The Atlas of Us

by Tracy Buchanan

  Claire wondered if those people would say the same now. She had a job writing about travel, there was that at least. And a failed marriage on the horizon, just like him too. Claire swallowed, turning to look out of the window at the forest-fringed road to distract herself.

  ‘No wonder your car’s playing up if you’re treating it like a trolley,’ Milo said. ‘There are such things as glove compartments, you know. Speaking of which,’ he said, leaning across her and opening the glove compartment as she tried to control her heartbeat, ‘I can’t promise any Bob Dylan but I have some U2 tapes somewhere.’

  He pulled a tape out and stuck it on as Claire forced herself to relax. Over the next three hours, Milo drove them around beautiful fishing villages where he seemed to know half the people, waving at them out of his window. When they stopped at a couple of places, Milo led Claire on a wild goose chase to find a ‘little tea room with outdoor seating I’m sure’s just around the corner’ or an ‘old open-air book market I swear is just here’. He only seemed comfortable outdoors, hovering outside with Archie and Blue when Claire wanted to pop into a shop or museum.

  They drove even further along the coast, stopping to take a twisting coastal walk up a hill thick with grass, sheep grazing in the distance, the growl of waves nearby, the mouth-watering smell of fish and chips from one of the restaurants dancing up the hill towards them. They talked a lot, Milo telling Claire about his childhood on the farm, she telling him about her job and the people she’d met along the way – about everyone but Ben, the person who pulsed between them wherever they went. When lunchtime drew closer and closer, Claire found herself not wanting to leave. As though sensing her thoughts, Milo looked down towards the restaurant where the delicious smells were coming from. ‘Hungry?’ he asked with a smile.

  She thought of Henry who’d be looking at his watch while tapping his fingers on the table. Maybe he’d even called her from the restaurant phone? She didn’t dare check. She didn’t want to check. She wanted to stay here, her troubles a distant memory, just the sea, Exmoor’s sloping hills, two dogs and Milo for company.

  She matched his smile. ‘Very.’

  Half an hour later, they were eating fish and chips in a café overlooking sandy, windy beaches.

  ‘You eat very slowly,’ Milo said, watching as Claire chewed on a chip.

  ‘It’s become a habit, I guess. My dad once said travel writing’s about all five senses, so I savour every mouthful to write about it later.’ She laughed as she watched Milo wolf down a chunk of cod. ‘Maybe you should try the savouring thing too?’

  ‘Have you seen the way my brother devours food and drink? I’ve had to learn to eat quick around him so he doesn’t get a chance to steal my stuff.’ He took a quick sip of cider. ‘So your dad taught you everything you know about writing, right?’

  ‘Yep. Jay was right: he was a really special writer. I have this one article of his I like to read over and over. Funnily enough, it’s about a country that’s really close to us, Belgium. He visited Ypres with my mum and sister while Mum was pregnant with me and he wrote about how the air was so heavy with loss and torment, he was scared it would infect me as I grew in Mum’s belly. But then he saw a solitary poppy, and it reminded him that birth and death are part and parcel of life, with blood spilled both times. It is what it is.’

  ‘I’d like to read that.’

  ‘I’ll dig it out and send it to you. It won an award, the Flora Matthews Foundation Prize for Travel Writing. It’s pretty prestigious.’

  ‘Sounds it.’

  Claire looked down at what remained of her food. ‘That’s the night Dad left us actually.’

  Milo frowned. ‘Left you?’

  ‘We woke to find him gone the morning after the ceremony, just a note scribbled on the back of the awards menu I’d kept. Time to march off the map, my darlings. All my love, Daddy Bo.’

  ‘I’m sorry. How old were you?’

  ‘Sixteen. Looking back, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. He’d started taking all that marching off the edge of the map stuff too literally, banging on about needing to leave behind societal pressures – which, in the end, meant his family too.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  Claire shrugged. ‘No idea. We didn’t hear anything from him over the next few months, not even on my seventeenth birthday or at Christmas. It felt like he’d thrown us away like a piece of rubbish. Mum said we needed to accept we might never see him again. My sister Sofia grew bitter. She’d never been as close to Dad as I was, but that really changed things for her. She pretended like he was dead.’ Claire looked down at the tiny globe hanging from her bag. ‘But I refused to give up on him. Six months after he left, I used the money he’d left in my savings to go find him.’

  ‘Brave,’ Milo said softly.

  ‘I was brave back then.’

  ‘Not now?’

  Claire shrugged again.

  ‘So did you find him?’ Milo asked.

  ‘Not then. I carried on travelling for a year or so, making money from articles. My mum met a new guy, moved to Hong Kong with him – she’s still there now. Sofia started training to be a solicitor, the very job my dad despised. It was only me who followed his path, travelling, writing. Then my uncle passed away. Mum couldn’t track Dad down to tell him, so I did some investigating and …’

  She paused, hearing the smash of rain against glass from the day she’d found him. She quickly swallowed down more cider.

  ‘You okay?’ Milo asked.

  She nodded. ‘I – I found him dying in a flat in New York. Turned out he’d been living there the past year, dying of liver cancer, refusing to bend to societal pressures and get medical help. He died in my arms a few days later.’

  ‘Jesus, I’m so sorry, Claire.’

  They were quiet for a few moments as Claire remembered how it had felt to see her dad lying there. She remembered thinking, Is this what marching off the map does – drives people apart, leaves people dying in pain all alone?

  She’d cared for him over the next few days, reading his favourite books to him, sharing memories from her childhood. The third night, he’d gestured towards one of the drawers in his room. Inside, Claire found a sky lantern, just like the ones they used to send skywards each New Year’s Eve, all the troubles and negativity of the year before written down on notes attached to them and sent away forever. He scribbled a note with trembling hands: his name, Bo. She hadn’t understood at first. But when he drew his last breath and her world felt like it was ending, it dawned on her: he wanted her to let him and all the negativity associated with him go.

  So that very night, she did what they’d done every New Year before: she sent the lantern skywards, her father’s name attached to it.

  ‘I went back to the UK after,’ she said, sighing. ‘Talked myself into a university course—’

  ‘Talked yourself?’

  ‘I’d been home-schooled, remember? Dad said education was just society’s way of brainwashing children so I had no qualifications. So I wrote this long rambling letter to a bunch of admissions directors at various universities and one recognised something, got me in for an interview and that was that. I worked my arse off, came away with a first-class degree in English, got the job at the magazine, got a mortgage, life insurance, the works, everything Dad once despised.’ She forced a smile onto her face as she took a sip of cider. ‘And now here I am.’

  ‘Why did you do everything your dad despised?’

  ‘Seeing him like that scared me. I realised if I followed the path he had, I might end up dying alone too. I chose a safer path.’

  ‘Are you happy with that decision?’

  She swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know. I can feel it pulling at me sometimes, the desire to just let everything go and fly with the wind.’ She paused. She’d not admitted that to herself properly, like the nights she’d feel the urge to just throw open the window and breathe in the wind, Ben protesting it was too cold as she imagined climbing out and
leaving.

  ‘What about your husband?’ Milo said, his eyes flicking to her wedding ring. ‘Is he a writer too?’

  She froze. She’d purposefully not mentioned Ben to Milo, aware of her growing attraction to Milo and what a betrayal it might be to her husband to utter his name in front of him. ‘No, he’s an engineer.’ Her voice cracked and she turned away, feeling tears start to well up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Milo asked softly.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She smiled to show she was okay but it just made her feel even more upset, her smile turning into a grimace.

  ‘Claire, what’s wrong?’ Milo asked, leaning towards her and trying to look in her eyes. He hesitated a moment then sighed. ‘I saw you crying before I shot the stag.’

  She looked up at him. ‘You saw that?’

  He nodded, his brown eyes full of emotion. ‘I know we hardly know each other but sometimes it helps to talk to people who aren’t so close to the situation.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than you know.’

  ‘Try me.’

  She looked into his eyes. They were open, curious, full of feeling. Maybe he was right?

  ‘My husband and I are having problems,’ she said. ‘He suggested we take a break.’

  Milo took in a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I don’t want you to think my marriage is a shambles,’ she said quickly. ‘It was good at first, really good. We met at uni, and though we’re completely different – I was studying English, my husband was studying engineering – we clicked right away.’

  Claire thought about the first time she’d met Ben. It was just a few months into her first year at university and she was starting to regret her choice. It all felt too restricting and regimental, lectures at particular times, meetings with professors, special clubs and different cliques. One night, when it all got too much, she got horribly drunk on snowball cocktails at a party and had to make her way back to her room in the dark. That’s when Ben turned up, driving alongside her in his Renault Clio and offering her a lift. Anyone else and she might have steered well clear. But there was something about Ben: an honesty in his soft green eyes, the neat turn of the collar on his shirt, the polite way he talked in his Home Counties voice. When he helped her into his car, she felt instantly safe and on the car journey to her room she unburdened herself, telling him how stifled she felt at university, even confessing she wanted to quit, something she hadn’t even admitted to herself. The next day, he talked her out of packing in her course over lunch then asked her out for dinner. And that was that.

  ‘What went wrong?’ Milo asked, pulling Claire from the memory.

  ‘We started struggling to conceive.’

  She paused, checking Milo’s expression. But he looked the same, willing her to continue with his eyes.

  ‘My fault,’ she said. ‘My insides are a bit of a mess, blocked tubes and dodgy eggs.’

  She didn’t tell Milo her blocked tubes were caused by swelling from the chlamydia she’d caught from a man she’d met in Paris while searching for her father. She’d been devastated when her GP had told her: yet more proof that travelling off the edge of the map was the wrong thing to do. She’d had an op to unblock her tubes but, when she still hadn’t fallen pregnant a year later, more tests revealed she had low quality eggs. IVF was her only chance of ever becoming pregnant.

  ‘We tried IVF,’ she said to Milo. ‘Three rounds, each one a dud. The last one was two months ago.’

  ‘Claire, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard IVF can be very difficult.’

  ‘The physical stuff I could deal with,’ she said, fiddling with her glass. ‘Sure, having your flesh pierced with needles each night isn’t exactly a ball. Being poked around by doctors, I guess you grow used to that over the years when you’ve been through what we’ve been through. And the effects of the hormones, the headaches and the nausea and the crazy outbursts … it was bloody hard, don’t get me wrong. But the worst part was how it affected me emotionally.’

  She could hear the tremor in her voice but ignored it. She needed to get this off her chest. She’d turned down the counselling that had been offered to her, thinking she could cope. And she’d always put on a brave face with family and friends. As for her and Ben, they couldn’t talk about it, not properly, because then they’d need to admit how difficult and painful it all was. This was her chance to vent and she was grabbing it with both hands.

  ‘The idea of never being a mother,’ she said, ‘never holding a baby in my arms and leaning my nose in to smell its sweet head, never feeling the tickle of its soft hair on my cheek.’ She shook her head, eyes filling with tears. ‘It’s unbearable. I’ve never been one of those girls whose whole life revolves around the idea of being a mother. But I’ve always wanted children. And the more you fight for it, the more you want it, you know?’

  Milo nodded, his face very sombre. Claire looked out towards the stretch of beach below, the hill they’d walked along earlier spreading out to its right. Two children splashed into the shallow water in their wellies, a little dog jumping up and down, yelping in excitement as their parents watched from nearby.

  ‘Seeing other people’s kids grow older,’ she said, ‘that’s been hard too, especially kids who are the same age my child would be if I’d fallen pregnant straight away.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘And then there are the looks of sympathy you get when you turn up to yet another wedding, still childless. That’s all bad enough but then add society’s expectations to it all: if you’re not a mother, a parent, you’re nothing.’

  Milo shook his head. ‘That’s rubbish. It’s an important role, yes, but you don’t need kids to have a fulfilling life.’

  ‘I guess I know that. But the message you do is in everything I see.’ She sighed. ‘And now I know all hope’s gone—’

  ‘You do?’

  She nodded sadly. ‘We paid for our first three rounds because the NHS waiting times were ridiculous. Now we’re finally at the top of the list and the NHS won’t fund us because my hormone levels are too hopeless.’ Claire stabbed her fork into her fish. ‘It’s definitely not going to happen now.’

  That consultation had been a month ago. Claire was used to these post-round consultations. With each one, more and more hope drained away, the doctors’ once jovial and optimistic demeanours replaced by frowns and serious tones. She’d known something was particularly wrong with this last one because the doctor they saw could hardly look Claire in the eye. When he’d broken the news that her last blood test had shown her hormone levels had climbed, suggesting her egg quality had plummeted, it felt like the swivel chair she was sitting on was spinning her around and around, sending her into freefall. She’d held on tight enough to her emotions to ask all the perfunctory questions, even cracking the odd joke or two. But when she stepped outside, she had broken down, mumbling into Ben’s shoulder, ‘It’s chaos, it’s all chaos.’ Because how could so many millions of people, some of whom didn’t even want to be parents, get pregnant and she couldn’t?

  Ben had just stared into the distance, trying to control his emotions, jaw tight, the same expression he’d had on his face ever since.

  Milo was silent so Claire looked up at him, heart thumping painfully against her chest. ‘This is the bit where you’re supposed to offer useless advice.’

  ‘What, like relax and it will happen?’

  ‘I prefer “My friend’s second cousin couldn’t conceive so she gave up and guess what? She got pregnant!”’ That’s the one my sister Sofia uses all the time.’

  She smiled but Milo didn’t smile back. He knew what she was trying to do, lighten the tone. Except this was a serious subject, wasn’t it?

  ‘If you say it’s not going to happen, I believe you,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair to offer false hope.’

  ‘Thank you, I agree,’ she said, sighing. ‘I did think about getting a loan to pay for another private round but I just can’t face it. You hear o
f people who have loads of rounds and it just takes over their lives. That’s one of the worst things too, feeling like you’re in limbo. I can’t be in limbo any more, I just can’t.’ Claire watched a woman walk along the shoreline below them, a book in one hand, her sandals in the other, her long blonde hair like candyfloss as it whipped around her head in the wind. ‘I think my life can be complete without a child, you know. I think I can carve a place for myself.’

  ‘Definitely. I have no doubt about it.’

  She looked into Milo’s impassioned eyes and almost believed it herself when he said that.

  ‘And your husband?’ he asked. ‘Does he feel the same way?’

  ‘No, he thinks we should have another round. He brought it up during our last consultation, but after, I told him I just couldn’t face it. Since then, we barely talk, just go through the motions. God, that sounds like such a cliché – married couple runs out of things to say to each other.’

  She laughed but Milo didn’t. Instead, he placed his hand over hers. She lifted her eyes to meet his, and she saw something in them that made her heart seem to thump a million beats at once. It wasn’t just sympathy for what she was going through; there was more to it than that.

  ‘You’re trembling,’ he said, voice hoarse. Her tummy flipped and half of her wanted to bury herself in his brown eyes and stop talking, just forget all the bad stuff. But the other half needed this, to get it all out, no interruptions from well-meaning friends about different remedies she could try to miraculously become fertile.

  ‘I can’t figure out if it’s simply the stress of being infertile,’ she continued, her gaze dropping from his, ‘or because we just don’t love each other any more and this would’ve happened even without the infertility. I think the problem is we married an idea of a life. A life with a nice house to do up, visits to DIY stores, life insurance … kids. But without the possibility of kids, it feels like that’s all gone. And with it, the purpose of our marriage. Does that make sense?’