chocolate and rolls down her sleeves.

  ‘But if he’s coming tomorrow you must hurry – you have to get a connection in Oslo. You’d need to move fast.’

  Cecilie stands slowly and looks at the couple at the door.

  ‘Table for two?’

  Fifty

  2 January 2019, Paris, France

  Lines snake around the four bronze legs of the Eiffel Tower. Excited faces from far away shuffle and smile. Hector Herrera stands next to the pilier nord. He chose that corner as it was the least crowded and had the shortest queue. Not that he’s planning on going up it today, he just wanted a comfortable vantage point, so he could see the spot in the middle, which is surprisingly empty but for a few photographers peeping up the tower’s iron girdle.

  Hector stands on his own, leaning, surveying the throng of people around him who are looking at maps or taking selfies or sipping hot coffee in a queue or huddling together in the bleak and bitter cold of a grey day they will never forget. He inhales the sweet and earthy scent of chestnuts roasting in a metal pan nearby and pulls his revolutionary’s cap down low over his eyes. He rubs his gloves together as if he’s standing at a campfire. He observes.

  Midday, under the Eiffel Tower, in the middle.

  Hector pulls up the cuffed sleeve of his fleece-lined military jacket. He had to borrow it from Ricky because Ricky had been to the Rockies a few years ago; Hector didn’t even own a coat. He looks at his watch and feels like a child in fancy dress; a boy on an adventure, like the cover of TinTin Au Tibet he picked up yesterday from a vendor on the Rive Gauche.

  12.30 p.m.

  I’ll wait.

  She’s not there.

  Fifty-One

  3 January 2019, Paris, France

  Lines snake around the four bronze legs of the Eiffel Tower. Excited faces from far away shuffle and smile. Hector stands at the pilier est, just in case the pilier nord was unlucky. He waited for five hours there yesterday. At first he was wide-eyed and vigilant, looking up at every lone woman who crossed the centre circle under the Eiffel Tower, weighed down by hope and expectation as beautiful and as heavy as the wrought-iron latticework in the sky above his shoulders. As the hours passed, Hector started to recognise people exiting their aerial adventure, having seen them when they joined the back of the queue, what seemed an age earlier, and he became more cavalier in his watch. More accepting that she wasn’t going to come. So he lost himself in Hergé’s ligne claire and hoped that, on the tiny off chance she would turn up, she would seek him out, sitting on the floor, leaning against a concrete pillar, reading about adventures in an even colder world than this.

  The view from the east pillar looks slightly different and he can’t smell the chestnuts from here, or perhaps the marrons man isn’t out yet. But at midday, Hector looks at his watch, removes and replaces his cap, and leans. Waiting. Observing.

  A family from the New World, carrying balloons and backpacks, stand under the empty vacuum of the tower’s skirt and laugh, before their balloons pass and Hector sees a woman in the middle, with bewildered eyes, and gets up off the floor.

  It’s her.

  Brown hair tied into a low ponytail, a fringe now, but her round eyes look as nervous as they did more than twenty years ago.

  ‘Güera!’ Hector shouts, straightening the strap of his hessian messenger bag as he walks across to greet her. He opens his strong arms wide and Kate blushes and laughs.

  He’s even more handsome than she remembered.

  Not the flaco skinny boy she first met in the orphanage that summer they painted the whole thing over. The kids were staying in Coatepec while Kate and the local boy, former inhabitant of the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Señora, Hector Herrera, were charged with painting the walls varying shades of white and terracotta. Hector was studying fine arts at the university campus across town, and painted frescoes and murals to lift the décor. Kate remembers how much of the summer she spent gazing up at him, watching as he straddled a wooden plank between two ladders, tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on his art. How she gazed up at him as he straddled her in her accommodation – but only when her kindly hosts were away by the coast.

  The skinny shoulders of a younger boy are now broad. That warm earthy brown skin looks a little tired and pallid under a bitter Parisian sky. But he is unmistakably Hector. His face is so handsome; his cinnamon-flecked eyes are as impassioned and as playful as Kate remembers. A youthful brown curl peeps out from under his cap at his temple, reminding Kate that he is four years her junior, as she smooths down her home-dyed hair. Ricky’s fleece-lined army-surplus jacket is buttoned up to the neck and Hector looks cold. Kate lowers her reddening face into the neck of her dark blue duffel coat as he approaches, her nose knocking the top brown toggle, and even though Hector can’t see Kate’s mouth, he can tell she is smiling.

  ‘Hello you,’ Kate says, falling into his arms. They hug tightly and she loses her breath in his jacket, his chest, his heart. As Hector squeezes Kate tight, she feels self-consciously thicker set. She knows she’s curvier than when Hector last saw her, when she fled Mexico a week early, heartbroken but braced and ready to start her graduate job at Digby Global Investors. Her hips have since borne three children, and as Hector releases Kate from his embrace, she tugs at the waistband of her polyester trousers, and then looks up.

  Their eyes lock. The apples of Kate’s ruddy English cheeks rise as she feels nothing but warmth for the man who broke her heart.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Hector,’ she says, intrigued as to why Hector Herrera wanted to see her now, on a bleak January day, after so many years.

  Why now?

  ‘Ay que friiiiiiiio!’ Hector laughs, shivering in this borrowed coat.

  ‘Oh, I’ve forgotten all my Spanish!’ Kate apologises.

  ‘That’s OK, I learned English,’ Hector says, startling Kate with the ease at which he speaks it. ‘Come on, let’s get outta here, so crowded, malditas turistas.’ Hector rolls his eyes and Kate laughs. She’d forgotten how easy he was to be around, a feeling she hasn’t felt with anyone in so long.

  ‘How are you? What are you doing in Paris?’ Kate asks.

  Hector puts his arm around Kate’s shoulder and leads her away without answering. There’s too much to cover, they can start somewhere warmer.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Kate giggles giddily, her wobbly voice warbling.

  ‘I found a good creperie in the park down there, you hungry?’

  ‘Not really…’ Kate was too nervous to eat this morning as she got the first train to Liverpool Street and crossed to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar. She didn’t even buy an almond croissant at Pret A Manger, an old favourite from her Digby days, her stomach was in such knots. ‘But I’m sure I will be shortly. Crepes sound delicious.’

  ‘Vamos,’ Hector says, playfully pulling in Kate as they walk side by side. Her temple brushes against his chin. Kate leans in and is surprised by how comfortable she feels, how the bubbling anger, humiliation and heartache that simmered i
nside her for so long have gone. They snake through the crowds like careless lovers again, heading to the Champ de Mars.

  Fifty-Two

  Lines snake around the four bronze legs of the Eiffel Tower. A woman with shiny black skin jingles miniature Eiffel Towers from a large copper ring. A family of five, all with similar high cheekbones and long quilted coats appear in the centre of the tower like Matryoshka dolls popping out of each other. A man drops to one knee and makes his sweetheart smile with a ring. Cecilie Wiig stands between four bronze feet and looks across at a gap in the crowd, her mouth wide open. She arrived a day late without telling him. To see if he really would wait forever. His beauty is breathtaking. And now she’s watching him walk away, a jubilant arm slung around another woman’s shoulder.

  *

  ‘So, let’s start with the most important stuff. You have kids, right?’

  ‘Yes! Three of them.’

  ‘Wow, congratulations.’

  Hector now walks with his hands in his pockets, happy to be reunited with his first lover; sheepish because he knows he broke her heart. Feeling empty because Cecilie didn’t come to him, but trying to put a brave face on it, as Hector always does. Kate clutches her floral bag under her shoulder because she’s worried someone will snatch it. She’d heard pickpockets are rife in Paris, but she’s managing to relax as they amble slowly along a dusty track within the park, the Eiffel Tower shrinking behind threadbare trees in their wake.

  ‘Two girls and a boy. I wanted to bring them to Paris, they don’t go back to school until tomorrow… but not one of them wanted to come.’

  ‘Really? Wow.’ Hector is baffled.

  Kate isn’t sure if Hector is surprised that she has three children or that none of them wanted to come to Paris, which makes her realise she doesn’t actually know him very well. But she witters along to fill any confusion.