The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘Flora’s going to adore her,’ Olivia said.

  Daniel laughed.

  ‘Our girls…’ he said, as he grinned to himself, thinking about life outnumbered by women, knowing he was the luckiest man on the planet.

  Forty-Seven

  July 2018

  Cambridgeshire, England

  ‘Do you want another blanket? It’s getting chilly…’

  Jim stood wielding an assortment of throws he’d gathered from the various chairs and patches of lawn they were dotted on all over the garden, tearing apart his sons’ teddy bears’ picnic as he went along.

  ‘Shh, don’t tell them it was me…’ He winked at Olivia, who lay on a lounger, her legs bound in striped merino wool, a chunky oversized snood enveloping her jagged shoulders. ‘No thanks, I’m comfortable.’

  As the late afternoon sunshine lit the corn in the field beyond the garden, Olivia sat still, watching a tennis ball rise – followed by the top of a child’s head as they leapt to catch it.

  She looked through her large sunglasses and didn’t move; she was mesmerised by the playful peekaboo limbs of her daughters and their friends.

  Wesley’s tanned arm sprung up as he released a ball with power, into the air, each time higher than the last; more of a challenge for the children to catch. He was leading a game between Flora, Sofia, Elliot and Finley – his and Jim’s twin sons who had recently turned ten.

  It had been a beautiful afternoon – apart from the wasps – but they had spiralled away, drunk on apple juice from the fallers and ice cream detritus from the teddy bears’ picnic, back to their nests to take cover, and now the soft evening sun was the colour of nostalgia as the cornfield was lit by a deep and gentle glow.

  The Beck De Boers had come up from London for Olivia’s birthday, to bring some distraction and cheer. Wesley packed a feast big enough for a Bake Off finale, Jim brought the flowers, booze and giant water guns. They were both terribly worried about Daniel and held him in a triangular huddle when they arrived, all three of them trying not to cry.

  Flora, Sofia, Elliot and Finley all got along well – the boys were feral and funny, climbing trees, doing silly impressions of the adults, bundling in a ball and rolling away in it when their rough and tumble went a bit far. The girls loved their get-togethers, even if boys could be annoying sometimes. But Elliot and Finley gave Flora permission to unleash her inner roar when she wanted to be boisterous; Sofia was their biggest fangirl and loved to play ‘red panda rescue’ with Finley during rare moments of calm. Their reunions were fun and exhausting, and as long as Wesley was around, the chaos was controlled. Olivia listened to his instruction from the field but couldn’t see his face, and imagined him to be a wonderful teacher.

  ‘Have you had a good birthday?’

  Olivia nodded. It would have been perfect, were she not terribly worried for Daniel too.

  ‘You?’

  ‘It’s not my birthday.’

  Olivia turned her head and rolled her eyes.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ Jim sighed sadly, as he slunk down on the lounger alongside her. ‘Budgie up!’ he said with a sparkle in his wide blue eyes.

  ‘Oh come on, I haven’t said that for ages!’

  She shuffled along a tiny bit and curled on her side facing the field, Jim mirroring the zigzag of her form so he could hug into her. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, throwing himself onto her like an additional blanket.

  ‘I don’t think they have much longer,’ Olivia said, looking to the looming shadows.

  ‘That ball is fluoro, the boys will be playing at midnight if they can,’ affirmed Jim. ‘Although I’m not sure Wes has much more staying power.’

  ‘Sofia is so tired.’

  Daniel was inside, clearing another round of the plates in the kitchen in case anyone got a second wind for birthday cake or fancied cheese and crackers.

  ‘Anyone for tea?’ called his distant voice.

  ‘Ooh bloody yes,’ whispered Jim, almost punching the air, before hollering, ‘Please! I’ll come help you!’

  Olivia nodded but couldn’t muster up the energy to shout.

  ‘Olivia too!’

  ‘Me three!’ shouted Wesley from the field. He hadn’t heard the question but guessed what it was from Jim’s enthusiasm.

  Olivia pushed her sunglasses up on her head, before rolling to her other side, to face Jim. Her moves were cumbersome and strained.

  ‘How do you think he’s doing?’ she asked, acute eyes piercing him.

  Jim knew what she meant.

  ‘As well as anyone could. I think…’ Even with a lowered voice, Jim’s Welsh diction was crisp. ‘He’s seemed genuinely happy at times today, fussing around the birthday girl.’

  Olivia gave a mournful smile.

  ‘It’s a strange thing. Daniel always puts such significance on my birthday. I think because of the five we spent apart more than the eighteen we’ve spent together. My birthday is such a big deal to him.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s so sad.’

  Jim looked away, to the field, hoping not to make Olivia sad. Hoping she wouldn’t say what he thought she was going to say.

  ‘He’s not understanding that it will be my last.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Jim said, his voice faltering, as he looked back at Olivia and frowned.

  ‘It’s funny because Daniel has always been more cautious, more negative than me, but he’s flipped. He thinks this is fixable.’

  Jim shook his head.

  ‘People change their behaviour during times of extreme stress. When life is turned on its head. Except for you…’ Jim stroked a strand of Olivia’s hair and tucked it behind her ear. ‘You’ve always been a badass.’

  Olivia smiled.

  Flora came out of the field, cheeks flushed and legs bare in denim hotpants, and Olivia and Jim both felt relieved their conversation had reached a natural finish. They smiled up at Flora.

  ‘They never stop!’ she said, nodding to Sofia and the boys in the field with Wesley, colluding with the adults.

  ‘They’re the reason I turned grey, Flora. You won’t remember – but I used to be gloriously flaxen-haired…’ Jim winked, as he got up from the sun-lounger and tucked his Wayfarers into his pocket. ‘I’ll go help Daniel with the tea.’ He kissed the top of Olivia’s head before he walked up the garden into the house.

  Flora, a bronzed picture of health and vitality looked down at her mother, who she was the same height as now, but Flora’s limbs were growing stronger while Olivia’s appeared to shrink, and her youthful smile fell into a frown as she studied her mother’s weak frame. Flora opened her mouth, as if she were about to admonish her. But it hung open, half in horror.

  ‘What’s the matter, tesora?’ Olivia asked, making a shield over her brow, even though the sun had gone down. Flora looked at her, lost for words, as if she had been petrified and couldn’t speak. Her bottom lip began to tremble as she was utterly speechless. ‘Darling? Are you OK?’ Flora shook her head defiantly, as if speaking would reveal a secret, and clambered onto the sun-lounger, mirroring her mother's form before grasping her around the ribcage and clutching onto her for dear life. She threw one gawkish leg over Olivia’s, and cried.

  ‘I’m so so sorry…’ Flora sobbed into the blankets and the bones of her mother. ‘I don’t want you to… to go away… I love you… I’m sorry…’ Her cries were muffled in the hair and flesh between them, but Olivia heard, as her heart swelled, and shrank with every beat as she wrapped her jagged arms around her daughter’s back and pulled her in.

  ‘I know you do. I love you too. So much. So so much. Never forget that.’ They clutched each other for a few minutes both sobbing as quietly as they could so as not to worry Sofia in the field, Olivia crying at the thought of all she might miss, Flora desperately not wanting to let go. Olivia caressed the baby hair at Flora’s temples. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she whispered. ‘You wil
l be all right. I love you, I love you, I love you.’

  ‘Tea’s up!’ shouted Jim, as he and Daniel walked through the open doors of the back of the glass house, each carrying a tray.

  ‘Right,’ said Daniel, looking down at his offering. ‘I can’t make it look as pretty as Wes, but I’ve cobbled together a cheeseboard. I think the flowers are edible…’

  Forty-Eight

  August 2012

  London

  In a sandy play area in a corner of the Olympic Park, the morning sun poked between pillowy white clouds, lighting up their huddle within the boundary of laurel bushes. Daniel’s arm was slung across Olivia’s shoulder on the bench next to him as she ate black cherries from a brown paper bag, sandwiched between their thighs.

  ‘Does it feel like a pilot’s holiday?’

  They sat watching their daughters play on the wood and rope climbing frame, set in an enormous sand pit in front of them. Flora was helping Sofia scale the stairs of the slide, before sending her down and meeting her at the bottom to rapturous applause and cherry-stained giggles.

  ‘A pilot’s?’

  ‘You know, when you’re doing what you normally do. Not so special.’

  Daniel rubbed his eyes. He had spent most of the past two months at the Olympic Park, with regular site visits before that. Writing about the preparations. The budgets. The selections. Whether the stadium would be finished on time. It reminded him of reporting on the Millennium Wheel for the Elmworth Echo – and the local engineer who had helped raise it. Now Daniel was sports editor for BBC Online – having wanted to transition from print to digital, as many of his peers were – and had spent much of the past few months being led around different facilities within the Olympic Park on press tours. The launch of the aquatic centre, the velodrome, the Orbit. The big unveiling of the athletes’ village, the state-of-the-art press area, the futuristic amenities and family friendly playparks and garden spaces. He’d pored over press releases and interviewed the chairman of the organising committee what felt like a thousand times. Asking tricky questions yet hoping to get behind the once-in-a-lifetime celebration of sport that was coming to his country. On his watch. He’d studied the schedules. Had the artistic notes on the opening ceremony and watched the petals gracefully lit in Thomas Heatherwick’s flame cauldron. He’d been at the Olympic Stadium and done live online reporting of Super Saturday.

  And now he was here, as a punter, a father. With his arm around his wife, not having to think about work or press conferences as he watched his daughters play. Although Olivia had a point: if he were honest, it was a little hard to shake the feeling he should be dashing across the site for his next story.

  ‘No, it’s lovely,’ he said, gazing at Flora, who was directing her sister to walk along a beam and leap onto wooden posts at the end of it, as if she were a show dog at Crufts.

  ‘That’s it Sofsof! Good girl,’ Flora applauded, as she rubbed her sister’s tummy.

  ‘Anyway, we’ll use the loos in the press centre, there has to be some perks to having spent more time here than at home this year. I don’t mind it being a pilot’s, or indeed a busman’s, holiday. Not if you don’t.’

  ‘I don’t mind. This is lovely. I just wish I knew it was so lovely before today. I would have pictured you here more happily.’

  ‘Maybe if you expected it to be cool, it wouldn’t be when you actually got here.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s not that lovely, but rather this moment in time is.’ Olivia gestured to the girls and then pretended to take a photo of the scene in front of her, as she had on the Otago Peninsula, making a box with her fingers and a clicking sound.

  ‘Yeah maybe…’ mused Daniel, thinking about all the not-so-lovely hours he’d spent in the Olympic Park. Olivia dissolved her imaginary camera and grabbed another handful of cherries.

  ‘You know I think if I died tomorrow, I would be happy.’

  Daniel looked aghast.

  ‘Don’t say that! You’re just 37!’

  ‘No, obviously. And I never want to leave the girls or you. I just mean that if I die tomorrow I would die a happy woman. A fulfilled woman.’

  ‘Really?’ Daniel didn’t understand it.

  But what about…?

  Olivia knew what he was thinking. Being fatherless. Sonless. The hard times.

  ‘Yes, really. I have all that I could want in life Daniel. We got very lucky, to find each other. I adore you and you adore me. Even though you can be a bit boring about football sometimes. But I have two healthy daughters – and two healthy mothers. I have the dream career I wanted. I genuinely think I am the luckiest woman on the planet. Too lucky perhaps.’

  Daniel looked scared as Olivia turned to him and put cherry-stained fingers to his brow.

  ‘Don’t be so frightened, Daniel, that you forget to stop and enjoy it.’

  Olivia nodded to their daughters. Flora, long-limbed like her mother. Sofia, clumsy and clambering, a jovial sparkle in her eyes as she held out her arms, entrusting her big sister to lift her into the swing.

  ‘I am enjoying it.’

  ‘Good.’ She untangled a cherry stone from her tongue and put it in the paper bag. ‘Then kiss me and tell me where the posh toilets are. I need the loo.’

  Forty-Nine

  August 2018

  Cambridgeshire, England

  ‘Right, I’ve dropped Flora in Cambridge, Sofia is at drums – shit, I’ve got to remember Mr Spicer’s cheque when I pick her up, that’s three weeks now… and I’m going to quickly prep that broccoli and kale bake. Then I can put it in the oven while I get Sofia… the three of us can eat lunch when I get back.’ Daniel nodded to the little coffee table he had bought and put by the window, with three bean bags dishevelled around it, so he, Sofia and Flora could eat some of their meals at the same time as Olivia ate hers, from the overbed table he’d bought from the mobility shop in Guildington.

  Olivia winced and looked out of the large, triangular bedroom window, that went all the way from the floor to the high, pitched roof. One pane was angled open in its deep grey frame to let the air in. It had been a long and sweltering summer – June and July had been consistently sunny, and although August had brought some normality to British summertime and the rains had started and the temperature dropped, the field beyond their garden looked parched and barren. A kestrel hovered over what Olivia assumed was a field mouse.

  Daniel plumped up the pillow behind Olivia and noticed her nose, still crumpled.

  ‘Did you not like the bake last time I made it?’

  ‘It was OK. A bit… earthy.’

  Daniel looked perplexed. He’d been quite proud of it.

  ‘I thought it was nice. And it’s packed with manganese and sulforaphane. Remember the article I showed you about sulforaphane inhibiting histone deacetylase?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, cruciferous veg are packed with it.’

  Olivia’s eyes stayed firmly on the kestrel, while Daniel kissed her nose to smooth out the creases of aversion.

  ‘I’d better get on if I’m going to get this in the oven before twelve. Can I get you anything?’ Daniel rolled up the sleeves of his raglan top. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘I need a poo.’ Olivia looked back at Daniel with a heavy sigh. ‘And I don’t want you to take me to the toilet.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  She glanced back at the kestrel as it made its dive.

  ‘I tried to go earlier, when the carers were here, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll take you now.’

  ‘No, you won’t. I’ll wait for them to come back later. I’ll hold it.’

  ‘They don’t come back on Saturday afternoons, remember?’

  Olivia shook her head. She couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, they all blurred into one at the moment.

  ‘They won’t be here until tomorrow morning, with the hoist for your bath.’

  Olivia shook her head gently.


  ‘Seriously my love, let me take you. You can’t hold it in, it’ll make you sick.’

  ‘I am sick.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you in there – just hold the grips on the new surround and shout when you need me to—’

  ‘No!’ Olivia snapped. ‘I’m not having you wipe my arse!’

  Daniel slumped and sat in the space on his side of the bed and put his fingertips on his closed eyelids.

  ‘Save me some dignity, Daniel.’

  He opened his eyes and put one hand on Olivia’s shin. He stroked it, longing for the muscles that used to hug the bone.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable.’

  ‘I know.’

  Olivia put her palm on top of Daniel’s hand.

  ‘You know, Linda – the nice carer with the helmet hair…?’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘It was her this morning, while you were at swimming. She told me a space has come up at the hospice.’

  ‘The hospice?’ Daniel rubbed his chin with his free hand.

  ‘She suggested I might be more comfortable there.’

  ‘Do you want to be there?’

  Olivia shot Daniel a look as if to say of course not.

  ‘Sorry,’ he added.

  ‘She said it doesn’t have to be terminal, some people go there for respite, just for a few weeks, so their families have a rest, so you could relax knowing that I was being looked after twenty-four-seven.’

  ‘You are being looked after twenty-four-seven. I’m under no pressure to go back to work.’

  ‘I know that… But look at everything you’re doing. Running around after the girls – their swimming and music lessons, all their parties and playdates – all you’re doing for me. It’s too much.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘And you could visit day and night if you wanted to. St Margaret’s is lovely. Remember when the girls sang there?’

  Daniel nodded but couldn’t speak. He’d seen what the men and women looked like in the common room as they watched the Guildington Primary School choir sing ‘Time After Time’ when Flora was in Year 6 and Sofia was in Reception. The anaemic faces and thin chests. The vacant eyes while they tried to take in uplifting rousing songs the children had diligently learned. Those sick people didn’t look like they’d be ever leaving St Margaret’s.