The Story of You (14 page)

There was a pause. I clutched the duvet to me, holding my breath, watching the blossom outside my bedroom window flutter to the ground like confetti.

‘But you’re not there, so … maybe you’re busy in the kitchen, rustling up one of your Kingy Breakfast Specials.’

I smiled. The Kingy Breakfast Special. I’d forgotten about those: a tower of fruit in a sundae glass, with an irresistible layer of yoghurt-soaked Frosties, and topped with crumbled digestive biscuit. Streets ahead of a Müller Corner. At least it was in ’97. I used to make stuff whilst Joe did a ridiculous running commentary, as if we were on a cookery programme. We called it Twits TV – God knows why …

‘On the other hand, perhaps you were fast asleep and are now cursing me. Go on, you are, aren’t you? You’re lying there in your scratcher, going, for God’s sake, Sawyer, will you just piss off? I’ve been trying to get rid of you for years …’

In spite of myself, I was laughing … a scratcher? What the hell was a scratcher? Only Joe would come out with a word like scratcher.

‘On the off chance you are awake, call me back, will you?’

I couldn’t bear it any longer. I lurched forward and picked up the phone.

‘Joe, I’m here.’

‘Hello …’ He actually sounded breathless with relief. I could hear his smile. ‘I thought something had happened to you.’

I almost choked on the next line. ‘No, Joe, nothing’s happened to me.’

‘Oh …’ Long pause. ‘So why the long silence? Have you been ignoring me?’

‘No, don’t be daft, I haven’t been ignoring you.’ Oh, God, to think his mum had just died and he thought I’d been ignoring him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back in touch about today. Things have been a bit … tricky,’ I said eventually. That was the understatement of the year.

‘What like, “tricky”?’ asked Joe.

‘Oh, work stuff.’

‘
Right.
’
I could see him nodding to himself. ‘Work stuff. I see.’ There was an air of suspicion – or was it confusion? – in his voice. Joe always hated to be confused, to feel you were keeping something from him; not in a possessive way, just because he likes people,
life
, to be transparent; he doesn’t know any other way to be. ‘You’ve always told me about work stuff before,’ he added.

I had, it was true. In the emails we’d exchanged after the funeral, I’d told him loads about life as a CPN. ‘What’s going on at work?’ he said.

‘Oh, nothing specific, just my caseload is getting bigger and then there’s Levi … Have I told you about Levi?’

‘Chronic depressive? Mum called Genevieve?’ He paused for effect. ‘
Beautiful
?’

I sniggered. Was I always going on about how beautiful Levi was? How unprofessional!

‘Yes, well, he keeps taking overdoses. He’s okay at the moment, but I’m worried, one day soon, he’s going to succeed,’ I said, grasping at straws.

‘O
kay
.’ Joe was genuinely thinking about this when I’d only said it as an excuse for not getting back to him. Levi was on the straight and narrow, for now, anyway. ‘Well, I guess you can’t save everyone,’ he said. ‘People are going to do what they want to do in the end. You can’t control other people’s behaviour, only your own. It’s a very good piece of advice I was once told. I always tell my students.’

‘It’s true,’ I said, even though I desperately wanted to save Levi, Grace, all my clients, and wished I could. ‘That’s a very good piece of advice.’

‘So, what else?’ he asked. ‘What’s your other excuse?’

I didn’t have any more excuses.

‘Because I’m free all day and I’d love to see you. If I stay one more hour in godforsaken Parson’s Green, I might descend into a pit of mourning and loneliness so bad that I might end up in one of your units, and you’d have to talk sense to me as I rocked silently in a corner.’

I was giggling at the same time as wanting just to hug him through the phone; I was thinking, ‘God, I wish this hadn’t happened.’ I wish so much I hadn’t let this happen, then maybe I could have left the past where it belonged and started afresh, made a go of it with Joe, at least had some fun, seen where it went. Also, I just wanted to be there for him, when he needed me – like he had been there for me – not consumed by all this other stuff going on. ‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘How have you been?’

‘Oh, up and down, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘One minute I’m fine, the next I’m in the foetal position, bawling my eyes out.’

‘It’s really healthy to have a cry,’ I offered. ‘It’s normal and it does get easier, I promise you. Someone once told me that grief starts out feeling like a big house you’re carrying on your shoulders, and eventually ends up as something you can put in your back pocket. I found that really comforting.’

Joe sniffed. ‘I really like that, thanks,’ he said. Although I knew it was no real compensation for not being on the end of the phone these last few weeks. I wanted to make it up to him.

‘Okay,’ I said, simply. ‘Okay, no more crap excuses. I’m available today. Now, where do you fancy meeting?’

‘Fossils,’ he said. He wanted to go and see the fossils at the Natural History Museum.

‘I’m massively into fossils, don’t you remember?’ he said. I joked I couldn’t imagine choosing, of my own free will, as my first boyfriend, someone who ever claimed to be ‘massively into fossils’, but then he jogged my memory about the caravan weekend we’d taken with Dad, Denise and Niamh to Lyme Regis, during that summer we got together. It was only nine months after Mum had died and I think Dad realized within the first hour that it was too soon to take us anywhere with Denise, who had been so overexcited, she’d spent two hours packing the car with the entire Lakeland Plastics catalogue: gadgets such as egg separators and orange peelers that we were never going to need over the course of forty-eight hours in a caravan in Lyme Regis.

Desperate to get away, Joe had spent an hour in The Fossil Shop one day, buying shark teeth and ammonites. I’d got bored and got chatting to a homeless tramp outside. I always sniffed them out, even then.

‘We can go and see fossils, if that’s what you want to do,’ I said. I thought the Natural History Museum might be good, actually; doing something other than sitting opposite one another at a table – I knew there was no way I’d be able to keep my mouth shut in that situation. Or worse, going to the pub and all the lying that would entail. I had to tell him about the baby soon, but not today. I didn’t have to tell him today, did I?

Of course, though, once we got to the Natural History Museum, all I could think about was the baby. Mainly because everything seemed to be about babies; the circle of life. We went to see the sea creatures – everything looked like an embryo; we saw an exhibition about the evolution of mankind, and all I could think about was the evolution going on inside me. There was even a photography exhibition called ‘Genesis’:
THE BEGINNING OF CREATION,
it said in huge blue neon letters. (I still hadn’t decided if this felt like the beginning or the end.) And then, just when I didn’t think I could take much more, Joe suggested we go into the Human Biology gallery, only to be met by a video playing about the baby in the womb, and a model, five times the size of a real one, of a baby
in utero
.

I steered us to the fossils.

‘My issue with fossils,’ I said, as we stood, noses up, to two separate glass cabinets, displaying in one ancient fossils and in another not-so-ancient fossils (which is about all I understood of the names with a gazillion letters in them, describing the different ‘eras’), ‘is that they’re not actually a thing, are they? They’re the imprint, traces of a thing. That to me just isn’t that exciting.’

Joe turned and looked at me, mock-horrified. He was wearing his glasses for the trip. They were a bit too big for his face and made him look very sweet. ‘You are kidding?’ he said. ‘Fossils are fucking fascinating.’

‘I’m going to quote you on that,’ I said. ‘Joseph Sawyer of Didsbury, Manchester, says, “Fossils are fucking fascinating.”’

‘You’re evil,’ he said, pretending to look studiously over his glasses at me before going back to the cabinet. ‘Anyway, they’re not always imprints or traces – sometimes they’re the actual thing. Come here.’

I did as I was told and joined him at the cabinet displaying the fossils of the ‘Palaeozoic Era’ that he was lusting over. ‘Fossils are
remains
,’ he read, emphasizing the words from the information panel entitled:
What is a fossil?
‘Or traces of animals and plants preserved in rocks … See that …?’ he pointed to something that reminded me of those marshmallow sweets you used to get called Flumps, but in rock version. ‘That is the actual shell of a creature that went extinct maybe five hundred million years ago.
That’s
how old it is!’ he said, excitedly jabbing his finger against the glass for extra emphasis. Joe was still, was
always
, when we were going out, so excited by life. Don’t get me wrong, it was annoying at times (making me walk in the pissing-down rain and the cold up Catbells fell in the Lake District, for example, ‘because the view at the top would be out of this world’ (you could barely see your own hand, it was so foggy, and he’d had to pretty much sit on me so I didn’t blow away). But I always loved that about him, and was thinking how great it was that he was still like that, especially after everything; how he could still make me feel surrounded by a kind of Ready Brek glow. Then, I’d remember the news I had to tell him, and that warmth would evaporate, leaving me with this emptiness inside. It could never work. I could never do it.

‘I guess that is pretty amazing,’ I said, pushing that feeling aside. ‘To think that we are looking at the same thing that perhaps Neanderthals or dinosaur eyes have seen.’

‘Oh, it’s way before there were dinosaurs, and definitely Neanderthals,’ said Joe. I loved his flat, northern vowels; leaving the North so early on, I’d lost much of my accent. ‘This is so old, fish were only just beginning to evolve.’

‘Wow.’

‘I know. We’re standing here in 2013, looking at something that existed millions and millions of years before man.’

I watched him from the side. The expression on his face reminded me of the expression my nephew wears when you take him to the ice-cream parlour bit of Pizza Hut and ask him to choose his toppings. It was an expression very much reserved for boys, I thought: to be so completely absorbed by something that you were incapable of thinking about anything else. How I wished for that gift right now.

‘What I love, too,’ Joe carried on, running a hand through that fine hair that never did anything, just flopped back down again, ‘is that these little fossil things can tell you so much about the past.’ We read from another information panel, which described how the earth below was effectively layers and layers of small rock fragments squeezed together, and that within these layers were remains of plants or animals, creating a fossil record of Britain’s past life.

‘
That’s an entire history of Britain, on the ground we’re standing on!
’
he read. Which did kind of blow my mind.

Joe cocked his head to the side.

‘That’s kind of like us, too, don’t you think?’ he said, after a moment’s reflection.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we’re like a big rock, with remnants, fragments from the past squeezed between the layers, aren’t we? You only need to study all those fossils to get an entire history of us, too.’

We got a sandwich from a little kiosk and went to sit on the daisy-strewn grass outside the museum. Joe had picked up a leaflet about palaeontology and was lying down, reading it, absorbed. My mind was going over and over what he’d said.

After a while he put down his leaflet and turned on his side. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.

‘What you said in there, just now,’ I replied. The sky was cloudless and powder blue. The sun throbbed. I imagined it was Mum urging me, pushing me to go on. ‘About us being like rocks, layers and layers of fossilized past
stuff
.’

‘Yeah, I quite like that analogy.’ He yawned, content. I pulled at tufts of grass, feeling something inside me tighten like a rope.

‘It scares me,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

I turned on my side, too, now, so I was facing him. ‘Just this idea that the past is always there; it doesn’t fade away, it leaves an indelible imprint. I mean, people go on about the Internet and how whatever you write on there, is out there forever, but it’s the same in life, too, isn’t it? You can’t actually erase your past.’

The hormones were making me philosophical, high-minded. I’d started reading Ted Hughes in bed, for God’s sake. Poetry seemed to be the only thing I was in the mood for.

The sun was shining directly onto Joe’s head, making the reddish tints in his hair stand out. He was looking downwards, picking at a daisy. I was admiring the handsome androgyny of his features; the angles of his cheekbones, the sweeping thickness of his lashes. His deep-set, generous lids.

‘I think it just becomes part of us,’ he said. ‘All that pain, those experiences, they makes us who we are.’

So what of my clients who had no end of pain? I bet they didn’t like how it made them who they are.

It was like Joe read my mind, because he lifted his head and, closing one eye against the sun, said, ‘That’s not to say I’m not totally fucked off at the universe for making certain things happen. My mum, your mum … everything.’ We both knew what he was talking about. ‘But the way I see it, everyone gets bad luck.’

I smiled, thinly. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘You can’t give up on life,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, it just gives up on you.’

He looked at me, for a long time, and took a breath, as if he was about to say something then stopped himself. I was aware of him shifting his body towards me, the rustle the grass made, but it was only when he was millimetres from my lips that I realized he was actually going to kiss me. I wanted to kiss him back so badly and yet I knew, with some instinctive, self-preserving part of me, that that kiss was a line, between the past and the present, and that if I crossed it now I could be sucked back into a dark place that I’d find it very hard to draw back from, that I’d have to tell him the whole story of what happened that summer – and what would that do to him? Most of all, I didn’t want to drag him there with me.