Famous Last Words

Chapter 21

21

It’s a text, flashing up bright in her hands like a spotlight.

Unknown

Today 19:16

51.52484054385982, -0.09271149661234793

9 p.m.

Sent from textanon.com

Funny, spam is usually purporting to be someone, isn’t it? To get you to do something? Cam replaces her phone in her jeans pocket and heads back out to Charlie, telling herself that the text is nothing. That she’s rattled by a stupid steak and a milkshake. That’s all. And overreacting to spam.

She filled in a form last night, to officially declare Luke dead so that she can sell the house, finally, and move on. That will be why she feels weird. She had to wait seven years to do so. And, as she filled it in, having convinced herself it was the right thing to do, she found herself thinking the thought she never admits to anyone: that, deep down, she thinks he is alive.

She approaches Charlie, and he doesn’t look up yet, is immersed in his phone, possibly work. Cam sometimes finds herself thinking, when she is with him, that he is not unlike herself.

‘Are we seeing Libby this weekend, did you say?’ he asks.

Cam winces. She did say that, didn’t she? In a moment of generosity to Charlie, she’d offered up a barbecue at Libby’s in return for not being committed enough. Because that’s the way it is for Cam: a brilliant day with Charlie, then three days full of doubt follow it. God knows what he thinks.

‘I don’t know – she’s struggling a bit,’ Cam says. ‘Latest round of IVF failed.’

‘Oh,’ Charlie says, his face falling. For two reasons, perhaps: disappointment for Libby, but evidence, too, that when Cam receives news like this, she doesn’t always reach out to tell him.

‘Is she with Polly tonight?’

‘Oh yes,’ Cam says, thinking that, these days, she couldn’t keep Libby away from Polly even if she wanted to.

She smiles as she thinks of her. That baby who laughed at everything and threw balls with abandon is now an almost-eight-year-old who laughs at everything and throws balls with abandon. Funny how sometimes everything changes and sometimes nothing does. Polly was Polly from day one.

Charlie nods, but says nothing. There is something in his history, Cam thinks, that triggers him. Perhaps he wanted children, perhaps he didn’t, but he won’t be drawn on the topic of parenthood. She supposes some people might have had that conversation by now, but they haven’t. Funny how long you can float along without a plan.

He looks up, smiles, and says: ‘Maybe we could send Libby something?’

And Cam thinks this is the exact wrong thing to do.

‘I don’t know,’ Cam says. ‘She doesn’t like to … to show vulnerability, I suppose.’ The thing Cam wants to say to Charlie is that he doesn’t know her sister. You can meet someone, be present in their life, even act like you know them well, but he doesn’t know Libby the way Cam does; doesn’t know that Libby would want to throw a bunch of conciliatory flowers in the bin.

Only the other week, the way that Libby chose to tell Cam that the IVF hadn’t worked was to say, ‘Well, I can eat whatever the fuck I like now, because the bugger didn’t stick around.’

It wasn’t out of character for Libby, but Cam had been surprised, nevertheless, that her sister’s cynicism pervaded so deeply. Her words were laced with pain that, clearly, she thought she was hiding well.

‘I’m trying to think what I would like if I were in a shitty situation,’ Charlie continues. ‘Like – probably just someone to make me my dinner and let me rot in self-pity.’

Cam lets out a surprised laugh, thinking that Charlie really understands and empathizes with people’s darkness sometimes.

‘Let’s just do that ourselves,’ she says.

‘It’s a date.’

Cam’s mind keeps going to that text message. It’s a strange kind of spam. Nine p.m. ? What spam includes a time?

‘I just feel for them,’ Charlie says earnestly. A beat, then he adds: ‘My ex didn’t want kids.’

And Cam looks at him, thinking she needs to forget that text, concentrate on him. She can tell that this admission has cost him something. It spills out of him with a wince: unusual for Charlie, ordinarily so slick.

‘Oh – I’m … I see,’ Cam says, wondering if she really wants to go here now. Evidently, he decided while she was in the bathroom that he did.

‘Yes. She left because I wanted kids and she didn’t.’ His gaze lands on hers, an even gaze. It makes sense. His tension sometimes when she talks about Polly … ‘It was an ultimatum from me, really, but she is the one who left – I wouldn’t have left her, actually.’ He sucks his bottom lip in, his expression slightly guarded. ‘It’s her prerogative, naturally,’ he says, in his typically overtly thoughtful manner. Cam is suddenly struck by the thought that Luke would think Charlie insincere, even though she doesn’t.

No. Leave , she commands Luke. Your opinion doesn’t matter to me now.

Charlie pushes his food aside. ‘She said I’d end up resenting her. Smart woman,’ he adds.

‘And you didn’t find somebody to have kids with,’ Cam says. This is the first time they’ve ever discussed anything like this. And all she can think about is why would a junk text message say nine o’clock in it?

She’s got to look at it again.

‘Yes. And wait for the painful irony – guess who has a child now?’ Charlie holds his hands up to her, and she searches his face for sadness, but there isn’t any, just a resigned kind of gloom, which she understands entirely. Somebody who has also experienced suffering. Cam didn’t want to start dating anyone else, and she certainly didn’t want somebody damaged, but there’s something nice about it, not tragic. Just somebody weathered, too, by life.

Charlie puts his cutlery down. ‘The kid looks just like her.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Cam says simply. ‘I know I have Polly … but believe me when I say I really know how it feels when life doesn’t go your way.’

‘Well, I appreciate that,’ he says. He looks at her. ‘Let’s take these as leftovers and go and rot in self-pity.’ He gestures to the tarts.

Cam smiles, then nods. But then her phone lights up again, this time an email, but she snatches for it on impulse, opening the spam message again, knowing it’s rude, but unable to resist.

And, clearly, her mind was still spinning over it while listening to Charlie, because look: it is far more than just a string of numbers, followed by 9 p.m . The numbers are separated by a comma.

Cam becomes distinctly aware of her heartbeat, which throbs and warps the room as she stares.

They are coordinates.

She’s got to go. Forget this conversation, that Charlie is confiding in her.

The light on her phone shuts off, and their eyes meet. She springs to her feet.

‘Oh, shit – I’m really sorry, Charlie … I need to – look,’ she says, flashing the phone but not properly showing him a text from Libby which doesn’t exist. ‘Polly’s ill. I’m so sorry. I have to go.’

And it’s probably obvious – so obvious that neither of them even acknowledges it.

‘Oh, for sure,’ Charlie says, and Cam is ashamed to note he doesn’t even seem surprised. ‘You have to do what you have to do.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Take care, OK?’ he says. He stays seated. Cam puts a twenty on the table and tries not to look at him. Tries not to admit to herself what she hopes to be true: that that text is from Luke, her long-lost, long-gone husband.

A few hundred feet down the road, stopping dead, she gazes up at the sky, that velvet blue of June. All around her, London plays out its summer symphony. People smoking, drinking, flagging down taxis. Distantly, she hears a man shout, ‘No – they’ve got two for ones!’

Cam looks back at her phone. A set of coordinates and a time. Now that she understands it, it doesn’t look like a jumble of numbers. It doesn’t look like spam. It looks like the most important instruction of her life.

She checks her watch. It’s twenty past eight.

She puts the coordinates immediately into Google Maps on her phone. All this time. All this time spent convincing herself to stop looking, to move on. And look: coordinates. Instructions.

Contact.

The map loads and Cam stares at the location. It’s a street in central London, Islington, an alleyway between two office buildings that has no significance to Cam whatsoever.

But the timescale does. The application she filled in last night. Does Luke somehow know? And want her to know that he isn’t …?

No. She can’t think this way. He killed people. He left . He didn’t come back. Sometimes, it’s been easier for Cam to believe that he’s dead, rather than in hiding. But then – who knows what she believes? At times searching for her husband, at times vowing to move on, at times angry, at times sad. Everyone wants Cam to have consistency on his disappearance, and she just doesn’t. Who could? The truth is, Cam is consistent: she pretends to believe he is dead or bad, while the real, true her believes he is alive and good. That’s the truth of it.

Nine o’clock. Forty minutes to go.

She could make it.

She’s going to go.

The Tube is the other way down the street, and she has to double back and walk past C?te again. As she does so, feet tripping with hurrying, she sees Charlie, supposedly the new man in her life. He’s got his food to go, in a little white cardboard box, and something sad unspools in her stomach as she sees hers untouched. He didn’t take it.

Eight fifty-five and Cam is one minute from the set of coordinates. She’s fast-walking up the street, eight fifty-six, eight fifty-seven. She can’t bear to ponder it, to hypothesize. Like most people prone to overthinking, in a crisis Cam’s head is cool. Has become more so, since Luke left: she can rely only on herself.

She arrives near to the spot on Google Maps. It is an alleyway leading off a totally normal London high street. Railway arches, co-working spaces, phone kiosks and takeaways.

A bus passes, the N19, and she winces. The N19 to Finsbury Park: she’d know it anywhere. Luke’s old borough from when they were dating. He once failed to get that bus back there …

Cam had been representing him for nine months. After the sale to Penguin Random House, she had gone on to sell US rights to HarperCollins and by the time she called him with their twentieth translation deal, he’d stopped answering the phone formally and started saying, ‘Hey, it’s the good-news train!’

Calls became five minutes of business and twenty of chat. Two minutes of business and forty of chat. Cam wasn’t getting anything done. One-line emails about contract terms had giant personal PSs attached that moved to texts and then to WhatsApps – his avatar gave her a thrill every time it popped up – that didn’t, strictly speaking, need sending at all. Remind me, did you do your Swedish translator queries – I can’t find them? she once sent, then looked around her. Friday, nine o’clock at night, her bare toes at the end of the bathtub, glass of Prosecco on the side. She didn’t need to know about Swedish queries, and she could’ve asked her rights colleague anyway. This was not work. This was … something she couldn’t yet name, or perhaps was afraid to.

But something about him, his effervescence, as bubbly as the drink beside her … Luke was more than just somebody she liked a lot, and certainly more than just another author client: he was a gateway to … to something more than good times. Luke was relaxation. Luke was ‘Oh, God, just turn your bloody brain off.’ Luke was ‘Look, just have some Jaffa Cakes and forget about it.’ And sitting behind those fun times was care. Care for her. Something she doesn’t have now as she battles bedtime and school-uniform ironing and birthday-card shopping alone, alone, alone.

Their first project together had been a success, the way Cam knew it would be. Friends emailed to say how much they’d enjoyed it. Even Libby said she couldn’t help reading it. Cam found it amusing that everybody’s reaction to it was precisely her own reaction to him: Luke was entertaining.

One night, nine months into their working relationship, they’d left a meeting with Simon & Schuster about a new deal for a singer-songwriter’s autobiography. They were walking across London Bridge, having gone for dinner and then drinks and then more drinks. It was way beyond a business meeting, and by this stage both of them knew it.

‘I’ll walk you to the Tube,’ Luke had said at midnight, his tone light. Cam remembers he had said ya , not you , an overfamiliarity she liked so much she’d played it back over and over in her mind as they strolled.

It began to rain as they crossed the street. ‘I’ll be fine from here,’ she said.

‘It’s cool.’ Luke indicated a row of bus stops. ‘I’m going to go from there, anyway.’ He drew the hood of his parka up with one hand, fur framing his face, and looked at her from within it. ‘Least I know you’re home safe. Or near enough.’

And it wasn’t about what he said, but, somehow, the atmosphere changed between them – just like that – as if someone had reached in and wordlessly flicked on mood lighting. The electricity of the weather, maybe: that it was raining was a satisfying pathetic fallacy to Cam, a woman who liked to live in literature where possible. Just as she thought this, the droplets got fatter, striking the pavements with little explosions. Cam was in flimsy shoes, and her feet became squeaky with water.

‘That’s your bus,’ Cam said to him as the number N19 pulled in, ‘Finsbury Park’ emblazoned on its front, but Luke ignored it. And that was the moment Cam knew.

‘I’ll get the next,’ he had said, his eyes on hers.

He didn’t.

And now here she is alone, watching that same bus speed away.

She walks into the alleyway, her breath held. It bends in a semicircle between two buildings. She thinks of all of the things she knows about the siege and the weeks before it: that the dead hostages were never identified, that Luke never reported the burglary. They are pieces of a puzzle. And there is an answer, but it doesn’t materialize, no matter how much Cam tries to put them together. She has just a handful, from a thousand-piece set. Maybe she will never get the rest.

Or maybe she is about to get them all.

The alleyway winds back on itself into a courtyard, but it’s empty. Nobody here. No windows look into the barren and uninhabited concrete square. All it contains are a few dead shrubs and a bench.

Google tells her she is standing at the precise coordinates. It’s twilight: she can’t see a soul. On the dim street, in a rectangle of light at the end of the alley where a streetlamp stands, the world continues. For the first time, Cam shivers. It’s late. Nobody knows she’s here. But what else was she supposed to do?

She double-checks the coordinates and then the time. And this is it. She stands there in the dark, in this weird, closed-off courtyard, closes her eyes, and waits for nine o’clock. Eight fifty-eight. Eight fifty-nine. Nine.