“Then why haven’t you?”
“When? When could I have done that?”
I could feel it now, spilling out, spilling over, leaking through the floodgates that I’d held so tightly shut.
“When would have been a good time to bring it up, Michael? When over the last few years would have been the right time for that? When you were sky-high and unable to take in a single word I was saying, when you were lying comatose on the bathroom floor—”
“Oh, come on—”
“No, you come on. Seriously. When exactly have you been in a place when you could have dealt with that?”
“I have dealt with it. I’ve spoken about it.”
“With who?”
“With Catherine,” he said, as if I’d asked a stupid question.
“Really?”
“Of course. What the hell d’you think? That I wouldn’t have discussed it?”
“I don’t know. I just… I didn’t realise… Yeah, I suppose you would’ve.”
I felt strangely jealous, excluded. It had never occurred to me that the details of that night – a night that felt so secretive, so personal – had been shared with an outsider.
“You’re the one who’s never spoken about it,” said Michael. “And you should. Because you need to move out from under the weight of it. I know it was a horrible, horrible thing, and you don’t witness something like that and come out the same person, but it’s like it shut you down or shut you off or something. I feel like it’s always one step forward and two steps back with you. You open up, then you shut down, you invite people in and then you push them away. You’re hard, Jay.”
“I’m hard?”
“Yeah, and I’m bloody hard too, in different ways, I know that, but I’ve been working on my shit for years. I just think it’s about time you started working on yours.”
I sighed, inched forwards in the traffic. I gazed ahead at the line of cars, the grey sky, the concrete industrial buildings lining the grimy North London road. He was right, I couldn’t go on like this. Too many regrets, too many thoughts going endlessly around in circles. Too much pushing people away, not wanting them to see to the heart of me, not wanting to risk it all again. Not wanting to have anything worth risking.
“I’m sorry if you’ve ever wanted to talk to me and haven’t felt able to,” Michael continued. “I understand why, and I wish things could have been different. But I promise you I’m strong enough to talk about it now. You’re right, I couldn’t have heard you before. But I can hear you now. So if you want to talk…”
The rain pattered down, and apart from the intermittent creak of the wipers, we sat in silence. Michael rested his head back and I chewed at my thumbnail until I tasted blood. I rubbed my eyes and sighed. He was right, I’d never tried to talk to him about it, not really. Talking about it had only ever been a notion. And maybe I did remember him trying to raise it, trying to explore what had happened and why and how. But when he wanted to talk about it, I wasn’t ready, and when I wanted to talk about it, he couldn’t. Somehow, we just missed each other.
“I’m sorry too,” I muttered.
A horn blasted behind us. I quickly put the van in gear and accelerated into the gap ahead of us, coming to a halt behind the black BMW with darkened windows that we’d been following forever. I suddenly wanted to tell him everything, to get every desperate, lonely thought out of my head in the hope they could be left there, on that wet, depressing stretch of road. But I didn’t know where to start.
“I think about Libby a lot,” was what came out.
“What, right now or…?”
“Yeah. And just… generally. But a lot right now.”
Michael waited for more, gave up, prompted me.
“Think what about her?”
I shook my head. “I really hate the way things were left. I always have done. And I know it was all a long time ago, but I’ve always really regretted the ways things went. It was just left a mess, and I wish there’d been a chance to tie it up. There are things I wish I’d said, and I just didn’t have the chance. I suppose as you get older you start to think about what you’ve done with your life, what you’d change. I don’t want to always have these regrets.”
Michael shrugged. “It was complicated, wasn’t it? What could you have said? And then she left—”
“Because of me.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.”
“Well, okay.”
“I imagine what it might be like if I could see her now, what I’d say.”
“Yeah? So what would you say?”
I didn’t even know how to start recounting all the imaginary conversations that had played out in my head over the years.
“I dunno, but I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to find her,” I confessed.
Michael was thoughtful for a long time. “Well, I guess she’d be a very different person now,” he said eventually.
I was tempted to make a joke about how long it had taken him to come up with that incredibly obvious statement, but I didn’t because I realised that actually I’d never really thought of her as being a different person. I knew she’d be older, that her life would be unrecognisable, but I’d never contemplated the idea that she would be fundamentally changed. But of course she would be. No one’s the same person at thirty-one as they were at fifteen. Life alters the core of you.
“You know what I heard Josh say the other night just before he headed out for his birthday?” I asked, the memory suddenly jumping into my head. “This friend of his, some girl, asked if his mum had called. And he said, ‘Fuck no, she probably doesn’t even remember it’s my birthday.’ How screwed up is that?”
“He’s not screwed up. Believe
