The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘Christchurch.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘We-llll,’ she lingered on her lllls. ‘Christchurch for a flight to Milano. Via Singapore and London. Then back to London for school in the fall.’

  Daniel could barely keep up, but the twang of her accent, the way she said Milano, the way she spoke English as if she wasn’t English, despite being confident and fluent, made him conclude she must be Italian.

  ‘Oh cool.’

  ‘Not so cool, my train leaves at half past midnight. I thought it was twelve-thirty lunchtime, so I got to the station half a day too early.’ She rolled her eyes as if timekeeping errors were a common occurrence, but one she had become accustomed to.

  ‘Oh no! Bummer.’

  ‘Luckily I have enough time to get my flight; I was going to spend the night in Christchurch but now I don’t need to. Saves on a hotel I guess,’ she laughed and looked up at an aeroplane, heading north up the globe. There was nowhere else to go.

  ‘Did you fancy a coffee?’ Daniel gestured to one of the cafes closing up on the long road back to town, a sense of urgency and anxiety in him that it might be too late.

  ‘Oh please! Something stronger, thank you. I have a six-hour train journey, a twenty-four-hour flight via Singapore, a changeover at Heathrow, and I won’t be home until…’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Daniel offered, relaxing in his stride, noticing that lights were coming on and starting to twinkle in houses and the city ahead.

  The girl laughed and started humming The Beatles. She started to sing ‘Yesterday’ blithely and out of tune, and laughed again, making Daniel laugh too, she was that infectious. Her enthusiasm and spirit filled Daniel with a delight he couldn’t remember having ever felt.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he interrupted her singing, overcome by the compulsion to know.

  ‘Olivia. My name is Olivia. Yours?’

  ‘Daniel. Nice to meet you.’ Daniel raised a hand awkwardly as if he were accepting blame for something, and was relieved Olivia didn’t notice as her excited gazed took in the day turning into night.

  ‘Dan-i-el,’ she said, lingering on it. Three syllables. ‘I like the name Daniel,’ she decided, having tried it out for size. Daniel felt like he’d won a prize.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  Olivia looked at her watch again.

  ‘Come on, let’s get a proper drink, Daniel.’

  *

  Windswept and weather-beaten, Daniel and Olivia walked into a bar that looked like it had once been a bank or a church or another grandiose Baroque building, with high ceilings and bad burgundy carpet covering the intricate mosaic floors hidden beneath it. Sport was on TV, big green rectangles of something Daniel tried to ignore.

  On the walk to town Daniel was surprised to learn Olivia was also travelling on her own, given he had mostly seen her surrounded by people. She had started in LA and gone to Fiji, before Australia – coinciding with her friend Mimi in Sydney for a few days, later joining Mimi’s family in Melbourne before her flight to New Zealand. They had discussed their well-trodden routes and compared notes on the best fish and chips of their trips (Daniel’s was at Mangonui on the North Island; Olivia’s was at a beach on the Great Ocean Road in Australia), before stopping on the threshold of the grand yet slightly soulless bar. Not once had Olivia acknowledged seeing Daniel at any of the places they had both been, and he didn’t know how to mention it.

  ‘This is so weird!’ Olivia marvelled. ‘It’s like a bar Mamma Una took me to, in Edinburgh, just a couple months ago, before I left for LA.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘I was there seeing family…’ Olivia’s eyes glazed over for a second. The wild zest in them wore a veil of sadness that made Daniel decide to keep it chatty.

  ‘But you live in Milan, right?’ he asked cheerily.

  ‘Milano, yes. I grew up there.’

  Olivia didn’t look like she wanted to explain her complex life story right now – traces of black mascara fibres smudged under her eyes and she fiddled with her nose ring as she stared at the ceiling.

  Daniel felt boring. He didn’t hop from Milan to Edinburgh and London. He wasn’t well-travelled. Until now anyway. But his lack of adventure, the functionality of his shirt, jeans and walking boots didn’t seem to bother Olivia; she seemed keen to get a drink with him.

  Her gaze landed on Daniel while she waited for him to go to the bar. There was something comforting in his ruffled hair, gracious face and green-brown eyes that made her not mind retelling her story. But she wanted – she needed – a drink first.

  ‘Shall we?’ she said, as she nodded towards the bar.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, what would you like?’

  ‘Jack Daniel’s and Coke please.’

  ‘OK, I’ll be right back…’

  ‘I’ll get us a chair,’ she breezed gaily.

  As Daniel walked to the bar he passed a large-headed man with a pink face who already had one eye on Olivia as he headed to the toilet, loosening the belt buckle on his thick waist. Daniel felt a momentary panic about losing sight of her again, about someone more bullish or more confident becoming her friend, but he knew this was different to Sydney. They had spoken. She had punched him on the arm.

  Daniel ordered their drinks and looked back at Olivia, who was setting her cloth bag down on the high round table she had pulled a stool up at. It was the first time she had seemed alone, not surrounded by a group of admirers, and she looked different. She took off her cagoule and screwed it up on a stool opposite, leaving the one by her side free for Daniel, and untangled her hair from her funnel-neck jumper. She wore long, loose, tie-dye trousers that looked like she might have bought them on another world adventure, to somewhere even more exotic.

  Daniel paid and walked cheerily back to the table, hoping his beer would revive him. Hoping it would give him the confidence to give her back her ankle chain without seeming weird.

  ‘She asked if you wanted a double.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Oh, shit, I just got you a single.’ Daniel felt inadequate again. He wasn’t used to this. To buying girls drinks. To having to make friends. ‘I can go back and get another m—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ she gesticulated for him to sit down. ‘Tranquillo, it’s fine,’ she said, taking a big slurp. ‘Next time.’

  Daniel set his daypack down on the floor at his feet and positioned himself on his stool next to Olivia and took a sip from his pint.

  Next time.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said raising his glass.

  ‘Saluti,’ she winked.

  ‘So, Daniel—’

  Dan. Ee. El.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ Olivia asked with a wry smile.

  She noticed.

  ‘What?! I’m—’

  ‘I’m just kidding. But I’m pretty sure I saw you in Australia, no?’

  ‘Yeah, I sort of recognise you,’ Daniel tried to say it airily, but it just sounded apologetic. Olivia sat up.

  ‘Siiiiiii! At the beach in Byron Bay!’

  Sunrise. She must have seen me.

  ‘Yes, beautiful, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Beautiful?!’ Olivia laughed. ‘It looked pretty painful to me!’

  ‘Painful?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you were the guy running on the beach, still attached to your surfboard.’

  Shit.

  ‘Oh. You were there?’

  ‘Yes, everyone on the terrace kinda… cringed. We were surprised you got back up.’

  Daniel’s shoulders dropped in defeat.

  ‘Yes, I got back up.’

  Daniel had rather hoped she would have picked a more romantic happenstance: Daniel the hero who held her drink. Daniel, pensive and self-sufficient watching the sun rise at Byron Bay. Daniel the stranger locking eyes with her on the highway. But of course, she saw his excruciating slapstick fail on the first morning of surf school. She didn’t even know he had learned to ride a barrel.

&nb
sp; ‘Yes, not my finest moment.’

  Olivia stirred the ice in her drink and laughed.

  ‘You looked cute.’

  Daniel’s tanned cheeks flushed pink.

  He didn’t know how to mention Sydney – twice – but tried to keep it casual.

  ‘Yeah, I think that was you on the highway in Queensland, wasn’t it?’

  Olivia lit a cigarette and nodded.

  ‘And I’m sure I saw you at Poste Restante in Auckland last week, but I was preoccupied,’ she laughed to herself as if she had a secret she wanted to share, but Daniel didn’t take the bait, he was too taken aback. Gutted to have missed her, even though he was with her now.

  ‘Auckland? Oh I didn’t see you.’ He looked troubled.

  ‘Yeah, you were ahead of me in the queue and I thought I recognised you… from the surfboard thing,’ she said flirtatiously.

  ‘From the highway,’ Daniel corrected with a quiet twinkle.

  ‘No, I definitely recognised you from the beach.’

  Olivia could see Daniel was actually embarrassed by his beach calamity, so she playfully nudged into his arm with hers as they sat side by side on the stools looking out to the bar.

  ‘And you’re at the end of your trip. How does it feel to be going home?’

  ‘Hmmm…’ She twirled her nose ring. ‘I have mixed emotions,’ she replied bluntly. Daniel was too shy to ask why, he didn’t want to pry, but kicked himself for not.

  ‘I don’t go home for another month,’ he said. ‘I have a job starting in September.’

  Olivia didn’t ask him what his new job was, she looked like she was still worried about going home, and he felt stuck. He wanted to tell her. Impress her with his new post, as a news reporter on the Elmworth Echo. She didn’t look the type to be impressed by that though; Olivia looked like it took more to wow her than working for a provincial newspaper. So Daniel changed the subject back to Olivia.

  ‘What do you do in Milan?’

  ‘I finished school there. International school.’

  ‘What’s “international school”?’

  ‘Oh, like a private one, with lots of kids from all round the world. It’s why people always ask me if I’m fucking American.’

  ‘I don’t think you sound American.’

  ‘Good.’

  He didn’t know what she sounded. Not Italian. Other than when she said the word Milano.

  ‘So why didn’t you go to an Italian school?’

  ‘My parents are social climbers.’

  ‘Oh cool. My parents have no ambition whatsoever.’

  They laughed, and Daniel felt a bit guilty. Silvia and John Bleeker would do anything for their sons, as long as they followed a standard path, a binary choice. Co-ed or the boys’ school? Mashed or boiled potatoes? Football or rugby? French or German? His mum was a primary school teacher and his dad was the manager of the Barclays Bank on the high street – Daniel had broken the family mould with this trip, but they were terribly proud of him for doing so.

  ‘So have you just graduated?’

  ‘We-lll, I finished a couple years ago, been fuckin’ around really, working here and there. Drinking too much. Did my foundation. But I start college in London in the fall.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’ Daniel asked, trying not to sound hopeful that they might meet up back home.

  ‘Central Saint Martins. I’m doing fashion design. Womenswear.’

  ‘Oh wow.’ Daniel pulled at the denim on his thighs to straighten his jeans.

  ‘Yeah I kinda blew my baccalaureate and had to retake, do work experience and then my foundation. I messed up.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you messed up to me.’

  Olivia shrugged. She sounded quite casual about messing up, like it was a rite of passage, one that all her friends did as if it were a gap year. Then the glaze appeared over her eyes again, the one Daniel had seen looking out to sea, and she downed her drink.

  ‘So where is Central Saint Martins?’ Daniel tried to sound breezy again. ‘I’ve heard of it but not sure…’

  ‘Soho – Mamma Una and I took a trip to look at it, after Edinburgh actually. See the university. I’ve got a little flat in the centre of the city. On Lexington Street, just a few blocks from college. Do you know Lexington? You are English, right?’

  Olivia looked Daniel up and down and he felt so terribly English and so terribly inadequate. To him, London was the place he would go to see football matches, or take school exchange students to Camden Market, or go Christmas shopping on Oxford Street, or get the train to Farnham or Brighton from Waterloo or Victoria – although he wouldn’t be doing that again. Olivia made London sound like New York.

  ‘Yeah, I know Soho,’ he replied, trying to sound worldly. ‘Living there sounds ace.’

  And expensive.

  Daniel didn’t realise people actually lived in Central London. Olivia nodded.

  ‘Yeah it’s near college and all the bars and stores and things.’ She took another sip and finished her drink.

  ‘And fashion sounds cool. How did you get into fashion?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she waved. ‘It’s just something I’ve always been surrounded by.’ Olivia swirled the ice in her empty glass. ‘Ever since I can remember.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘You know how your senses can take you back to a place in your past and it fills you with comfort?’

  Daniel inhaled the smell of his dad’s Old Spice aftershave and nodded.

  ‘Well, for me it is the sound, the hum, of the sewing machine. It’s the most comforting sound in the world.’ Olivia closed her eyes again as she searched for it in the rolodex of her brain. Edwyn Collins came over the speaker, ‘A Girl Like You’, and Daniel’s heart ached as he looked at her. Olivia’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember; her face looked scared, something about her looked like she had suffered a car crash, but Daniel could tell she had wings hidden in all that hair.

  *

  Olivia Messina was something of a phoenix born out of the ashes of an accident. Her mother Nancy, herself flame-haired and feisty, travelled through Milan in the early Seventies – and decided to stay. She’d been broken-hearted after the boy next door in Edinburgh turned out to be a let-down and she’d decided to go interrailing, ‘to show him’.

  Nancy’s mother, Jean, Olivia’s Scottish grandmother, who was originally from the Hebrides and thought that the test of a woman was whether she could cut peat or not, pleaded with her 20-year-old daughter not to go.

  ‘You’re so naïve!’ she said.

  ‘Well, this will make a woman of me.’

  ‘Staying here and learning a trade will make a woman of you! Anyway, if you’re doing this to punish Hughie, you’re wasting your time. Better to get revenge right under his nose.’ Nancy’s mother did always have a bitter streak.

  But Nancy had a thirst for adventure that her mother didn’t. She didn’t need to go to the islands and learn to cut peat; she didn’t need to learn another trade, she was already an excellent typist; and she didn’t need to get revenge under Hughie’s nose. Finding love in Antwerp, Valencia or Munich would be even more satisfying. And anyway, she wasn’t going travelling to find love.

  ‘I want to see Europe,’ she protested. ‘Look at the new opportunities there!’

  So her mother and father, austere in manner but enchanted by their daughter, agreed that she could go, to get it out of her system, and they gave Nancy fifty pounds and waved her goodbye at Waverley Station, as she started her European odyssey clutching a small brown suitcase.

  Nancy didn’t expect to fall quite so spectacularly in love with Milan as she did. But the moment she arrived, under the cylindrical glass roof of Centrale station, and walked through the hulking portals into the city, she knew it would be a while before she would be leaving. It was so spectacular! The fascist flush that commissioned such a space had fallen, but the faded grandeur sat well with Nancy. It felt strangely more like home than the house on Montgomery Street ever had, and that’s where
her interrailing stopped. She rented lodgings in the bourgeois Wagner district of the city, with bustling boulevards and neighbourhood gelaterias, and enrolled in an Italian course until she got a nannying job with a wealthy family.

  When Nancy’s Italian was strong enough she left nannying – ‘I bambini non sono per me,’ she apologised to the lady of the house – and took a job in the typing pool at the Pirelli Tower. The excitement of working there was immense; typing in another language kept her on her toes, and she was super useful when her boss, Alessandro Messina, needed someone to help him compose a letter in English.

  Alessandro was a charming and dapper man who wore Zegna suits and smoked Toscano cigars. A social climber from Sicily, Alessandro was a senior accountant at Pirelli, who soon fell for the Scottish typist, who he revered as if she were a magical creature. Nancy wasn’t that unusual-looking in Scotland – her soft pageboy cut and neat neckerchiefs gave her delicate face a business-like gravitas – but in the Pirelli Tower she turned heads; many of the men walking the corridors in their wide lapels and flared suit trousers, hair slicked and a cigarette dangling from their lips, gawped at Nancy as if she were the first redhead they had ever seen. Alessandro picked Nancy out of the typing pool for her bilingual skills and her beauty, and she became his PA, typing his letters, popping out for his piadina and cigars, going for drinks after work with him, and soon La Scala. By 1974 Nancy was sleeping with Alessandro, while also arranging his holidays with his wife to the Dolomites, Camogli and Sicily.

  She didn’t think of Hughie once.

  In the autumn of 1974, when Nancy realised they had slipped up and she was pregnant, she sat in Alessandro’s office and they cried together.

  ‘What are we to do?’ he begged.

  Nancy was lost for words.

  Alessandro and his wife Maria had been longing for a baby for seven years without any success. ‘This will break her.’

  Nancy sat on the sofa clutching a handkerchief, for the first time in her life unsure. Of what to do. Of what it would mean for her future with Alessandro. Of what it would do to a job she loved. She had made so many friends in the Pirelli Tower, she didn’t want to give it up.

  ‘I can’t do this to her,’ Alessandro sobbed, conflicted by the treachery he was about to admit to but elated to have the child he’d assumed was impossible.