Chapter 15 #2
Eleven years. Eleven years of friendship, of him being the person I call at midnight, the person who waters my fuchsias and fixes my windows and sits on my kitchen floor at three in the morning when the grief is too heavy to carry alone – and the whole time, underneath all of it, there was this.
A thing I said when I was too young to understand the weight of words.
A sentence he absorbed and carried and never once threw back at me.
He told Cara. Casually. Like it was just a funny story from the past. Like it was something he’d made peace with.
But you don’t tell someone about a wound that’s healed. You tell them about a wound that still has edges.
‘Nina?’ Cara is looking at me. ‘You’ve gone pale.’
‘The heat,’ I say. The word tastes like ash. ‘Still getting to me.’
‘Do you need to sit down?’
‘I’m fine. Just going to find the loo.’
I don’t find the loo.
I walk to the edge of the field, where the cliff drops away and the sea spreads out black and silver under stars, and I stand there with my hands shaking and my tea going cold and I try to breathe.
He heard.
Not just heard – absorbed it. Stood on the other side of a door at seventeen and listened to me perform cruelty for an audience, and then came back the next day and never said a word.
I need a moment. I need several.
Why did I say it?
I know the shape of that afternoon. The girls, the dare, the charged electric feeling of having done something new and not knowing what to do with it. I kissed Tom. Tom kissed me. And it had been—
What had it actually been?
The panic I felt walking back to my friends wasn’t the panic of something wrong. It was the panic of something right. Something that mattered. Something I was seventeen years old and completely unequipped to hold.
So I laughed it off. Because I didn’t know what else to do.
I said it was like kissing my brother because I was scared, and the easiest way to manage something frightening is to make it small.
I hadn’t even meant it. I’d known I hadn’t meant it, somewhere underneath the performance, and I said it anyway – with conviction, with sound effects, for girls whose names I cannot now recall.
I could have said it was fine but awkward.
I could have said it didn’t feel right. I could have said nothing.
Instead I produced the most comprehensive demolition available and performed it for an audience, and then I looked for his face in the crowd to see if he’d heard, and he wasn’t there, and I told myself good and moved on.
Except he had been there.
The music starts behind me. The second half. Celia Johnson about to go back to her husband, about to choose the safe life, the steady life, the life that doesn’t ask too much.
I stay at the cliff edge. The tea has gone cold. My hands have stopped shaking but the shaking has moved inward, deeper, a tremor in my architecture, because it’s not just about the kiss.
It’s about everything.
I’m an awful person.
An awful friend.
I think I’m going to hurl. My stomach cramps and I bend over, sweat beading my skin, my ears ringing.
This isn’t about Tom walking into that common room with a false smile on his face, even though I’d just undermined him. A private moment that wasn’t meant to be shared.
It’s everything.
It’s Tom.
It’s the fact he always smiles at me. He’s always there. Even when I’ve told people he kisses like my brother, even when I get a new boyfriend and drop him from everything.
Karaoke. It hits me like a sledgehammer. The other day in the pub was the first time Tom and I have sung karaoke since I met Peter.
I left Tom on the outskirts, just like I left him outside that common room door all those years ago.
And now another woman is sitting on a picnic blanket with her hand on the spot of skin above his wrist and being the friend he probably deserves.
I crumple down onto the damp grass, stare out at the sea.
I don’t really do anything at all; nothing but stare.
Tom finds me at the cars.
‘There you are.’ He’s carrying the blankets, Cara a few steps behind with the basket. ‘You disappeared after the interval. I was worried.’
‘Needed air.’
His gaze narrows. I needed air in an outside cinema on a clifftop? ‘You’re sure? You’ve been quiet all evening.’
‘Just tired,’ I say. ‘Long week.’
He holds my gaze.
The silence is intolerable.
‘Okay,’ he says finally.
We drive back in near silence. Cara talks about the film – Celia Johnson’s face in the final scene, the devastating restraint of it. I listen from the back seat, watching the road unspool in the headlights, watching Tom’s hands on the wheel, watching everything.
He drops me at the café. I climb out and I’m almost at the door when his voice stops me.
‘Nina.’
I turn. He’s leaning out the window, and in the streetlight his face is all angles and shadow. ‘Whatever’s going on,’ he says quietly, ‘you can tell me. You know that.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m here. I’m always here.’
‘Goodnight, Tom.’
‘Goodnight.’
He pulls away. I watch the taillights until they turn the corner. Cara’s silhouette in the passenger seat. Tom’s hands on the wheel.
Inside, Chips is waiting. He presses against my legs, solid and warm.
Chips nudges my hand. I look down at him.
‘I think I’ve been very stupid,’ I tell him. ‘For a very long time.’
He doesn’t argue. He just leans against me, warm and patient, the way everything in my life that matters has been warm and patient.
I stand in the dark café with my hand on the counter and I feel the ground shifting – not violently, not all at once, but the deep slow movement of something fundamental rearranging itself, the tectonic plates of a truth I’ve been standing on without knowing it was moving.
Eleven years ago. He heard me say the worst thing. And he stayed.
I go upstairs. I get into bed. Chips climbs up after me and puts his head on my ankle.
My mum’s words from the day I came back from Truro swim in my head. Who are you, Nina Ellis?
Whoever I am, I’m not sure I like her.