Fifteen years earlier
By the time I returned to Bristol, the cold wind of disenchantment had blown, and I was universally abhorred for bringing you – it was said – to the edge of a breakdown.
‘Something’s happened,’ Liv told me when I arrived back at our flat, a great deal thinner, my skin marked by exhaustion circles, the pallor of many nights without sleep.
‘No one is talking to us. You for the way you dumped Lucian, me by association.’
Liv was outraged by this, but she still stood by me.
‘He’s broken, Catherine.
When I saw him, his hands were shaking so much when he lit his cigarette.
I thought he was going to start crying.
’
At first I just nodded, for speech was impossible.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?
Don’t you care?’
‘Nothing matters any more,’ I said eventually, and my voice sounded exactly as I felt: emotionless, zombie-like, an expression of greyness.
Somehow I found the words to tell Liv, ‘My mother is dying. She hasn’t got long.
’
‘Oh Catherine,’ Liv said.
‘How can this have happened to you?’
I effectively closed my life down, skipping lectures and hurrying out to my weekly tutorials, furtively scanning the streets like a criminal, ducking into doorways if I spotted anyone I knew.
I resigned from the student newspaper; no amount of pleading from Angry Jeff could make me change my mind.
At night I lay sleepless in my bed, thinking of you, then thinking of my mother, but only for a few minutes at a time, for the pain was so vicious and extreme I sometimes felt like I was the one who was dying.
I was something different now, a time bomb, a student with a gory countdown to death and bereavement.
People didn’t want to know.
Friends I’d drunk coffee with day in, day out, now crossed the street rather than think of the right thing to say.
A close cousin of mine – we were born six weeks apart – stopped calling.
I wouldn’t see him until my mother’s funeral, and even then he had no words.
I didn’t blame any of them.
We were nineteen, twenty.
Death was too big for us to handle.
It made me think of you, facing your father’s suicide all alone.
Such irony: the only person who could understand what I was going through was the one I couldn’t speak to.
New travels fast in a university town.
Not long after my return, I opened the door to find Sam standing there in his big black overcoat and his Nike trainers, worn as sporting accessory not fashion statement.
His eyes were always able to express multiple emotions – strength, understanding, forgiveness.
To Sam I could say sorry, over and over again.
He opened his arms and I walked right into them.
I thought if I held onto him tightly enough, then maybe he could levitate me away.