Miss You (7 page)

I poured out the rest of the champagne, knocking it back like lemonade.

‘Do you think we ought to get something to eat?’ Nash said, suddenly the less drunk, sensible one.

The nearest restaurant was Greek. It wasn’t serving food until six, but the waiter said we could sit and have a drink. Nash, who had been to Greece, said we should order retsina. The sour
pine taste was like the air in the school shower room after the cleaners had been in.

Nash was very direct. ‘How did you vote?’

Born in 1979, we were Thatcher’s generation. We had known nothing but Conservative government, but this May, change had swept across the country.

‘I’m not very political.’ I tried to duck the question because I hadn’t actually voted.

‘You’re a Tory then,’ said Nash. ‘If you’re not prepared to challenge the status quo . . .’

I’d never thought about it like that. I’d been brought up to think it rude to ask about someone’s politics.

‘Football or rugby?’ she demanded.

‘Football and running.’

‘So you’re a minor public-school boy who didn’t quite fit in,’ she deduced, with a flap of her napkin and a wave in the direction of the waiter who was setting up a big
table.

I winced at the accuracy of her summation.

‘I bet your dad’s a doctor.’

‘He’s a dentist.’

‘A failed doctor then. Even worse!’

It had never occurred to me that maybe Dad’s desire for both his sons to become doctors had in fact been about his own ambition. Had he not quite made the grade himself? Was Nash very
perceptive, or just very rude?

‘What shall we have?’ she asked, browsing through the menu. ‘I’m vegetarian, by the way.’ Her statements came out like challenges, as if she was expecting me to
argue with her.

Apart from a dish called moussaka, which was pretty much indistinguishable from all the other sloshy trays of mince they’d served us at school, I’d never eaten Greek food before so I
let her order. The waiters brought us little plates of oily dips, slabs of fried rubbery cheese, and baskets full of warm pitta bread that sank comfortingly to my stomach, soaking up the pine
aftertaste, and allowing me to agree that a carafe of house red would be a good idea.

My memory of the evening is hazy. There was sparring, and laughter, and crying too. Nash’s parents were divorced, her father twice remarried, her mother now living with another woman. She
seemed to have a lot of half-brothers and half-sisters in various countries around the world. Nash referred to her father as a bastard, but clearly longed for his affection. A sense of relief
washed over me when I realized that this woman, who came across as so sophisticated, was also insecure.

‘So what about your family?’ she asked me.

‘Nothing to tell.’

‘Very mysterious!’

‘Or very ordinary?’

‘Any brothers or sisters?’

A second elapsed.

I saw Ross’s face glancing back at me through the thickly falling snow, his teeth white, his eyes hidden behind ski goggles.

‘No,’ I said.

It’s not really a lie, Ross.

‘Look,’ I added quickly. ‘I’m not interested in being defined by where I come from or who my parents are. I’ve always felt like an outsider in my family and at my
school. Now I’m free to be who I really am.’

‘So, who’s the real you?’ she asked.

‘Haven’t a clue.’

Nash mistook my answer for wit.

I woke up the following morning fully clothed, but feeling fine, almost sparklingly alert, until I went to get up and discovered my skull had been replaced by a rigid steel box
that bashed against the tissue of my brain with every slight movement. I weighed the alternatives of ducking back under the duvet, or running off the remains of the alcohol.

Among the still-unpacked possessions lying on the floor, I located my sports bag and pulled on shorts and running shoes. After a panicky search for my key, I saw that I had sensibly left it in
the door when I locked it, although I couldn’t remember doing so. I couldn’t actually remember returning to the room, although, as I stepped out into the rain and splashed along at a
slow jog, a mental video of the previous evening began to spool through my mind, freezing randomly on single frames of searing embarrassment. Had my hair really become entangled in the plastic vine
that decorated the Greek restaurant ceiling when I stood up to go to the toilet? Had we really smashed plates and danced in a frantic circle with the wedding party?

The city pavements were slippery with a dirt soup that splashed my legs and soaked into the mesh of my white running shoes, but the rain felt cool and cleansing, flattening my hair, cascading
down my face when I tilted back my head.

The streets were fairly empty, with only an occasional bus sloshing past. I had no idea where I was running to, but decided to turn left when I reached a major crossroads, into a more well-to-do
area with estate agents, a pub with tables outside and baskets of bruised red geraniums swinging in the damp breeze, and a newsagent which was just opening up. Flipping through an A–Z, I saw
that I’d come three quarters of the way around a squarish circle. My hall of residence was less than a mile away. I bought a pint of milk. The rain was beginning to ease as I pounded back,
and my hangover was gone.

In the male shower room, a big, bluff kind of guy was towelling down ostentatiously just like the rugby players did at school to make sure you clocked the size of their muscles and their
dicks.

He stared at my mud-bespattered legs.

‘Got wrecked last night. Been out to run it off,’ I said, and saw I’d gone up in his estimation.

Back in my room, I found a brand-new kettle in a box marked
Kitchen
along with a big jar of premium-quality instant coffee, a canister of Coffee Mate creamer and some tins of baked beans.
My mother had thought of everything and I now regretted my reluctance to let her help me unpack and tidy everything away as she would have liked.

With two mugs of coffee in my hands, I was about to give Nash’s door a sharp kick, when I had another flashback.

Did we kiss? We did. Right there outside her door. A peck, then a Frenchie and then, looking at me with heavy-lidded eyes, she’d asked if I wanted to come in, and it was clear that we
could have had sex, but I’d muttered something about it not being a good idea.

Nash wasn’t really my type. I hadn’t even known I had a type until then.

I drank both cups of coffee, then set off to the Medics’ introductory talk.

There was an almost tangible buzz of nerves among the crowd of strangers congregating outside the lecture theatre and a ripple of laughter when the student who was standing
nearest the big wooden door tried the handle and discovered that it was open.

‘Your first step on the way to becoming independent learners,’ the professor remarked acidly from the lectern, as we filed into the tiers of seats, casting surreptitious glances
around to see if others were taking off jackets, or taking out notepads.

Along the rows, I recognized a couple of faces from the interview day. A boy with glasses soberly acknowledged my nod of recognition; a girl wearing a headscarf looked away shyly.

‘Which one of us is going to faint, do you reckon? There’s always one, apparently, at our first sight of a cadaver . . .’ the guy next to me whispered.

I unfurled a forefinger to point at the shiny blonde bob of a girl sitting right in front of us, who suddenly turned, as if she’d detected the slight movement in her direction. She was
classically pretty in an appley, English kind of way. Her eyes held mine for a moment and I could feel the colour spreading over my face.

Her name was Lucy, my neighbour discovered when we broke for coffee and ended up sharing a table in the cafe. His was Toby.

If I’d been a moment later arriving outside the lecture theatre, or squeezed onto the end of a row of seats instead of starting a new one, I would probably have spent my training with
different people. Or doesn’t it work like that? Were Lucy and I always destined to meet and have coffee together? If I’d sat next to Jonathan, the guy with glasses, would I have passed
my university years playing chess, and would I, too, have gone on to be a renowned oncologist? We think we choose our friends, but perhaps it’s always just a matter of chance.

They took us into the anatomy lab during the first week. I suppose the idea was to confront it straight away. In the corridor outside, everyone was talking loudly, but silence
descended as we trooped in. The air was thick with chemicals.

I had tried to prepare myself by imagining all sorts of different people when the bag was opened up, but the faces I had envisaged were old. This was a young man, the side of his face disfigured
where his head had hit the pavement as a lorry turned left into his bike.

Next to me, Toby fainted. I helped carry him out of the lab, lying him on the floor with his legs up on a chair, and sat with him, pretending to be the calm one, until he thought he was up to
going back inside. By that time, the other students at our table had been allowed to touch the body, and shown how the organs would be accessed in a surgical procedure. Anatomy teaching would not
start in earnest until the second term, our tutor reassured us, by which stage we’d have had several opportunities to get used to the experience.

‘Are you OK?’ Lucy asked me as we stood in the refectory queue afterwards.

The concern on her face made me wonder if she’d observed my own struggle in the lab. She was so sweet and so pretty that for a moment, in a cynical attempt to make her like me more than
Toby, I was tempted to tell her about Ross. But I held back because I couldn’t bear the idea of my new friends being all sympathetic or limiting their vocabulary around me.

I’ve spent my whole life in your shadow, Ross. I’m not doing that any more.

Hope was the little donkey in her first nativity play. Nobody thought she’d do it after the fuss she made about not being allowed to be an angel. To be honest, I
didn’t see why she couldn’t be an angel, there were enough of them, but Mrs Madden, the Reception class teacher, said people weren’t doing Hope any favours bowing to her will all
the time. To be fair to Mrs Madden, I don’t think it was because Hope didn’t look or behave like an angel, I think she was just tired of all the questions.

Christmas was a confusing time for Hope.

‘Is Mum with the
herald
angels?’ she would ask, making them sound like some chapter of bikers. And, ‘The Virgin Mary looks just like Our Lady.’

‘Because she is the same, Hope.’

‘Why is she called Virgin?’

‘It’s just another name.’

I made her a cardboard donkey mask just in case she changed her mind, and when at the dress rehearsal Mrs Madden pointed out, in a last-ditch attempt to include her, that the little donkey was
the only one apart from baby Jesus who had a carol just about them, Hope decided she would go on stage after all, on all fours, taking her role very seriously and getting very cross when the other
children joined in to
her
song. In the end, a compromise was reached where Hope sang the first verse herself and the rest of the class were allowed to come in for the chorus of ‘Ring
out the bells tonight, Bethlehem! Bethlehem!’

Hope had sat out watching so many rehearsals, she knew where everyone should stand. You could hear her telling the camel that he wasn’t in the right place in between verses of ‘Away
in a Manger’. Several of the mothers came up after to tell me how Mum would have been proud, their fixed smiles meaning they’d let it go this time.

Hope wasn’t popular, even with the other kids. You’d think that four- and five-year-olds would be too young for that, but they’re not. On playground duty, I would watch her
charging around and around the painted lines on the tarmac in some determined pursuit of her own, praying that one of the kids would ask to be her friend. Hope didn’t seem to notice, but it
broke my heart.

When I mentioned Hope’s isolation to Dad, he just came out with the usual stuff about Hope being spoilt and mollycoddled. If people just left her alone, he said, she’d soon sort
herself out, missing the point that people were leaving her alone, but you didn’t challenge Dad like that.

Brendan rang from Australia every fortnight, but he wasn’t much help when I told him my concerns about Hope.

‘I expect you’d be lonely, if you were five years old and lost your mammy,’ he said. ‘You worry too much!’

‘I expect you’d worry if you were eighteen and you’d been landed with your little sister to look after,’ I wanted to say to him. But that would have been childish.

At lunchtime on the last day of term, Mrs Corcoran sent word she wanted to see me. Waiting on a hard chair outside her office, I was sure she was going to issue a warning about Hope’s
behaviour, or worse, but when she called me in, she told me that the school was about to advertise for a teaching assistant, but if I wanted it, the job was mine.

‘A mutually beneficial arrangement,’ she called it.

‘You might as well get paid for all the work you do,’ said Doll, as we sat watching
Sleepless in Seattle
. She’d got into the habit of coming round with
a takeaway and a video every Friday night when Dad was out at the pub, usually choosing something romantic on the basis that we’d both be able to have a good old cry. ‘Just until Hope
settles,’ she added.

We all used that phrase a lot. When Hope settles. As if it was just a temporary arrangement. I borrowed books from the course reading list from the library, so I wouldn’t be behind if some
miracle allowed me to slot back into university.

I suppose I had kind of been expecting Doll to put up an argument, but we both knew I didn’t really have a choice. Dad had to go out to work so he couldn’t look after Hope, even if
he’d had the capacity or inclination to deal with a young child. Any other alternative was unthinkable.

‘I know how much you wanted to go to university, so I’m sad for you, but I’m happy for me,’ Doll said, picking up a triangle of pizza. ‘Do you think that makes me a
good friend or a horrible selfish person?’