Chapter 35
‘So what did the advanced group get up to while we were working on our forehands?’ I ask.
‘We also did groundstrokes, then devoted the last fifteen minutes to overhead smashes.’
‘Ugh,’ I shudder. ‘I hate those.’
‘Are you serious?’ he grins, clearly not relating to this at all. ‘That’s your glory shot, right there. There’s nothing better than belting the ball out of sight and killing any chance your opponent could reach it.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I miss every time.’
‘Surely not every time?’
‘Every. Damn. Time. I attempted one in a tournament as a kid once and hit myself in the face. I had a spectacular nosebleed, in front of a whole crowd. I was mortified. It’s not a good look when you’re thirteen years old.’
He takes a deep breath then blows out his cheeks. ‘I’m . . . trying to work out whether I am supposed to think that story is tragic or funny.’
‘You should see my therapy bills.’
‘Well, if it makes you feel any better I was once playing in front of about twenty parents and thought I’d try something new and exciting with my serve. It resulted in . . . let’s call it a “self-inflicted groin injury”.’
I widen my eyes. ‘Are you telling me you smacked yourself in the balls?’
‘Then had to hobble to the bathroom to puke.’
‘Oh my God,’ I gasp, but now we’re both laughing. ‘Oh, that’s bad, Sam. That’s very, very bad.’
As our laughter dies down, he looks at me with those unfeasibly green eyes. I’ve noticed, every time he does that, it feels like a magnetic field has momentarily formed around us, or like we are inside a little bubble and nobody else exists.
‘Did I know you were into tennis back when we were teenagers?’ He asks the question more to himself than me. ‘I feel like we should’ve played together that summer.’
‘I’d sworn against it by then, after the aforementioned incident. Anyway. We were revising that whole time.’
‘True. Still, I don’t know how I didn’t know this about you,’ he says.
‘There were a lot of things you didn’t know about me,’
I say, twirling the stem of my glass.
He tilts his head, intrigued. ‘Like what?’
I look back up at him. And maybe it’s the rosé or the sunshine, or something else I can’t put my finger on, but I feel the need to come clean with him.
‘Like . . . I really liked you, Sam.’
There is an emphatic tone to the sentence which makes it sound unintentionally intense. But the moment it’s out there, part of me feels glad to have said it. I look up to see him trying to interpret this sentence.
‘Well, I really liked you too.’
I look down at my glass for a moment and consider just leaving it. But I can’t.
‘Then why did you disappear?’
I try to give off casual vibes, but I’m not sure it works. I feel immediately silly for sounding so bothered by something that happened decades ago. I wave a dismissive hand. ‘Forget I said anything. You probably don’t even remember.’
‘No, I remember.’
‘It was just silly teenage stuff. Anyway, you did me a favour because I went to London and met the love of my life.’ I look up at him with a deliberately playful smile. ‘Still, you tosser.’
I nudge him in the arm.
But suddenly he isn’t smiling back.
‘I should’ve written to explain,’ he begins to say. ‘I wanted to. I was just not in a good place.’ He looks, suddenly, like his mind is wandering away from him.
‘Sam, it’s fine,’ I say, waving my hand again.
Then, after a brief pause, he says: ‘My mum died that autumn.’
And just like that, I feel like the tectonic plates are shifting underneath me. I sit back in my seat, almost speechless.
‘Oh. Sam. What happened?’
During those weeks Sam and I spent together, his mum was being treated for ovarian cancer.
She’d been diagnosed four years earlier and had been given months to live, but went on to defy doctors to the extent that – in Sam’s words – ‘I was half convinced they must’ve swapped her medical notes with someone else’s.
’ But in July she went downhill and it was a matter of weeks before she knew she was going to die.
‘She wanted to go back to Ireland to be with her family when it happened. We were only there less than a month when she left us. And I was just . . . I suppose I was . . .’ he shakes his head as he tries to find the right words, before settling on just one: ‘Lost.’
He pinches the top of his nose as if trying to stem some emotion, then gives a small shake of his head. ‘Sorry. Haven’t talked about this for years.’
He clears his throat before continuing. Reeling from the loss of his mother and now effectively homeless, he didn’t know what to do with himself.
His mum’s family offered him a home in Ireland.
But he was eighteen, technically a man, and though he had a hard-won place at university, he’d already missed the start of his course in London.
While his uncle dealt with the house sale and other ‘sadministration’, Sam did the only thing he could think of.
‘I ran away,’ he shrugs. ‘But I was clueless about where to go, so just phoned the first charity I could find who did any medical work abroad and signed up as a volunteer.’
The organisation in question performed transformative surgery on kids with cleft lips, which left untreated meant they struggled to eat, speak or breathe.
He worked as support staff in the Dominican Republic and then Rwanda for two years, met some inspiring people and eventually ‘got himself together’ enough to return to the UK and re-enrol on a medical degree course, this time in Edinburgh.
‘Back in the days when I met you, I’d been convinced that I’d go into oncology.
You know, because of Mum.’ He shakes his head.
‘But I came to the conclusion it would just be too painful, that never-ending reminder. And I loved the work our organisation was doing. It felt important. I guess . . . the rest is history,’ he says, with a flat smile.
I take a deep breath. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was sick that summer?’
‘Because I hoped she’d get better,’ he shrugged. ‘I was partly in denial. But at the same time, I was going with her to have treatment several times a week and at that point it seemed to be going so well . . . until it wasn’t.’
I look down at my glass. ‘Well, now I feel like an idiot.’
‘Why?’
‘I’d assumed you’d met someone else. Or had other ideas or . . . oh I don’t know. All those silly teenage preoccupations. I had no idea you were going through all that.’
‘Well, I should have written. I wanted to. I just . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.’ He looks up at me, sincerely.
‘I apologise, Jules.’
‘Oh, God. Don’t,’ I wave him away.
‘Well, I do.’
I turn to him and try to coax a smile from him. ‘You’re not allowed to.’
He doesn’t rise to it. ‘Julie. I am making this apology and I would very much like you to accept it.’
He meets my eye and returns my smile. It’s a tiny, subtle gesture. But the connection it conveys is as deep as the ocean.
‘Okay,’ I say finally. ‘Apology accepted. But don’t call me Julie.’
He laughs. I take a sip of my rosé and lower the glass.
‘I . . . do understand grief, Sam,’ I say.
‘I know you do.’ He nods, slowly. ‘So, what happened to your husband, do you mind me asking?’
‘Of course not. It was an asthma attack. He was at a conference in Newcastle and started coming down with a chest infection. He phoned me on the second night to say he was getting the first train home the next morning. He never came back.’
We don’t move for another hour. We discuss what it’s like in
the acute stages, when you’re filled with fear and feel like screaming every time you hear the words, ‘I’m sorry for your loss’.
We talk about how we hid how much we were suffering, in his case running away to travel; in mine, refusing to accept help, even from friends and family and throwing myself into a hundred different activities with Frankie.
We also talk about how, even years later, although the noise in your head does quieten, there are times when sadness can still engulf you.
‘Yeah. It can feel like a tidal wave sometimes, can’t it?’ I say.
He nods. ‘I didn’t mean this conversation to get so deep.’
‘Sometimes deep conversations need to be had,’ I shrug. ‘Even in lovely places.’
‘That’s very wise. So are we friends again?’ he asks.
Friends. I like that. Friends is a concept I can definitely get behind.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Good,’ he smiles. ‘Then let’s get out of here and go get those showers before people start to complain.’