The Story of Us (27 page)

‘Emma.'

‘Richard,' I countered, wondering how in such a short period of time we had managed to travel so far apart that even hellos or goodbyes were now beyond us.

I gratefully accepted Caroline's offer of a shower, and as I stood beneath the hot jets, soaping off the mud from the cemetery, I wished all the stains of the day could be so easily washed away. Richard's comment that Caroline felt that she had ‘killed Amy' had left me shocked and stricken with the kind of guilt that seeps deep into your bones, and runs through the marrow like a raging cancer. I'd had no idea that Caroline felt that way. None. I hadn't a clue that she was carrying the crushing weight of responsibility for our friend's death on her fragile shoulders.
Perhaps, if you hadn't so callously turned your back on her you would have known that
, a censorious voice intoned in my mind. I dunked my head back beneath the stinging jets as though to drown it out.

Caroline had left out a soft fluffy jumper and some leggings for me to borrow, and by the time I dressed and went downstairs, my own muddied clothes were already tumbling somersaults in the frothy suds within her washing machine. I gave a small sigh of relief. It was good to know the domestic goddess was back.

She was waiting for me in the lounge, curled up on the settee with her legs tucked beneath her. I collapsed on to the deep plush cushion beside her, and we turned to each other with almost identical looks of apology.

‘I'm so sorry—'

‘I'm so sorry—'

We broke off and looked at each other, bright blue and emerald green eyes both brimming with unshed tears. There was a long moment when neither of us spoke or moved. Then I made a sound which was halfway between a laugh and a sob, as we fell into each other's outstretched arms in an avalanche of apologies and relief. There were garbled half sentences, interrupted by unintelligible denials, and a great many tears, some from happiness, but most were because something precious, which so easily could have been lost, had just been retrieved.

Her phone rang a short while later and I knew it was Nick by the curve of her smile as she picked up the receiver. I wandered into the kitchen to give her some privacy, but I could still hear some of her end of the conversation.

‘… I got a little upset today…'

I gave a small snort at her glaring understatement. She ought to know me well enough by now to realise that if she didn't tell him herself, I was going to relay everything that had happened the moment he got back from his conference. The worrying incident in the cemetery had shown all too clearly that Caroline was still suffering with injuries from our accident. She just had the type of wounds that needed more than sutures and antibiotics.

We ordered pizzas from a local takeaway (very un-Caroline) and surprisingly managed to find enough of our lost appetites to almost finish the large cheesy feast (very un-both of us).

‘So, Miss McAdam,' I began, when the cartons had been disposed of, and we had returned to the cosily lit lounge. ‘Richard said something very disturbing earlier on—'

‘Are you two finally speaking again?' she said with undisguised delight.

‘No. No we're not. Not really,' I replied, determined not to let her divert me from what I wanted to say. How was I going to put this? I shook my head. There was
no easy way.

‘Caroline, you
did not
kill Amy.'

Caroline gasped. ‘Wow, the diplomatic corps are crying out for people like you, you know.'

‘I'm being deadly serious here, Caroline. Amy's death wasn't down to you. Not at all.'

‘I was driving the car,' she stated baldly.

‘And it was
my
hen night,' I countered. ‘Does that make it my fault too?'

‘Of course not,' she refuted.

I picked up her hand and held it tightly within my own. ‘She had just taken off her seat belt. And you did everything you could to avoid the accident,' I told her, recalling that her memories of the final moments before the impact were hazy. ‘And afterwards, if it hadn't been for you bravely climbing out of the wreck and finding Amy on the road, well Jack would never have known we were there, and wouldn't have stopped and well… everything would have been different.' In more ways than I could even begin to count.

I could see a familiar furrow crease her brow. It was the one she used to wear when faced with an impossibly hard problem which refused to be solved. I pressed home my point. ‘Jack might have been the one who pulled me from the wreckage, but
you
saved me every bit as much as he did, Caroline. You have to believe that. I owe you my life.'

It had been a good decision to stay the night, I decided, as we prepared for bed some hours later. I suspected that half the reason for Caroline's mini-breakdown at the cemetery had been due to a long sleepless night without Nick. She had stopped taking the sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed, but so far had adamantly refused to listen to his advice to attend bereavement counselling. I'd actually found several screwed up leaflets for support groups stuffed into a kitchen drawer when I'd been looking for takeaway menus.

‘There's no shame in needing help,' I said, as I unwrapped a brand new toothbrush Caroline kept for unexpected guests (incidentally, who
does
that?).

Caroline was cleaning her own teeth in the adjacent sink, and I had to wait until she'd expelled a foaming mouthful before she bargained. ‘Maybe I'll go, if you will. ‘Have you considered counselling?
Relationship
not bereavement. For you and Richard.'

I patted my lips on the thick fluffy guest towel and shook my head.

‘That's for people who have a problem that can be fixed in their relationship. This isn't fixable. It's irreparably broken.'

‘It doesn't have to be,' she continued, stepping cautiously through the minefield of my shattered engagement. ‘I know you really don't want to hear this, but Nick says he's never seen Richard like this before. It's way worse than when you guys broke up last time.' I bit my lip, but didn't reply. ‘He's
really
sorry, Emma. He knows he made a dreadful mistake.'

‘Good. I'm glad he appreciates that. It saves me having to keep pointing it out to him, and by the way, I thought you guys were on
my
side.' This is what we've come down to, I thought sadly: who gets custody of the shared friends.

‘We're not on anyone's side. We're Switzerland.' I glowered at her reflection in the mirror. ‘Okay,
I'm
on your side. But Nick's Switzerland. All right? It's not like Richard has anyone else to talk to.

‘You're going to get past this, aren't you?' she continued desperately, switching off the bathroom light and padding ahead of me into her bedroom. ‘People do. They find it in their hearts to forgive and then they move on.'

I ran my comb through my hair before climbing into Nick's side of the bed. There were two perfectly good spare rooms in the house, but for some reason neither Caroline nor I had considered I would sleep anywhere else except in her room. She climbed into the other side of the bed and switched off the light. Perhaps she didn't want me to see her face when she asked her final question. ‘The reason why you don't want to get back with Richard, that wouldn't have anything at all to do with Jack Monroe, would it?'

The question hovered in the darkened room between us. ‘Goodnight, Caroline,' I said firmly.

I lay awake for quite a while after the gentle pattern of Caroline's breathing told me she had already fallen asleep. It took me longer to drop off, and it wasn't really surprising that memories of countless sleepovers from our past were keeping me awake. Except there would have been one other person in the room, occupying a narrow foldaway bed pushed as close as possible to Caroline's divan. The memories were so vivid that I almost expected Caroline's mother to come through the door at any minute, telling us with exasperation, ‘For the last time, girls, go to sleep.'
My eyes grew heavy and I turned on to my side, curling my legs up in tight foetal curl.

‘G'night, Caroline,' I murmured sleepily into the silent room. ‘G'night, Amy.'

I saw it as soon as I looked out the window the following morning. It looked, I thought, a little shinier than the last time I'd seen it, as though it might possibly have been through a car wash.

‘Your car,' said Caroline in bewilderment, staring through the front windows at the older and shabbier vehicle parked neatly beside her own, as yet unused, model. ‘How did it get here?'

I'd set the alarm on my phone extra early, to give me enough time to call a cab, retrieve my abandoned car from the cemetery and
still
get to work well before the shop opened. At the very least I owed Monique an early start and an explanation.

‘Ohh,' Caroline answered her own question. ‘Richard. He's got a spare key, has he?'

He did. It was one of many things I'd been meaning to retrieve from his flat. There were also several items of clothing hanging at the far end of his wardrobe, a shelf of toiletries in his bathroom and quite a few books and DVDs slotted among his throughout the flat.

‘Well, that was thoughtful of him,' Caroline put forward, popping two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘Wasn't it?'

I gave her a watery smile but didn't reply as I savagely buttered and mutilated a slice of toast. I think that said it all.

As much as I didn't want to, I had to acknowledge the return of my car. In the end I took the coward's way out and did it by text.
Thank you for retrieving my car.
I hesitated, wondering what to add. I flexed my fingers over the screen, before allowing them to type in a quick flurry.
Can you please drop my spare key into the shop next time you are passing?
I hit Send before I could change either the message or my mind.

‘There,' I said with a smile, leaning back in my seat to survey my handiwork. ‘What do you think?' My mother extended both her hands, carefully considering the deep pink varnish I had just applied to her nails.

She looked up at me and smiled. ‘They're beautiful, Emma, so pretty. Thank you.'

I began gathering up the tools from our home manicure, screwing lids on to various creams and lotions and slipping bottles back into a vanity case. My mum positioned her hand so that the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the window could showcase the neatly shaped and polished nails. ‘Such a pretty colour, it's exactly the same shade as Magenta Sunset from the Fisher colour chart that we order from at school.'

I raised my eyes and looked at her with a sad smile. How cruel was Fate when it decided that she should be able to recall the brand name of practically every colour on a chart she hadn't set eyes on in years, but couldn't remember a thousand lost memories of her life as a wife and mother.

We both really enjoyed the hour or so we spent on her weekly manicure, but probably for vastly different reasons. Over the months, as I filed and shaped and painted, I never once forgot the memory of what had prompted me to introduce this new ritual into our lives. Richard and I had gone to visit a care home which someone had recommended as having excellent facilities for Alzheimer's patients. Of course my dad had categorically refused to accompany us, which in hindsight had been no bad thing. Not that there was anything particularly terrible about the home; the building was modern, the facilities were more than satisfactory and the staff seemed friendly and attentive enough.

But as we toured the building, past the bedrooms which though filled with photos, cushions and throws still looked like they belonged in a hospital, a feeling of immense sadness started to wash over me. We walked down a long corridor passing rooms occupied by vacant-faced elderly residents, often sitting in the dark, staring distantly at… at nothing. This wasn't the place for my mum, not now, not ever. This wasn't where my warm-hearted parent with the quick and easy smile and the irrepressible sense of humour belonged. The creative woman with the keen eye and artistic flair had no business being here. She wouldn't fit in at all.

We came to the end of the corridor and the manager, who had been showing us around, reached into his pocket and extracted a key to unlock a pair of wide double doors.

‘And this day room is kept specifically for our dementia patients. We have to keep it locked as some of them have a tendency to go walkabout.'

The door swung open and I felt my heart sink as I realised I was wrong. Mum would fit right in. The aroma of incontinence was hard to ignore, but that wasn't the reason why I didn't want to cross the threshold into the room. Suddenly my hand was gripped and squeezed firmly, and I turned to see Richard looking at me with concern. He shook his head gently and brought his face closer to mine.

‘This isn't the place for her. Don't get upset.'

I had nodded back at him, my throat too tight for words, but I truly don't think I had ever loved him more than I did at that moment, just because he understood everything I was feeling without me having to say a single word.

Of course we couldn't just abandon the tour; that would have been rude. We had to at least make it look as though we were seriously considering the respite care package we had come to view. There were several residents within the day room, most of whom looked further down the road to dementia than Mum was currently positioned. But looking around at their lost and empty faces was a horrible preview that I knew was going to stay with me for a long time to come.

There were boxes of jigsaw puzzles piled upon a table, which no one was attempting, shelves full of books with no revealing gaps to indicate any had been taken down, and the baby grand piano positioned in a bay by the window had a faint layer of dust upon it. The room, like the people in it, seemed to have lost its purpose. I could hardly hear the manager's words over the noise of a wide-screen television with the volume blasting out so loudly I was surprised no one's hearing aid had blown a fuse.