Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Bren calls Nora, and she does not pick up. It is eight in the morning on a Tuesday, and he’d assumed she’d be on the train to work.
He looks out the window at the birds. Two wood pigeons. Starlings in the gutter, he can hear them, the scrape of clawed feet and kicked moss as it rings out.
He tries three times, then gives up. Turns to look at his rucksack, packed and bulging once more. Socks washed and ironed by his mother. Who irons socks, he said to her, last night. I do, pet, she said. It’s my love language. Leave me be.
He’d wanted to speak to Nora this time. Not leave a message that might never get shared, or, now she has her own phone, send a hollow, impassive text.
But he has to go. His flight is at one, he wants to be at the airport for half ten, he can hear his mother in the bedroom below, preparing to say goodbye.
A drawer rolling open. Fresh tissue folded beneath her sleeve.
He’ll try again once he’s through security.
Call me, he texts her. And then he’s downstairs, his rucksack lugged behind him, and his mother is offering him breakfast like it is an ordinary day even though she knows that it isn’t, because he had told her last night about his plan and his ticket and how he didn’t want a fuss made, and he saw her glaze over as he showed her the adventure centre he was returning to, saw her mouth say lovely, even though it wasn’t, to her.
So, Josie asks, after he’s eaten a slice of toast to keep her happy, after he’s checked he has his passport, one last time. Is this it, then?
This is what Nora had asked him, thereabouts, when he’d left her engagement party.
And this provokes something in him. Déjà vu; a slow, upward swell of emotion.
So much has happened in so short a time, he thinks.
When for twelve years, he’s scaled mountains and crossed ravines and skimmed atop the darkest, deepest waters, so he could avoid the real landscape of his life.
I guess I’ve got time for a coffee, he says.
And Josie beams with delight.
_
They take their coffees to the bottom of the garden. His mother has pulled two plastic chairs under the shade of the oak, and there is dew on the grass. Misty morning. Feels like summer; she says this; he agrees.
They sit, the steam rising off their cups.
I’ll come home more often, he says to her. For Christmas, and stuff.
You don’t have to, darling.
I know I don’t.
Both of them, he thinks, reflecting on all the holidays he’s missed.
All the birthdays. His thirtieth. Her sixtieth.
All the phone calls cut short, because there was nothing to say; when in fact there is so much to say, he can feel it like the earth under his feet, the ash he’d let sift through his hands.
He thinks of New Zealand and how clean the air is there.
How much there is to do and see, how distracted and entertained and exhausted he is, so much of the time, and then his mother says I love you, you know, and he looks up.
It’s not that she doesn’t say it. She says it often, at the end of phone calls, love you, by way of goodbye. But this feels different. Intentional.
Not just because you’re my son, she says. And not just because I see your father in you, which I do.
Bren waits for the flare in his blood, at this, but it remains calm, like the river.
I love you because you saw me at my worst, Josie says.
And I know that must have been terrible, growing up, Bren.
I know you had to learn to care for yourself, too young.
Or to rely on your dad instead of me. But despite that, and I know I’ve said it before, you knew I didn’t need to be babied.
You knew you could go and live your life, and leave me to live mine.
And that fills me with strength, Bren, that has sustained me, more than anything, since he died.
They can hear the starlings from back here.
Scrabbling, still, in the gutter.
It brings me peace, in fact, his mother goes on, knowing that you’re not hovering over me, but doing what makes you happy.
Bren looks past his mother, now, to the branches of the tree curving low over the roof of the garden shed.
He thinks about how he and Nora used to jump off at this lowest point, career back to the house for snacks or else force their way through the gap in the hedge to get to the river behind.
They swam in it, a few times, against Josie’s wishes; Freya encouraged it; Jon pretended not to know.
I’m not sure I am happy, he says, and Josie’s face drops, so he hastens to say it’s all right. Really. Because surely knowing that, means he can try and do something about it.
He looks down at the soil packed hard around the roots. His father there, now. A part of the world, down here, which is the same as the world out there, really, wherever he goes. It’s all the same land, the same air.
I want to find someone, he says. Someone I can let in, or … open myself up to, I guess.
Someone that’s not Nora? Josie asks, and he looks at her, then, lets out a breath that’s part-laugh.
I don’t know that I even let her in, half the time, he says. I think that’s the problem, Mum. Even the person I’m closest to has always felt … far away.
And it is not what he’s admitted, but what he’s called her in that admission, which is not lost on either of them. Mum. There is a moment where they feel that, like the dew damp on their shoes, and then Josie says she’s getting married today, Bren.
He doesn’t quite understand.
She called Freya, first thing, she says. Who called me.
Bren tries to keep still. Fights the urge to stand, or to run.
You two, he says, in the end. You really share everything, don’t you?
And Josie smiles. Says oh, you have no idea.
Bren pours his coffee dregs onto the grass. Wants to leave, now. Thinks of Nora, and this thing he is not a part of – how she is bungee jumping, like he’d told her to – how he doesn’t get to care. But he does. And that caring, in itself, is not losing. Not a failure, like he’d always thought.
Well, the best man won, he says. Or lost. Depending on my job title, in absentia.
Josie laughs. Little, lovely sound.
Lovely.
It’s catching, see.
You’ll always be my best man, she says, as she puts her hand on his arm.
And it is this simple, meaningless compliment that does it.
That unleashes something that for so long, he’s tamped down.
He puts his hand on top of hers, and tells her he’s sorry.
I know you get why I left, when I did, he says.
But I am sorry … that I never came back.
If you didn’t come back, Josie says, then who am I talking to?
He is not sure he deserves to be let off the hook, like this, but then she says don’t hold on to any guilt, here, Bren. There are other emotions that take priority.
Bren had thought, after his meltdown on the green, that he wouldn’t be able to cry for at least another twelve years. But it’s only been thirty-six hours and he feels a rise of internal colour and heat, presses his empty coffee cup, cool now, to the side of his face.
You’re quite wise, really, aren’t you, he says.
It’s all this alone time, Josie says. Makes you reflective, and opinionated.
Or maybe that’s just living next to Freya, he says, and she laughs again, and he recognises that laughter, from his childhood, because it had been there. Often enough. Between all the things he’d worked so hard to leave behind.
_
At ten o’clock, Nora is waiting in her wedding dress outside the registry office.
She got ready in her flat, called a cab, arrived on time. Half an hour early, even, but she’d been told in the email from the registrar that this was advisable.
Robin’s shoes and shirt had been gone when she woke that morning.
No note, just a vague, half-sleeping memory of him saying he’d see her later.
Left to garner their witnesses; his brother, and his brother’s flatmate, he’d suggested, last night, which doesn’t surprise her; Shay would’ve kicked up a fuss, had to travel in from London; ease and spontaneity here was key, and she’d agreed.
What does surprise her, though, is that her watch now reads five past the hour, and still, Robin is not here.
She looks up and down the street.
Strangers everywhere, traffic lights changing.
A flicker, then, of doubt. Worrying he is not quite over what they have not quite talked about; Bren, and the fight they had, and all the things she thought she’d resolved with her dress.
This thing she’d made and is wearing, for this appointment she’d never cancelled – so lucky, so serendipitous, thank you universe, as Robin would say, thank you fortune and luck and aligning stars.
She’d thought that was, surely, enough.
That they’d hold hands and sign the papers and get lunch for two afterwards, walk along the river feeling happier than they’d ever done, the same as before but different, because they were a family now, officially, as if sharing some open secret with the world, he hers and she his, and yet he is nowhere to be seen.
_
She’d texted Shay a selfie that morning. After she’d slipped into her dress, her hair left loose over her ears. No ranunculi. No jewellery. And just as she was going to leave the house, Shay sent ten exclamation marks and then phoned her, said, mate, you’re beautiful.
Nora couldn’t help thinking how Freya would’ve scoffed at Shay’s choice of word.
Brides, only ever reduced to beauty, no matter what they do or stand for, make or say or care about, but she thanked her friend, all the same, not just for the compliment but because Shay had stopped teasing her about Bren, as soon as Nora had explained her plan.
Who was chuffed, the night prior, when she texted her to tell her he said yes.
Go get married, already, Shay said. And give Robin a kiss from me.
Thanks, Shay. I will.
After they’d hung up, Shay sent her a stream of emojis, for luck; horseshoes interspersed with clovers, to which Nora replied: no luck needed.
Three yellow stars. Then she’d grabbed her key and slid her phone into her pocket because of course, she wasn’t going to spend weeks altering the wedding dress of her dreams, labouring over the memories and composition and the symbolism of the thing, and not give it pockets, in what world.
_
But maybe she did need the luck, because now it is quarter past and still, she’s alone.
She calls Robin for the fifth time, sixth, but he does not pick up.
Goose doesn’t answer, either. She tries to sign herself in at reception to save time, keep her panic at bay, but they say they can’t move forward without the second attendee present so she steps back for another couple who are both there, both attendees, presumably, both committed and on time, a guy in a leather jacket and a woman with piano-playing hands who get to go ahead of her at the time she is supposed to be signing the marriage certificate, a piece of paper, everyone says, but a piece of paper, it turns out, that she’d really wanted to sign.
At half past ten, instead of signing that paper, Nora is standing outside again, still in her wedding dress and still waiting for the man she wanted to marry, who she’d thought had wanted to marry her.
Cars pass.
The traffic lights turn red.
Drivers glance at her through wound-down windows, a woman with a pram walks by and stares, just like the woman with the pianist hands back inside marrying her person, maybe, signing the paper that changes nothing and yet everything, else why would people do it, why would they want it, why does she want it, she has tried not to but she does.
She fiddles with a thread on her bodice while she waits, checks her phone.
Her worries began to ripple, some time ago. Expanding outwards.
And in a flourish of fear she pulls up Robin’s name on the screen once again to text, this time, ask him what’s happening, is everything okay, everything’s fine, she thinks, she plans to say, and I thought this would prove that to you, she is thinking this as she types when her phone rings in her hand and it is not Robin or Goose or even Bren but an unknown number, no name.
A stranger.
A hospital.
She is told to come, quickly.