The Moment You Were Gone

by Nicci Gerrard

  Several times she made up her mind to track him down. Several times she stopped herself because she heard his voice in her head, telling her quite calmly that he was involved with another woman. There was nothing he could say that would change that.

  In the end, Gaby phoned her friend Nancy, waking her in the early hours of the morning, to pour everything out. It sounded so paltry when she said it out loud, so insignificant; she was almost embarrassed to hear herself speak. Nothing had happened between them: they had witnessed a crash together, then walked home through the night; they had hardly touched, and had not-quite kissed; he had told her he was not free and he had left her at dawn without saying anything except ‘Goodbye’. So why did she feel so jittery, so sick with desire when she remembered him, so hollow and sad when he didn’t call? Nancy listened without interrupting; Gaby could imagine her at the other end of the line, sitting up straight in bed in her stripy pyjamas, neat and calm even though it was the small hours and she’d just been woken up.

  Gaby stopped talking. For a few seconds the silence buzzed between them.

  ‘You’ve fallen in love,’ said Nancy.

  ‘I have,’ said Gaby, half giggling but feeling the tears gather. ‘Isn’t it ridiculous? But it hurts so much that I don’t know what to do with myself.’

  ‘There’s probably nothing, really,’ said Nancy. ‘No way round except through.’

  ‘I do wish you weren’t so far away,’ said Gaby. ‘You’re the only one I could possibly say this to without feeling an utter fool, and you don’t try to cheer me up by saying things like “Time heals everything.”’

  ‘Which it kind of does.’

  ‘And “There are plenty more …” ’

  ‘There are.’

  ‘Don’t spoil it.’

  ‘Are you feeling really down?’

  ‘I guess I am. Down and blue. I know it’s stupid.’

  ‘I tell you what, shall I come and visit? I could, you know. How about tomorrow?’

  ‘No, don’t even think of it.’

  ‘I’ve already thought of it.

  ‘I know it will pass.’

  ‘But I’d like to come. I miss you. I can get there by early evening, is that OK?’

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘You’d do the same for me.’

  ‘Any time.’

  Ten days after the crash, Connor stood outside 22 Jerome Street. He had been there since eight o’clock in the morning and it was now nearly eleven. The sky was low and grey; there was a persistent drizzle that had soaked through his clothes and made his hair stick to his skull. He was damp and hungry and hugely embarrassed by himself. He kept thinking that he should go, then giving himself ten more minutes, then another ten. At half past nine a young man had slouched out of the house, long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. At just gone ten a woman of about Gaby’s age, but tall and slim, with hair cut short and wearing ripped black jeans and a leather jacket, had emerged. No sign of Gaby. Upstairs, all the curtains remained closed. He paced up the street, then back again. If someone was looking at him, they’d think he was casing the joint. No, they’d think he was a stalker – and he was a kind of stalker, a risible figure, skulking in this narrow street, waiting for someone who’d probably not given him a moment’s thought since they’d parted in the darkness, on the outskirts of the city, as the first faint band of light appeared on the horizon. He shifted irritably from foot to foot, feeling trickles of water escape down his neck. Of course, he should simply knock at the door and ask for her. But he couldn’t bear the thought of being ushered into the house like a guest, to her pitying surprise, or being turned away politely with the news that she wasn’t there or, worse, was still in bed with whoever she had chosen to go to bed with the night before.

  He’d give himself till a quarter past. Then he’d forget about her. End of story.

  He’d give himself till half past. Not a minute after.

  At twenty to twelve the door of 22 Jerome Street opened and Gaby stepped into the street. He’d been tormented by her image, day and night, and there she was – a bit smaller than he remembered, her face a little thinner, her hair the colour of golden syrup, her eyes dark. She was stuffing a croissant into her mouth and laughing, while little flakes of pastry scattered round her. There was a man behind her, tall and broad and – Fuck him, thought Connor. Fuck him and fuck everyone who looked like that, so easy and happy and nice, inheriting the earth and not even noticing, while he, Connor, was skinny and serious and gripped with such cramps of longing for Gaby that he thought he’d die of it. For a second, as he stood there, he understood that while he had spent the past week and a half rearranging his entire life, Gaby had gone about her business as usual, scarcely casting a backward glance at the night in which they’d met. Of course she hadn’t, because there she was in front of him, in a calf-length purple dress with dozens of tiny buttons, and black wellington boots, her hair tamed into plaits and a cloth cap on her head and, following her, a man. She was smiling over her shoulder at him, teasing him. There! She’d put her arm through his proprietorially as they reached the pavement and popped the last piece of croissant into his mouth.

  Connor told himself to hurry away; she wouldn’t even notice he was there, a scrawny, damp rat in the gutter. But even as he was thinking this he had stepped forward and was standing before her.

  ‘Connor!’ she said. ‘I thought –’ she stopped. She wasn’t smiling, just looking at him.

  Connor stared into her face, into her large dark eyes, trying not to see the handsome, smiling face of her companion, or the third person who’d now emerged from the house. ‘The man died,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘I do know. He died on the way to the hospital. His name was Ethan and he was studying engineering. He was an only child. I met his mother.’

  ‘He was well over the limit,’ said Connor.

  ‘I know. I talked to the police. I went to see them,’ she added.

  ‘So you know that that was why he crashed.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It was,’ he insisted.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said formally.

  ‘Well, then –’

  ‘Well, then,’ she replied. She didn’t move and neither did he. Drops of rain trickled down his cheek.

  ‘And I’m no longer involved with anyone,’ he said, grinding out the futile words in spite of the man at Gaby’s side. ‘I wanted to tell you that as well.’

  ‘I see,’ said Gaby.

  ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you. It was ridiculous. Ludicrous!’ he added, with self-loathing.

  ‘We were just going to the laundrette,’ said Gaby, and Connor noticed the man beside her was carrying two large plastic bags, which, he could see now, were stuffed with sheets. Dirty sheets. He felt bile in his throat. ‘Do you want to come with us?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He almost spat the words at her. ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘This is Stefan, by the way,’ said Gaby. ‘Stefan, Connor.’

  Stefan. Of course. Connor nodded brusquely, trying to snarl his lips in an approximation of a smile, although he knew he was fooling no one.

  ‘Stefan’s my youngest brother,’ said Gaby. ‘Well, he’s older than me, but he’s the youngest of my older brothers. He’s staying for the weekend.’

  ‘Your brother,’ said Connor. ‘Oh!’

  ‘Hello,’ said Stefan, shyly, putting the plastic bags on the pavement and holding out a large hand. Connor was suffused with a warm affection for him. He shook Stefan’s hand vigorously, for too long.

  ‘And this,’ Gaby added, as a young woman joined them on the pavement, ‘this is my dearest friend Nancy. She’s here with Stefan. Or, rather, Stefan is here with her.’

  ‘Nancy,’ said Connor. ‘Stefan and Nancy.’ He beamed at them both, his cheeks flushed with foolishness and joy, and they smiled kindly back at him, Stefan’s arm draped loosely round Nancy’s shoulders. ‘Gaby?’ Connor said
, turning back to her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I come to the laundrette after all?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. But you’re wet through – how long have you been out here?’

  Connor opened his mouth to say he’d been passing and happened to see her, then swallowed the words. He was sick of the subterfuge and the self-control of his life. He wanted to bare his soul before her, begin afresh. ‘Three and a half hours,’ he said.

  ‘Three and a half hours?’

  Connor felt utterly exhausted with desire, and could barely stand upright. His flesh ached and his heart was a violent bruise. All he wanted was to hold her and be held. Nothing else mattered any more.

  ‘A woman could fall in love with you,’ said Gaby. ‘Here, carry this bag.’

  ‘Gaby, I have to tell you that –’

  ‘Later. Tell me later.’ For one tormenting moment, she laid a hand softly against his hectic cheek and smiled at him at last. ‘We have lots of time.’

  Two

  She found the A4, spiral-bound, lined notebook inside a sequined pink bag that Sonia had loved many years ago when she was little. It was pushed to the back of the wardrobe, along with neatly paired shoes, a coiled-up belt with an ornate buckle that she couldn’t remember having seen before, a sewing-box, a dress that had slipped from its hanger, a box of old school books and GCSE course-work, a couple of paperbacks (Tess of the D’Urbervilles and a dog-eared Agatha Christie omnibus) and a black bin bag packed with clothes Sonia had grown out of but couldn’t bear to throw or give away. It was clearly hidden, not meant to be found, let alone read. She was an honest woman; she prided herself on being trustworthy and even felt a bit guilty when she snuck a glance at postcards friends had left lying around on their kitchen table. Nevertheless, she found herself pulling the notebook out of the bag. Knowing that she shouldn’t, she opened it. The writing, in blue ink, was round, neat, familiar. The date was at the top – 1 September 2005 – and underlined.

  It’s three in the morning, muggy and warm, and I’m writing this to you although I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what to call you because you don’t have a face or a name. You could be anyone at all, and for as long as I can remember that has scared me. Really scared me – not like the kind of nervousness I get before exams, when I have to take deep breaths to clear the tightness in my chest. More like the fear I feel in nightmares, black waves coiling over me, and even after I have lurched awake and know it was all a dream, it takes time for the fear to lift. Ominous, that’s the word. I can feel it all day, like a great black monster on my back. I mean, what if you turn out to be – oh, I don’t know – weird in some way? What if something’s wrong with you? What if I hate you or you hate me? There’s a thought experiment we all did once, when we had to try to make ourselves not think of something and of course we couldn’t. If you try not to think of something, that’s what you’re thinking of. I’m trying not to think about you. I think about you all the time. I’m always looking around me and wondering, Is that you? The one in that coat, the one with the dog, the small one with a shuffling walk, the old one, the rich one, the poor one, the beggar in the town centre whose buttons are all undone and whose hand is outstretched and whose red face is a mixture of humility and hatred, the unhinged one who’s shouting at the whole world and nobody wants to look at because it’s as if they’ll be cursed; the one who meets my eye and smiles, or doesn’t smile, who looks away … Even writing this, my mouth goes dry and my heart beats a bit faster.

  And I don’t even know why I’m writing to you. Well, I guess I talk to you often enough in my head. Other people talk to their cat or their hamster or something. My friend Goldie talks to her fish, for goodness’ sake, I’ve seen her do it. She presses her face against the bowl, so her eyes go goggly, and mutters things. Mad. I have a dog – he’s a golden retriever, George, and I’ve had him since I was six so he’s pretty old now; he lies in the porch and farts a lot, and whenever I go near him, even if his eyes are closed, he thumps his tail on the floor-and I have been known to talk to him when I’ve felt that no one else in the world understands me. But mostly I talk to you. I have to warn you, what I say isn’t always very loving. Lots of times, I’ve told you I hate you. Can you hate someone you don’t know?

  We had this teacher in year eleven, who took us for life skills. Mrs Sadler. She was short and dumpy and always wore skirts just below her knees, and cardigans; she left last term because she had cancer and I don’t know if she’s going to be all right or not. She did all the required stuff - you know, about sex and taking proper precautions and about being in a caring relationship and about being able to say no and having self-esteem; or about drugs and how smoking’s the most dangerous drug of all and how you don’t need to follow the group. Blah-blah. And after all that, or alongside it, I guess, we had these discussions in class. I don’t know why it happened, but people really talked about what they felt about things in a way I’d never heard them do before. Even ones I thought I knew quite well, or boys who thought that talking about emotions was sissy. You know, it was quite touching - the boys with their number-one haircuts and their tattoos and their swagger, or the girls with sideways ponytails and fake nails and bottles of vodka in their schoolbags who call you ‘boffin’ and ‘sad’ if you read anything except stupid magazines, or anyone who’d been having sex since they were thirteen – and you realized they were quite like you, after all, not just hard and indifferent but worried about things, with troubles at home and trying to cover it all up.

  So there was this one week – we were probably discussing peer-group pressure or something – when we were talking about the need to know who you are and to be strong and confident in that. It started off with Mrs Sadler saying it was dangerous to try to impress people by pretending to be someone you weren’t, and it didn’t work anyway. It was better to be yourself, and people would respect that in the end. But Theresa suddenly said, ‘What if you hate who you are?’ Everyone knew she’d been cutting herself with the blade of her pencil-sharpener. Then clever-clogs Alex butted in and said that he didn’t think there was a real ‘you’ – you were just made up of everything that had happened to you in your life, and you could decide who you wanted to be – and Lee said no, he thought you were born the way you were and you couldn’t change that. You were stuck with yourself and that was that. It sounds a bit obvious when I write it down, but it didn’t feel like that at the time.

  I remember I started to feel all strange and agitated. I put up my hand to say something, and everyone turned towards me. And I burst into tears. It wasn’t silent, graceful tears, the way they have in soppy films, that trickle down your cheeks and don’t change the way you look – oh, no. Great, gulpy, snotty, noisy, ugly crying. I knew my eyes were swollen, my nose was red, my skin was all blotchy. I felt as if my chest was trying to come up my throat and my whole body was shaking. It was like I was turning inside out, all the raw, pulpy bits of myself I keep hidden coming to the surface. But I couldn’t stop. I cried for ages. Mrs Sadler told Goldie to take me to the medical room where I lay down on the bed and sobbed even more while people fussed round me and someone said I was probably on my period. I think I was as well. No one knew what to say to me afterwards. I don’t think I’d ever cried at school before, even though I’ve been there since I was eleven. I’m just not like that. (I’m the boffin, remember.) Afterwards, I felt completely drained. I could hardly move. And I didn’t know where it had come from, all that grief.

  Anyway, so the point is that next week is my birthday: 6 September. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this down rather than saying it in my head. I’m going to be eighteen. Eighteen years old. Officially an adult, though I don’t feel it. Then I can drink (I already drink). Go to any film (I already do that as well). Get married without my parents’ permission (I’m not about to do that, I promise; I don’t see any reason why I should ever marry). Get into debt. Gamble. Vote (the Green Party, I think, though I’ll have to wait and se
e). I’m already old enough to join the army and kill someone. But on the day I turn eighteen, I’ll start school again for my final year. That doesn’t seem so exciting, does it?

  But Mum and Dad are throwing a party for me in the hall down the road at the weekend. They insisted, and kept going on about what a big day it is and how I deserve it to be properly marked, and I don’t dare tell them I’m kind of dreading it. I’m not very good at big parties anyway, and at my own I’ll feel responsible for everyone and worry if it’s going OK, and what if lots of gatecrashers come and throw bottles around? I would have preferred to go out with a few friends, something more intimate. Or just with Alex for a meal.

  They’re right, it is a big day. Not in the way that they mean, though – or maybe that is what they mean, deep down, but they can’t bring themselves to say it out loud. We don’t talk about it. We talk about everything else instead, so many words to cover up what’s not being said. Sometimes I think one of us is going to mention it – my heart starts thudding away in my chest and my mouth gets all parched – and then the moment passes.

  Mrs Sadler would say I should talk about it and I know she’s right. She would say that things are less scary when you talk about them and I know that’s right too. I don’t know if it counts, writing this letter to you. It’s more like a diary, anyway. I’m kind of talking to myself by talking to someone else.