The Moment You Were Gone (5 page)

Connor told himself to hurry away; she wouldn't even
notice he was there, a scrawny, damp rat in the gutter. But even as he was thinking this he had stepped forward and was standing before her.

‘Connor!' she said. ‘I thought –' she stopped. She wasn't smiling, just looking at him.

Connor stared into her face, into her large dark eyes, trying not to see the handsome, smiling face of her companion, or the third person who'd now emerged from the house. ‘The man died,' he said. ‘I thought you'd want to know.'

‘I do know. He died on the way to the hospital. His name was Ethan and he was studying engineering. He was an only child. I met his mother.'

‘He was well over the limit,' said Connor.

‘I know. I talked to the police. I went to see them,' she added.

‘So you know that that was why he crashed.'

‘Maybe.'

‘It was,' he insisted.

‘You're very kind,' she said formally.

‘Well, then –'

‘Well, then,' she replied. She didn't move and neither did he. Drops of rain trickled down his cheek.

‘And I'm no longer involved with anyone,' he said, grinding out the futile words in spite of the man at Gaby's side. ‘I wanted to tell you that as well.'

‘I see,' said Gaby.

‘I shouldn't have bothered you. It was ridiculous. Ludicrous!' he added, with self-loathing.

‘We were just going to the laundrette,' said Gaby, and Connor noticed the man beside her was carrying two
large plastic bags, which, he could see now, were stuffed with sheets. Dirty sheets. He felt bile in his throat. ‘Do you want to come with us?'

‘No, thank you.' He almost spat the words at her. ‘I don't think I will.'

‘This is Stefan, by the way,' said Gaby. ‘Stefan, Connor.'

Stefan. Of course. Connor nodded brusquely, trying to snarl his lips in an approximation of a smile, although he knew he was fooling no one.

‘Stefan's my youngest brother,' said Gaby. ‘Well, he's older than me, but he's the youngest of my older brothers. He's staying for the weekend.'

‘Your brother,' said Connor. ‘Oh!'

‘Hello,' said Stefan, shyly, putting the plastic bags on the pavement and holding out a large hand. Connor was suffused with a warm affection for him. He shook Stefan's hand vigorously, for too long.

‘And this,' Gaby added, as a young woman joined them on the pavement, ‘this is my dearest friend Nancy. She's here with Stefan. Or, rather, Stefan is here with her.'

‘Nancy,' said Connor. ‘Stefan and Nancy.' He beamed at them both, his cheeks flushed with foolishness and joy, and they smiled kindly back at him, Stefan's arm draped loosely round Nancy's shoulders. ‘Gaby?' Connor said, turning back to her.

‘Yes?'

‘Can I come to the laundrette after all?'

‘I don't see why not. But you're wet through – how long have you been out here?'

Connor opened his mouth to say he'd been passing
and happened to see her, then swallowed the words. He was sick of the subterfuge and the self-control of his life. He wanted to bare his soul before her, begin afresh. ‘Three and a half hours,' he said.

‘Three and a half hours?'

Connor felt utterly exhausted with desire, and could barely stand upright. His flesh ached and his heart was a violent bruise. All he wanted was to hold her and be held. Nothing else mattered any more.

‘A woman could fall in love with you,' said Gaby. ‘Here, carry this bag.'

‘Gaby, I have to tell you that –'

‘Later. Tell me later.' For one tormenting moment, she laid a hand softly against his hectic cheek and smiled at him at last. ‘We have lots of time.'

She found the A4, spiral-bound, lined notebook inside a sequined pink bag that Sonia had loved many years ago when she was little. It was pushed to the back of the wardrobe, along with neatly paired shoes, a coiled-up belt with an ornate buckle that she couldn't remember having seen before, a sewing-box, a dress that had slipped from its hanger, a box of old school books and GCSE course-work, a couple of paperbacks (
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
and a dog-eared Agatha Christie omnibus) and a black bin bag packed with clothes Sonia had grown out of but couldn't bear to throw or give away. It was clearly hidden, not meant to be found, let alone read. She was an honest woman; she prided herself on being trustworthy and even felt a bit guilty when she snuck a glance at postcards friends had left lying around on their kitchen table. Nevertheless, she found herself pulling the notebook out of the bag. Knowing that she shouldn't, she opened it. The writing, in blue ink, was round, neat, familiar. The date was at the top – 1 September 2005 – and underlined.

It's three in the morning, muggy and warm, and I'm writing this to you although I don't even know who you are. I don't know what to call you because you don't have a face or a name. You could be anyone at all, and for as long as I can remember that has scared me. Really scared me – not like the
kind of nervousness I get before exams, when I have to take deep breaths to clear the tightness in my chest. More like the fear I feel in nightmares, black waves coiling over me, and even after I have lurched awake and know it was all a dream, it takes time for the fear to lift. Ominous, that's the word. I can feel it all day, like a great black monster on my back. I mean, what if you turn out to be – oh, I don't know – weird in some way? What if something's wrong with you? What if I hate you or you hate me? There's a thought experiment we all did once, when we had to try to make ourselves not think of something and of course we couldn't. If you try not to think of something, that's what you're thinking of. I'm trying not to think about you. I think about you all the time. I'm always looking around me and wondering, Is that you? The one in that coat, the one with the dog, the small one with a shuffling walk, the old one, the rich one, the poor one, the beggar in the town centre whose buttons are all undone and whose hand is outstretched and whose red face is a mixture of humility and hatred, the unhinged one who's shouting at the whole world and nobody wants to look at because it's as if they'll be cursed; the one who meets my eye and smiles, or doesn't smile, who looks away … Even writing this, my mouth goes dry and my heart beats a bit faster.

And I don't even know why I'm writing to you. Well, I guess I talk to you often enough in my head. Other people talk to their cat or their hamster or something. My friend Goldie talks to her fish, for goodness' sake, I've seen her do it. She presses her face against the bowl, so her eyes go goggly, and mutters things. Mad. I have a dog – he's a golden retriever, George, and I've had him since I was six so he's pretty old now; he lies in the porch and farts a lot, and whenever I go near him, even
if his eyes are closed, he thumps his tail on the floor-and I have been known to talk to him when I've felt that no one else in the world understands me. But mostly I talk to you. I have to warn you, what I say isn't always
very
loving. Lots of times, I've told you I hate you. Can you hate someone you don't know?

We had this teacher in year eleven, who took us for life skills. Mrs Sadler. She was short and dumpy and always wore skirts just below her knees, and cardigans; she left last term because she had cancer and I don't know if she's going to be all right or not. She did all the required stuff - you know, about sex and taking proper precautions and about being in a caring relationship and about being able to say no and having self-esteem; or about drugs and how smoking's the most dangerous drug of all and how you don't need to follow the group. Blah-blah. And after all that, or alongside it, I guess, we had these discussions in class. I don't know why it happened, but people really talked about what they felt about things in a way I'd never heard them do before. Even ones I thought I knew quite well, or boys who thought that talking about emotions was sissy. You know, it was quite touching - the boys with their number-one haircuts and their tattoos and their swagger, or the girls with sideways ponytails and fake nails and bottles of vodka in their schoolbags who call you ‘boffin' and ‘sad' if you read anything except stupid magazines, or anyone who'd been having sex since they were thirteen – and you realized they were quite like you, after all, not just hard and indifferent but worried about things, with troubles at home and trying to cover it all up.

So there was this one week – we were probably discussing peer-group pressure or something – when we were talking about the need to know who you are and to be strong and
confident in that. It started off with Mrs Sadler saying it was dangerous to try to impress people by pretending to be someone you weren't, and it didn't work anyway. It was better to be yourself, and people would respect that in the end. But Theresa suddenly said, ‘What if you hate who you are?' Everyone knew she'd been cutting herself with the blade of her pencil-sharpener. Then clever-clogs Alex butted in and said that he didn't think there was a real ‘you' – you were just made up of everything that had happened to you in your life, and you could decide who you wanted to be – and Lee said no, he thought you were born the way you were and you couldn't change that. You were stuck with yourself and that was that. It sounds a bit obvious when I write it down, but it didn't feel like that at the time.

I remember I started to feel all strange and agitated. I put up my hand to say something, and everyone turned towards me. And I burst into tears. It wasn't silent, graceful tears, the way they have in soppy films, that trickle down your cheeks and don't change the way you look – oh, no. Great, gulpy, snotty, noisy, ugly crying. I knew my eyes were swollen, my nose was red, my skin was all blotchy. I felt as if my chest was trying to come up my throat and my whole body was shaking. It was like I was turning inside out, all the raw, pulpy bits of myself I keep hidden coming to the surface. But I couldn't stop. I cried for ages. Mrs Sadler told Goldie to take me to the medical room where I lay down on the bed and sobbed even more while people fussed round me and someone said I was probably on my period. I think I was as well. No one knew what to say to me afterwards. I don't think I'd ever cried at school before, even though I've been there since I was eleven. I'm just not like that. (I'm the boffin, remember.) Afterwards,
I felt completely drained. I could hardly move. And I didn't know where it had come from, all that grief.

Anyway, so the point is that next week is my birthday: 6 September. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this down rather than saying it in my head. I'm going to be eighteen. Eighteen years old. Officially an adult, though I don't feel it. Then I can drink (I already drink). Go to any film (I already do that as well). Get married without my parents' permission (I'm not about to do that, I promise; I don't see any reason why I should ever marry). Get into debt. Gamble. Vote (the Green Party, I think, though I'll have to wait and see). I'm already old enough to join the army and kill someone. But on the day I turn eighteen, I'll start school again for my final year. That doesn't seem so exciting, does it?

But Mum and Dad are throwing a party for me in the hall down the road at the weekend. They insisted, and kept going on about what a big day it is and how I deserve it to be properly marked, and I don't dare tell them I'm kind of dreading it. I'm not
very
good at big parties anyway, and at my own I'll feel responsible for everyone and worry if it's going OK, and what if lots of gatecrashers come and throw bottles around? I would have preferred to go out with a few friends, something more intimate. Or just with Alex for a meal.

They're right, it is a big day. Not in the way that they mean, though – or maybe that is what they mean, deep down, but they can't bring themselves to say it out loud. We don't talk about it. We talk about everything else instead, so many words to cover up what's not being said. Sometimes I think one of us is going to mention it – my heart starts thudding away in my chest and my mouth gets all parched – and then the moment passes.

Mrs Sadler would say I should talk about it and I know she's right. She would say that things are less scary when you talk about them and I know that's right too. I don't know if it counts, writing this letter to you. It's more like a diary, anyway. I'm kind of talking to myself by talking to someone else.

If I tell you all about me, so you know me, maybe that'll mean I know myself. Whatever Alex says about the self not really existing at all.

It's starting to rain at last, so heavy it's like someone's throwing gravel against the windows. It's dry here, the earth all cracked after the summer and the grass yellow, but in the morning everything will feel fresher. I wonder what it's like where you are. I wonder where you live. I've always loved being inside, in the dark, and listening to the rain. When I was nine, Dad took me camping, just the two of us and George, and just for one night. I'd been pestering him for ages and finally he gave in. We cooked sausages on the little throwaway barbecue and played cards by torchlight. I was cold and wore my socks to bed and my jersey over my pyjamas. There were mosquitoes buzzing about and when I lay in my sleeping-bag I could hear them whining next to my ear. That night it rained and rained and rained. I remember lying in the tent, with Dad snoring by my side and George snoring at my feet, and listening to the drops falling on the canvas over my head and feeling completely safe. ‘Safe and sound,' as Mum would say.

Mum also says that it's better to regret the things you do than to regret the things you don't do (although I'm not sure if she believes it: she's pretty cautious herself). I'm not going to send this letter. It's not really written to you anyway. How can you write a letter to someone who's a complete blank, an absence? This is probably a kind of diary, a diary that's
pretending not to be. I always promised I wouldn't write a diary, full of all those stupid, embarrassing, nobody-knows-who-I-really-am thoughts. It's four in the morning now, and outside it's dark and windy and wet. It's easy to imagine that not a single person is awake except me. Real diary-writing time, real nobody-knows-who-I-am time.

But I'm going to try to get in touch. I've decided.

I don't really know how to sign off. In Keats's last letter, which he wrote to Fanny's mother not to Fanny herself, because it made him too upset to write to her, he said, ‘I've always made an awkward bow.' Isn't that incredibly sad? I'll just put my name.

Sonia

The last four lines were at the top of a page, under which there was a blank space. The woman hesitated, then turned it over. The writing was not as neat. It looked as if it had been written in a hurry, or in distress. Words were crossed out violently.

12 September 2005

I've done it. I took the day off school (the
very
first time I've ever truanted, and I only missed physics and maths because I had lots of free periods – that's what I'm like: I do a life-changing thing, but I make sure I only do it on the one day I don't miss many lessons). I was surprised by how easy it turned out to be. Ridiculously easy, after all these years. So now I know who you are. And in a few days you'll know who I am, or my name, anyway. One day I will see you. I feel like I've stepped over some crack, and as soon as I did, it opened up into a great abyss behind me, so now I can't go back to where
I was before. All of that's over. My childhood is over, I suppose, and all of a sudden I want it back, more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. I can't believe what I've done. It's as if I've committed a terrible crime. I feel bad, really, really sick and yucky, and just want to curl up in a little ball. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to know.

The woman sat for a few minutes on the bed, looking at the sentences before her. Her face was expressionless. Then she shut the book and carefully replaced it in the sequined pink bag. She pushed the bag to the back of the wardrobe, exactly where it had been before, and closed the wardrobe door. She patted out the indentation in the bedclothes, where she'd been sitting, then left the room.