Chapter 9 #2
Shall we share some fries, he asks her.
Back up a bit, she says, not looking at the menu he’s proffered. You’re mad because I didn’t come with you?
I think I’ll get the chilli beef, he says.
Or you’re mad that I’ve set a wedding date?
A side of onion rings, maybe.
How are these things related? Nora asks.
Come on, Nora, they’re entirely related! You weren’t going to settle down. You were going to see the world, do something different with your life.
No, Nora says, you were going to do those things. Just last week you were saying how great I’m doing, when you came over. What changed?
That’s my question, Nora, what changed?
I don’t need to justify my life to you, Bren.
No, but you need to be able to justify it to yourself.
She opens her mouth to argue but then the waiter appears.
Youngish, acne on his chin, biro poised.
Bren orders the chilli burger with large fries and a beer, whatever you’ve got, Corona, fine, and Nora is still looking at him as the waiter turns to her, his pen hovering above his notepad. And for you?
Uh, Nora says. Um.
She skids the menu around on the tabletop.
A lemonade, she says. And … the falafel burger. Please.
They don’t come with fries, the waiter says.
That’s okay, she says.
Order some fries, Nora, Bren tells her.
I don’t want fries, she says.
In what world don’t you want fries?
In this one, she snaps, as the waiter takes the menu, raises his eyebrows at Bren, as if to wish him luck, then retreats. Nora crosses her arms.
Things change, Bren, she says, and her voice is hard. You left. And I met someone.
It is the first time she has circled close to the subject. He feels it. He’s sure she does, too. Something charged, between them, as someone turns up the restaurant music at that exact moment, afternoon turned to dinner service, lights dimmed.
I’m getting married because I want to, Nora tells him, and Bren nods, once. Slow.
Don’t do that, she says. Don’t act like you don’t believe me.
Nora, I literally just nodded my head.
If you must know, I have thought about this a lot, she says, because she knows him, knows what he’s thinking. Robin is not someone I’ve settled for. My life is not something I’ve fallen into, because of a missed opportunity, or whatever.
So you’re happy? Bren asks. It is not meant to be accusatory; it is genuine. He wants to know – now he’s seen her, in that dress, and his own heart has flooded with things he’d not wanted to feel – what her answer is.
Yes! she says, but he hears the hesitation in her outbreath, before she rushes on. Happiness isn’t only found in adventure, Bren! Which you would know, if you’d spent any real time with anyone, these past twelve years. If you hadn’t just.
What?
Disappeared, she says. With only a goodbye to my mother.
A goodbye? Bren says. It was hardly a goodbye, Nora.
Fire inside of him as he says it, gush of regret, blazing-hot shame. Someone drops a glass by the bar. Smash and scatter, brief silence, and then it is Nora’s turn to say what.
Don’t be coy, Bren says. Don’t pretend you can’t remember.
Remember what?
The message I left with Freya.
The waiter comes back, then, with their drinks.
Eye contact broken as he puts down his beer, her lemonade, says is that all okay for them; yes thanks.
And when she looks back at him, he feels like he’s turned the same colour as his hair.
Red with the memory. The humiliation of all they’d agreed, intuitively, never to speak of.
But there is something happening to Nora’s face, too, as she studies his own.
A stillness settling over her, which means something starts to dawn on Bren, too.
I called your house, from the airport, Bren says, watching her reaction. And Freya answered. I told her where I was going, and that I was going now, but that I didn’t want to go without you. That I didn’t want to … do anything, without you.
It is still mortifying, to him, all these years later.
I made her write it down, he goes on, as Nora stares at him. What town I’d be staying in, what airport you should fly into. And I.
Told her I’d wait for you, he does not say, because he can’t bear to repeat it.
Was told she’d pass it on, he finishes. All that anger in him, changing colour, like Nora’s face. Her stillness, now, quite unnatural.
She didn’t, is all that she says.
They look at each other over their drinks.
Why didn’t you … she begins, her voice catching. Why didn’t you call the house again. Or email me, or something.
It was just too crazy when – and another memory comes at him, his father falling down, in front of him, so he talks faster, to keep it at bay – and you were at school, and I wasn’t, because –
My dad’s heart had stopped and I was a mess.
And I found a flight leaving that afternoon, he says. With one spare seat. And I didn’t think about it, I told my mum I wanted to go and she just said I should, if I needed to, and so I just … went. Because I couldn’t be there, with her. I couldn’t do anything, to help.
He wills Nora to move. Just nod, even, but she doesn’t.
But we had a plan, Nora, I know, Bren says. And that hadn’t changed, for me, just because I left … a bit early.
She keeps her eyes on his. The only part of her that seems able to move, searching his own; like she’s not sure whether to believe him.
I had to race to the airport to make it, Bren says, reliving the nearly missed train, his sprint through security.
But at the gate I stopped to think, for like, two minutes, and I knew I should tell you, before I got on that plane, so I called.
It was after school, by then, but Freya picked up, said you were next door with my mum. ‘Like you should be,’ she said.
Swallow, then, as he remembers. Knowing that would be the story, always; that he’d left in his mother’s hour of need: when that need was in fact endless, and if he stayed, he’d never be able to break free.
But we were boarding, he says, so I just told her, instead.
She was fuming with me, Nora, for leaving, but when I asked her if she’d tell you everything, she said she would.
And I really thought I’d get on that plane and you’d come join me, at some point.
After the funeral, maybe, when you were ready.
But you never came. You never even … picked up the phone, or sent an email, to say why.
The memory of it like heartburn, as he recalls checking and rechecking his phone, waiting for her response, sort of sick and sort of free but also certain he couldn’t have stayed.
Calling her house, in the end, a few weeks after he’d touched down in a new place and rented a room and still heard nothing.
Saying hi, when she picked up. Long pause before she said it back.
Dredging up the courage to ask, you spoke to your mum, then?
and her reply, tight, and quiet: yeah, Bren, I did.
Shame, afterwards. Hot, and thick.
So I guess that’s it, he’d said, with a tightness of his own.
Yeah. I guess it is.
And not once, in all this time, had he considered she’d not been given the right message; not once had he conceived of the fact that she might never have known that he’d left, yes, but not left her.
That he’d wanted her beside him. And like the bubbles in her lemonade, all of his resentment, all his own fury and confusion, rises to the surface, and dissipates.
Everything he thought had been her rejection of him, evaporating, because it turns out she must have been thinking the same.
They feel this, in the quiet parts of themselves, as the city sky beyond the window falls to black. Ice melting in her glass. Music thumping overhead.
All this time, Bren says, you thought I’d just gone?
No nod, or noise; Nora’s face doesn’t look like her own.
God, he says, as the music changes. No wonder you’re so mad at me.
_
Nora leaves, but does not head home to her flat.
She gets on a train and then a bus to her mother’s cottage, watching unseeing through the dark; Bren stays in London, saying he wants to eat, walk, clear his head.
Alone, she feels like a set of jangling keys, all nerves and sharp edges, the bus jerking stop-start at every junction, but soon enough, she’s letting herself through the porch, only to find the house empty.
The greenhouse, too. So she sits at the kitchen table and waits, hardening with every tick of the hot pink clock. Numbers, swirling, in her head.
Twelve years, it’s been, since she saw what she saw in the upstairs bathroom; since she pretended not to, and tiptoed away, reeling.
Four weeks of silence and shame, avoiding Jon, until she didn’t have to, because he was gone.
Gone. Twelve years since his cardiac arrest, since Nora held Bren as he yelled no, in the driveway, no, Dad, no.
Nineteen minutes for the paramedics to arrive, sixty-two of trying to restart his heart.
Josie, inside. Freya, pacing. Nora, not knowing how to feel about this man she had loved, was livid with – but what did it matter, now, because he was dead.
And there was nothing left to do, except quash it all down.
Twelve years of keeping that secret.
Twelve years, too, since Bren had left.
Nine, since she fell for Robin, though there has always been a part of her that felt something was unresolved, something restless inside her, and now she knows why. Because what Bren has told her changes everything. But it shouldn’t, because it’s less than two months now, until she’s married.
Two halves, to make up a heart.
Two people, taking up hers.
And who knows how much time has passed in this kitchen – could be an hour, could be less – but then she hears footfall on gravel and her mother calling her name, Nora?
when she sees her shoes by the door. And then she’s tramping into the kitchen without removing her own, bright yellow flowers in the crooks of her arms.