Together Apart

by Natalie K. Martin

  ‘You helped her, then?’

  Peter shrugged. ‘It wasn’t just me. It took a whole network of people, and she still goes to AA meetings. This thing with Sarah is hard on her. She misses a daughter who, for some unknown reason, has turned her back on her family. Nine years is a long time.’

  Adam nodded, but what was he supposed to say? Sarah’s diaries had implied that everything wrong with their family unit was Peter’s fault. In them, Peter was the one who came between Sarah and her mum, grounded her, made her life unbearable and tried to control her, but what he was hearing now was very different.

  ‘I just wish she’d let go.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Everything. I tried to show her another way of dealing with her feelings. That there were people who could help, places she could go to. All this “making her life hell” that she goes on about.’ He shook his head. ‘She was a child becoming an adult, and she needed boundaries, like any other. It was as simple as that. I’d have thought she’d have realised that now, what with her job and all.’

  Adam scratched the back of his neck. It was all at odds with what Sarah had written, and now he didn’t know who or what to believe.

  ‘I understand this is none of your business, really, but you’re her friend, and I’d guess you’re a close one. You seem like a decent lad, and I can tell you care about her. Maybe you can talk some sense into her. All of this animosity, it’s killing her mother, and as nice as it is that she’s come back today, it’s going to affect Caroline, and Sarah’s not going to be the one who has to deal with it all once she’s gone. It’s time for her to let it go.’

  Adam nodded. ‘I understand.’

  Peter smiled, sat back in his armchair and turned the volume of the television up.

  Why did Sarah hate him so much? Was it just on principle because her dad had died and Peter had moved in? Everyone had to deal with teenage angst at some point, but surely it was erring on the side of ridiculous to have kept it up for so long. He could see how Sarah’s view of Peter could be skewed through no fault of his own. He wasn’t stupid. There were always two sides to every story, and he didn’t believe that Peter was totally innocent in what went on between them, but he was beginning to question whether Sarah had taken any responsibility for her part in what had happened.

  He looked again at the pictures hanging on the wall. He couldn’t help but feel for Caroline. How would she cope after they left, wondering whether she’d have to wait another nine years to see her daughter again? Would she start drinking again? No wonder the house felt joyless. He looked up at the ceiling. Sarah might see this as an obligatory visit, but Caroline had been waiting a long time for this. Whatever they were looking at up there, he hoped it would help.

  A few minutes later, he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and Sarah walked back into the living room.

  ‘We should get going,’ Sarah said, putting on her coat.

  ‘Are you sure you can’t stay?’ Caroline asked, wringing her hands together. It reminded him of when Sarah had stood in his room and apologised for the things she’d said about the baby.

  ‘We can’t. We have to get to the cemetery,’ Sarah replied and gestured to Adam.

  Peter and Caroline walked them to the side door, and after saying goodbye, Caroline pulled Sarah into a hug. Adam raised his eyebrows. Sarah was hugging her back. Okay, so it wasn’t a full-on bear hug, but it was an improvement on the one they’d had before, when Sarah had kept her arms firmly by her sides.

  ‘Bye, Peter.’

  The look of surprise on Peter’s face must have mirrored Adam’s. Less than an hour ago, she’d barely even acknowledged him. Adam held open the gate and watched Sarah as she walked through it. Something had definitely changed.

  32.

  Adam put his seatbelt on and looked at Sarah. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied, looking at him with a lopsided smile.

  ‘What’s that?’ He looked down and saw her playing with a piece of string.

  ‘It was Richard’s. He used to wear it as a bracelet. I thought I’d lost it years ago.’ She closed her hand around it and put it in her pocket. ‘It was in the attic with my stuff. Peter found it.’

  He saw the confusion in her face.

  ‘I didn’t even think he noticed that I wore it.’ She looked out of the window. Caroline was standing by the gate.

  ‘He seems nice. They both did,’ Adam replied, looking out at Caroline.

  ‘Nice?’ She looked down at the bracelet again and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to go?’

  ‘I have to. And we have to get back anyway.’

  She put her seatbelt on, and he started the engine. As they drove away, she craned her neck to look at Caroline waving them off until they turned the corner.

  Sarah insisted that they park outside the cemetery. She wasn’t sure exactly where the service would take place and wanted to wait in case she saw people she recognised. They didn’t have to wait for long. Within minutes, a group of cars turned into the cemetery, and when a group of guys on skateboards whizzed past, she stiffened as if someone had stuck a rod against her back. She took Richard’s bracelet from her pocket and held it in her hand as Adam started following the now substantial group of cars and skateboarders.

  It was still raining, and with the radio turned off, all he could hear were car tyres crunching over gravel and the hypnotic sweep of the windscreen wipers. It reminded him of the clock in Caroline’s living room with the pendulum swinging to and fro, like the windscreen wipers were counting down the seconds. Sarah stared straight ahead, playing with Richard’s bracelet, wrapping it around her index finger, unravelling it and starting over again. Adam narrowed his eyes. A little part of him was jealous. It was ridiculous being jealous of a dead person, but he was. The way Sarah had reacted to the news of Richard’s death made it obvious she’d never really got over him, and to make it worse, it wasn’t like they’d split up because they’d fallen out of love. They’d split up because they’d been forced to, and it probably made everything seem that much more rose tinted. For all he knew, she could be sitting next to him, wondering what her life would have been like if Richard hadn’t moved away. She could be wishing the two of them were married by now, with children, living happily ever after.

  ‘Adam,’ Sarah said firmly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said to stop back there.’

  He looked down. He was gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles had turned white.

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

  She looked at him with questioning eyes, and heat prickled the skin under his shirt collar. What was wrong with him? What kind of person felt jealous about a dead person? Ahead of them, the procession had stopped, and people were getting out of their cars.

  It was a mixed crowd with people of all ages, Goths dressed head to toe in black and a group of girls wearing exceptionally bright dresses. The last of the skateboarders arrived, smoothly kicking the backs of their boards before grabbing them and coming to a stop in one fluid motion. It reminded him of a group of skaters he’d seen going up and down along graffiti-coated ramps on the South Bank.

  ‘Just pull up here,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Why? It’s raining and you don’t have an umbrella. It would be better to go up there with everyone else.’

  ‘No, I think I’ll wait,’ she said, twirling the bracelet around her finger.

  Adam looked at the multicoloured crowd gathering on the wet grass. ‘Am I missing something? I thought this is why we came here?’

  ‘I’ll go when I’m ready, Adam. Okay?’

  He raised his eyebrows and stared at her. Would he ever understand her? She’d made such a fuss about coming, but now they were here, she seemed to have changed her mind.

  He looked at the crow
d through the cascading raindrops distorting the image through the window.

  ‘You still love him, don’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Richard.’

  She frowned and shook her head. ‘Why would you say that?’

  He continued to look out of the window and shrugged. ‘He left because he had to, not because he wanted to. I know you still wanted to be with him, and I think you always have ever since.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  The pulse in Adam’s neck throbbed. He couldn’t keep it in for a second longer. ‘I read your diaries.’

  He turned to face her and steadied himself for the inevitable barrage of abuse that would be coming his way, but instead, Sarah stared back at him, blinking, with her mouth hanging open.

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘What did you expect, Sarah? You dumped me with no explanation, telling me there were things from your past that I didn’t know about, and you refused to talk to me about it.’ He sighed and rubbed his forehead. ‘I didn’t go hunting for them. I found them and I read some. It doesn’t excuse what I did, but look at it from my point of view.’

  She shook her head. ‘Your point of view? You’re telling me that you read my private diaries, and I’m supposed to look at things from your point of view?’

  ‘If you’d been honest with me to begin with, I wouldn’t have had to. I mean, for God’s sake, look at how you’ve been acting. You’ve ignored me, told me you’re pregnant and completely disregarded my feelings when you decided to have an abortion. If you’d been open with me in the first place, things might have been different.’

  Adam winced as her hand whipped across his cheek. It took a second for him to register the fact that she’d slapped him. Hard.

  ‘You bastard,’ Sarah said, her chest rising and falling violently. ‘On today of all days, you choose to come out with this? How dare you sit there acting all self-righteous? You went off and fucked someone else after, what – a month? You don’t get to take the moral high ground.’

  Adam sighed. There it was – the Tamsin-shaped bomb he’d hoped would never drop. He opened his mouth to speak, but Sarah put her hand up.

  ‘Don’t talk to me.’ Her voice cracked as she grabbed her bag. ‘Just fuck off, Adam.’

  She got out of the car, slamming the door behind her. He watched her marching away from the car, and with every step she took, his breaths got shorter and shorter.

  ‘Fuck!’ He banged his fists on the steering wheel before running a hand through his hair.

  Why had he told her about reading her diaries? What the hell had he been thinking? He swore again and looked out of the passenger window. Sarah was walking off into the distance, away from the crowd at Richard’s grave and away from him.

  His temples started to throb as blood and adrenalin rushed to his head. He looked around. What was he doing here anyway? He was miles away from home, sitting in a cemetery for the memorial service of someone he didn’t even know, and his pregnant ex-girlfriend had just walked away from him for the second time.

  He shook his head. ‘Seriously, what the hell am I doing here?’

  He turned the key in the ignition and turned the car around.

  Adam left the cemetery and followed the road down the hill. Why had Jenny told her about Tamsin? He clenched his jaw. As much as he wanted to be angry with Jenny, he wasn’t. He was angry with himself, which was worse. Of course he’d been keen to sleep with Tamsin to begin with, but Sarah didn’t know how he’d felt afterwards. She had no idea that he’d realised it was her he wanted, and nobody else. All she would have seen was that he’d slept with someone else less than a month after proposing.

  The rain hit the car like bullets, rendering the wipers useless. As soon as they cleared one sheet of rain away, the windscreen was coated with another. To say it was turning out to be a miserable day was an understatement and a half.

  He pulled over and looked at the seat next to him. Man, she’d got angry. He’d never seen her temper before, and despite the way he’d defended himself, she had every right to be as angry as she was. He’d read her diaries and stupidly told her about it as she sat looking at her first boyfriend’s grave for the first time. Talk about bad timing. He unscrewed the lid off the bottle of water sitting in the cup holder and gulped it down in one go. He wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. The truth was, he’d wanted a reaction. Simple as that. He’d got jealous, angry and frustrated with all the secrets. It had felt like he’d just been taking her shit for far too long. Except now that he’d got a reaction from her, he felt like a complete arsehole.

  How did she make him feel like this? If any of his exes had acted like Sarah had been acting lately, he’d have walked away a long time ago, but she’d got under his skin in a way that no woman ever had before. She wasn’t perfect – far from it – but neither was he.

  Sarah was different. He’d known from the start that she had something other girls didn’t. She didn’t care about makeup or clothes or money, and despite how she’d been acting lately, she was a caring person who tried to do the best by other people. He’d always sensed that she had something bubbling under the surface, something that she fought to keep a lid on – a kind of vulnerability – but he’d put it down to her job. She dealt with a heap of challenging things every day, and he’d reasoned with himself that dealing with the stress of other people’s problems every day was why she sometimes looked like she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. He knew it couldn’t be easy, but she was dedicated to it, and he’d admired her for that. He’d loved her for it and he still did. But now, he wasn’t so sure it was that simple. And even if it was, he’d learned that love wasn’t enough.

  A relationship needed more than that. It needed trust and respect, and both were in tatters. She’d hidden her past from him, and he’d gone behind her back and read her diaries – and that was just for starters. How could any couple ever get past the things they’d thrown at each other?

  Adam rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms. Christ, when was the last time he’d cried? Probably when he’d broken his arm when he was thirteen. Crying just wasn’t something that he did. But as he sat in his car on a hillside in a city he didn’t know, the tightness of tears clogged his throat.

  Everything was fucked. If it wasn’t fucked before, it was certainly fucked now. He rubbed at his eyes again. He didn’t want the tears to fall, but thinking about the girlfriend he’d lost and the child he was about to lose wasn’t helping.

  Broken trust, damaged respect. There was nothing holding them together anymore. His confession had snapped the last bit of thread between them. All he’d wanted was to get to the truth and hopefully get her back, but instead, he’d driven the last nail into the coffin containing their relationship.

  He looked at the clock on the dashboard. They had a long drive back to London, and he was tired. He’d have to go back and get Sarah. He just wanted today to be over and done with, and as all they had to return to was a joyless flat, now was the time to admit defeat.

  33.

  By the time Adam turned back into the cemetery, the early winter evening was setting in, and the rain was so heavy that he had to switch his headlights on as he inched along the gravel driveway. Was this the spot he’d parked up in earlier? He was sure it was, but everyone had already left. He frowned, stepping out of the car, and walked over to where the crowd had gathered before.

  The rain lashed his face as he read Richard’s name inscribed into the square block of marble. Resting on top of the headstone was the string bracelet Sarah had been playing with. He looked around, but there was no sign of her. Maybe she’d already left.

  He took his mobile out of his pocket and called her as he walked away from Richard’s grave, but it rang out. She was obviously still angry with him, and he knew he’d disappointed her, which was even worse. No other wo
man would get anywhere near the kind of love he felt for Sarah. It had taken a bruised ego, a rebound fling and a slap around the face for him to realise that there was nothing to fight for anymore. Even the baby, the only real, tangible link between them, would soon be gone.

  He sighed and wiped the rain from his face as he walked back to the car. He had a gym towel in the boot; he was sure of it. The sound of rain hitting the trees around him felt hollow and strangely far away as he wiped his face dry. He looked around. Was she still here? He had no idea how big the cemetery was, and he didn’t want to play an endless game of cat and mouse, but he’d have to look for her. He didn’t have a choice.

  He drove along the pathway until it split in two. Which way had she gone – assuming she was even still here? He looked at the paths, alternating between left and right, and took the one on the left. Even with the heater on full blast, he shivered. He didn’t see anyone as he crawled along the path. Maybe he really was the only one here. What a way to spend a Saturday – alone in a cemetery with just a car radio for company.

  Was that her? He leaned forward and squinted. It was her, sitting on a bench with her back to him. Her cream coat stood out in the bleakness like a beacon. He killed the engine and sat watching her. She didn’t turn around, but she must have heard him coming. He hoped she’d calmed down, at least enough for him to apologise and explain that he didn’t need or want to know her secret anymore. He got out of the car and quietly closed the door. His eyes flicked over towards a bench up ahead. It didn’t look like the others he’d seen dotted around the cemetery. Instead of legs, the smooth, dark-grey slab of stone sat on four cubes, two on either side. Each was painted a different colour and etched with letters from the alphabet.

  Stepping away from the path and onto the grass, he began to make his way over to her. This bit of the cemetery felt very different. He stopped and crouched, resting the fingertips of one hand on the cold, wet grass as he looked at the elliptical black granite headstone by his feet, framed with a grey teddy bear. He looked at the dates beneath the name: 17 May 2009–17 May 2009. He shuddered and looked at the grave behind it. The wind curled itself around his neck as he looked at the image of Eeyore, the depressed yet loveable donkey from Winnie the Pooh. He swallowed and winced. He might as well have just swallowed a razor blade.