The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  The blood drained from Daniel’s face and he imagined those bright red capillaries emptying. Time.

  Don’t pop your clocks.

  He stood up and paced the ward, with a rising anger that made him want to throw the sippy cup and smash it against the equipment. To pull out the cannulas from her hands and rip out the catheter attached to her urinary tract. He was overcome by an urge to unplug every wire and tube and smuggle Olivia out of the room, over his shoulder. He wanted to smash in Fraser’s cart the next time he saw his merry face wheeling it from the back. But he couldn’t do any of these things, so he clasped his hands, fingers splayed, to his face, shook his head to mute his scream, and sat back down.

  ‘Darling—’ Olivia tried to put a placatory hand on his arm, the way she always did when her floaty charms were calming the demons of Daniel’s more anxious mind. But Daniel shook it off in desperation.

  ‘How the FUCK—’

  ‘Shhhhhh, tesoro…’ she persisted.

  They both looked over to Dionne’s bay and Daniel lowered his voice. ‘How the fuck do I write anything so significant? I can’t write anything more than a match report. How do I write something that comes anywhere near doing us – doing you – some kind of…’

  ‘Justice?’ Olivia levelled him with a look. ‘None of this is just, but I want you to write a document. An account. So the girls have more than a sense of injustice. So they have a lovely story. So their memories are more than of their family being at the fruit.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Essere alla fruta. Hitting rock bottom.’

  Daniel rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of his right hand.

  ‘I thought we’d been there. I thought we hit rock bottom when we lost Jude.’

  Olivia gave a laboured swallow, but said nothing.

  ‘And we climbed our way out of the bleakness. We can do it again. We’re strong. You’re strong!’

  Olivia’s silence spoke volumes; it unnerved Daniel, who carried on, in despair.

  ‘I dunno, my love. It’s too big. It’s too important. I’m not sure I can.’

  Daniel looked away and picked up the rest of the newspaper from where it had fallen and blown, now under the metal bed on wheels, and flattened it on top of the polyester blanket over Olivia’s feet. He pressed it down again in an attempt to neaten it. To make it readable. ‘I just think it’s beyond me.’

  Olivia laughed from out of nowhere. A punch of a laugh that took the wind out of her sails and made her rattle. She coughed and swallowed hard again.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Daniel, you’re a writer.’ Her tone was that of a woman telling a man he was being ridiculous. But she wanted to be kind. ‘You’re a father. My lover. My husband. I know you can.’

  Daniel felt all the hot embarrassment and anger of a teenage boy, as his kind face turned to petulance, and suddenly, lost for anywhere to hide, he brimmed to the boil and slumped his face onto Olivia’s blanketed thigh. To muffle the sobs more than anything.

  ‘I can’t, I just can’t…’ he sobbed, as he shook his head into the hospital blankets, building friction between face and synthetic fibre. Electric currents raged.

  ‘I can’t write about you as if you’re not around. I can’t bring up two girls without you. I can’t do this. I don’t know how.’

  Olivia was startled to see Daniel sob and put her hand on the back of his head as he cried into her leg. The touch of his hair felt soothing, even when she was trying to calm him. The crown of his soft hair, a thousand shades of brown, was swishy and swirly like the fur of a brown bear rippling in the wind.

  ‘Shhhh, it’s OK tesoro mio, it’s OK.’

  Daniel raised his hopeless face. For months he had held it together, but he just couldn’t now.

  ‘How can I bring up two girls without you?’

  Dionne stirred from behind her curtain and Daniel and Olivia heard her call button buzz from the nurses’ station in the corridor. Before a nurse could walk past and disrupt them, Olivia leaned into Daniel who was now sitting up, still clutching her thigh, and pressed her forehead to his.

  ‘You already know how.’

  Three

  September 2018

  Cambridgeshire, England

  ‘Sofia’s asleep in your bed, Flora’s still up.’ Nancy stood in the open atrium of the Huf Haus hallway, smoothing her shirt down in the reflection of the long mirror on the wall, while the girls' Italian grandma Maria fussed in the large open living room, checking the contents of the two backpacks that were propped up on the sofa. ‘I think she’s worried about tomorrow,’ Nancy added matter-of-factly, as if she were telling her reflection. ‘Although she’s not admitting it.’

  ‘Flora’s worried about everything,’ Daniel said as he hung his keys on a hook by the large modern door. ‘She just doesn’t like to show it.’

  To make it known that she could in fact hear hushed whisperings and chatter about her, Flora opened her bedroom door and padded along the glass balustrade of the long landing in her pyjama vest and shorts.

  ‘Oh, hi Dad,’ she said casually, before slipping into the bathroom.

  ‘Hi gorgeous,’ he gazed up. Before Daniel could ask Flora if she were OK, she shut the bathroom door behind her.

  Maria, a middle-aged woman with lustrous black curls, a tiny waist and fleece-lined slippers despite the balmy September evening, shuffled towards the front door, putting on her beige mac as she checked off her mental tick-list.

  ‘Andiamo?’ she said to Nancy, who nodded, before both women fixed their concerned looks on Daniel, to check whether he was OK to be left. They paused, searching his face for a miracle.

  ‘Oh, yes, go! I’ll be fine!’ Daniel assured them.

  They unfroze – for Maria to fasten her mac, and for Nancy to put her reading glasses into her handbag.

  ‘Their bags are all packed and on the sofa,’ Maria said, as she fixed a silk scarf around her head and tied it under her neck. Daniel would think she were a Sicilian peasant if he didn’t know her mac came from Aquascutum, and her scarf and slippers from Liberty, bought on one of their many trips to London in the past year. ‘Sofia was very particular about a certain special pencil case she wanted to use tomorrow, but I just couldn’t find it Daniel,’ she gestured with exasperated hands, pronouncing Daniel as if it had three syllables; the way Olivia had when they first met.

  Dan-i-el.

  ‘I can get her a new one in Cambridge tomorrow if she’s that set on it.’ Maria liked any excuse to go shopping.

  Daniel scratched his head.

  ‘The unicorn one?’

  Maria nodded.

  ‘Si siiiiii, of course, unicorno, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked in the kitchen… her bedroom… under the sofa – nowhere!’ she said, raising her hands to a higher power – in the form of a modern chandelier made of Perspex.

  ‘I think it’s in my car. Don’t worry, Maria.’

  ‘We ought to be getting back,’ Nancy said, disinterested in the mystery of the unicorn pencil case. ‘You should have an evening.’

  Some evening Daniel was going to have – it was almost ten o’clock, he noticed. Flora really should be asleep by now.

  ‘Si si,’ concurred Maria, slinging her designer handbag over the crook of her arm.

  They looked around the spacious hallway, its glass walls either side of the door looking out to the sheltered driveway at the front, and picked up a collection of hessian shoppers, laundry bags, Tupperware, books, magazines and all the things they ferried between the Huf Haus in Guildington and their Airbnb apartment in Cambridge, which they’d become accustomed to as the trips from Milan became more frequent; as their need for washing machines and stoves and somewhere to be practical became more apparent and the spare room or the Travelodge didn’t cut the mustard.

  ‘We’re off!’ Nancy half whispered up the stairs. She didn’t expect a response from Flora and she knew Sofia was fast asleep.

  ‘Good luck tomorrow, cara mia!’ Maria ad
ded with an expectant smile, but there was no answer.

  Daniel kissed both women on each cheek as they stepped out into the pale night sky and loaded up the hire car. Nancy got into the driver seat for the fifteen-minute journey back to the city centre. Maria had never learned to drive.

  So much stuff. Daniel thought, as he tucked all their shoppers into the boot, feeling guilty that most of it was for his benefit. For the girls. For Olivia.

  He was certainly grateful to his mothers-in-law, but Daniel couldn’t wait to be on his own. To crack open a beer. To put the telly on. To think about what Olivia had asked of him. To do some more research into promising studies. To check up on the woman from Albuquerque. To click on all the links Mimi had forwarded him over the weekend, about veganism and crazy sexy juicing and living clean and CBD oil – which he didn’t want to revisit after Flora’s dalliance with it at the start of the summer. He wanted peace and solitude so he could watch TV, get back to his iPad and scroll scroll scroll for answers and a cure.

  Maria stopped in her tracks on the gravel drive and raised a finger.

  ‘Si. Oh Dan-i-el.’ Three syllables. Daniel leaned against the door frame, his hands in his pockets. ‘Mimi called the house phone. Said she’d try you on your mobile.’ Daniel remembered the three texts from Mimi he had received at Olivia’s bedside.

  ‘Grazie Maria,’ he said with a nod. He loved the women dearly, but couldn’t wait to close the front door on them.

  *

  Daniel kicked off his trainers, leaving them on the floor by the shoe rack and walked up the floating staircase in his socks. He wanted to put on Match of the Day 2, but he felt the pull to check on his girls first. As he walked up the stairs his feet felt sweaty, leaving a misty imprint on each step as he rose, and he cursed himself for overdressing today in jeans and a top when shorts and a T-shirt would have done.

  He opened his bedroom door to see Sofia lying face down, cheek pressed on the mattress just below the pillow, a picture of purity. Her mouth was open in a small circle and she was wearing little pants and no vest – standard night attire for their hot bod, who always worked up a sweat while sleeping. Daniel unravelled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from under Sofia’s arm, placed it on the bedside table, turned off the lamp and kissed her cheek with dry lips and a broken heart.

  Sofia stirred and Daniel froze by the door, not wanting to wake her. She’d slept so fretfully for the past few weeks and months, he’d stopped protesting about her padding into her parents’ room and edging him across the big double bed.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Daniel – eyes already wrung from having sobbed into Olivia’s thigh in the hospital – wanted to cry again, but he put his hand to his dry mouth as he looked at his little girl: his bear cub with brown hair like his. He walked back to the bed and half covered her, for comfort more than warmth, and closed the door gently behind him. Past the spare bedroom, Sofia’s bedroom and the family bathroom, at the other end of the landing, Daniel tapped Flora’s bedroom door twice gently and opened it.

  ‘Hey…’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘You ought to get some sleep you know.’

  Flora groaned.

  ‘You’ll want to feel your very best for the first day back.’

  Daniel tried to not sound pressurising, then had a sudden flash of panic about uniforms, bags and packed-lunch boxes, before reminding himself that Maria would definitely have taken care of it all.

  ‘Their bags are all packed and on the sofa.’

  Flora lay on her side, one arm under her head, gazing into the lava lamp on her bedside table. Daniel perched on her bed by her knees. Up close he could see Flora’s irises illuminated by the light, like the swishes and swirls in brown and orange marbles he played with as a child, as she watched red orbs of wax rise gently.

  ‘Whatcha looking at?’

  He rued himself for trying to sound cool.

  Daniel followed Flora’s gaze and examined the mutating globules of wax as they rose like balloons at a fiesta before reconsidering; they started to look like haemoglobin sharpening into focus under a microscope. The water in the lamp like the bags of fluid, drugs and saline that weaved in and out of Flora’s mother. Daniel didn’t find the lamp as soothing to look at as Flora seemed to.

  ‘I don’t want to go back.’

  ‘But it’s Year 10!’ Daniel said, as if galvanising her into battle. ‘GCSEs start here! My big girl needs to glide into that school like the goddess she is, refreshed from the summer. Ready to take on the—’

  ‘Not school.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to go back to that place. To Mum.’

  Flora gave a guilty sideways glance in the direction of her dad then looked back quickly at the rising red blood cells.

  Daniel ruffled the back of his hair, trying to hold back a groan. He desperately wanted to stroke Flora’s hair, lighter as it usually was at the end of the summer, not the deep russet it turned in midwinter. Flora hadn’t spent this summer in Camogli or Ibiza or Scotland. This summer had been spent at the local lido, her hair turning lighter as her freckled face turned pink with blushes caused by the boys doing their A levels, many of whom fancied Flora but didn’t know what to say to her because of her mum.

  Daniel hadn’t stroked her hair in so long, he didn’t want her to feel awkward. She had been increasingly standoffish since her mother’s illness; even worse since her incident with four friends and a bottle of CBD oil.

  ‘Aww, don’t say that princess. Mamma loves seeing you. She loves you so much. Your visits are the best thing about her day.’

  As he said it, Daniel realised he was piling too much pressure on his daughter, adding to the million reasons he already felt wretched. Wretched about being a bad dad. About palming the girls off on Nancy and Maria. About the fact there seemed to be nothing he could do to make Olivia better.

  She is still a child.

  ‘I know Papa. But I want her here. Where she should be.’

  ‘I know, and she will…’

  Flora rolled onto her back and flashed her father a look of mistrust and doubt.

  ‘And that’s great you’re keen to go back to school. After the shit summer we’ve had, some normality will do you good – to see Amelie and Jessie and do all the brilliant things you love. Get back to basketball. Get back to guitar. I get it. You need routine and fresh air and to not be sitting in that place with your sister and your nonnas.’

  Flora gave a conciliatory frown as if to say, ‘I know.’

  ‘Come on.’ Daniel straightened the duvet over his daughter’s long limbs, kissed her forehead and briefly stroked her mane of hair scattered on the pillow above her scalp, as her mother’s was in the hospital.

  Flora rolled back onto her side in a foetal ball and returned her focus to the lava lamp, giving Daniel his cue to go.

  ‘I love you princess.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, as she shut her eyes and tried not to cry.

  Daniel turned the main light off at the door and closed it, leaving only the red glow of the lamp softly lighting the room.

  ‘I love you too,’ came a flat and little voice from the other side of the door.

  *

  In the open downstairs living space, Daniel leaned into the abundant fridge and scoured it for beers. He couldn’t see any Peroni, Moretti or Brew Dog for the food his mothers-in-law had filled it with: a large earthenware dish bursting with melanzane alla parmigiana and covered in cling film; leftover fig cake; tubs of yogurt and cartons of smoothies for the girls’ packed lunches. Bags of gnocchi next to Tupperware packed with Maria’s ragu. A tray of tiramisu. A bountiful cheese box and some tins of fizzy orange.

  Beer.

  Daniel felt the salve of coolness on his hot face and took a can from the back of the fridge before shutting the door. The kitchen was large and modern, as was all of the downstairs, with vast glass walls, some of them all the way up to the roof, all looking out onto decking, the
garden, Olivia’s studio and the fields beyond it. It was an open and exposed space, but Daniel liked to think that only deer, badgers and hedgehogs would be peering in as he slumped into the L-shaped sofa and put on the TV.

  Crack.

  The hiss of the cool can brought little comfort to shoulders weighed down by a task, a truth, he didn’t want to face. Next to the girls’ new backpacks was Daniel’s own bag he’d slung on the sofa, which he opened, and slid his laptop out of its case.

  Olivia used to joke that Daniel was surgically attached to his computer, but he hadn’t needed it so much lately, not since his site editor had told him to go on leave just before the World Cup. The emails had started to slow down. He was taken off editorial groups about Russia, strategy, story planning and tickets going spare. Now he only tended to get messages from friends, although they’d been less frequent given how poor he was at replying. He was grateful for the enquiries, he just hated not having good news to impart. So he only spoke to the odd close colleague. His deputy sports editor at BBC Online, who was currently stepping up and covering for him. The chief football correspondent, who predicted big things for his beloved Cardiff City this season and spent the summer trying to distract Daniel with transfer news, Fantasy Football and Predict The Score commitments. The fashion editor at Daniel’s former paper, who had championed Olivia’s clothing line from the get-go. And Jim. Jim still called and messaged daily, even when Daniel didn’t answer.

  He put the beer down, a pool of condensation forming on the glass coffee table, and turned on the TV, letting out a sigh that turned into a yawn. Mark Chapman in the Match of the Day 2 studio provided some welcome normality, some rhythm to a topsy-turvy time. Since he had been on leave, in a world without deadlines, interviews and breaking sports news, Daniel was surprised by how easy it was to forget which day of the week it was.

  Sunday.

  He leaned back, fired up his MacBook, minimised the internet and its tabs about living strong, juicing and wonder drugs, and opened Word. Command + N. A new document. It’s how he usually began writing up a story about the Lions’ tour or the Ashes, or an exclusive interview with Bradley Wiggins or Usain Bolt. The blank white rectangle still put fear into him, still gave him imposter syndrome after all those documents written, after all these years, but never had he felt the fear as sharply, and wondered how the hell he should begin, as he did now.