“The first person?”
I sigh and look up at the clouds. I think it might start raining soon. Is that a sign? Michael clearly thinks this is a bad idea anyway, so I might as well tell him the whole story, everything I’ve decided on. And I have decided.
“After I’ve seen Libby, I’m going to see Tom. And Max. There’s just… there are things I need to say, to just… get out.”
Another pause on the line.
I notice I’ve stopped moving again. I shuffle in circles on the towpath, looking at my feet, risking the odd glance up ahead.
That’s it. That’s the exhibition. As the people ahead of me shift, I catch sight of the paintings and my stomach flips.
“Okay,” Michael says, clearly unconvinced, “well, if that’s what you need to do—”
“I don’t know,” I say, suddenly confused again. “I don’t know what I need to do I just… I need to do something.”
“Okay,” he says, more encouragingly, “okay, then I hope it goes well, I guess. I hope you get whatever you need from this.”
I rub my eyes. I shouldn’t have answered my phone. I’ve always been terrible at making decisions, and now this feels like a bad idea, even though last night, lying in bed unable to sleep again, I was sure it was the right one.
I put my phone in my back pocket and stare out at the water, searching for confirmation that I’m doing the right thing. I try to recall my conversation with Michael last week, the moment I realised something had to change.
We’d been driving in my van, the scene for many of our deeper and more meaningful conversations. Or, more accurately, we’d been stuck going nowhere in my van after hitting a traffic jam on the way back from IKEA, the new wardrobe Michael wanted laid out in the back. It’s not that we can’t hold a meaningful conversation face-to-face, but stuck in a small space without distractions, our eyes diverted by the road ahead, thoughts and feelings flow more freely, and this was one of those times. Plus, it was raining. I always say too much when it’s raining.
“What do you think’s brought it back on?” Michael asked, sounding concerned. “I mean, it’s been, what, nearly ten years, since you’ve had those kinds of symptoms?”
I shrugged. “Stress maybe. I don’t know. I think it might be linked to Josh, I feel like it started in the build-up to his birthday, months ago, this kind of tightness in my chest. I know that makes no sense, it’s just—”
“Josh?”
“Turning fifteen. Just… turning that age.”
I saw him nodding slowly out of the corner of my eye and I knew he understood.
“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully, “I know. It brings a lot back, doesn’t it? Watching him.”
I looked down on the blue Corsa beside us also trying to exit from the roundabout. The young couple were arguing about something; her gesticulating wildly at the wheel, him shaking his head despairingly. Relationships. Why bother?
“Do you ever think about it?” I asked quietly.
Michael sighed heavily. “Of course I do.”
I watched raindrops gathering on the windscreen like an invading army hastily claiming territory, the wipers intermittently brushing them away before they attacked again.
“I think about it all the time at the moment,” I admitted. “More than ever. Me, you, Tom, Max, Libby… everything that happened. Something will happen in the day – a feeling, a word, a sound – and it just triggers all these memories. Memories I didn’t even know I had. But they’re so vivid. And it’s hard, you know. It’s really hard.”
I traced my finger along the scar under my right thumb. I felt Michael watching me and I knew, without even turning towards him, the expression upon his face: brow knotted in concern, eyes full of a desire to help. This is why I kept things from him, hid them away until I reached bursting point. Because he cared so much. And I wasn’t sure he had the resources to care like that.
Michael stretched his legs out, placed his trainers up on the dashboard.
“The past weighs heavily on you, doesn’t it?”
I turned away and gazed blindly through the window, rubbed at my jaw, chewed on my thumbnail, my throat constricting with the accuracy of his statement. I had to get a grip on things.
“I mean, it gets to me too at times, of course it does, but you… it’s like it overshadows you. It always has done.”
I didn’t answer. I never realised he understood that about me. How strange to have never known he saw right through me when I felt like I’d been hiding it all. All that effort for nothing.
“We’ve never talked about it much, have we?”
I shook my head, swallowed hard, suddenly wishing I hadn’t brought this up.
“Why is that?” he mused.
Inappropriately, I smiled, even laughed a little. It wasn’t funny in the slightest, but it’s often what I do when I’m angry, when I’m hurt, when I want to scream something out loud but I know that I can’t because I don’t want anyone else to be angry, to be hurt. The truth was I’d wanted to talk to him so many times, but how could I?
“None of us talked about it,” I said, hearing my own voice tinged with resentment.
He heard it too and turned sharply towards me.
“I tried to talk to you about it. At the time. And you shut me down time and again—”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember anybody wanting to talk about it.”
“Really?” he said, suddenly taking his feet off the dashboard and twisting towards me in his seat, incredulous. “Because I remember very clearly trying to talk about it on several occasions and you literally telling me I do not want to talk about it. Believe me, I wanted to. I tried.”
“It wasn’t exactly an easy thing to talk about, was it?” I said, feeling defensive. “I didn’t
