by Lia Louis
We’ve been sitting here, outside the station in the warm, honey rays of the sun, and we’ve barely taken a breath. We’ve covered small talk – the weather, how hot the sun is, his work. Then we went on to Mum’s leg, then Dilly, then Charlie, and it’s like we can’t stop. So many gaps to fill, so many empty spaces on a calendar to account for. Ed and I always ‘got on’ so I don’t know why I expected it to be awkward, really, or stifled. In college, that’s how it started. Non-stop chats at the bus stop, as Daisy fiddled with her phone and I obsessed over things he said and the way he smiled, as she smirked and rolled her eyes. And I’ve missed this. I really have. I’ve missed this familiar, easy conversation about the world we both shared for so long.
‘Charlie with a baby,’ says Ed. ‘In my mind she’s still sleeping with guys in rock bands and trying to talk me into trying out tantra. Did I tell you my brother Tom’s having a baby?’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yup. Due in October. Layla’s taken early mat-leave. Can’t exactly operate on people when you’re vomming. Hyperemesis gravidarum.’
‘What?’
‘Severe nausea and sickness. She’s really suffering.’
‘God. Sounds like a bloody spell. Poor Layla.’
‘Mum’s fussing. Keeps on going round there. Every McDonnell is waiting for the baby call.’ Ed smiles brightly and something hot pangs then, inside of me. Jealousy? Maybe. And it’s not that Layla wasn’t sweet. She was, she even used to call me her sister-in-law and I’d loved the sound of it at the time. But maybe it’s seeing a tiny glimpse of what might’ve been, if things had been different. But then, would Ed’s parents ever have treated me like they did Layla? Fussing, caring, waiting by the phone? I always felt like a half a person, when I’d sit round their dinner table. Doctors. Vets. Bloody brothers off on casual trips to Borneo to save lions and sloths. The last time my brother went anywhere, it was Hull and that was to stay in his friend’s nan’s caravan for the weekend and he’d got off with a guy that dressed up as a pug for the kids at the holiday park. I always wondered how Ed’s parents took it, when we split up. Glee, probably, that Ed and I never married and never got the thirty grand all married McDonnell couples get. They’d sooner save that for when Ed met a medic or that bloody professional ballet dancer Ed’s mum always forced him to speak to at weddings and parties. ‘Ed, did you know Felicity is here? She’s just got back from Prague, she looks lovely,’ and I always had to wrestle down the urge to say, ‘Yes, and did you know I was here, you know, his girlfriend of ten years?’
‘Shall we take a wander?’ Ed asks me now, and we both get to our feet. Shall we take a wander? There’s that old, snuggly cardigan, my arms slipping straight in. How many times in my life have I heard that sentence? Holidays together and lazy Saturday mornings in town, coming out of a café after breakfast, sunshine on cobbles, the day ahead of us.
Ed and I leave the station and walk through town, the blue sky smudged with pearly clouds, the sound of distant church bells carried on the breeze. My phone vibrates in my bag. Mum. Her third missed call. She’s had a letter from the hospital. They want to check her leg, see how the fracture is healing, and she does not want to go. ‘Ring them, Noelle,’ she said desperately as I left for work this morning, as if she’d been sent a ransom note and not an NHS letter, ‘tell them I’m fine. You won’t forget will you, darling?’
Ed’s eyes slide down to the phone in my hand. ‘You OK?’
‘Fine.’ I quickly type out a text instead. Everything OK? Will ring hosp asap. She’s obviously forgotten that I’m meeting Ed, although meeting a friend, is what I told her.
‘Your mum?’
I put my phone back into my bag. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Can we go via the flowers?’
Ed rolls his eyes, but smiles warmly. ‘Do I have a choice?’ he says, and we turn to enter the bustling heat of the market of our little town. ‘You gonna load me down again?’
‘Course,’ I say. ‘It’s tradition.’
Ed chuckles, ruffles the caramel curls on his head. ‘True.’
I keep thinking about what Sam said about Jenna, and about owing the years. Jenna is Sam’s Ed. And I don’t know what this is exactly, with Ed, just that it feels nice. That blanket around my shoulders, that cardigan I can snuggle into. Safe and worn in and familiar.
‘Did you ever do the course? The part-time floristry one? At the florist in the city,’ asks Ed, as we wander through the market stalls. The deep smell of sticky toffee hits us in a sweet warm gust as we pass a sweets stall, sunshine bouncing from the lines of glass jars in shards.
‘No, I haven’t yet.’
‘Why not?’ Ed’s questions are always like this. Short, to the point, black and white, no added fluff. We argued over his directness, probably more than we argued over anything else. Ed is blunt. Straight to the point, to the heart of the matter. It’s probably why he was always going to make a good doctor. But his bluntness often felt like heartlessness. ‘Why not get her a carer?’ he’d say about Mum, as if she was just a problem to be fixed, like booking a plumber for a leak. ‘Why is it that you feel like it’s you that has to stay?’ and ‘What do you actually want from your life? Well? It’s a simple question, Nell.’
‘I haven’t got around to it yet,’ I say. ‘Work’s busy, I barely have a minute to myself …’
‘Because of your mum?’ He holds his hands up then, showing his palms, a silver band on his middle finger. ‘I’m not prying, Nell. I’m just asking. I know how much you wanted to do it.’
‘I know. But I still do a lot with flowers,’ I say, like I’m trying to sell myself to him, or something. Impress him. Pass some sort of test. ‘I make posies, bouquets and stuff. I post them on Instagram. I’ve got a few thousand followers now.’
Ed glances at me, his mouth a straight, impressed line. ‘Really?’
‘I did request you. As a friend. Last night.’
‘Oh, did you? I’m hardly on it. Insta-newb. That’s me.’
We wander through the market. Clothes stalls, soap stalls, a huge white truck with an open shutter selling meat, the man behind the counter shouting something in such a musical way, I have no idea what he’s saying and can’t imagine anyone else does. I look at Ed out of the corner of my eye. He looks exactly the same as he always has to me. Even if I think back to teenage Ed, I feel like he’s barely changed. In looks and in character and ambition – it’s unwaning, like him, I suppose. He always wanted so much from life. He wanted it all for me too. ‘This hospital in Portland, Nell, it’s incredible,’ he’d said to me the night everything changed – the night we officially began to split right down the middle, a hairline crack. ‘They have an opening. Elias, my uni buddy, he’s over there, and he called me.’ Then it was you could do this and we could do that and ‘we could even come back after a year or two, I could do my intercalation year …’ and I remember saying, ‘Ed, this is – a lot. This is miles away.’
And I remember the websites he’d shown me then. Courses. Workshops. Houses to rent. A plan he’d made, with a space for me. But a space I didn’t quite fit into – a size too small, or too big. I didn’t sleep the night he came home with the job offer. I watched him sleep beside me in the dark instead, and I think I started to grieve then, for us. I knew he would go regardless. I knew those were the last nights I’d sleep beside him. Because I couldn’t leave. Mum wouldn’t be OK, suddenly, not needing me, and she’d never have left me when I needed her. Twelve weeks later, Ed got on a plane, and I’d sat in the garden watching plane after plane fly over, wondering which one was his, and which one in an alternative universe, I was sitting on beside him.
Ed budges up next to me, touching his shoulder to mine. ‘This is nice, Nell,’ he says, fingertips brushing mine at my side. ‘It’s really nice to be back.’
‘It is,’ I say.
A cloud slides over the sun casting us in grey shadows, the breeze pricking the tops of my arms with goosebumps.
Ed laughs. ‘Yeah, not
sure I’ve missed the unpredictable British weather, though, to be fair.’
‘Was it good? In Portland?’
Ed’s eyes light up at the question, and like someone just squeezed the flames between their fingertips, it’s gone. ‘The weather?’ he asks.
‘Everything.’
He hesitates, weighing up the two options. To divulge, or to not. Then he just says, ‘It was cool, Noelle.’
We wander more on the cobbles through stalls selling clothes, selling wind chimes, and punnets and punnets of plump summer strawberries. And before I’ve even realised, we’re outside Charlie’s tattoo studio, its candyfloss pink wooden sign jutting out from the sandstone brick. Shit balls. I hope she doesn’t see. But then – I sort of hope she does. I’d rather her just see us, than have to explain, because she’ll ask me. ‘What’s it all about, then? Do you want to get back together?’ and I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.
‘She in?’ asks Ed casually.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and no, we’re not going to say hi. She’s packed out today. Saturdays are her busiest day.’
Ed laughs and then gives a shrug. ‘Does she still wanna whip my arse, then?’
‘Absolutely yes,’ I say, and he looks down at his shoes as we start to walk by, as if a little wounded. I peer inside, half expecting to see Charlie looking at me from the inside, mouthing ‘What the actual fuck, Elle?’ But … she isn’t in there. It’s a tiny little shop, you can see right in, watch Charlie and Clemmie, her assistant, at work. And I can see Clemmie inside, chatting on the phone, her thick purple hair in a high ponytail, swooping black eyeliner flicks by her eyes. But no Charlie. Weird. Where is she, then? Maybe she’s in the loo. But where are all the customers she said she had today? So many she couldn’t help Theo in the shop, so many she couldn’t look after Petal and had to work an extra day. I think about the day that she was driving in the opposite direction, and about what Theo said about being worried about her. An affair? No. No, how can I even think that? Only a traitor would think that about their closest, kindest friend.
‘And do you still want to? Noelle?’
‘What? Sorry I just – Charlie isn’t in there. And she said she would be, and well, she isn’t so …’
‘Right.’ Ed gives a shrug. ‘So?’
‘She’s been – Theo said she’s been … weird lately.’ And I know what he’s thinking as he looks to his side at me, his eyes hooded, bored. He’s thinking he wishes I’d concentrate on worrying about my life instead of other people’s. He’d say it all the time, when Mum would blow up my phone with missed calls, when Dilly wouldn’t come home until late and I’d wait up in the porch, in my dressing gown. ‘Why can’t you see that you have a life to live of your own, Nell?’ he’d say, frustrated, and I’d tell him I was living it. Wasn’t I? Then ‘For who?’ he’d ask and there would always, always be an argument. I’d accuse him of trying to change me. He’d shout at me about being stagnant. I’d cry, tell him I’m sorry I’m not a McDonnell. He’d apologise, tell me he just wanted more for me. That he wanted me to remember it was Daisy who lost her life that night in the car with Lee, not me.
‘Charlie’s fine, Nell,’ says Ed now, pushing his hands in his pockets. ‘Stop fretting.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’ He smiles knowingly, and I look then, properly, at him, the face I know every contour of, and I feel this longing, like a reaching hand from my chest to his. Ed. My Ed. I know his favourite fabric softener, the way he hates buttering toast straight from the toaster because the butter melts, and I know the names of all the motivational speakers he likes to listen to in the shower. I know him, and he knows me. Even the ugly, dark parts I try to stuff deep in the back, pretend they aren’t there. I want to reach out and hold him. I’m still me. You’re still you.
‘How was America?’ I ask him, stopping suddenly on the pavement. He stops too.
‘Er, I already said? It was cool.’
‘No, Ed,’ I say. ‘How was it really?’
A sudden breeze whips through the air, and something topples and smashes onto the cobbles from a nearby stall selling handmade stoneware – little milk jugs and rustic, stone-coloured mugs. A group of builders opposite, whoop and cheer.
Ed watches, takes his time looking back at me. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘You know what I mean. What did you do every day?’ I carry on. ‘Like … did you still eat a takeaway for dinner every Friday? Did you miss watching EastEnders? Did anywhere serve bacon sandwiches like Chancer’s? Did you meet any friends? God, I don’t know. Just – tell me things. Everything. All of it.’ I’ve missed him. I’ve missed two whole entire years of memories and experiences and stuff – there’s a blank space between us of things I don’t know, that he doesn’t know. We knew what each other had done every day down to the minute for twelve years. And now we know nothing.
‘You know you’re asking me to gloat, don’t you?’ says Ed, with a rueful smile.
‘So be it. I want to know what I’ve missed. I want to know what it was like.’ Because I was almost there, right beside you, I think. Those memories would’ve also been mine.
Rain starts to spit from the sky and we both look up at it.
‘All right,’ says Ed slowly. ‘Let’s grab some lunch, then head back to mine.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘Hi, this is Noelle Butterby, I’m calling again about the––’
‘The camera?’
‘Yes. Yes, God, I bet you’re sick of hearing from me, but the guy I spoke to last week said the head of history was back from annual leave yesterday so …’
‘No, no, that’s quite all right. But I’m afraid we still haven’t come across it. I’m sorry.’
‘I just – I know it would mean a lot to a lot of people …’
‘I know, but it’s like I said to your friend last week, it probably is in the other vessel––’
‘My friend?’
‘Yes? He called asking about a disposable camera. One that might have been unclaimed, I just assumed it was something to do with you––’
‘What was his name?’
‘Um. I don’t know, he didn’t leave a name, I don’t think. It was just a casual enquiry.’
‘But it was a guy?’
‘Yes. He said he was an ex-student.’
Sam’s dad Frank won’t speak a word. I was expecting rude remarks, I was expecting grumbling and tutting and short answers, and perhaps having too much to say every time I picked up an item or opened a bin bag. But what I wasn’t expecting, was him completely blanking me as if I am an unwelcome ghost haunting his little flat who he’s been advised to ignore by a priest. ‘Ignore this strange and troubled soul and she will get bored and eventually pass on to the other side, Frank. I’m afraid it’s the only way.’
I said hello when I arrived, and I offered to make him a drink. Silence on both occasions. I was almost tempted to go up and prod his wrinkly face, check he wasn’t some sort of waxwork.
A woman called Gloria opened the door when I first got here – a carer with one of those smiley faces I would have definitely described as infectious had she actually had any sort of effect on Frank other than making him look even more like a man hopeful for death.
‘You are Noelle,’ she said in a strong Irish accent. ‘Come on into the happy house.’ And she’d laughed and whispered out of the side of her mouth, ‘I hope to get a smile from him by the time I retire. What do you think? Possible?’
She sorted Frank’s breakfast and helped him into his dining chair to eat it, then back into his armchair. I could hear him grumbling about it being ‘bloody pointless’, but Gloria explained he’d seize up if he spent all day in one armchair.
‘Nonsense,’ he’d snapped. And when I’d smiled, passing the doorway with a full box of cardboard recycling, he’d stared at me with as much contempt as you’d give a passing door-to-door salesman and/or criminal. Then I’d dropped half of it, and he’d inhaled
so deeply, it’s a miracle I wasn’t sucked up his nostrils along with the sideboard.
And now, it’s just us. Me and Waxwork Frank. A match made in the fiery pits of hell.
‘Frank?’ I call from the kitchen, peering my head round the door, but he doesn’t respond because of course the fucker doesn’t.
He’s in his chair, watching a daytime TV show as if there is a gun to his temple forcing him to, and I’m hesitating in the kitchen doorway after spending fifteen minutes more than the three hours I’m being paid for in the spare bedroom filling bin bags, emptying cardboard boxes of old newspapers, and a suitcase bursting with papers I showed to Frank before he shouted, ‘No! Don’t touch that!’ and I’d dropped it like it was a bomb. I’ve over-run because it’s in disarray, this flat. In every nook and in every little crevice, is just more stuff. It’s like Mary Poppins’ magic bag, but full of crap instead of fancy lamps and funky umbrellas. But I’ve also over-run because I can’t stop thinking about what the woman at the college said on the phone. I’m totally distracted, my brain doing all sorts of laps and relays around itself, coming up with hundreds of stories that belong in library shelves and not in real life.
‘Your life is not a Nicholas Sparks novel, Noelle,’ Dilly would remind me now if he knew I’d even laid awake considering Lee being the male student asking for the camera, when in fact Lee is sadly very much dead. And yes, there’s nothing to say it’s the same camera, but I dunno – I think it is. An ‘unclaimed camera’. Of course they’d assume Daisy’s camera would be unclaimed – that’s the language they’d probably use if they were referring to an item belonging to someone who isn’t here any more, and something that, without me being there to collect it, would definitely just sit there. I’d asked Ed, who looked at me as if I’d finally crossed the border into madness.
‘Nope, wasn’t me, Nellie,’ he’d said with a shrug. I’d met him straight from the train station again with a takeaway coffee the day of the call. It’s become a bit of a routine. A coffee straight off the train after his shift, walking through town together, meandering through the market, Ed tugging at my arm to join him in his flat above a cycle shop and sometimes I do, depending on how many calls Mum has made, whether Ian’s with her. It’s a temporary let – someone his dad knows, who’s travelling, and every time I visit, I feel like I’m in someone else’s home, with someone else’s things.