Page 21 of Pictures of Him

‘Have you? But why?’

‘Why do you think? Because you’re beautiful and I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.’

‘I’m not beautiful,’ I said, and I remember how you laughed.

When I looked in the mirror I always noticed the pallor of my skin against the darkness of my hair. I thought I looked washed out, insipid, ghostly. You led me over to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room.

‘Can’t you see how lovely you are?’

You stood behind me, lifted up my hair and kissed the back of my neck, and the sensation of your mouth on my skin was almost more than I could bear. You drew your fingers slowly across the features of my face, the length of my nose, the breadth of my lips. We locked eyes in the mirror as you unbuttoned the top button of my shirt, then another and another, until it swung open and I was standing there in my pale blue bra. We didn’t speak, not one word, just the blood rushing in my ears as you removed every piece of my clothing, barely even touching me, until I stood there entirely naked. I can recall exactly the sharp shock of eroticism, pressing my bare flesh against fully clothed you, your hands reaching up to touch my breasts, your mouth warm against my neck. My first taste of sexual adventure and I was hooked.

I am blinded by longing, breathless with it. Sam flashes into my mind, Sam and then Julia, and I know this will be my excuse.

We are halfway around the lake now on the opposite side to the café, and as we approach it, an old man stands up and vacates his bench. I take your hand and pull you towards it, and just that brief touch of flesh on flesh is a current running through my bones. We sit down and look at each other. This is it. My chance to overturn fifteen years of regret.

‘I’ve thought of you every single day since I left,’ I say.

Four months before: Lucian

I am hung-over (parental funerals will do that), depressed (ditto), and from the look on Catherine’s face – horror-struck, no other word for it – it seems the whole thing has been a massive set-up. Why am I putting myself through this when it’s clear that her feelings towards me haven’t changed, not one bit, in the last fifteen years. Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.

She looks overwhelmingly beautiful and a little sad, just as I remember her. I have stared at her drawing so many times, that sketch I made more familiar to me than anything else I have ever drawn, and now here she is, standing before me in the flesh. Beautiful. Sad. Frightened. She looks like she wants to run away.

‘Is it really so bad seeing me again?’ I ask, and she smiles suddenly and says, ‘The opposite of bad,’ and call me a bloody fool, but I just want this moment to go on for a little longer.

‘Coffee?’ I say, and she follows me into the bland white space of the Serpentine Café, and now all I really want is to look at her. Over the years I’ve forgotten how dark her hair is, that deep black-brown, the colour of earth afterrain; and her eyes wider and a little rounder I see now than I made them in the sketch but essentially the truly jaw-dropping feature of her lovely face. I see her surreptitiously watching me and it makes me smile, to think of us both here transfixed by the ghosts of our past. How could it be any other way? I am thinking of a night when we lay together on my bed listening to the Rolling Stones,Black and Blue, one of my favourite records. When ‘Fool to Cry’ came on, I walked over to the window and lit a cigarette, blowing plumes of smoke into the damp night air. The song always reminded me of my father and his desperate end, and though I said nothing, Catherine knew I was thinking of him.

‘You still miss him, don’t you?’ she asked.

The astuteness of her question and the gentleness of her voice overwhelmed me, a dangerous sea of sorrow rising in my chest. I didn’t turn round to look at her when I told her about the way he’d died, a shotgun wound to the head, not a heart attack as I’d thought at the time. Finally I spoke the words I had been too ashamed to say.

‘I feel somehow responsible that I wasn’t able to make his life worth living.’

‘You were ten. It wasn’t your fault, you can’t think that. It had nothing to do with you.’

‘We were a team of two, my father and I, him and me against the world, or at least against my mother and my sisters and their little club for three. But he left me anyway.’

Catherine didn’t say anything, not then; she just walked over to the window, wrapping her arms around me from behind, face pressed into the space beneath my shoulder blades, waiting for me to turn. But later, just as we wereabout to fall asleep, I remember her voice in the darkness.

‘I won’t ever leave you,’ she said.

But a few weeks later, that’s exactly what she did.

The question that is tattooed eternally beneath my skin rises up and out of me before I’m able to stop it.

‘Will you tell me what happened? Tell me why you left?’

It’s obvious that I am going to ask this question, that even after all this time I still need to know what went wrong. The way she left me, just a note scrawled on my sketchpad, with no explanation –I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do this. I can’t see you any more– her stark refusal to ever see or speak to me again, drove me mad, I think. And I have lived in the shadow of that madness ever since. But this Catherine, the one who claims to be different, this mother of an almost teenage boy, stands up so violently that her chair tips over and I see a real horror flash across her face.

‘I can’t talk about it,’ she says, and I think, my God, she’s actually going to run out on me again. She is hiding something, I realise it instantly, and I wonder why it has taken me all these years to understand. But what? What could possibly be so bad she wasn’t able to tell me at the time; what was it that made her refuse to ever see me again? I’ve tormented myself with this question over the years, and now, looking at her stricken face, listening to her tortured voice, I realise that she has never told me the truth. But I can’t push her any further; if I do, she’ll run and that’s the last thing I want.

We walk all the way round to the other side of the Serpentine without saying a word, while roller-bladers glide in between us and joggers pass and toddlers crouchbeside the water to drop their torn scraps of bread. We sit down on an empty bench and she looks at me and says, ‘I’ve thought of you every single day since I left,’ and I understand how hard it is for her to say those words, her version of an apology. I understand that what she is really saying is please, can we start again? So I’ll spend a little longer here, absorbing her loveliness, this girl who once shattered my heart.

The conversation becomes easier. I ask about her children and she shows me photographs on her phone. The little girl, Daisy, a miniature version of her mother except for her wild curly hair, is dangling upside down from the branch of a tree, an inverted gap-toothed smile.

‘She looks funny and brave,’ I say.

‘She is brave. Worryingly so sometimes. A risk-taker. The opposite of me.’

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