A Year and a Day

by Isabelle Broom

  Now it was almost as if Annette had turned to stone, trapped under the weight of her anger, and there was nothing Hope could do to save her.

  ‘Smile!’ Charlie called out, snapping Hope out of Narnia and back into the present.

  She was holding up the queue, she realised, pulling herself together and making a silly face for the camera.

  ‘Enough!’ she said, getting to her feet and letting an older Swedish woman take her place.

  Charlie showed her the photos and she groaned. They were absolutely frightful.

  ‘Delete those right away, you naughty man,’ she said, trying and failing to snatch his phone out of his hands. As she did so, it started ringing loudly and he pulled it away out of reach.

  ‘Ow.’ She rubbed her fingers.

  ‘Sorry, love.’ He reached for her absently, still holding his phone at arm’s-length. ‘I have to take this.’

  She watched as he darted off and vanished into the crowd. Being secretive wasn’t like Charlie at all, and Hope felt herself shrinking inwards on the spot. Who could be calling to make him scarper off like this? He wouldn’t have answered if it was just a customer – she’d watched him ignore a few work-related calls since they’d arrived. The idea of it being another woman was so absurd that Hope almost laughed, but then she remembered the circumstances that had led to them being here together in the first place. Although she’d been cheating on Dave, neither she nor Charlie had ever brought up what would happen if they got caught, or if she would leave her husband. It had happened out of the blue, and now Charlie was stuck with her – he was doing the honourable thing because she’d been kicked out. There was so much that she still didn’t know about him.

  As she stood mulling this over and gazing up at one of the city’s many clocks, Charlie reappeared, a wide smile on his face and two takeaway cups in his hands.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ He balanced the cups on top of a blue postbox and scooped her into his arms.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ he said, hugging her tighter.

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said against his chest, feeling him tense up a fraction.

  ‘Oh, that? It was just some business to do with the flat, nothing you need to worry about.’

  ‘The flat?’ She wanted to believe him, he’d given her no real reason not to.

  ‘I wanted to get it valued,’ he told her. ‘I figured we’d be needing a bit more room, and—’

  He didn’t get to say anything else, because Hope had grabbed his face and was kissing him harder and with more passion than she ever had before, and when she eventually let him go he looked bewildered.

  ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I just …’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’ Charlie picked up the cups and handed one to her before taking her spare hand. ‘I thought we could drink these hot chocolates while we walked, but now I’m thinking they’d taste much better back at the hotel.’

  Hope nodded, feeling a tug of longing. She needed to connect with him again and chase these dark thoughts from her mind.

  ‘Let’s go and find out.’

  18

  The gargoyle glared down from its perch on the cathedral roof, its body and face contorted with discomfort. The water that usually poured down from the spires and out through its open mouth had frozen, adorning the gaping monster with a jagged flat tongue of ice which sparkled pleasantly in the faint afternoon sunshine.

  Sophie knew that the gargoyles were designed to protect the cathedral from evil spirits, which was why they had to look so terrifying, but she found the various creatures more amusing than alarming. In fact, over the years she’d grown quite fond of them.

  ‘Just like looking in a mirror, Bug,’ Robin would have quipped if he were here. His absence was starting to feel like an ache, and Sophie glanced up to the cathedral clock, willing the hands to move around faster. Why was it that when you wanted time to pass by in a blur, it always seemed to slow to a crawl? And the reverse was also true – standing here now looking up into the vacant eyes of the scowling stone creatures above her, Sophie felt as if every other moment before had rushed away from her. She wished that she could reach back into the past and grab her memories with both hands, lay them out flat and safe somewhere, like dried flowers in a press, so she could return to them whenever she chose.

  As if on cue, the city clocks started to strike, almost as if they were mocking her silly fantasy. There was no escaping the fact that time was beating on, they seemed to chime. It was one thing you could never get away from in this city – the sense of time passing. From pretty much every part of Prague, you could see a clock. They were everywhere – not just on the churches, monasteries and more official buildings, but also on the front of shops, at the top of poles and on the walls of every household that had its curtains pulled aside. Sophie was sure that if she closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough, she would be able to hear the ticking.

  There was a large crowd of tourists waiting to enter the cathedral, so Sophie stood back and waited while they filed in one behind the other. A small boy in a bright-green hat was dragging his feet, imploring his mother in a language that Sophie couldn’t understand. If she’d had to hazard a guess, though, it would be that he was bored, that he’d seen the inside of enough churches and cathedrals to last his whole life and could they go somewhere a bit more fun, please? She watched the mother bend down and whisper something in her son’s ear, only for him to gaze up at the roof in awe. The gargoyles had won a new fan.

  Sophie’s parents had often told her that she was a horror as a child. Not so much badly behaved as inquisitive and fiercely independent, which meant she thought nothing of running off to take a closer look at something or begin a game, without telling her mum and dad where she was going. She used to find their exasperation bewildering, until she met Robin. Now she understood completely how frustrating it could be when the person you cared about more than any other thought nothing of vanishing for hours at a time. But just as her parents had discovered time and again, trying to tell someone off for simply doing what they want is never an easy task.

  ‘I’m going to kill him!’ Sophie had raged to her mum the last time Robin had disappeared off on one of his ‘walkabouts’, as he liked to call them. What was endearing in a film about an Australian man who wrestles crocodiles did not translate into real life, when your boyfriend hadn’t been seen or heard from for eight hours and had switched off his phone.

  ‘He’ll turn up soon,’ Sophie’s mum soothed. ‘He always does.’

  ‘I just don’t understand why he does this,’ she moaned, accepting the mug of tea her dad had just made for her and kicking the leg of the kitchen table in irritation.

  ‘It’s not the table’s fault,’ her mum pointed out, which wasn’t helpful.

  ‘He makes me feel like a nag, and I’m not!’ Sophie went on. ‘I don’t care if he wants to go off and do his own thing – I just like to know that he’s okay.’

  ‘I understand, darling,’ her mum said, pulling her best sympathetic face as she knelt down on the floor to empty the washing machine. ‘But unfortunately you can’t change people. If you try to, you’ll only end up pushing them away.’

  ‘I don’t want him to change, I just want him to send me a bloody text.’ Sophie was aware that she was repeating herself. It wasn’t the first time that Robin had done this, and every time it happened they ended up having the same silly debate, and her poor parents ended up hearing the same complaints from her. She didn’t know why she let it wind her up so much, because she also knew that as soon as he came back, his camera loaded with photos that he’d taken on his solitary adventure and a look of exhilarated contentment on his face, she would forgive him instantly.

  ‘Why don’t you go out on your own walkabout?’ her dad suggested. ‘You used to do it all the time when you were little. It drove me and your mother half-mad.’

  ‘I’ve grown up,’ she pointed out sulkily. ‘And I wish Robin would, too.’

  The trut
h was, Sophie had never been able to bear being away from Robin for long – not since that very first day on the snowy bridge. It wasn’t that she hated his independent streak, more that she cherished every second that she spent with him.

  ‘Are you in the queue?’

  Sophie was distracted from her thoughts by the question, turning to find an elderly couple peering at her, their gnarled hands clasped together and a dash of colour in their cheeks. She hadn’t realised that she’d come to an abrupt standstill outside the cathedral entrance, and shook her head to clear it.

  ‘You go ahead,’ she told them, smiling as she stepped to one side. She loved seeing old couples together, so in tune with one another that they were almost more like a single person than two separate entities. Growing old together was an expression she’d never really appreciated when she was younger, but now she understood it completely. She wanted to be by Robin’s side when the first grey hairs stole through on his temples, and when the skin on his eyelids sagged with the weight of time passing. She wanted to run her fingers across the lines that appeared on his face, watch his skin begin to droop under his chin and his veins stand up to attention on the back of his hands. She wanted to be the one who could look into his eyes even when they were misted with age, and still see the sparkle beneath the milky surface. It was all she wanted, just to always be with him.

  When she finally shuffled forward through the slush and made her way into the cavernous cathedral, the large crowd of tourists had long since vanished, and she stood for a time in the entrance chamber, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the muted darkness. On either side, stained-glass windows stretched high above her towards the Gothic vaulted ceiling, each one a riot of colour, resplendent against the surrounding stone walls.

  Sophie had a sudden recollection of when she’d made her own stained-glass window from coloured strips of plastic at primary school. She tried to walk right back into the memory now and feel the scissors in her hands, smell the glue and remember how the slippery plastic had felt between her fingers, but of course she couldn’t. The passing of time had placed layer after layer of new memories on top of that one, and it was now nothing more than a smudge of colour in her mind. Sophie wondered why it was that the mind dug these snippets out from time to time only to snatch them away again. She’d talked about it to Robin often, but he’d just patted her head and told her she was crazy.

  ‘I think there’s only so much room in there,’ he said, tapping the side of his head. ‘I think you need to accept that some memories aren’t really worth saving.’

  ‘But what if you forget the ones you want to save?’ she pressed.

  ‘Silly Bug.’ He kissed the end of her nose. ‘I don’t think it works like that. The ones you like the most – the really good memories, like your wedding day, or, say, the day you first saw me.’ He gave her a cheeky look. ‘Those are the ones you can always call up. But what you had for dinner on a random Thursday night in October ten years ago isn’t all that important, so you don’t need to remember it anyway.’

  Sophie stared at the stained-glass windows in the cathedral until her eyes started to sting, wondering if by standing here now she was pushing out an old, treasured memory to make room for this new one. It scared her to think that one day in the future, she might not be able to remember every little detail of the things that had mattered the most to her. She wished there was a way to store them, emotions and all, in a jar, and then she could screw the lid on tight and peer at them through the glass.

  She watched as the little old couple she’d spoken to outside made their slow way up towards the centre of the cathedral. She had been in here many times now, but today she had a goal in mind. There was something in here that she wanted to see. More than that, she needed to see it.

  Sophie padded quietly past the pulpit and carried on around the corner until she could see what she was looking for – her whole reason for making the journey up here. The silver looked almost golden in this light, gleaming with unapologetic pride in its dingy setting. There was a rope around the base – a gentle reminder to visitors that this was not something they were permitted to touch – but Sophie almost gave in to the urge she had to cross that threshold. She settled instead for kneeling on the cold, hard floor in front of it, so close to the thick velvet rope that she could smell the mustiness of age clinging to its fibres. She closed her eyes and concentrated on what she was feeling, for once content to sweep away a space in her mind to make way for this new moment.

  It was cold in the cathedral, but as she knelt there, her gloved hands resting in her lap and Robin’s tatty old hat pulled down so far that it almost covered her still-closed eyes, Sophie felt a brilliant warmth steal its way through her.

  19

  ‘Ah, to have legs this long and thin.’

  Megan turned to Ollie and they both looked back at her reflection in the warped glass, pausing to pull faces at one another before collapsing into laughter. Ollie took a step to the left, and immediately one half of his face grew huge and stretched in the mirrored wall, his mouth an enormous, bloated strawberry and his nose a giant aubergine. Megan giggled and fell into him, only for her reflected chin to be sucked suddenly downwards until it reached her toes.

  ‘This was a great idea of yours,’ she told him when she had regained the power of speech. She much preferred this final room of the Mirror Maze, with its funny, distorting glass, to the labyrinth of regular mirrored passageways that they’d had to navigate to get here. It was just wrong that a girl should be able to see her face and her bottom at the same time – and from at least five different angles at once. Especially when it was a bottom as unwieldy as hers.

  ‘Don’t thank me – this was all that old couple’s idea,’ Ollie told her, stepping backward and forward so he could watch his face bend and twist.

  ‘Still,’ she grinned at him with hugely enlarged teeth, ‘I’m glad you nagged me into it. Now I get to laugh at you in here and have you buy me dinner later – sweet deal.’

  ‘I would have bought you dinner anyway,’ he said, nudging her forward until her legs vanished completely in the glass and her shrunken little body floated just above her boots.

  There was a group of young children in the long, rectangular-shaped room with them, all squealing with delight at their reflections. Megan watched Ollie as he turned to look at them, affection and amusement written on his face as he listened to their happy shouts. Her camera was resting on her chest, the wide canvas strap around her neck, and she surreptitiously removed the lens cap.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever have any kids?’ Ollie asked, not looking at her but at the giggling children. They were now doing some sort of strange dance in front of one of the mirrors, and a few of the younger ones were literally doubled over laughing at their classmates.

  Megan took her finger off the shutter release button and sighed. It wasn’t the first time Ollie had asked her this question, and he already knew the answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she told him truthfully, just as she had the other times he’d asked. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to have any children, it was just that she hadn’t ever really given the idea that much consideration. The thing she had always wanted was to take photos, that was all she had really cared about for as long as she could remember. And anyway, she had plenty of time yet before she had to worry about kids.

  ‘I know you want them,’ she added, leaning against a pillar as the group of children were called away by their teacher and began filing out of the room in neat pairs. ‘I bet you want a whole football team.’

  ‘Nah.’ Ollie shook his head slowly as he turned back to face her. ‘I reckon two would be enough – a girl and a boy, ideally.’

  ‘You’d have to name the girl Megan, obviously,’ she told him. Ollie didn’t respond, but Megan was sure she heard him mutter something under his breath.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked, twisting around so she could talk to him in the mirror. The one they were both facing made their m
iddles stretch outwards, as if someone had trodden downwards on their heads and squashed them.

  Ollie waited until their eyes met before he replied, taking a deep breath and rubbing his hair away from his face.

  ‘What would you say if I told you I’d met someone?’

  Megan’s stomach lurched lower than it had in the warped glass.

  ‘Have you?’

  Ollie screwed up his face a fraction. ‘No, but that’s not the point.’

  ‘What is the point, then?’ she asked, genuinely mystified.

  ‘I just mean, would you mind? We spend a lot of time together, and if I had a girlfriend then I imagine that would have to change.’

  Megan considered this for a moment. The idea of Ollie with a girlfriend was unsettling, and she didn’t want to dwell on the reasons why.

  ‘I’d be fine with it,’ she told him, stepping forward until she was only a few inches from the glass wall and could no longer see his expression. ‘You’re my friend, Ollie – I want you to be happy.’

  ‘Did you ever …?’ he began, and she turned again to look at him.

  ‘Ever what?’

  ‘Ever think about what would have happened if we had, you know?’

  She did know. She’d allowed herself to imagine it many times over the past six months, but she also knew why it couldn’t happen. Why they couldn’t happen.

  She hadn’t meant to sigh, and flinched when she saw the immediate hurt reflected in Ollie’s eyes. As he went to turn away from her, she reached across and caught his arm.