He releases me, and I let my eyes slide up to meet his for an instant. ‘Don’t feel too guilty,’ he says quietly.
‘I’ll try.’ I can hardly form the words in my head, let alone talk. I mumble a goodbye and twist away from him, walking fast down the street. I am still shivering with adrenaline. I turn those few seconds over and over in my head, trying to understand what I am feeling. A strange sense of anticlimax is trickling through me. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. And it’s already gone.
When I find it, it’s in a place so obvious that I hadn’t even bothered to look at first: a dark red notebook with nothing printed on the spine pushed in between two novels on the bedroom bookcase. Hiding in plain sight – it’s her all over. I should have made more effort to think the way she does, but it doesn’t come easily.
I sit down on her bed and flick backwards through it, watching the dates at the top cycle back in time until I reach January, and then I read every page she has written for the next six months. The words are crammed in, crowded almost on top of one another, as if she has had difficulty squeezing her thoughts into the narrow lines. She writes from the heart, holding nothing back. And yet the first thing I feel when I come to the end is a crushing sense of disappointment. It’s so pedestrian, all of it. She’s an intelligent woman, and she can talk a good game, but when it comes to emotions Caroline clearly paints by numbers. Some of the phrases she uses are so worn and universal that it makes me wonder if she even realizes that this diary could have been written by pretty much any woman in the country. I think about him all the time. I want to be with him, even when he’s only just gone. I can’t think about anything else, can’t even step back to understand what I’m doing or why. I can’t get enough of him and it scares me. Things like that. Put slightly differently, twisted an alternative way, over and over again, for six months.
As I expected, the last entry comes on 8 July, and then there’s nothing. Just blank space. I read through the whole thing one more time, and then I do what she should have done long ago and light a match to the pages one by one by the open bedroom window, watching the charred black fragments drifting down to the pavement below the tower block and disappearing into nothing. It takes a long time. Halfway through, I feel a little pang of guilt, because it doesn’t sit well with me to destroy something that someone else cares about, even if that someone is her. I get over it, though.
When it’s done, I sit there for a while, thinking again about the words I have just burned and their prosaic simplicity, how far they fall from anything that really matters. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. When it comes down to it, what she’s writing about isn’t important. It isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s just love.
Away
Caroline, May 2015
I SEE HER coming from the top of the street; a tall, slim figure strolling in jeans and a bright blue vest top, her hands pushed casually into her pockets. I’m on the way back from my trip to the newsagent’s to pick up the paper. It’s obvious that we’re on a trajectory towards each other, that our paths can’t avoid crossing.
I’ll just keep my head down and pass by quickly, I decide. The carrier bag feels slippery in my hand and I can feel my cheeks burning. It’s ridiculous – I don’t even know the woman. It doesn’t matter if she thinks I’m the rudest person she’s ever met, or sends a bulletin to all her neighbours saying that they should batten down their hatches and ignore me on sight. I’m only here for a week.
‘Hi. How are you doing?’ I hear the words coming out of my mouth with a kind of detached incredulity, unable to pinpoint exactly what nuance of social nicety has compelled me to say them.
She smiles brightly at me, seemingly delighted. ‘All right, thanks,’ she says, stopping dead opposite me, in a way that makes it impossible to nod and hurry on by. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, fine,’ I say, and suddenly I’m talking fast, conscious that I am going to do this, and seeing no point in delaying. ‘Listen, sorry if I was a bit rude yesterday. I’m not used to strangers being friendly.’ I laugh in what is meant to be a self-deprecating way, although, to my ears, it sounds positively unhinged. ‘I live in a city, you know; not much interaction between the neighbours.’
The woman nods, and I see her eyes flick over me subtly and curiously. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she says. ‘I can see it might have seemed a bit weird. To be honest, I’m just bored. I don’t know many people around here, and I’m not working at the moment. When I saw someone new, well, I got a bit overexcited.’ She gives a short, humourless bark of laughter.
‘I see,’ I say, to fill the silence. I find myself staring at her small diamond stud earrings and the pale pink lipstick she is wearing. I often wear a similar shade, but I don’t think it looks as good on me. She looks put together with that sort of effortless elegance that is as rare as it is artful, as if she has just stepped out of a glossy fashion spread in a high-end fashion magazine. She’s not the sort of person I would expect to be lonely.
‘I was just on my way to a café,’ she cuts in to my thoughts. ‘You don’t fancy a coffee, do you?’
Just as I did the day before, I feel jolted – the directness of the invitation, the oddness of it. Faced with it a second time, it feels impossible to say no. I think of Francis waiting back at the house, but he was still in bed when I left, nowhere near ready to leave for the trip to Greenwich we have planned. I could send him a quick text from the café, let him know I’ll be a bit longer. ‘OK,’ I say.
The woman is already walking briskly on, clearly expecting me to follow. ‘Great,’ she throws back over her shoulder as I hurry to catch up. ‘It’s not far. I’m Amber, by the way.’
‘Caroline,’ I say. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I add lamely.
Part of the reason this feels so strange, I realize, is that I am not used to making new friends. That process of laying my quirks and foibles out for inspection and seeing if they are accepted or not is something you do less as an adult. I can remember doing it only once, in the past few years. As the thought crosses my mind, I wince and dig my fingernails into my palms, trying to fend it off, but before I can slam the door on it I’m back in your bedroom with you lying next to me, watching you watching me with my heart in my mouth, and that look in your eyes that tells me you see me. You know me.
I am following Amber blindly, with no idea of where we are heading. We are turning on to a bijou little high street: a collection of small independent stores and charity shops, and a green-fronted coffee shop towards which Amber walks, pushing the door open and elbowing inside. ‘What do you want?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I’ll get it …’ I start to reply, but she shakes her head.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘I invite you out, I pay. You can repay me another time.’ She is looking at me teasingly, almost coquettishly. There is an indefinable charisma buzzing around her that I can’t help but be attracted towards, perhaps all the more for its slightly manic edge.
‘OK, thanks. Just a filter coffee, then,’ I say, sinking into one of the armchairs arranged by the window as she heads for the counter. While she gives the order, I rummage in my handbag and realize, with a sinking feeling, that I have left my mobile back at the house. Francis won’t like not being kept informed, and I feel a pang of compunction that makes me wonder if I should make my excuses and leave.