Chapter 5
5
SIX DAYS BEFORE HE LEFT ME
This isn’t possible.
The door behind me doesn’t belong to room 307.
The door behind me doesn’t even belong to the Grange Hotel.
The door behind me belongs to Flat 2, 14 Winchester Road.
This is our flat. Kit’s and mine.
What the actual hell is going on?
Smells and sounds I recognise assault my senses from every angle, all merging together, soup-like. I can’t differentiate them.
I understand that I’m standing still, but the sensation feels like I’m spinning, as though my arms are outstretched, my feet stepping around and around on a playground.
And I’m in the private stairwell that leads to our second-floor maisonette.
I look up the stairs: grey carpet, white walls, film poster of Highlander – one of Kit’s favourites – hanging on the wall, chipped banister, fake potted plant beside me. We’d tried keeping a yucca alive the year before but neither of us ever remembered to water it.
My eyes continue gliding upwards; Kit’s jacket is hanging on the top of the banister. It’s his brown leather aviator jacket. The one I bought him for his birthday along with a pair of aviator sunglasses, a nod to his love of Top Gun .
When the sequel came out, my heart ached that he wasn’t here to see it… I think of the necklace, the warranty… Could he have been around all of this time? Did he go and see Maverick and think of me?
My thoughts are thick. The feeling of movement slows, but my surroundings are cylindrical, like I’m looking through a fisheye lens, like everything is wide view.
My right hand grasps at my throat, around to where the locket should be sitting, but the necklace is gone, my skin at the nape of my neck bare beneath my fingers. My hand rides further up, to the short stubble of the back of my pixie cut. I hold out my hand, my engagement ring isn’t there: gone is the French manicure; my nails are painted turquoise. Kit painted them the week before he went missing. We’d been watching World’s Toughest Jobs . There was a woman working as a window cleaner on high-rise buildings in Canada. We had been discussing if we could do it.
After he disappeared, I remember not taking the polish off, and with each passing week, there would be less and less paint on the nails. I’d sobbed the day the last piece of colour flaked away in Mum’s washing-up bowl.
I notice that I’m gripping something in my other hand: a bottle of brown sauce.
What. Is. Happening ? A wave of nausea rises through my chest, and I swallow hard as I try to concentrate on what I can see, what I can hear; I need to ground myself. I need to focus.
The cacophony of sound is starting to separate: a news report on the TV in the lounge, a radio playing, the parp of a horn outside, the slam of a door in the flat beside ours. Their names pop into my head: Jenna and Phil… We used to call them the power pair, all business suits and sharp creases.
I can smell bacon; the fabric softener on my clothes: honeysuckle and sandalwood; the Dove deodorant I favoured; the plug-in air freshener at the top of the stairs, something vaguely vanilla… and just… here . Our flat.
The flat Kit and I lived in.
How is this possible?
The motion slows and I look down. I’m not in my wedding dress. I’m wearing a pair of blue skinny jeans, faded along the thighs and ripped at the knees. My white long-sleeved T-shirt is tucked in, my feet in a pair of white trainers.
I’m standing with my back against the front door.
Kit’s voice permeates through the sounds and smells.
Kit.
My throat dries as his voice tumbles down the stairs. He’s singing ‘Seven Years’ by Lukas Graham. He always sang when he cooked.
Bacon.
I close my eyes, white light dancing behind my eyelids.
I know when this is. This is the Saturday before he left. I went out to get brown sauce from the corner shop.
I tip my head back, my eyes scanning the landing above. I climb the stairs slowly, following the sound of his voice; he’s badly out of tune as he always was. The smell of bacon is stronger as I reach the top of the stairs, the sauce still clutched in one hand, the other reaching out, resting on his jacket, on the smooth leather. My throat is tight. I’d always wondered if Kit had somehow modelled himself on Maverick. He didn’t look like Tom Cruise – Kit was tall, broad, light brown hair always a little in need of a trim – but he had that same spark in his green eyes, the same easy charm, the grin that could disarm, the confidence that he could try anything and still come out winning.
I carry on towards the kitchen. The pan is hissing. His voice continues. He’s singing about becoming thirty years old and his stories being told. I place my hand on the door, adding the smallest amount of pressure, my heart racing, my whole body shaking.
He’s here. Right in front of the cooker, his back facing me: khaki shorts, a white T-shirt, light brown hair messy, spatula in hand as he conducts the music echoing around the room from the radio on the windowsill next to the fake potted herbs.
I cross the room quickly, my arms wrapping around his narrow waist, his stomach muscles solid. I bury my nose into the fabric of his T-shirt, the same fabric softener, but beneath that… is Kit. I’m digging my forehead between his shoulder blades; afraid to look up, to let go, to see his face, to lose him all over again.
‘Hey,’ he says, his voice rumbling through his sternum. ‘That was quick. Did you get the sauce?’
I can’t speak. I can’t pull away from where my face is buried in his spine. My hands are wrapped around him so tightly; he’s starting to move from my grasp.
‘Liv?’ He turns; there’s the sound of the spatula hitting the counter; his body moving around; my head being somehow dragged around his side, my cheek now against his chest. ‘Baby, what’s wrong? What happened?’ I want to touch every part of him, to feel everything that I have tried to remember over the past seven years. I can feel his heart beating through his skin and I want to climb inside, to reach into his chest and hold it in my palm, to feel it thumping, working, alive… I would drink his blood if I could. He’s kissing the top of my head, his hand finding my chin, lifting my face upwards .
It takes me a moment to open my eyes, to look up, but I do.
‘Kit?’
He’s got two-day stubble. His nose is longer than James’s, lifts at the end slightly; there’s a smattering of freckles across it, but those are his eyes. Those eyes that I first saw as he looked down at me on the bank of the River Wye, sea glass, long lashes, mischief behind them that I have thought of so often.
‘What happened?’ he asks, concern crossing his features. ‘Are you hurt?’
How can I tell him? How can I tell him, he happened? That he is the one who hurt me; he is the one who left me, who destroyed all of this.
‘I… You…’ I can’t speak. My words are glue and mud. ‘Kit?’ My legs begin to give.
‘Wooah.’ He drops down and lifts me in his arms. ‘You’re fine; I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’
He carries me to the lounge and places me down gently on the sofa. I watch as he reaches for the controller just as the news presenter says, ‘Good morning if you’re just joining us. The time is ten forty on Saturday the 19th of March. Today’s headlines—’ But Kit has turned off the TV and is crouching beside me, a hand on my forehead. This time next week he will be gone. I’ll spend Easter Sunday standing next to police lines, people pressing cups of lukewarm coffee into my numb hands. James will be amongst the search party, the wind and rains buffeting around him, as he takes careful steps forward over bracken and hills, looking for signs of his brother’s body.
‘Let me get you a drink of water.’ He rushes from my side. I try to tell him not to go, but the words are sandpaper in my throat. My eyes dart around the room, taking in the surroundings. Everything is the same as I remember it: the coffee table with a bowl of pebbles in the centre, each one found by us in various places all over the world; the bookcases, jammed with paperbacks of all genres – classics, crime, romance; fairy lights hanging around the edges; our initials carved into one of the shelves after a drunken night.
On the table by the window are my books, planning notes for the start of next term beside them, highlighters and Post-its scattered all over the surface, Kit’s laptop open. Mine had been handed over to the tech guy in the shop up the road. A faulty motherboard needed cooking or something like that. I remember how, when I got the call to pick it back up, it felt like another lifetime ago that I had taken it in to be fixed. It was only ten days and my life was not just turned upside down, but hollowed out.
Kit returns, his eyebrows furrowed in concern. For a second he looks like James. I’d never noticed that before. I’d always thought them to look so different, but they have the same wave of movement there. Their eyebrows aren’t straight when they frown; they lift and dip: corrugated.
James.
I feel a surge of emotion.
‘James?’ Kit puts his hand behind my neck and brings the glass of water to my lips. ‘What about him?’
I must have spoken that out loud. Is James here? In this… wherever I am? He must be. But so is Kit.
I take a sip and then remove the glass from his hands, placing it on the coffee table.
I’m watching his every move, listening to his breath, noticing the stray hair on the shoulder of his T-shirt, the kink of a curl just below his ear, the fine lines around his eyes, the dimple in his chin, the small mole on his neck.
The sofa creaks with his weight, as he crosses his legs like one of my kids on the classroom carpet. He reaches for my hand: warm, dry, real. ‘What’s happened, Liv? Tell me, because you’re scaring the shit out of me.’ His thumb runs over mine, his eyes, those eyes, scanning my face.
In the year after he left, I always felt like I could still see him, sense him in the shadows, not an outline, more of a smudge, an impression. Now I question, if, just like the image through the window this morning, I had seen him. That is the image of Kit that I have lived with for the past seven years, but now… just look at him. Three dimensional, four dimensional even, as the feelings of love, obsession, guilt, swell and subside inside my skin like the waves I had imagined had swallowed his body. That was the most obvious of explanations: that he’d fallen, that he’d drowned. I had preferred that, rather than picturing him deep in a crevice, starving, becoming emaciated in the dark.
‘Nothing,’ I say shaking my head. ‘Just felt faint, that’s all.’
I don’t know what else to say. I want to tell him the truth, but I don’t know how to begin to describe what’s happening. I could tell him, but that might change the future and this wouldn’t just be the butterfly effect; this would be a whole-stampede-of-elephants effect.
Because how can I begin to tell him everything that has happened? How do I say: well, you see the thing is, Kit, seven years ago, or in six days’ time, you will pack a bag, tell me you’re going for a hike and then you will disappear from the face of the earth. I thought you were dead; we thought you were dead, so did the police. It’s official now, by the way; you’re presumed dead now, did you know? We had a funeral. Oh and by the way, I’m about to marry your brother – you don’t mind do you? Cool.
‘You sure? Because you look… spaced out.’
‘I’m fine.’ I try to keep my voice steady, crossing my legs, mimicking his posture. I take his hand, turn it over in my palm, memorising every line; he has a cut around the base of his thumb. I’d forgotten that. He’d cut it picking up a pasta sauce jar that I had knocked over. He brings his palm to my face, cupping my cheek. I close my eyes, letting the warmth of his touch hold the weight of the past seven years in his palm. I open my eyes as he brings his forehead against mine. He’s so close, I can see the green and blue pigment around his pupil, like the inside of a marble.
‘I love you,’ I say those words, words where the consonants are sharp and determined, but the vowels are broken around the edges. These words that I didn’t say the day he’d left. I never said it back. I was busy hanging the washing over the radiators, distracted. It was hammering down with rain, a storm that soon swept him away in gale-force winds – at least that’s what I’ve always thought. If only the weather forecast had been more accurate, he wouldn’t have gone; the winds were set to die down by the afternoon, he’d said. The rain was supposed to have moved on by the time he got there. But the storm didn’t abate until the next day.
‘Hey, hey… ’ He pulls me against him, wrapping his arms around me. I can feel his ribs, the strength in his arms. My face is wet against the curve of his neck, always tanned from his love of the outdoors. I breathe him in, my body shaking and sobbing.
I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know if I’ve time-travelled, if I’ve had an aneurysm, if I’m asleep or if I’ve been pulled into some weird alternative universe… maybe I’m doing a Gwyneth and this is a sliding-doors type thing – I’ve got the same short-hair look going on – but one thing I do know is that I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful that even if this moment is an illusion, that I get to hold him, that I get to tell him I love him.
Kit pulls away, a gentle kiss; but my whole body tightens slightly.
James. I love James . But I think of the necklace in James’s pocket. The warranty. Did he know Kit was alive? Did he always know? If he hid that from me, I can’t trust him. Our entire relationship is built on us looking for Kit. On our grief for him, on our search, on our acceptance.
Downstairs, the door slams. Kit turns his head towards the door. ‘You ready?’ James’s voice shouts up the stairs: the man I’m marrying, here in the past with the man that I lost.
The man that I still love.
Kit rolls his eyes, oblivious to the thoughts wrapping themselves around my brain. He smiles at me, kissing the top of my nose.
‘We’re in here,’ he says. I look up and there he is. James fills the door frame. He isn’t as tall as he looks, but there is something in the way he holds himself, chin slightly lifted as though he’s ready to take an insult that makes him seem taller. He’s younger, has a bruise along his cheekbone, and when he sees me, his face closes. Shuts down.
You see the thing is, when Kit was alive, James… well, let’s just say, we didn’t get along.