Nora, 5
They don’t see Seb any more. And though they do see Finn, he’s not the same as he used to be. This new Finn can’t smile, won’t talk and doesn’t want to play. Overnight, Nora goes from having two best friends to having none. Like this, her world suddenly becomes small.
Where is Seb? After he disappeared, Nora’s mum spent weeks trying to reach him without answer. Then she’d left him one last message before deleting his number.
‘Do what you like to me,’ she’d said into the phone, not knowing that Nora was listening in. ‘But I’ll never forgive you for doing this to her.’
Nora’s mum can be stubborn. But no one can be as stubborn as Nora. She is expected to forget that Seb ever existed, but she will not be told what to do, nor whom she can or cannot talk about.
‘I hate you!’ she says, at one point.
‘I hate him!’ she says, at another.
‘I hate this,’ she hears her mother say, while crying on Finn’s mum’s shoulder.
They have to be there for each other. They can’t rely on anyone else to stick around.
Nora’s mum’s film almost stopped entirely when Finn’s dad died, but it was Finn’s mum who made her carry on.
Nora has started school now, and she’d never seen her mum cry as much as she did when she first saw her in her uniform.
And yet, Nora doesn’t mind school, actually quite likes school, even if it is sometimes scary, even if it is often overwhelming.
She is a different person to the one she used to be.
Nora still doesn’t know where Seb came from, or even who he really is.
She just knows that there was a before Seb, and an after.
Now Nora has a mother who schedules time for their Saturday movie nights, who puts up a tent and a projector and makes popcorn, who cuddles with Nora in their matching dressing gowns, who talks over the film but only to tell Nora that she’s perfect, that she’s limitless, that she never thought she’d be so lucky as to end up with someone like her.
Nora is coming together. Her memories have begun to stick.
In years to come, when she’s older than her mother is now, she will stare out of a window through semi-transparent curtains and be surprised by what she can bring to mind.
Feelings of loneliness, of apathy, of her mother crying in cars and keeping her at arm’s length.
But also these movie nights, the brightest parts of her very early past, and her mother, her fixed point, right there at the centre.
She will understand, then, that the greatest love story of her life might just be that of herself and her mother.
‘What kind of films does Seb like?’
It’s been six months since Nora last saw Seb, and his name is already so alien that the question is genuinely offhand.
Autumn has come and gone, the edit with it.
Nora’s mind is more elastic than her mother’s, and her world is already expanding again.
She’s got a new focus. She’s devoting her entire existence to making Finn laugh, saving up jokes and stories for every single one of their visits.
Sometimes, just sometimes, it works – and sometimes is more than enough.
‘Where did that come from?’ her mum says.
And it’s not like she chokes on her popcorn or bursts into tears, but she starts doing that thing she does with her hair when she feels like she’s being watched, tucking it behind her ear over and over again. She’s always done that.
‘He was around,’ Nora says. ‘Then he wasn’t.’
‘I’m surprised you remember.’
‘Of course I remember,’ Nora says. ‘We love Seb.’
‘It wasn’t very nice,’ Nora’s mum says, ‘the way he left.’
Nora shrugs. ‘I forgive him.’
Her mum laughs. ‘Oh, do you?’
‘Yeah.’
Her mum looks sad, now. ‘I don’t know what Seb likes any more,’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose it matters.’
Nora thinks hard about this. Then she shrugs. ‘I’ll ask him.’
Nora’s mum hasn’t stopped looking at her. ‘And how will you do that?’
Nora turns back to the film, reaches for another piece of popcorn. ‘He’ll come back,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t leave us behind.’