The Pieces of You and Me. Rachel Burton
told me. We’re still in touch – I think she probably hears from me more often than she hears from her son though. They were never a close family, were they? He always seemed to prefer our house to his.’
A memory flashed in my head then of us doing our homework at my mum’s big kitchen table together, heads down over our books, kicking each other with our toes under the table. I hadn’t realised that Mum still kept in touch with Rupert’s parents. She returned to Cambridge now and again, but I hadn’t been back since she moved to London. I’d avoided Cambridge since Rupert left.
‘His sister is a doctor now,’ I said. ‘She lives in Sydney.’
Mum nodded. She already knew that too.
‘How did you feel about seeing him again?’ she asked. It was impossible not to notice the look of concern on her face. I knew she was worried about me. Mum knew better than anyone how ill I had been and she had been concerned about me going on Gemma’s hen weekend at all, thinking it might be too much for me. When I had first got ill, I’d left my job at the newspaper and moved into Mum’s spare room. I’d never got around to moving out again. I hadn’t been able to summon up the energy if I’m honest, so I turned the spare room into a bedroom-cum-study and I started writing a book about Ancient Greece, not knowing where it would take me at the time.
I didn’t know how I felt about seeing Rupert again. Part of me was regretting not talking to him more, not asking for a phone number or if he wanted to meet for a coffee before I went back to London. But part of me thought there was too much pain and heartache, too much left unsaid, to simply pick up where we left off.
‘It was lovely to see him,’ I said, not really answering Mum’s question at all.
‘I sense a but,’ my mother replied, putting down her secateurs and coming to sit next to me. She tilted her head up towards the sun and pushed her sunglasses up her nose. Sometimes she looked like a film star.
‘I never expected to see him again,’ I said. ‘I’d finally stopped thinking about him. It was a shock.’
Mum reached over to pat my hand. ‘Of course it was a shock,’ she said. ‘Did you talk about seeing each other again?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘There was so much I felt I couldn’t tell him,’ I replied. ‘About what happened, about how ill I was, about Dan, about still living here with you.’
‘Living with your mother is nothing to be ashamed about. Why did you feel you couldn’t tell him?’
Mum had a habit of always getting straight to the point.
‘He’s achieved so much,’ I replied. ‘He’s top of his field and I’ve achieved virtually nothing. We both had so much potential …’
‘You’ve had two books published,’ my mother interrupted. ‘Both of which sold well, and you’ve just signed a contract for two more.’
I knew I was making excuses and pretending that it hadn’t felt right seeing Rupert again. The truth was I hadn’t had the courage to take the opportunity and neither had he. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t been thinking about him constantly since I’d seen him, thinking about the past, about what could have been.
*
Later, when I was lying in bed unable to sleep, I found my eyes wandering in the dark to the top of the wardrobe where I could just make out the shapes of the two plastic boxes up there. One box contained all the diaries and journals I’d kept since I was seven years old, the other was full of photographs. Everything that was in those two boxes was so tied up with Rupert, with my father and with everything that happened the summer after we graduated that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at them for years.
Until tonight.
I turned on the bedside light and got out of bed, dragging a chair over to the wardrobe so I could stand on it and pull the boxes off. It was a struggle to do it quietly but I didn’t want to wake Mum. I didn’t want her asking questions.
I could still remember the long hot summer of 2003 when Rupert and I were seventeen, the summer I first met Dan. I could still remember the sound of Gemma and Caitlin bickering and the sensation of the sun on my skin as Rupert, Dan, Camilla and I lay by the river. I could still feel the coolness of the water as we swam lazily in the river in the afternoons and the feeling of Rupert’s hand in mine. I could still remember the way Camilla used to look at him, the way she would touch his arm or his knee when she talked to him.
Camilla and I were at school together, but we were never close. Sometimes she’d turn up with Gemma and Caitlin; sometimes she’d seek us out on her own. I knew it wasn’t me she came to see though – I knew it was Rupert and I was glad of Dan that summer. He was Rupert’s friend but he always felt like my ally. I can still remember the sense of inevitability I felt when he and I went to London together and Rupert and Camilla stayed in Cambridge.
So many memories, but the one thing I could never remember, no matter how hard I tried, was the sound of my father’s voice. However tightly I had tried to hold on to it, it had faded over the years.
My memories, like most nostalgia trips, were rose-tinted. I’d almost forgotten how angry I used to feel whenever Camilla touched Rupert. That underlying sense of jealousy and rivalry that I felt back then had melted into adulthood and an understanding of the complexities of life, of the shades of grey – teenagers seem to have an almost over developed sense of black and white, of right and wrong.
It seemed that things hadn’t worked out between Rupert and Camilla after all but I wasn’t sure that changed anything. The past has gone and the years in between have been too long and too full of difficulties for the reunion Gemma seemed to think Rupert and I deserved.
Haven’t they?
I sat down on the floor next to the boxes and pushed the one with the photographs away. I wasn’t ready for that yet. I opened the box containing the journals and found the first one and I started reading.
… A few days after we turned seven, my grandmother died.
At her funeral I cried big fat tears. I hated that I couldn’t stop them from falling in front of everyone. I hated that I couldn’t be stronger for my mum. You stood beside me in your school uniform, your jaw set stoically – a baby version of the way you set your jaw later whenever anyone disagreed with you.
You refused to go to school that morning, insisting on being at the funeral, on being with me even though your parents didn’t want you to. They told you that you were too young to go but you said you were twelve hours older than me and you came anyway. Halfway through the service, when I thought my tears would never stop and Dad had run out of tissues, I felt your hand slip into mine, hot and sticky and reminding me that you were there. Everything would always be all right as long as you were there. You may only have been twelve hours older than me but you always understood the world better than I ever did.
We were born twelve hours apart – you at 6 p.m. and me the following morning – in the same hospital, our mothers recovering in beds next to each other, an odd but lifelong friendship developing from that initial bond. You were early and I was late, which was the pattern that continued for the rest of our lives. You were always waiting for me to catch up with you.
Our parents’ houses stood back to back and our mothers’ friendship transferred to us. We grew up together, in one another’s pockets. We made a hole in the back fence so we could cut through into each other’s gardens instead of walking around the block to the front door. We wandered in and out of each other’s houses as though we owned the whole street. We did everything together from the moment we were born.
Our first day of school seemed less daunting because we had each other. We were always in trouble for talking, or for reading some book or other that we weren’t meant to be reading, both of us so ahead of the rest of the class even then.