But it didn’t feel like a holiday at all. It felt as if I was heading to a funeral. Perhaps, even, my own.
Somehow, Jill got me into the airport terminal.
Repeating the Zen-like mantra that nothing was permanent, that I could always come back, that if I didn’t leave I would never forgive myself, she led me to the check-in desk and watched with me as my bags trundled away on the conveyor belt. “There’s no changing your mind now,” she said.
During the ten-minute queue for security, she chatted constantly with forced joviality, saying things like, “I hope you end up staying there. Aïsha wants an Ozzie Christmas,” and “I bet James takes you somewhere nice for a break the second you arrive.”
But I wasn’t really listening, and I wasn’t really thinking about anything else instead. I just felt numb.
When finally we had to separate, Jill hugged me and said, “You know what Luke said? About you being happy? He was so right, you know.”
I smiled meekly – it was all that I could manage.
“Now go,” Jill said, pushing me towards the arch of the metal detector. “Go and be happy. And phone me in twenty-four hours, when you arrive. No! Phone me in twenty-five, once you’ve had a shag.”
On the first plane, I thought about Luke and only about Luke. Again, I ran every detail I could remember through my mind’s eye, torturing myself again with his birth, with the first time he called me “Mum”, with his first day at school. I analysed every word he had said that morning searching for hidden meanings. He would miss me like “crazy”, he had said, but was I making him actually crazy by leaving? Would we all end up in therapy because of my selfishness? I certainly felt as if I were on the verge of insanity.
I remembered Luke’s first split lip, I remembered nursing him through chickenpox, I remembered the look of pride on Cliff’s face the first time he managed to ride his pushbike without stabilisers, and with each thought I shed a few more tears.
I asked the hostess for more tissues, and the guy beside me, a less good-looking version of Bruce Willis, visibly edged away from me in his seat, and who could blame him?
After we had swapped planes in Dubai, my new female neighbour said, “Still, halfway there now!” And at that precise moment, something within me switched, and a huge surge of love for James, of excitement about the new life ahead of me, swept through me, energising every cell. It was as if I had completely forgotten why I was doing any of this, and now those thoughts were back, I was swamped with them. How fickle are our emotions? Perhaps it was simply a self-defence mechanism coming into play; perhaps that level of intensity of suffering – for suffering it was – is quite simply unsustainable.
Whatever the explanation, once that halfway point was behind us, I started to think less about Luke and more about James, remembering the sensation of him holding me, kissing me, lying on top of me – sliding, even, inside me. And as the pain faded and was replaced by love and joy and yes, arousal, I let myself purposely revel in those thoughts of him, of the farm, of Brisbane, of my new start.
“You look like you’re happy to be going home,” my neighbour said, and I realised that I had been staring out of the window and grinning. “Actually England’s home,” I told her. “Or it used to be, anyway.”
After the final flight change in Sydney, I arrived in Brisbane feeling even worse than I had the first time around, and dragging myself through customs and passport control felt like a test of the limits of physical endurance. But then I stepped out into the airport lounge and James looked up and saw me, his expression shifting from one of utter boredom – the flight was almost three hours late – to one of downright adulation, and I couldn’t help but beam back at him.
The path from where I was to where James was standing was too much to bear, so I abandoned my suitcases and ducked under the rail so that I could run into his arms. He was wearing a big sheepskin jacket and it felt like being enfolded within the arms of a vast teddy bear.
“I thought you’d never make it,” he said.
“Me neither.”
James gave me a peck, then went to retrieve the suitcases. When he returned, I asked, “A peck? Is that all?”
“Nope,” James said. “Not at all. But not here. Come outside and see the day. It’s a beaut’.”
We wheeled my cases out of the airport, and I gasped at the blueness of the sky, at the stunning clarity of the light, at the freshness of the winter air, and felt the veil of depression that I had been living under for the last few months lifting already.
“Hang on there, girl,” James said, and I realised that he had paused and that I had been striding ahead. I turned back to face him and smiled quizzically. He looked suddenly glassy-eyed and pale. “I’ve got something to say,” he continued.
My grin faded a little. He looked deadly serious.
“I need to say that . . . Well . . . that you’re single now,” James said, and my heart began to plummet like a lift with a broken cable.
“Your divorce, I mean,” James said, frowning as he read my expression. “It’s all finalised, right?”
I grimaced in nervous relief. “Oh, yes. Yes, that’s all done and dusted.”
“So I . . .”
“Yes?”
“Sorry but this is hard.”
“What?”
James slid his hand to his pocket and pulled out a small box, and I instantly knew what was coming next.
“Will you . . . ? Look . . .” James stammered.
“Yes?”
“Look . . . I . . . Um . . . OK. What I’m trying to say is, will you bloody marry me, Hannah?” he finally said.
It crossed my mind that this was unreasonably soon, and that I was unreasonably tired. It crossed my mind that I had sworn never to marry again. And it crossed my mind that this was the exact welcome I had been hoping for, nay, dreaming of.
“Yes, James,” I said, stepping towards him. “Yes, of course, I’ll bloody marry you.”
FOURTEEN
Cliff
Hannah’s final act before leaving was to unconsciously bust up my relationship with Rob. At least, I hope it was unconscious.
After repeated attempts at getting him to meet either Hannah or Luke, or both, I had given up and consigned the subject to the drawer of pragmatically-abandoned ideals. It had been plain to see how the idea terrified Rob, and I had realised that I was close to losing him over it. So without further discussion, I dropped the subject.
Hannah, as ever incapable of accepting anyone’s point of view but her own, launched a surprise attack one Friday.
Rob had just arrived and – because he was muddy and sweaty from his working day – was in the process of stripping ready to take a shower.
By the time I had got rid of Hannah – or rather, given up trying to get rid of her and slammed the door in her face – Rob had vanished down the fire escape.
I watched in dismay from the balcony as he started his van and drove away, Hannah absurdly running behind him creating a cringe-worthy scene. From shy, closeted Rob’s point of view, this was, I knew, the worst possible outcome.
I phoned Rob’s mobile immediately, but he didn’t answer. This was normal; he was driving. But when I phoned him again half an hour later, then once again that evening and still got no reply, I began to suspect the worst.
Over the following few days I left increasingly desperate messages, but things didn’t improve: Rob’s phone went from ringing lonely followed by voicemail, to voicemail direct – he had switched it off.
The following Tuesday I waited nervously for him to come to the house as planned, but long before the usual seven p.m. arrival time, I sensed that it was over.
Just in case he was checking his phone from time to time, I left further messages. I begged him to phone me. I promised him that I had known nothing of Hannah’s visit. I told him that I missed him. I asked that, out of respect, if he was leaving me that he should at least tell me so. And finally I told him what I had never once said because until th
en, I hadn’t realised it: that I was in love with him.
I hunted for his business on the internet and found, in addition to the defunct phone number, an e-mail address, to which I sent a long, eloquent, heartbreaking message. When he failed to reply even to this, I realised that I had reached the limits of what self-respect would allow. If he was a hard enough man to ignore that message, then he was too hard a man for me. He could, I muttered furiously, go fuck himself.
My final e-mail to Rob coincided almost exactly with Hannah’s departure for Australia, another surprisingly traumatic event for me. If it hadn’t been for Luke I think I might have had a meltdown, but following Hannah’s departure, I was only too aware that the last thing Luke needed was his father falling apart. I forced myself to grin, get up and make breakfast every morning. And I held it together – just about.
At the beginning of July, Luke asked if he could bring a new friend home. Her name was Lisa and she was a pretty, quiet thirteen-year-old.
I asked Luke if she was his girlfriend and he answered, “Kind of.” They had been together for a while, he said, but he hadn’t said anything before because he hadn’t wanted Hannah to know. That made me feel pretty special.
When I asked him if we needed to talk about the birds and the bees, Luke groaned. “Dad! I’m twelve!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that, A) I know all about the birds and the bees, and B) that I’m too young to do anything about it.”
I laughed. “OK then!”
“The age of consent is sixteen, Dad. You can go to prison for years for doing stuff at my age!”
“Fair enough,” I said, pulling a face. Even I hadn’t known that.
Along with Billy and Karim, Lisa – another keen gamer – became an almost constant fixture around the flat that summer, and it was just as well. A house full of noisy teenagers couldn’t fill the vacuum that Rob’s disappearance had left in my life, but it certainly kept me busy.
Once, I caught Luke staring into the middle distance, and asked him if everything was OK. “Just thinking about Mum,” he said. “It’s funny that it’s night-time there. It’s weird. I suppose she’s asleep.” But other than that one incident, and the few quiet moments he would spend after each daily phone call from her, there seemed to be little evidence that he was suffering. He was twelve and he was living in the centre of town in a cool flat. He had a faithful best mate, a girlfriend and both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation. He seemed pretty happy with his lot.
Once the term began again, Luke started spending occasional evenings at school, and to plug the gap I logged onto some dating sites again. But my heart wasn’t really in it anymore. None of the guys I spoke to ever seemed as clever, or cute, or sane, or indeed, as mysterious as Rob, and without exception, I couldn’t even motivate myself to go and meet them. I felt that I had somehow missed out on my destiny. I still vaguely believed that Rob would drop, once again, from a tree in front of me.
One Sunday, the day after Hannah had informed us that her September return trip would be no more than a one week visit to tie up loose ends, Luke asked me while I was cooking dinner if I missed her.
To avoid thinking too deeply about the question, I laughingly told him that I missed her lemon meringue pie, and the next evening when I got home from work, I found that Luke, Billy and Lisa had jointly cooked me one.
The kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it, and though the pastry was uncooked and the meringue was the texture of an omelette, I had tears in my eyes as I carved out four slices, because they were slices not of dodgy pie, but of love, offered to me by my son, and it hit me then how close I had come to losing him; it struck me in that moment that, wife or no wife, partner or no partner, the fact that Luke had wanted unveeringly to stay by my side made me the proudest, luckiest man on the planet. “You’re amazing, Luke,” I croaked. “You’re the best son anyone could have.”
The End (Almost)
POSTSCRIPT: CLIFF
By October, Hannah had been back, shipped her remaining possessions to Australia, tied up all of her loose ends, and once again tearfully departed. Our old house had been put on the market because despite the fall in house prices, we both just wanted to get rid of it. Hannah needed the money, and I needed the mental space that the house was still occupying.
One night, I got home from work and found Luke not, as expected, playing video games with Billy, nor watching TV with Lisa, but lying in the dark in his bedroom. I switched on the light and Luke looked up at me glumly. It was immediately obvious that something was wrong, and I assumed that the Hannah crisis which I had long been expecting had finally arrived.
I sat on the end of his bed and jiggled his socked foot. “What’s up, Champ?” I asked.
Luke sighed.
“No Billy tonight?”
“He’s gone to the cinema with Sue.”
“And Lisa?”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “With Greg, I expect.”
“Greg?”
“Her new boyfriend. A sixth former. He’s got a car.”
“Ah,” I said. “Hence the long face.”
“Hence the long face,” Luke repeated.
“Anything I can do to cheer you up?”
Luke shook his head.
“You’ll get over her, you know,” I told him. “I know it doesn’t feel like that now, but you will.”
“Well, yeah!” Luke said. “Of course I will.”
Once dinner was served, I called him to the table. He slouched from his room and then slumped opposite me before proceeding to prod his dinner with a fork. “Omelette? Again?” he said.
“There’s nothing else in. I’ll go shopping tomorrow,” I promised.
“We had omelette last night. And the night before.”
“No, we had that salmon thing last night.”
“Well we still have omelette almost every night.”
“Luke!” I said. “Just eat it or don’t eat it. I don’t care.”
“Sorry,” he said, sitting up and beginning to eat.
“You’re allowed to be a bit grumpy tonight,” I said softly. “But don’t push your luck.”
“Sure. Sorry.”
“Are you upset about Lisa?”
Luke shrugged, then frowned and said, “Maybe.” Then, unexpectedly, he asked, “What happened to Rob?”
I looked up at him in surprise. “I . . . I don’t know really. He sort of vanished.”
“He vanished?”
“Yes. He went off and never came back.”
“You must have called him.”
“I did. But his number changed.”
“Lisa stopped answering too,” Luke said. “That’s how I knew something was wrong.”
“That’s nasty,” I commented.
I went round to see her,” Luke went on. “But she wouldn’t see me. Greg was there.”
“Yuck. What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just came home. Did you ever go see Rob?”
“No. I never even knew where he lived.”
“Wrecclesham,” Luke said.
I swallowed hard and blinked at him. “I’m sorry?”
“They live on that Wrecclesham estate.”
“How can you know where Rob lives?” I asked, my heart beginning to race.
“How can you not know?” Luke asked.
“Well he never told me, for one. Really? Do you really know where he lives?”
Luke nodded. “He’s Tracey Ben’s dad, isn’t he. They live next door to that academy school.”
“Weydon?”
“Yeah.”
“But how do you know Tracey Ben?”
“She used to be friends with Lisa,” Luke said. “She used to have really wicked parties round there, but I think they fell out over some stupid shoes or something.”
The next evening after work I drove to Weydon school, and after less than five minutes of searching in ever-increasing circles, I spotted Rob’s van parked on a driveway. I added his new number – written o
n the van – to my phone, but then returned home without calling. I wanted to speak to him face to face.
The next morning I got up early and drove to Rob’s. I watched from the end of the close until, at eight, Rob left his house. From a distance, my heart thumping, I tailed him to a golf club in Alresford. I watched him park up, unload his ladder, strap himself into a harness and begin to climb a tree before I approached him. I didn’t want him to be able to run away too easily.
“Rob!” I called. He paused, turned to look down at me, then said quite calmly, pleasantly almost, “Cliff! What on Earth are you doing here?”
“Hoping to talk to you,” I replied.
Rob climbed back down and invited me to sit in the van – it was starting to spot with rain.
He was as beautiful as ever, and his proximity within the van was hard to bear. Despite everything that had happened, all I really wanted was to kiss him again.
“So what brings you here?” he asked.
I explained that Luke had revealed his whereabouts and that I had tailed him.
“Very cloak-and-dagger,” Rob said. “I’m impressed.”
“So what happened, Rob?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I was freaked when your ex turned up. And when you kept calling, I lost the plot and threw my phone in a pond.”
“Why?”
“Stupidity?” Rob said. “It cost me over three hundred quid to replace it.”
“But you know were I live,” I said. “You could have come round.”
“I’m sorry, Cliff,” Rob said. “But I realised we were getting too close.”
“Too close? How could we be too close?”
“Someone was gonna find out sooner or later. I couldn’t risk it. And if Luke knows Tracey, well . . . I wasn’t far wrong, was I? He didn’t tell her, did he? About us?”
I shook my head. “He’s a model of discretion.”
“I missed you though,” Rob said.
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