Chapter 15 #2
When Lily has handed in her dissertation and finished her stint volunteering at the Fringe festival, she takes the train down from Edinburgh to spend the rest of the summer with Bear, where days flutter from the calendar as though caught by a gust of wind—twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, thirtieth—and gone.
On the final night—his lease up, his belongings stacked in boxes by the wall ready for Bees to collect in a hire car the next day—they lie in bed.
The window is half open and outside Bear can still occasionally hear groups of students walking past in a scuffle of half-caught sentences and the beery rip of a too-loud voice.
It is the kind of night where even at 2 a.m. warm air wraps around bare shoulders.
The kind of night where the sense of ending and possibility is as heady as the jasmine that sprawls beneath the window ledge.
“Are you awake?” Bear asks.
“Yeah. Are you?”
“Yeah,” he says, each sensing the other smiling in the darkness. “What will we do?”
“About what?”
“You know.”
“I didn’t think we’d make it this far, but we have. Do we really need a plan?” Lily asks.
“It feels unfair not to. I mean for you, at least.”
“Because I’m the one who’s staying? Or because you want a clean break?”
“The first.”
“Just go and do your digging then. I’ll be fine.”
He smiles again and squeezes her hand beneath the sheets. He likes the way she teases him, makes his painstaking archaeology work sound like a dog burrowing into sand at the beach.
“But it will never be any different. There might be a few weeks between digs when I’ll be back. But mostly—”
“You think—”
“I mean, I could get some cultural resource management work over here—stopping a build if we find something of interest, with some antsy developer breathing down my neck. But it’s not what I want.”
“Can I speak?”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t know what I’ll be doing yet. I might be back home, or in Edinburgh if the Fringe job comes off. But I’m also thinking of applying to work abroad.”
“You are?”
“Yes.” She doesn’t tell him that although she wants these things, she is partly driven by a wish to show him she has a life of her own, that she’s not trying to pin him down.
It isn’t the right reason for pursuing something, but the result is that her life is opening up, becoming bigger by trying to fill the shoes of this independent woman she knows he will love.
Does love. Has loved, since they were fourteen and were put next to one another in maths.
Atkin and Atkins. We’re like our own pharmaceutical company, he’d said.
When they left for different universities, they’d made no promises, but in that first Christmas break, they found one another in the pub on the first night home and slotted straight back together.
They never asked what the other got up to in term time.
If there was anyone else. But for Lily, at least, there had been no one.
Just a lone experimental kiss with a girl on her course—Celeste’s lips had surprised her by being so much softer than Bear’s; she thought about those lips a lot.
But she didn’t think of Celeste. Sometimes boys walked her home after a rehearsal or bought her drinks in the subsidized bar, holding her gaze a moment too long.
And by way of reply she would look away.
And Bear. Bear went out briefly with a history undergraduate, paid to throw shapes on a podium high above the other clubbers, like a messiah leading them in drugged dance as sweat trickled down their torsos and plastic cups of water were downed and then crushed beneath their feet.
He’d liked her lean body, that she was so ready to be looked at.
But when she stayed over, she would say, “Pass the remote, babe,” putting her hand out for a controller that was just as easily within her reach as his.
And somehow, as he leaned forward to hand it to her, he was aware this was not something Lily would do.
And that he didn’t want this other incarnation of a girl.
The pattern repeated several times, a wallpaper to those years.
There was the chemistry student who laughed too loudly and whose hair smelt of isoamyl acetate instead of apples.
And the girl on the Silchester dig in Reading, whose eyes sparkled when she talked about the midden layer of earth, the concentrated darkness speckled with archaeological treasure, but whose frame felt like a mismatched jigsaw piece when she first pressed it against Bear’s at night.
Hang on, he’d said, gently maneuvering himself on top of her, confused when that, too, felt wrong.
In the summer between their second and third year, he met Lily at the station when she arrived home from Edinburgh and the feel of her hand in his, the way she kissed him and, later, the way her body dovetailed perfectly with his, the exact kind of nothing and everything they talked about when they were together…
it all felt right and inevitable. He didn’t mention this to Lily, not wanting to extract some urgent commitment from her.
But he stopped turning to other girls and expecting them to be her.
“So you’re happy to leave things how they are?” he says.
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yeah,” he says, and each feels the other smiling in the darkness.
Home from the airport, Cora, Maia, Sílbhe, Mehri, Fern, and Lily stand crowded around the doorway looking at the still-life of Bear’s room.
Already, a dust seems to have settled over his things.
They lean against the doorframe, against each other, quietly surveying.
It is a clash of boyhood and adulthood, never quite updated to reflect the latest version of himself at twenty-one.
Finally, Mehri says, “Look at us. All pining over that boy. God, it’s been glorious, hasn’t it?
” And everyone knows exactly what she means.
They eat pizza and watch When Harry Met Sally…It’s not as good as anyone remembers and they talk over it and wonder what time of day it will be when Bear lands in Jordan.
At midnight, Lily walks back to her parents’ house, a ginger tom mewling for attention as she nears home, dashing between gardens, always reappearing in a driveway just ahead of her.
“Night, puss,” she says, giving him one last stroke before letting herself in.
She goes upstairs and sits on the edge of her childhood bed.
She feels a profound emptiness. And in the bluish light of her moonlit room, the realization that Bear may never truly be hers seems cast in stark relief.
He’s not the only man in the world, she tells herself.
Someone else will want to share a flat, a cat, a car, a house, children, a dog, a life together.
But then, even a little bit of Bear seems better than none.
The next day, Lily is offered a paid position planning the following year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
She turns it down. She needs to leave too.
Not just their hometown, but her university city as well.
It’s just too painful to be left behind.
And so she applies for a role assisting a professor of Romantic literature in Rome, and far sooner than she’d expected, she is there.
She and Bear keep in touch by time-lagged texts and emails that ping at odd hours.
Lily does not tell him about her neighbor, Davide, who resets the ancient fuse box in the corner of her living room when the lights go out, and who presses her against the wall and runs his hands up her thighs beneath her skirt, whispering her name—Giglio—in Italian.
She doesn’t feel guilty and nor does she feel it signifies an ending with Bear; it’s all she can do to cling on to some self-respect, to cope with the fact of knowing Bear may never be ready to settle down with her.
When Bear writes, she tries not to notice the girls’ names that crop up increasingly often.
If there is a threat, she tells herself, it’s more likely to go unnamed.
And so, she focuses on the things he does mention and tries to get a sense of his day, of what he will be doing at any given moment.
She knows he eats watermelon for breakfast because they are cheap and plentiful.
That he rises at 4 a.m. because it’s too hot to work on site in the afternoons.
That they cover everything over each night with huge tarpaulins, but still creatures get in and carry the earth from this decade into excavated areas 10,000 years old.
She and Bear give the creatures nicknames and joke about his unwinnable battle, and she tells him about the Italian slang she is learning and about her clumsy foreignness.
“It is just so mortifying to be English!” she writes.
He feels it too. At the weekend, away from the dig site, he wanders around Madaba, soaking up the sounds and smells, and the Arabic, which floats across the city streets with its vowels that catch softly at the back of the throat.
After a few days without communication—when Lily stops work to refresh her email every few hours, and then every few minutes—Bear resurfaces and lets her know he’s had amoebic dysentery.
He emails a photo captioned, Back to work, finally.
She studies it. He is holding a hand trowel, looking almost impish.
His face is partly in the shade of his sun hat, but from what she can see, he is gaunt, and his T-shirt appears suspended from his shoulders as though on a clothes hanger.
Let’s stop this, she thinks. Let’s go back to England and do safe, normal things.
But her work is going well, and she knows she could never suggest he abandon his dreams.