The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘I said I’d be waiting in the car outside. Eleven-thirty. You knew that.’

  ‘But she’s not home alone. Mum’s there!’

  ‘Your mother can’t look after your sister at the moment. Your mother is very frail. I left two people who aren’t capable of looking after themselves home alone in the middle of the night, for well over an hour…’ Daniel shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry Papa. I just lost track of the time and then I couldn’t find my—’

  ‘Why does she annoy you so much? Why are you so horrid to her?’

  Flora was taken aback, and the feeling of giddiness at having kissed George Burford-Mason on the decking at midnight seeped away as the blood drained from her face. Her mouth gaped open. She felt a little bit sick.

  ‘She’s poorly, you know. I thought you might be angry about it, that this was your way of taking your frustration and anger out – on her – but this started before Mamma got sick…’

  Flora’s fast-sobering eyes welled up.

  ‘She loves you, you know.’

  Flora couldn’t speak; her bottom lip started to wobble. Daniel grabbed his phone and house keys from the cubby in the middle of the car. ‘And she needs your love and kindness – now more than ever. Tomorrow we’re going to London for the night; on Monday we get her test results back. She—’

  ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY I DO IT!’ shouted Flora, stopping herself from crying by frantically fanning her eyes.

  Daniel was shocked by Flora’s outburst of honesty and paused, his hand hovering over the silver door handle.

  ‘I know when I’m doing it but I don’t know why!’

  Startled by the fear and softened by the beauty in his daughter’s face, Daniel retreated. They sat crippled in silence for almost a minute, before Daniel spoke.

  ‘Well, can you try to stop yourself next time? We need to pull together. Can you do that? Can you stop yourself? Please!’

  Flora nodded, cheeks flushed with Bourjois, fury, Apple Sourz and shame.

  ‘Great, well let’s get to bed then.’

  Forty-Four

  December 2009

  Cambridgeshire, England

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you my darling…’ Olivia stood next to the young magnolia tree in the icy garden. The moon was lighting up the frost so it sparkled on the grass around it; she and Daniel hadn’t taken off their winter coats since coming home, paying the babysitter and putting her in a taxi.

  They had been out for an early dinner – pie night at their favourite pub, The Victoria, in the village – before Olivia’s 10 p.m. eating curfew ahead of her C-section the next morning. At dinner Olivia told Daniel she would like to visit Jude’s tree before bed and Daniel wrapped his hands around Olivia’s and pulled them in for a kiss.

  They had planted the magnolia in memory of Jude’s birth and death, three years ago next week. A forever reminder that he was stillborn but still loved. Now the tree was burgeoning, if not yet blooming – winter was never kind to it – and Olivia stood in front of it, side-by-side with Daniel, holding a small candle. ‘You’re always in our hearts. You always will be.’

  She let out a sigh, like a warm libeccio wind raging across the Mediterranean, enveloping Jude’s tree with a veil of love.

  Daniel rubbed the small of her heavily burdened back, her belly low and distended, and nodded. Flora was upstairs asleep in her bedroom.

  ‘Is there anything you want to say Daniel?’

  Olivia turned to him, pained.

  ‘No, no – you always say it best.’

  Olivia nodded in agreement and turned back to talk to the tree, to Jude.

  ‘This baby will not replace you… you’re always here in our hearts and we will never forget you. We won’t, will we Daniel?’

  That was what worried Olivia most – apart from tomorrow going hideously wrong – that Jude might be forgotten.

  ‘I didn’t beg you to open your eyes because I knew they wouldn’t!’ Olivia lamented, as if she were apologising.

  ‘It’s OK Liv, you did everything right!’ Daniel interjected, worried his pregnant wife would get distressed.

  ‘I know. I just wish I knew what those eyes looked like. Whether they were like yours or mine or neither of us. So we could see him and reassure him we loved him. So we could see how lovely his soul was. How lovely it is.’

  ‘I think we know how lovely your soul is, Jude,’ Daniel said to the tree, and Olivia, cold hands clutching the warm and comforting candle, huddled into his neck. ‘We will never forget you,’ Daniel affirmed, as Olivia nodded against his skin. ‘We will always keep your memory and your story alive.’

  Forty-Five

  June 2018

  London

  Daniel stepped out onto the busy pavement of Euston Road and scoured it for a taxi among the buses, people carriers and cyclists. None of the black cabs had their lights on, although it was hard to tell in the reflection of the summer morning sunshine.

  He let out a sigh, and through the blur of traffic, Daniel could see the Premier Inn on the other side of the road. He looked up to the window of the room he stayed in the night before the bombs went off.

  Daniel had missed the last train back to Guildington and got the cheapest, cleanest hotel option he could find. A £79 Premier Inn room within stumbling distance of the station. He’d got to his room, eaten two custard creams from the packet by the kettle (to soak up some of the alcohol) and flopped on the bed, passing out in his clothes.

  He woke to beeps of traffic, the anger of a hot July morning, the jostling of people onto buses and towards the tube. He thought he’d only been asleep for five minutes but suddenly it was morning – his head was thumping – so he showered and put yesterday’s clothes back on before heading back to work. As he walked past King’s Cross station he didn’t realise four men with explosive devices in backpacks were congregating there.

  Daniel had already got to the newsroom in Farringdon when PA and Reuters newswires came through, talking about a power surge over near Liverpool Street.

  The picture editor called from Aldgate East to say it was more serious than that and she was going to stick around to see what she could find out. One colleague, half deafened from being on the tube between King’s Cross and Russell Square, stumbled into the office shell shocked and barely able to speak, but he was too scared to go home. Daniel started to worry about his junior sports reporter – who was always at her desk with a soy latte and some bircher muesli by 9 a.m. – and was relieved when she burst in shortly after 10 a.m., saying she had seen the bus explode on Tavistock Square, and had run for her life.

  As the vernacular changed from ‘power surge’ to ‘terror attack’, and injuries became fatalities, Daniel desperately tried to get through to Olivia at home, to let her know he wasn’t one of them, but the landlines weren’t working; the mobile networks were down.

  He looked across the traffic blurring between him and the Premier Inn and remembered that day. The panic of the days that followed. Fifty-two lives taken, almost 800 injured. A terrified wife at home.

  ‘Taxi!’ he shouted, as one driver set a passenger down outside the British Library, but it was too far away, someone else jumped in first. He looked back up at the grey blackout liner behind the inoffensive hotel room curtain, drawing a line under the memory, wondering how he was going to get through today.

  *

  Daniel and Olivia had stayed in a different sort of hotel last night, something more comfortable. A plush room with a view of St Pancras’ peaks. Daniel wanted a comfortable bed and a bounteous buffet breakfast for his wife, to see if that would pique an appetite in Olivia. Her frame had become so thin since her fall, he worried about her lack of strength, her ‘bouncebackability’ as they called it in sport, but he was sure she could. He’d seen those strong thighs, twisting and jiving with a drag queen on a speaker podium in Sydney; he’d seen them straddle him on steamy nights at home and on holidays; he’d seen them birth three babies. He knew Olivia had the strength in
her to get better.

  ‘Taxi!’

  Olivia still wasn’t interested. She’d only nibbled on a corner of brioche to humour Daniel. Her lack of interest in food was as alien to Olivia as it was to him; she had always tucked into whatever was in front of her. But that moment Olivia had hit the ground running, her desire for cannoli and brioche, for fig tart and ravioli, evaporated into the concrete.

  ‘Taxi!’ bellowed Daniel, knowing how ridiculous it was, that drivers would never hear him. They stopped on a hand gesture or a whim.

  Daniel looked at his watch. They had half an hour to get from the hotel to the appointment, only a mile away, but it wasn’t walkable. He should have been flying to Russia today, to cover the build-up to the World Cup, but he didn’t want to be away from Olivia and the girls, not until they knew more, so he’d sent out the deputy sports editor alongside the chief football correspondent.

  If the results go our way, I’ll go out for a game or two. Moscow or Ekaterina.

  A taxi finally pulled up and Daniel waved through the glass wall, to the square sofa on the other side of it, where Olivia was sitting, leaning on a metal frame in front of her. She propped herself up onto it as Daniel spoke to the driver, her thin shoulders hiking up like a V around her shrunken neck. Olivia didn’t look tall anymore.

  With the frame in front of her she slowly walked out. Her trousers loose, her feet bony, and the taxi driver waited patiently, meter on, for her to get in with Daniel’s help.

  ‘Queen Square please mate,’ he said, as he lay the metal frame on the floor of the black cab and arranged their legs around it before closing the door with a hefty pull. He looked at Olivia and gave her a reassuring smile, while squeezing her thigh and noting that it must be thinner than Sofia’s now.

  *

  ‘So we’ve had a look at the MRI and CT scans. And I’m afraid, as suspected, there is a new tumour. Several actually.’

  Olivia and Daniel sat on plastic chairs in a long thin office within the redbrick walls of the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, while consultant neurosurgeon Mr Greene leaned against a table strewn with piles of papers. Greene was flanked by two doctors perched on desks. Three wise men, their faces drawn, as they did their best to look Olivia and Daniel in the eye.

  She missed the handsome doctor from Ibiza, with a grey beard and a sparkle in his warm brown eyes, and almost wanted to laugh when she remembered how beautiful he was, how much easier this all was back then. How she didn’t understand what Mr Greene was saying.

  My girls.

  Daniel wanted to hit him, for failing at trying to be nice about it when this was news he delivered every single day.

  Actor cunt.

  He did have his most sincere face on.

  A foppish younger surgeon who Olivia imagined had a high-achieving wife propped himself between stacks of papers on Mr Greene’s left. His face was one of sympathy and apology. Another medic with a bald head found some space to Mr Greene’s right. His face was so indistinguishable Daniel and Olivia knew that they would never remember it. It was all such a blur.

  Where is she? Where is Okereke?

  Olivia inhaled a long breath and closed her eyes.

  This isn’t happening.

  Daniel tried to squeeze Olivia’s hand but his was shaking and clammy and he knew it wouldn’t be calming at all, so they sat side by side not touching like schoolchildren trying to pay attention. He ruffled his hair and looked at the consultant accusatively.

  ‘But Dr Okereke said… we were told in January…’ the words wouldn’t come out. ‘What treatment plan do you have then?’

  His question was aggressive. He still wanted to punch the surgeon in the face.

  She said they’d got it all out.

  ‘I’m afraid, with these types of tumour, and with the location of them… it’s not always possible to operate. Ergo, we won’t at this stage.’

  ‘At this stage?’

  Daniel’s aggression turned to hope.

  The surgeon read the situation. As the most experienced brain surgeon in the country, he had led hundreds of conversations like these.

  ‘It’s not that we’re not bothering to treat your wife Mr, er, Messina. It’s that we can’t. I’m terribly sorry. There are multifocal glioblastomas and they’re very delicately placed, some in the very centre of your wife’s brain.’

  ‘You said – Dr Okereke said – she was cancer-free. Was she fucking joking?’

  ‘Daniel…’ Olivia put a hand on his arm.

  ‘No. She – Mrs Messina – you were cancer-free then. These are very aggressive and very fast-growing cells.’

  A thick silence hung in the room, a question hanging over the diagnosis that Daniel desperately needed to know the answer to. But Olivia didn’t want to ask.

  ‘What about chemo?’ he asked. ‘You said at an earlier meeting that chemo might be an option down the road. Is this the time for chemo?’

  ‘We have discussed this, my colleagues and I – and we don’t think your wife is strong enough or fit enough for chemo at the moment.’

  She can get fit. I’ll force-feed her if I have to.

  ‘Are you saying you would turn her down for it?’ Daniel felt so agitated, like a frustrated toddler banging at a wall to be understood, he wanted to cry.

  Mr Greene looked grave. Like he was searching his brain for diplomacy rather than a solution.

  ‘I’m not sure it would help at all.’

  ‘You’re not sure or do you know? Can she have it or not?’

  ‘I would say…’ He stroked his neck and turned to Olivia. ‘That as long as you are able to walk into this building yourself and ask for chemo, you can have chemo.’

  ‘I can’t walk anywhere at the moment by myself,’ said Olivia, almost laughing, as if this surreal conversation wasn’t about her.

  He knows that, the cunt.

  ‘We’ll get you fit enough, my love,’ Daniel said defiantly, almost to spite the medics. ‘Do some physio. I’ll cook, we’ll get your weight back up. Get your mums over.’

  The young doctor with the floppy hair wanted to give Daniel a hug but couldn’t.

  ‘Get you well enough for chemo, we can do it.’

  Olivia let out a sigh of submission.

  ‘Oh. If you think so.’

  The doctors said nothing. The one with the blurred face looked down at the floor. Maybe that’s why Daniel and Olivia would never really remember him – he wasn’t even there. He hadn’t said anything. Just observed. Maybe the Grim Reaper doesn’t wear a hood and a cloak. Maybe he’s so bland and nondescript, people don’t see death looming at all.

  Forty-Six

  December 2009

  Cambridge, England

  Olivia lay on the operating table looking up at the ceiling. The plinky plonk opening chords of Florence + The Machine’s ‘Dog Days Are Over’ made her almost rise off the slab in elation. Daniel was in scrubs next to her. The heartbeat was strong. She would never have to go through labour again after she begged her midwife and consultant not to make her.

  The fear of it had been plaguing her dreams increasingly as her pregnancy progressed. Jude’s face as he lay still, in her arms. She used the doppler most nights just to check. She had spent a restful if nervous summer, not quite believing this day would come.

  ‘Please can I have a C-section?’ Olivia pleaded with the consultant obstetrician, a thin man with a translucent face and cloud of white hair. ‘My baby is due on the day my son died. I can’t go through that again.’

  Mr Kristiansen pored over the paperwork. There hadn’t been any explanation as to why Jude’s heart stopped beating, but he assured Olivia it wasn’t due to her work, or Flora’s rambunctiousness. It wasn’t bad nutrition or that she didn’t sit down enough. It wasn’t Olivia’s penance for a period of creativity. After short consideration, Mr Kristiansen agreed.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ he said, reading the fire and fear in Olivia’s eyes, and booking her in for a week before the due date.


  The weeks waiting, beyond thirty-six when Jude had died, were the hardest. Every night Olivia went to sleep she feared her baby would stop kicking, even though Sofia barely stopped doing cartwheels, even in her tummy.

  The day finally arrived, and Olivia and Daniel were at hospital at 8 a.m. as instructed. They hadn’t found out the gender this time. Olivia didn’t know how she’d feel if she were told she were having a boy.

  The anaesthetist spoke softly by Olivia’s ear. Telling her what he would be doing to Olivia’s spine and how it might feel. He asked her if she could feel a cold spray on her thigh, her tummy, her shoulder and she said she couldn’t. She didn’t feel the incision or the ripping of her placenta. She didn’t feel the violent tear as Mr Kristiansen pulled her apart. Daniel winced as he watched the consultant’s face as he tugged.

  Olivia didn’t feel that ‘washing up in your stomach’ sensation she had been warned about.

  All she felt was a strange sense of calm. That this was going to be OK.

  The dog days are over.

  As Mr Kristiansen lifted Sofia out, screaming and crying and bloody and blue, the silver-haired midwife who had held onto Olivia three years before cheered, ‘A girl!’, and she placed Sofia onto Olivia’s chest. She was moving. Crying. Limbs flailing. Her swollen and scrunched face put out by the interruption, the cold room and the stark lights.

  Olivia didn’t think this clinical birth would be the one she enjoyed the most. A healthy baby, coming into the world to the soundtrack of her pregnancy.

  ‘A girl!’ Daniel marvelled, looking at their pale waxy daughter – her hair not red like Flora’s; dark but more abundant than Jude’s – as if she were a thing of magic. Olivia held Sofia’s naked body against her clammy cold chest and cooed. She had an impish look about her, a funny face. Olivia stroked her nose and inhaled the bliss of relief as Daniel cradled them both and cried.

  ‘Girls! My girls!’