The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘OK I’m Kenny!’ she ordered, as she took Daniel’s hand, started singing and he joined in apprehensively.

  For four clunky minutes they sang ‘Islands in the Stream’, badly, in unison, wide eyes looking at each other, scouring each other’s souls for fragments of comfort they could sense within them.

  *

  Sitting on stone steps under a portal outside the imposing train station, Olivia checked her bag to make sure she hadn’t lost anything. Disappointingly, the sports bar – seemingly all bars in Dunedin – closed at 11.30 p.m., so Olivia and Daniel had an hour to kill. An hour to amble to the nearby station and wait for Olivia’s train; an hour for Daniel to eke out their evening to the very last moment.

  ‘You sure you didn’t leave anything in the bar?’ Daniel asked, worried by how drunk and giddy he was feeling.

  ‘Only my dignità,’ Olivia joked.

  ‘You got your plane tickets?’

  Olivia rummaged in her cloth bag.

  ‘Passaporto, train ticket, plane ticket, Walkman, headphones… money. Yes! All good. Don’t worry, all my treasures are here.’

  Then Daniel remembered.

  ‘Shit!’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Olivia gasped. Daniel’s sharp realisation had made her jump. And then laugh.

  Daniel had been so caught up in getting to know Olivia, fearful of the grains of sand ebbing away in a timer that was constantly on his shoulder, that he had forgotten about Olivia’s ankle chain, safely stowed in the inside pocket of his bag.

  ‘I have something of yours! I’m so sorry, I meant to…’

  Olivia half smiled, half frowned, as she watched him open the bag on the stone step between his feet.

  He felt the familiar shape of the chain. Its links and gems he had caressed and examined, imagining the life of its owner, and pulled it out of his bag.

  Olivia saw it, her eyes widening in disbelief.

  ‘My necklace!’

  ‘Necklace?’

  ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘In Sydney. In the club. You gave me your drink to hold, so you could dance.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘A drag queen. Pulp Fiction. You were dancing together.’

  ‘Her! I remember her! That’s when I lost it?’

  ‘You danced so hard your jewellery flew off!’ Daniel chuckled to himself. ‘I tried to catch up with you…’

  Olivia’s eyes welled up as she lifted the chain weaving through Daniel’s fingers, threading it into hers. She stroked one of the stones with her forefinger and thumb.

  ‘My necklace.’

  She looked adoringly at it, then adoringly at Daniel.

  ‘Thank you thank you thank you! I cannot believe it!’

  ‘Well, I wanted to tell you – at sunrise in Byron Bay. After the whale had stopped leaping, but I turned back and you’d gone.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then on the highway, I wanted to tell you – I looked for you in Cairns…’

  Olivia silenced Daniel with an emphatic hug, her arms looping around his neck next to her. She squeezed him tight, in a wholehearted embrace.

  ‘This is amazing, I thought I’d never see it again. I can’t believe I’m reunited with it on the last night of my trip. Thank you, Daniel.’

  Daniel was relieved she wasn’t angry.

  ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t remember earlier tonight.’

  A tear trickled down one of Olivia’s cheeks.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Very OK. This is wonderful. You are wonderful. This necklace – my father gave it to me when I was a little girl. These are ruby, peridot and citrine – the birth stones of me and my mothers.’

  Daniel looked at the chain under the pale glow of the streetlight. It was sparkling more now that it was in her hands. He was so obsessed with the girl it belonged to, he hadn’t noticed the beauty in the gemstones. He hadn’t realised it were so precious.

  ‘I loved it so much, that as I got bigger and it became tight around my neck, I had it made smaller, a few links taken out so I could wear it on my wrist. But I wear it on my ankle. My father always anchoring me to the ground.’

  Daniel smiled.

  ‘I knew it was careless to bring it backpacking.’ Olivia shook her head, as if she were chastising herself, looking like she was sobering up. She fastened the chain to her ankle, safely under her trousers, and shook her head again.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Daniel asked, nudging his arm into hers. Wishing he had the confidence to hug her.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘My dad… He died in April.’

  ‘Oh god Olivia, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘A heart attack. He was 64. Older than my mothers – twenty years older than Mamma Una anyway…’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘But too young for a heart attack. It was his second one!’ she shrugged, as if it was funny, when clearly she didn’t think it was.

  Olivia looked up and her eyes met Daniel’s. They were honest and heartfelt and she didn’t feel drunk enough anymore.

  ‘I’m so fucking sorry.’ Daniel felt moved enough to pull her in, and she placed her face in the curve of his neck and let out a quiet cry. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Olivia’s gentle sobs slowing. Daniel, conscious of the time and wishing he could stop it, stroked her arm under her cagoule, before Olivia pulled back, pushing her tears up to the wisps of baby hair on her forehead.

  ‘That’s why I came travelling really. To get some breathing space. To meet men and have distractions.’

  She laughed bittersweetly.

  Daniel didn’t like the thought of Olivia meeting men and being distracted, even if he might be one of them.

  ‘To drink hard and party hard. Ah!’ Which reminded Olivia of the hipflask she hadn’t mentioned when she did the inventory of her bag. She whipped it out to lighten the mood.

  ‘One for the road?’

  Daniel marvelled and nodded while Olivia took a swig of astringent vodka. She handed the hipflask to Daniel and he followed suit.

  ‘Shit man,’ he said, wincing. ‘And I really am sorry, about your dad.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I would never have made such a fuss about being Kenny Rogers had I known.’

  Olivia smiled gratefully.

  *

  ‘Have you got your passport?’

  Olivia’s heavy lids drooped as she felt for the rectangle inside her cloth bag.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she nodded. ‘And you asked me this already. You’re fussier than my nonna.’

  Daniel looked at the large train station clock. She had six minutes to haul the backpack she had clumsily pulled out of the locker in the left luggage area, onto her back and up to platform one, but she didn’t seem bothered, Jack Daniel’s, Dolly and a vodka reviver all coursing through her veins. The revelation about Olivia’s father and the ticking clock was sobering Daniel up. The vodka hadn’t worked for him.

  ‘Your train terminates at Christchurch, yes? You won’t fall asleep and miss your stop?’

  ‘I will fall asleep – but I won’t miss my stop. Christchurch is the last one, si.’

  She pulled her Walkman and a cassette box out of her bag. ‘I got my bedtime ballad to listen to.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘“Hyperballad”.’

  ‘What?’

  She shook the rattling cassette box as she turned it around. It was ‘Post’ by Björk.

  ‘It’s my sleeping album.’

  ‘No way! That’s my “in transit” album. I listen to it on the longer journeys. I love her.’

  Olivia was silenced, surprised by the English boy with a soft heart. They stood alone in the middle of the station, neither knowing how to end their brief encounter.

  Four minutes.

  The elaborate mosaic floor under their walking boots and the Royal Doulton tiles up to the circular balcony above the bookings hall made Olivia fe
el as if she were a diva on stage at La Scala, and remembered she would soon be back in Milan. But she already had her audience, Daniel’s eyes were firmly on her face.

  ‘You’d better go. You’ll miss your train and your flight.’

  Daniel heaved the backpack off the tiles and onto Olivia’s back, the weight of it almost making her topple backwards.

  ‘Whoa!’ she laughed as Daniel caught her by her two outstretched hands and pulled her back up in his.

  ‘Want me to carry your bag to the train? It’s massive.’

  ‘No, no, no, I’ll be fine.’

  Three minutes.

  They paused, and Daniel looked around self-consciously, at the empty and ornate ticket hall, and then back to Olivia in their bubble in the middle of it. Both were surprised by how empty the train station was for the last departure to the island’s largest city.

  ‘Allora,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘Thank you for my necklace. I can’t tell you what it means to me. How happy I am to be going home with it.’

  Daniel smiled.

  I don’t want you to go.

  ‘You’d really better go. Have a safe trip yeah?’

  Olivia nodded.

  ‘And a brilliant party. Save me some cake, right?’

  ‘I’ll see you in London,’ Olivia replied, without much conviction.

  As Daniel looked to see if Olivia was joking, she pressed her lips onto his, his gasp silenced by her mouth. Her lips were wet and plump and her tongue tasted of liquorice and honey. She pulled back again, the weight of her backpack and the ticking clock drawing her away. ‘Ciao.’

  Two minutes.

  ‘See you in London,’ Daniel smiled and nodded, scratching the back of his head, as he watched Olivia zig-zag to her train on platform one, backpack dragging her down, travel documents and world possessions carelessly slung across her front in a flimsy cloth bag. He desperately hoped he would. ‘Oh and happy birthday!’ he shouted, up towards the platform beyond the barrier. ‘It’s your birthday now!’ he yelled louder, his face full of hope that she would turn around and smile.

  But Olivia didn’t look back.

  Eight

  August 2017

  Ibiza, Spain

  ‘Girls! Are your cases packed?’

  Olivia flitted around the villa, gathering bottles of suncream, trinkets, phone chargers and the few magazines she wanted to take home.

  Flora was flopped on the sofa in a loveheart print playsuit, looking at her phone.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your case. Is it ready for Dad to put in the car?’

  ‘Erm…’ Flora looked vague, as if she didn’t have a clue where she was or why her mother was hassling her to get her suitcase together. From the distraction of Snapchat, Flora had forgotten she was even in Spain, and not on the L-shaped sofa at home. That she wasn’t actually an animated puppy with enormous eyes and a long protruding tongue.

  ‘Your case? Your stuff? Your new bomber jacket?’ Olivia said, appealing to her daughter’s sense of priority, even though it had been too hot to wear it all holiday.

  ‘Erm, sure,’ Flora shrugged unconvincingly.

  ‘Well, go check. And where’s your sister?’ Olivia asked, although she didn’t really need to. Sofia had spent most of the holiday doing cartwheels around the pool’s edge. Daring to get closer to the blue and white tiled lip of the pool with each starburst of her limbs.

  Flora rolled her eyes and stood up, to go and finish packing. True. She didn’t want to forget her Love Moschino bomber jacket, the pride and joy her parents got her for her birthday in the spring.

  Olivia, hair piled on her head, walked back into the bedroom where Daniel was stuffing charging cables and battery packs into a leather holdall.

  ‘I don’t know, I thought we’d made a leap yesterday. Now it’s back to monosyllables and attitude.’

  ‘She’s 13. I’m sure you were the same at 13,’ Daniel reassured.

  ‘Yes, but yesterday was so… perfect. Like it was a glimpse into the future.’ Olivia padded onto the stone floor of the rustic ensuite bathroom to gather the toiletries around the sink, wiping damp bottle bases onto a hand towel strewn next to it and putting them into a washbag. She stopped to examine her reflection in the mirror above it. To envisage what she might look like when her daughters were adults. She stared at herself, imagining lines creeping around her face like ivy climbing a withered wall, and she felt no fear in ageing. She saw Flora’s face on hers, and imagined what a wonderful grandmother she might make.

  Yesterday had been lovely. For the first time in the entire holiday, Olivia had got Flora to put down her phone and actually engage with her.

  ‘Wanna go on an adventure?’ she had asked poolside after breakfast, as Daniel patiently played bat and ball with Sofia. To Olivia’s utter surprise Flora said yes. So they jumped in the hire car and drove from the clifftop villa to Santa Gertrudis, where they bought pottery and ate wild beets and goats’ cheese in the village square, then to San Juan market to buy local honey, a necklace each and listen to live music, followed by the boutiques in Ibiza Town. Olivia stopped to look at dresses, fabrics and patterns, draping some of them around Flora and making mental illustrations of how she would shape them, how she would cut the fabric. How good they would look on her daughter. They stopped for a glass of rosé and a mocktail at a little finca on the way home, and Flora tipped her head back and beamed a smile Olivia wished she could bottle. Flora was even more beautiful than her mother, even though she didn’t smile as much. Her skin was more olive, her hair more lustrous; the whites of her dark brown eyes sparkled against the terracotta tones of her face. Maria always said she was born a wise and cynical soul, and she adored her.

  ‘I’ve had the most perfect day,’ Olivia said, as an earthenware bowl of prawns in garlic sauce sizzled between them, hoping her enthusiasm wouldn’t make her daughter recoil.

  ‘Me too,’ Flora replied, and Olivia felt like she had cracked a nut.

  *

  ‘Well, I’m sure the teenage angst doesn’t end there!’ Daniel called out from within a cloud of cable spaghetti on the bed. ‘Plus we’ve got it in another five years with Sofia.’

  ‘Hmmm, true,’ Olivia said, still examining her reflection. The laughter lines around her eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. Freckles that had married and morphed into bigger sun splatters after ten days in the Balearic sunshine. The sun-kissed streaks of her hair, as it went every summer, as it was when she first met Daniel. She tugged at her face and noted that her skin was almost as dark as her own paternal grandmother, Nonna Renata – a Sicilian peasant who was almost 100. Alessandro would take Olivia to visit his parents, Vincenzo and Renata, every winter when she was a little girl, and Renata would marvel at the redhead playing around the orange groves. Nonna Renata seemed old to Olivia thirty years ago, so she imagined how ancient she must seem now – as shrivelled and as soft as a sultana – to Flora and Sofia on their half-term trips to Sicily.

  Alessandro had left the island to study in Milan, and took great pride in returning in his shirts, ties, dapper suits and paler skin, as if no one could tell he ought to be a farmer. The Pirelli building had a way of making men pale, but there was no mistaking Olivia’s Sicilian heritage, smothering her Scottish roots at the end of a summer holiday, reflected back in the mirror today, making her feel both aged and revived.

  The shopping trip with Flora had given her so many ideas, so much inspiration. Most of the dresses she created were flouncy but neutral, in muted tones, but for some embroidery or beading, usually in the same shade as the net, silk or tulle fabric. But yesterday’s trip, the milestone with Flora, gave her new inspiration. The Balearic tiles and fabrics had reminded her of Sicilian majolica at Vincenzo and Renata’s house: patterned earthenware covered in blues, yellows and golds, adorned with pictures of cherubs, saints and fruits. Stories that the Moors had painted and the potters of Sicily took as their own as the trade winds from north Africa
blew ships through the Balearics en route to the Renaissance. Draping Flora in such prints inspired Olivia to create a whole line of clothes with more colour, more pattern: an ode to majolica, her nonna and her heritage.

  Mi famiglia.

  Olivia undid her topknot and let her hair tumble down. She considered brushing it, though she rarely brushed it because it looked better unkempt than bushy. She picked up the big paddle hairbrush next to the copper sink, and dropped it on the floor, taking a small bottle of face oil with it, and smashing it on the tiles.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Avere le mani di pasta frolla…’ Olivia muttered to herself.

  Olivia rarely spoke Italian outside of Italy anymore – and it had been almost two decades since she’d lived there.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Pastry hands, I have pastry hands, it’s OK,’ Olivia said, as she bent down to pick the oil up, but she got stuck halfway. ‘I… I dropped a hairbrush.’

  Daniel walked into the bathroom.

  ‘You OK?’

  Olivia stared at the brush and the leaking oil on the floor at her feet but didn’t say anything. She couldn’t even turn the bottle to stem the small slick of oil. It was as if she had frozen, bent over, in the shape of a question mark. Daniel’s question lingered in the air but he didn’t think much about the severity of it, and tried to lighten the mood.

  ‘I won’t tell the girls it was pills and not hairbrushes you used to drop…’

  It wasn’t very funny, but Olivia could feel in her face that she wouldn’t have been able to smile even if she had wanted to. She was frozen, and a burning sensation struck her like a lightning bolt in her right temple.

  ‘Daniel… Daniel, I can’t feel my…’

  ‘Hey hey, come here.’ Daniel carefully rubbed Olivia’s back as he gently straightened her and turned her to face the sink’s ledge so she could lean on it.

  ‘Daniel!’ she shouted, her voice echoing in the curved copper as she threw up into it. ‘I can’t—’ She heaved again violently. ‘I’m spinning.’

  ‘Shhh, shhh it’s OK, it’s OK…’ Daniel propped Olivia’s elbows up on the smooth stone around the sink. ‘Lean on this, don’t move. I’ll just grab the flannel.’ Daniel reached out to the bath.