What Goes Around

chapter SIXTY EIGHT

I'm incredibly nervous walking in.

I look around the pub but I don't have to look for long. She's sitting at the seat where I used to sit with him and I know then he must've brought her here to.

I'm not quite ready to go over. I give her a nod. I can see that she's got a drink and I walk over to the bar and I go to order a glass of wine but I order a soda water – I think I might need it.

‘Thanks for coming.’ She gives me a nervous smile. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually come or if you did…’

‘I don't want to row.’

‘You look well,’ she says and I do.

I feel well.

I'm wearing my red dress that looks like a sarong but with flat silver sandals this time.

Maybe people think I should be wearing black.

I don’t feel black though.

It’s spring.

‘How are you?’ I ask and I watch her crumple.

‘I'm sorry,’ she says. ‘I'm so, so sorry.’

I can feel her grief and her shame and I recognise it.

‘I tried to ring you so many times but I keep hanging up the phone.’

I get up and walk around the table and I slip in the booth beside her and I put my arms around young shoulders and I feel as if I'm holding me. She tells me how much she loved him, how special he had made her feel, how she’d always been awkward and shy, how, in fact, she’d been a virgin.

I hold her as she sobs it out - to me, and she can sob it out to me because of all the work I’ve done on myself.

‘You should write it all down,’ I tell her. ‘Keep a journal - I know it sounds mad, but it actually helps…’

‘Oh I do,’ she says. ‘It's the only thing that’s kept me sane. Not that you'd think that if you read it.’

‘You should see mine,’ I say.

And then I tell her something a woman once told me.

About nuclear reactors and that toxic shame and loathing we all hold inside and I tell her to keep pouring cool water, to simply dilute it. I know that she gets it and that she’ll be writing about it tonight.

‘You’re going to be okay,’ I tell her.

I have to go, I really do, because I'm picking up Charlotte at the end of her lunch break and I promised I’d bring the puppy to show her dad, so I have to go home and get him.

We walk out of the pub together and I feel the warm breeze as I farewell her. Somehow I know it's not quite goodbye - that next year this is where we will be.

I know I'm looked after.

I know this year I've been looked after.

I don't know how or why.

Sometimes I feel that there's this big master plan we’re not privy too, that there’s a connection we simply can't see and I’m not talking about Facebook!

I don’t know if it’s God, I don’t know what to call it.

I just feel that there’s something more.