Page 35 of The Man Who Didn't Call
Then he stepped round and kissed me. ‘Such a silly thing,’ he said. ‘But I knew you’d like it.’ His arms wrapped tight around me.
I kissed him back, harder. All I wanted to do was kiss him.
I wondered how I could possibly go back to LA when happiness of this sort was right here. Here, in the place I’d once called home.
Eventually we found ourselves in the leaves without any clothes on.
I had mulch in my hair, probably insects. But I felt only joy. Deep, radial branches of joy.
Chapter Seventeen
Dear Eddie,
I’ve thought long and hard about writing this letter. How can I possibly reach out – yet again – now you’ve made such a conspicuous show of being alive but unwilling to communicate? How can I be so desperate, so unwilling to heed your silence?
But last night I found myself thinking about the day we walked up to see that welly. What a silly, lovely thing it was to do; how we stared up at it and laughed. And I thought, I’m not ready to give up on him. On us. Not quite yet.
So this is it: my last-ditch attempt to find out what happened. To work out how I could have got it so wrong.
Do you remember our last night together, Eddie? Outside on the grass, before we hauled your enormous tent outside and then spent the next few hours trying to put it up? Do you remember that, before we both collapsed with exhaustion in the damned thing, I was meant to tell you my life story?
I’m going to start it now, from the beginning. Or at least the edited highlights. I figured that maybe it would remind you why you liked me. Because whatever else you might have managed to hide from me, the liking-me bit wasn’t made up. Of that much I’m certain.
So. I am Sarah Evelyn Harrington. Born Gloucester Royal at 4.13 p.m. on 18 February 1980. Mum taught maths at a grammar in Cheltenham, and Dad was a sound engineer. He did a lot of touring with bands, until he started to miss us too much. Afterthat he did all sorts of soundy things locally. He still does. Can’t stop himself.
They bought a wreck of a cottage in the valley below Frampton Mansell, about a year before I was born, and they’ve lived there ever since. It’s about fifteen minutes’ walk along the footpath from your barn. You probably know it. Dad and his friend reopened that old path the summer he and Mum moved in. Two men, two chainsaws, several beers.
Being in that valley with you made the place feel very different. Reminded me of a Me I’d forgotten. And as I said to you on our first morning, there is a good reason for that.
Tommy, my best friend, was born a couple of months after me to the ‘slightly fraught’ (Dad’s words) couple in the house at the end of our track. He and I became best friends and we played every day until that strange, sad moment in adolescence where playing just isn’t the thing anymore. But until then, we forded streams, stuffed ourselves on blackberries and made tunnels through blankets of cow parsley.
When I was five, Mum had another baby – Hannah – and after a few years Hannah joined in our adventures. She was utterly fearless, my sister – far braver than Tommy and me, in spite of being several years our junior. Her best friend, a little girl called Alex, was quite literally in awe of her.
It’s only now, as an adult, that I realize quite how much I loved my sister. How I was in awe of her, too.
Tommy spent a lot of time at our house because his mum was – as he put it – ‘crazy’. I’m not sure, in hindsight, that was fair, although she was certainly preoccupied on a very deep level with very surface things. She moved their family to LA when I was fifteen and I was heartbroken. Without Tommy I had no idea who I was anymore. Who were my friends? What group did I belong to? I knew only that I had to latch on to someone fast, before I wheeled off the school social scene and became a confirmed loner.
So I latched on to two girls, Mandy and Claire, with whom I’dalways been friendly – if not exactly friends – only now it was more intense. Intense and exposing. Girls can be so cruel when they’re young.
Two years later I was on the phone to Tommy at five in the morning, begging him to let me come and stay. But I’ll get to that later.
I’m going to leave it there. I don’t want to just vomit my entire life story all over you, because you may not want to hear it. And even if you do, I don’t want it to sound like I think I’m the only person on earth with a past.
I miss you, Eddie. I didn’t think it was possible to miss someone you’d known for only seven days, but I do. So much I can’t seem to think straight anymore.
Sarah
Chapter Eighteen
There he was: Reuben. Right there at a table in the BFI cafe, talking to his new girlfriend, whose face was just out of sight. The brown-husked remains of a coffee next to his hand, all about him the simmer of self-possession and new masculinity.
I remembered the shy, skinny boy I’d found quaking outside a Mexican restaurant all those years ago, his hair gelled and his neck sheathed in cheap aftershave. The crushed and trembling quality of his voice when he’d asked me out a few hours later. Now look at him! Broader, stronger, quite the Californian hero with his tapered fashion shorts, his sunglasses, his deliberately careless hair. I couldn’t help but smile.
‘Hello,’ I said, arriving at their table.
‘Oh!’ Reuben said, and for a second I saw the young man I married. The man I thought I’d be with forever, because a permanent life with him in that sunny, cheerful city was all I thought I’d ever need.
‘Hey! You must be Sarah.’ Kaia stood up.
