Page 112 of Here One Moment

But the longer it went on, the more impossible it seemed. Leo told himself that uncomfortable emotional conversations are bad enough with your romantic partner, there’s no need to suffer through them with your friends, life is too short, it shouldn’t be necessary, et cetera, et cetera. Leo told himself it was for the best. If Rod wanted to waste his life with that woman, then so be it, but he couldn’t be around her.

They haven’t spoken since. Leo heard through the grapevine that Rod eventually broke up with his cruel, toxic girlfriend (Leo should have just waited it out), found his personality again, moved back to Victoria, and married someone else, apparently not a wicked witch. He had three children. He got out of engineering and ended up working for a global travel company. Leo hasn’t heard anything else for years now. The grapevine no longer exists.

He has sometimes wondered if the reason he doesn’t have many friends (“any friends,” says Neve, which is rude and not true—he has friends, it’s just that everyone is very busy) is because of his shame over what happened with Rod. Sometimes it still shocks him. He can’t believe he wasn’t best man at Rod’s wedding. He can’t believe they don’t know each other’s children.

If Rod was told he was going to die, would he call Leo? Leo is pretty sure he would. And Leo would be devastated. For Rod, and for himself, and for the time they’d wasted.

Or maybe Rod barely remembers him. He might say, “Who did you say you were?” People change. You can’t go backward, only forward. They might have nothing to say to each other like those stilted, awkward conversations at school reunions where everyone is thinking, No, but I’m different now.

He unpeels the Post-it note from the computer, crumples it into a tiny ball in his hand. Neve should not be interfering in his life, calling his mother like that. But then he is flattening it out on his desk, and he’s punching in the numbers on his phone, and he doesn’t remember agreeing to do this, but apparently he is, he’s running off a cliff without checking the depth of the water.

The phone is answered before he has time to change his mind.

“Hello, this is Rod.”

A bit brusque, a bit deeper than Leo remembers, but essentially still Rod: just the tiniest suggestion of his dad’s Dutch accent. It’s unbelievable. Rod still exists. All this time Rod has always been available on the other end of a phone. As easy as this, and yet it’s like Leo has done something metaphysically impossible.

Leo says, “Hi, Rod. This is…I just thought…well. It’s Leo.”

There is a long pause. A very long pause.

“Leo Vodnik.”

This time Rod laughs. “I know who you are, Leopold.”

His laugh catapults Leo back through time. He can smell Rod’s chicken curry, he can taste the Carlton Draft beer they used to drink, and even the way he is sitting, loose and slouchy, tipped back in his chair, reminds him of the Leo he used to be, when Rod was his friend. He rests his feet up on his desk.

“Long time no see,” says Rod. “All good?”

“Yeah,” says Leo. “All good. What about you? Been up to much?” Because he sees how they’re playing this, the comedic bit they’re about to perform. They’re going to pretend nothing has happened, no time has passed.

But then Rod says, in a different, urgent tone, the tone of an older man who has learned that bad things can and do happen, “Please tell me you’re not dying, Leopold.”

“No,” says Leo. He puts his feet back on the floor before he falls and hurts his back—he’s always telling Oli not to sit like this. “I’m not dying. Well.” He sighs. He sees the lady on the plane, those pale blue eyes, the strangely familiar brooch. “According to a psychic I’m—”

He stops, because he suddenly remembers what the symbol on the lady’s brooch signifies. Only Rod Van Blair saying “Leopold,” a name no one else uses, could have excavated this obscure, specific memory from the crystallized layers of his consciousness.

He says, “It’s a long story.”

“Let’s hear it,” says Rod easily, as if they’re sitting on the living room floor in their shabby terrace, a small bag of weed and a family-sized pizza box on the floor next to them.

Everything has changed and nothing has changed at all. Leo is filled with equal parts terrible regret for the time they have lost and sweet relief for the time they will hopefully have again.

He presses his phone hard against his ear. “It’s so good to hear your voice, mate.”

There is another pause, long enough for Leo to wonder if they’ve been cut off, and then Rod says, and he sounds a little congested, “Likewise.”

Chapter 93

It’s a strange experience to be married to someone who dislikes you but loves your body.

I do not recommend it.

It took me a long time to understand this. I don’t know if David ever understood it about himself. It probably wasn’t good for him either. Perhaps he tried to resist his feelings. Perhaps he woke each morning and told himself, I will not find her annoying, just as I woke each morning and thought, I will not be annoying.

I think this kind of relationship is only possible when you are young enough to fully inhabit your body. When you are older there is more separation between yourself and your physicality. Your body lets you down, it creaks and cracks and aches, it often feels unfamiliar, but back then my body was me, and his body was him, and if our bodies loved each other, that was enough.

Although, of course, it wasn’t.

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