The Moment You Were Gone

by Nicci Gerrard

  If his father was here, he thought, tapping ash with a hiss into one of the mugs, he would be putting everything away at once, finding a place for all of Ethan’s possessions, trying to turn the room into another home. He could imagine his frowning, concentrated face; the precision with which he organized things. He could be very purposeful, his father, like many of the adults Ethan knew. He strode through his days as if they were a road that led to a known destination and he mustn’t turn aside or let himself be delayed. But Ethan liked the sense he had now of floating in the currents of this day, sitting in a heap in the warm room and having no idea of where he should be heading and no particular desire to head anywhere. He could find a bar and stay there until it closed, nursing a beer and listening to other people’s conversation; he could take a bath; he could knock on one of the doors in this corridor of identical rooms and make a gesture towards friendship; he could cook a meal at midnight, smoke a joint, cycle round the city with the map Gaby had pushed into the side pocket of his backpack, go to sleep in this small, warm space, sitting on the carpet with his knees up in a bridge, and only rise as it got dark. Anything was possible.

  He lit another cigarette, drew the smoke into his lungs, let it out in a dissipating bluish cloud. He thought of his mother’s face as she left, screwed up in an effort to be cheerful. Then he reached over and took the pack of playing cards out of his backpack. He dealt columns and started to play patience, as his father had taught him many years ago. He must have played it hundreds, thousands, of times. He’d played it incessantly through GCSEs and A levels – for luck, as an omen, a ritual of superstitious distraction. Before each exam, he’d have to get all his cards out. And then there were those grey Sunday afternoons; those rainy camping holidays in Scotland and Wales. Fish with flabby, salted chips, damp clothes, and inside the humid tent, the cards tipping on the rucked sleeping-bag. He laid out seven more cards, liking the plasticky snap they made. Once he’d got out in a game, he told himself, he would do something. He’d go and knock on doors, meet neighbours, phone friends in other halls of residence. When the cards told him.

  At last Gaby stood up, paid for the coffee and pastry, pulled on her jacket and left the café. Outside, the sky had darkened and it was trying to rain. A few large drops landed on her cheek and hair. Turning back on to the main street, she quickened her pace and headed for the station. She’d have time before the 16.22 arrived to buy a magazine or book, and she’d settle down in a window seat, drink brown tea, go home. It made her feel dreary, the thought of returning to her old life, as if nothing had happened. She pictured Ethan’s dark, stripped room, fluff balls in the corner and dead flies on the windowsill, bare spaces along the shelves, and silence thick in the room, like an odour. She had insisted that Connor should go on his long-planned sailing trip, yet now she knew that he should have been there to mark this event. After so many years they were a couple living on their own again. They should have said goodbye to their son together, then taken a wild walk or gone swimming in the sea, got drunk, been undignified, booked into a hotel for sex, got on to a plane that would take them away to an unknown destination. Anything, rather than a dutiful return, back in time for a glass of wine and an early night.

  She bought a single ticket to London, Paddington. She gazed round her, but nothing made sense and the crowds and bright lights wavered in her vision. Putting her fingers to her cheeks, she found she was weeping. The tears slid down her face in sheets, her throat ached, her heart was heavy. And then, over the loudspeaker, she heard an announcement: the 16.18 was due to arrive on platform two, calling at Plymouth, Liskeard, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, St Erth and Penzance.

  For a moment she stood, at a loss, while passengers flowed past her in both directions. Then, clutching her one-way second-class ticket to London, she went towards the train that would take her in the opposite direction, and sat down in the empty first-class carriage. She held her breath and pressed her nose to the window. Small rivulets ran down the glass; outside, figures wavered in the strengthening rain. She felt the engine vibrate and the people on the platform fell away as the train began to move towards Cornwall, slowly at first but soon picking up speed.

  Sitting back in her capacious, illegal seat, she looked past her own fugitive reflection in the streaming window, out on to the sodden patchwork green of the countryside that flooded by under the leaking grey sky. In the incessant rain, it resembled an Impressionist painting, all smudged colour and light, like a landscape inside her head. A tremble ran through her, whether of happiness or sorrow she could not tell, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was her younger self she was looking at in the vague mirror of the window – the one she thought she had left behind, but who had been waiting for her to return. The train shuddered on, carrying her back into her past.

  Four

  It was Connor’s watch. Stefan slept down below, wrapped in an old tartan blanket with his feet sticking out and one large hand curled round the side of his face, as if he was comforting himself. Every so often he flinched, shifted, half woke. The sea was quite calm tonight, the moderate waves lifting and dropping the boat, up-up and down again in a lethargic waltz. Even in sleep, Stefan could feel how the boat tugged forward with the wind, then went slack before picking up momentum once more. It was a rhythm he loved and tried to store in his body: the asymmetrical rise and fall while the water slapped against the bows and vibrated almost imperceptibly under the keel. The old wooden boat creaked.

  It was the eighth year running that the two men had made the trip together. In the summer, after the university term had ended and Stefan was free, they sailed his small yacht to France. Connor would then return home, and Stefan would spend his holiday there, sailing into small ports and harbours, or simply pottering about. Sometimes a friend would join him, more often he preferred to be alone with his books, his thoughts, the salty wind in his face and the spray stinging off the waves. Then, in the autumn when the academic term was about to begin, Connor would fly out and they would sail back across the Channel, to the berth near Southampton.

  As he felt himself falling back into sleep, he heard, far off, the muffled boom of a foghorn – too distant to worry about. Anyway, Connor was on deck. Stefan could imagine him sitting at the stern in his oilskin, one hand resting on the tiller, his eyes narrowed as he watched the compass, the horizon and the taut belly of the sail. They’d be all right tonight. He turned on his back, laid a forearm against his eyes, was pulled down into his dreams.

  The boat bucked up against a steep wave, then shuddered into its valley. Connor felt it tug against the tiller. The wind was strengthening. Without looking at what he was doing, he poured coffee from the flask into the pewter mug, then shook a cigarette out of its packet. He put it into his mouth and, with one practised hand, struck a match. Gaby thought he’d given up, but for the few days each year when he was at sea with Stefan, he liked to smoke. Especially when he was alone on deck at night and all around him, in every direction, its edges bleeding into the sky, was the sea. There were times on the watch when he felt as if he was hallucinating, the world topsy turvy and terrifying. The waves crested and tipped in a kaleidoscope of snow-capped mountains and craters, while the sky was a dark and watery ocean rushing above him. The liquid, shifting landscape seemed to flood into his brain, and his sense of who he was dissipated and dissolved. If he let himself go, it would be like dying. Then he had to blink, gulp the harsh coffee, light another cigarette and drag himself back to the precision and solidity of the present.

  ‘Connor Myers,’ he said aloud. ‘Forty-four years old. Doctor. Husband. Father.’ Was that all? His life was an infinitesimal speck, tossed on the ocean.

  But usually what he felt in these lonely stretches was the kind of clarity and contentment that he rarely achieved in his daily life. He lived so pressed up against the obligations of each day (seeing patients, hearing stories that made him feel helpless, all the increasing bureaucracy of the job, domestic chores, family
crises). Only here, suspended between earth and sky with the cry of the terns and shearwaters rinsing through his mind, could he see himself whole and clear. He knew he was a taciturn man, often filled with a sudden, powerful anger, which he concealed under a tense impatience. He hated to lose control. He hated untidiness, disorder, things not going according to plan. He wasn’t very good at taking pleasure in the small moments of life. He wasn’t good, he admitted to himself, at being happy, although he could do grief exceptionally well. Ethan had once accused him of despising happiness, and although he’d denied it at the time, he knew it was partly true. Happiness often seemed to him to be a kind of laziness, a moral apathy or blindness. But maybe, he thought now, as he sat on the deck and watched the nose of the boat pushing into the water, then snouting up again, maybe what he really felt was that he had not earned the right to happiness and that he had not deserved his luck: not his beautiful, joyful wife, or his raw, romantic son who, even now, was leaving home.

  If he had said such a thing to Gaby, she would have laughed and put her arms round him and told him he was a self-punishing, guilt-ridden, ridiculous Puritan and that it didn’t work like that. He could imagine her so clearly that, for a second or two, it was as if she were with him on the boat; he saw the way she’d stand to absorb the motion of the waves, her hands on her hips, legs apart, hair tangled in the wind. She was good at being happy. She treated small moments as gifts and was grateful.

  Yet it was wrong to reduce Gaby to ‘happy’, as if she was an unstained child who had not yet acquired all of the messy, furtive and ambivalent self-consciousness of an adult. She’d had her share of misery. After Ethan had been born – to Connor’s shock and her own shame – she had plunged into a full-scale, weeping, catatonic post-natal depression that seemed bewilderingly out of character and had taken many months to lift. They rarely talked about it now. But for a moment her weeping, swollen face presented itself to him and he stared at it in the dark, full of tenderness.

  Then, unbidden, another memory rose in him. It was so vivid that it was almost as if he were watching it on a screen. Ethan, who was eight or nine months old, was lying in his carry-cot in the living room, finally asleep after hours of struggle. They were sitting on either side of him, exhausted. There was a half-drunk bottle of wine on the table, and a fire in the grate, so it must have been winter-time. It was dark outside. Connor could see the reflection of the flames dancing in the window-panes. He watched himself get up and close the curtains. ‘He’s out for the count,’ he said. ‘Little bugger.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she said, sighing and sinking back in the sofa. ‘I was about to suggest brandy in the milk. Sometimes I think I’m not cut out for motherhood.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say that! Don’t. After everything you’ve gone through – well, you’re a hero.’

  ‘A hero?’ A splutter of laughter came from her.

  ‘Heroine.’

  ‘Hero’s better.’

  He looked down at her, smiling. ‘Hero.’

  They stared at each other, the smile fading from his face, replaced by confusion. ‘You look all in,’ she said softly.

  ‘I am. Done in.’

  As if the strength had run out of him, he sank to his knees in front of her and put his head in her lap. She ran her slender fingers through his hair. Neither spoke, and it was in silence that he lifted his head and kissed her blindly, pushing her back against the sofa and clambering after her; in silence that she undid the buckle of his belt and that he pulled up her skirt. They clung together like drowning people, each trying to save the other, pull the other under.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said, into the soft hollow of her neck.

  ‘Sssh. Quiet now. Don’t you go and wake Ethan.’

  But Ethan had been fast asleep, his hands curled into small fists and his breath deep and even. There had been a quivering behind his eyelids to show that he was dreaming.

  Connor blinked and shook his head. The images receded; he was looking out at the moon, broken up in the choppy landscape of the sea once more, a tiller in his hand and the main sheet coiled neatly at his feet. The wind freshened and the boat leapt forward. Connor felt the wind cool against his face. It was still many hours before dawn – that barely perceptible lightening on the horizon. Then he heard Stefan’s old alarm clock give its tinny rattle, and Stefan’s groan. Soon enough the sun would be up, and they would see other boats dotted around them. Soon he would be home.

  Five

  The notebook was no longer in the sequined pink bag. She bent inside the wardrobe and rooted around among the discarded clothes and shoes. It wasn’t there, or in the chest of drawers, among the underwear or the T-shirts. She lifted up the mattress – that was where boys were supposed to hide pornography, wasn’t it? – and looked under the bed, but all she found there was a sock. Then she looked in the schoolbag – a scruffy grey backpack, with writing in felt tip scrawled all over its fabric, torn along one seam – and that was where she found it, sandwiched between the physics textbook and the one for higher maths.

  21 September 2005

  Anyway, I suppose I should tell you something about myself. There’s all the obvious boring stuff, and you know some of that already. I’m eighteen. I do well at school, mainly because I work hard (they’ve always called me boffin at school, and it used to make me a bit miserable, but then I decided to take it as a compliment and now it kind of has become one. I guess Mrs Sadler would see a moral in that: be true to yourself blah-blah). I am doing A levels in maths, chemistry and physics, and Mum and Dad think I ought to study medicine but, really, I want to be a scientist. Genetics, maybe. Who knows? I love books – I wanted to do English as well as science, but in the end I had to give something up. I swim for the school and for the last two years I’ve competed in the national trials. My best stroke is crawl, and I’m quite good at butterfly as well. I love swimming. It’s the closest you get to flying. Sometimes I think I’m most like myself when I’m in the water. There we are – back to the idea of a ‘self’ again. I take lots of photographs and perhaps there’s a particular reason for this, but that’s another story. (Mum and Dad gave me a really good digital camera for my birthday.)

  OK. What else? My closest friend is called Goldie – that’s not really her name, of course. Her name is Emma Locks, but because she’s got this rippling golden-blonde hair everyone called her Goldilocks, then just Goldie and it stuck. Most people don’t even know her real name any more. We met each other when we were five; she’s almost like my sister now, except we don’t quarrel. I’ve got a boyfriend called Alex. He’s clever and ironic and dry, and half the time nobody understands a word he’s saying. Maybe it sounds strange to say this but I’ve always thought he’ll be the one to finish it between us. One day he’ll wander off and forget to tell me he’s gone.

  Maybe I like him precisely because he’s a bit strange and you can’t explain him even to yourself or pin him down. He eats raw chillies at lunchtime.

  None of this says that much about me, though, does it? I could be anyone at all. We did an exercise in creative writing at school once. We had to write a hate-list and a love-list. I can’t remember what I put, but I’m going to do another for you, and try to be honest.

  I hate: sand between my toes, tomato ketchup, rats, pebble-dashing, animal liberationists, thongs, cooked apples, itchy jumpers, supermarkets, hair sprouting out of noses and ears, designer labels on the outside of clothes, those wristbands with slogans on them that make you feel like you’re doing something to help the world simply by wearing them, people who think they’re radicals because they’re wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, fat African dictators in white suits who live in grand palaces and eat caviar while their country burns and starves, people using foreign words in their sentences to impress you, spittle at the corner of mouths, Christmas-tree lights that are all tangled up, drizzly Sunday afternoons, waiting for someone, those envelopes with grey fluff inside, golf, windscreen wipers on dry windows, the word ‘minging�
�� (and ‘manky’ and ‘pikey’ and ‘scum’), hair in food, dog shit on the pavement outside my front door, November and February, theme parks, recorded advertisements on the telephone, bank statements, tepid baths, politicians looking sad during two-minute silences, arguments about whether Darwin was right, feeling jealous of friends, patchouli oil, chewing-gum (being chewed, or stuck under tables and seats), the soft-mushy sound people make when they eat a banana, party political broadcasts, trifle, the lottery, being told it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, being told to ‘cheer up, it may never happen’, being told that I’ll change my mind when I get older, the smell of beer, sweet popcorn, strawberry creams, plasters in swimming-pools, asterisks replacing swear words, instruction manuals, new-year resolutions, my socks slipping down inside wellington boots, waking up and not knowing where I am, when I don’t get the joke but laugh anyway, ulcers, Monopoly, the sound I used to make on the violin before I gave it up, white chocolate that sticks to the roof of your mouth, people claiming that climate change is still unproven, music in lifts, peanut butter, someone whispering and thinking they might be whispering about me, worrying about my weight, eggshell in my mouth, toothache …

  I can’t think of anything more right now, although I’m sure I will as soon as I’m not writing this.

  I love: the smell of basil, the smell of coffee being ground, the smell of petrol and nail-varnish remover, clean sheets, hot baths in the winter after I’ve had a really long day, the times when I’m swimming well and I feel strong and supple and just right, getting a simultaneous equation to come out, Keats’s poetry (and John Donne’s and W. H. Auden’s), fish pie, blackcurrant ice-cream, sour apples, the words ‘clunk’ and ‘odd’ and ‘thwart’ and ‘fizzgig’, the skin of baked potatoes, crying in weepy films, notebooks with thick white pages that haven’t been written in yet, getting the giggles with friends, waking up in the dark and looking at the clock and seeing I’ve still got hours to go before I have to get up, May and early June, rock pools, warm evenings, receiving a letter in the post, the smell of grass after it’s rained, thunderstorms, warm rain, weeping willows, firelight, the colour green, Italy, snorkelling, pistachio nuts, bread just out of the oven with lots of butter, cycling downhill (after I’ve gone up it), the sound when you cut through a hank of hair, good teachers, staying up all night and seeing the sun rise, dancing when you get the rhythm right and the music feels like it’s running through your whole body, cherries, the smell of babies, doing cartwheels, mist in the early morning, sharpening pencils, swimming naked, cooking lemon drizzle cake, picking scabs, windy weather, elections, the Olympic Games, bread-and-butter pudding, little white clouds, my room when I’ve tidied it and every single thing is in its proper place, teat pipettes, strangers who smile at you for no reason, big soft towels, the bobbly scar on my index finger where I grabbed on to a barbed-wire fence, white wine, New York (I’ve never been there), owls …