upon this; how typical of him to seize (unknowingly?) on one of my sorest points and tweak it until I was on the verge of losing my temper every time he mentioned it. By the way, I should have explained this before now, but Chris was my oldest friend, from way back in our days at primary school in Birmingham. I’d kept in touch with him pretty consistently ever since then, until five years ago, when Caroline, Lucy and I had gone on holiday with Chris and his family to Cahirciveen, in County Kerry. It had been a disastrous holiday – disastrous because of an accident that happened to his son, Joe, who had ended up with quite nasty injuries. A lot of blame was flung around in the wake of this accident, in various directions, a lot of things were said that shouldn’t have been said, and the upshot had been that Chris and his family had left early, and flown back to England. Since then, he hadn’t contacted me once. Presumably he was waiting for me to contact him, but I didn’t feel able to do that, because … well, now is probably not the time to explain. It all gets very complicated. As for why the ins and outs of my friendship with Chris should be of any interest to my father (‘How is he?’ he kept asking, ‘When did you last see him? Who did he get married to?’), it seemed that this would remain one of life’s unsolved mysteries.
I lay in bed a little while longer, thinking about that image of the three of us together in the woods. Then I realized where it came from: in the long, hot summer of 1976 (the summer of the drought, as it will always be remembered by people of my age) our two families had gone camping together in the woods near Coniston Water, up in the Lake District. I couldn’t remember much else about it, except that my father had taken a lot of photographs that week, and I still had them in an album somewhere. Yes, in the dreaded back bedroom, unless I was much mistaken.
I fetched the album and got back into bed with it, turning the bedside lamp on and propping myself up against the pillows. The album was bound in dark-blue imitation leather, and the prints inside had seen better days, their once vivid colours now badly faded. Also, I’d forgotten what a lousy photographer my father was. That’s to say, I’m sure his pictures were good, if you liked nature photography, or extreme close-ups of weird pieces of rock whose exposed textures happened to have caught his fancy, but if you wanted to be reminded of what your family holiday had been like, you were wasting your time looking at them. I flicked through the pages impatiently, wondering why on earth he had not seen fit to take a single picture of me or my mother. Or any other human being, for that matter. But I knew that there was at least one picture of Chris and Alison in here – a picture I had once known well, although I hadn’t looked at it for at least ten years – and when I eventually found it, on the very last page of the album, I realized that the images that had been coming to me in bed that morning had been strange hybrids: half- memory, half-dream. In this photograph, Chris and his sister were standing up to their knees in the water, on a grey, sunless afternoon. Their hair was wet from swimming and Alison in particular looked extremely cold. She was wearing that orange bikini, and her young, evenly tanned body was topped off by auburn hair cut into a boyish short-back-and-sides.
I yawned loudly, and let the photograph album drop on to the bedspread. When I did this, and the light from my bedside lamp caught the picture of Chris and Alison at a new angle, I noticed something odd: if you looked at it closely, you could see that the photograph had once been folded in half: there was a faint crease, running in a vertical line exactly down the middle. Why would that have been? I yawned again, turned away from the album, and reached out to turn off the lamp. It was no good trying to think straight while I was feeling like this. I could tell that I still needed lots more sleep. My last waking thought was not of my broken friendship with Chris Byrne, or my once-complicated feelings towards his sister, but of Poppy. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t have her number any more. And she had never even told me her second name.
I woke up again just before seven, and shortly afterwards, did something I’m rather ashamed of, involving my computer, and the internet. I wasn’t going to talk about it here but, well, I suppose the idea is that I tell you the whole story, warts and all, so I can’t very well leave it out.
How shall I explain this?
It’s to do with Caroline. It’s to do with Caroline and how much I still missed her.
The thing is that – besides email and the telephone – I did have another means of contacting Caroline: one which I only used very occasionally, though, because using it made me feel a bit cheap, and a bit dirty, and a bit angry with myself. Nevertheless, there were still times – times when I missed her really badly, and wanted more than a polite, quickly curtailed chat, or a couple of functional sentences about Lucy’s progress at school – when using this method seemed like my only option.
It began like this.
When we were married, and Lucy was, I suppose, about five or six, Caroline started using the internet a lot more than she had been. I think it happened when Lucy developed a nasty rash around the base of her neck one time and Caroline went online to see what she could find out about it. Sooner or later this led her to a site called Mumsnet, which was full of mothers discussing just this kind of problem, comparing experiences and offering solutions. Anyway, the rash came and went but clearly they were discussing a whole lot of other things on Mumsnet because soon Caroline was spending half of the day on there. After a while I seem to remember asking her something sarcastic like how many hours a day could you spend having online conversations about MMR injections and breast pumps, and she told me that actually she was contributing to threads about books and politics and music and economics and all sorts of other things, and she had made a lot of friends online already. ‘How can they be your friends?’ I asked, ‘if you’ve never met them?’ and she told me that this was a very old-fashioned thing to say, and that if I was going to come to terms with the twenty-first century I was going to have to keep up with ways in which the concept of friendship was evolving in the light of new technologies. I couldn’t think of an answer to that one, I have to admit.
Well, maybe Caroline had a point after all. That’s to say, looking back, I can understand why she needed to go online to find all these friends and have all these discussions. She certainly wasn’t finding them at home. She’d tried making friends with the other mothers at Lucy’s school, and had even tried, at one point, to get a local Writers’ Group started, but somehow none of this ever seemed to quite work out. Thinking about it, she was probably really lonely. I always hoped that she’d become best friends with Trevor’s wife, Trevor’s wife Janice, but I suppose you can’t force these things. It would have been good if we could have done things together as a foursome but Caroline was never especially keen. And I was no help, to be honest. I know perfectly well that I wasn’t in Caroline’s league, intellectually. I never read as many books as she did, for instance. She was always reading. Don’t get me wrong, though – I like books as much as the next man. When you’re on holiday, for instance, down by the swimming pool, baking yourself in the sun, there’s nothing I like better than putting my nose into a book. But with Caroline, it was more than that. Reading seemed to become her obsession. She would regularly get through two or three books a week. Novels, most of them. ‘Literary’ or ‘serious’ novels, as I believe they’re called. ‘Don’t they all start to seem the same after a while?’ I asked her once. ‘Don’t they all seem to blend into one?’ But she told me that I didn’t understand what I was talking about. ‘You’re the kind of person,’ she used to say, ‘who will never have his life changed by a book.’ ‘Why should a
(Bloody good book, actually, if you ask me. Didn’t change my life, though.)
I’m digressing so much, I suppose, in order to put off telling you the really shameful thing, which is this: after
