Page 61 of Pictures of Him

‘You will be able to come, Catherine, won’t you?’ Ling says, and I say, ‘Of course I will.’

‘Does that mean we have a chance?’ you ask, low-voiced. And I tell you, ‘I don’t see how we can be apart again,’ which is the truth.

News of Ling and Harry’s wedding starts to spread along the table and you jump up, demanding more champagne from a passing waitress. There are hugs, kisses, congratulations all round, and by the time I’m halfway down this glass, I realise I’m too drunk.

I don’t like it. I don’t like the slow erosion of clarity, a melting in my brain, a fluidity in my body, sensations that can trigger the harsh adrenalin of recall. Memories I don’t want clamouring for recognition. When I want to forget – need to forget – I can do that, though it takes practice, a sort of mindfulness where I focus on the smallest details around me.

You’re talking to Liv and you don’t notice me getting up from the table.

‘Back in a minute,’ I tell Ling, and I step outside the tent, forcing myself to register the exact colour of the night as the last of the light disappears – midnight blue, I’d call it, though you would know the correct shade. The strip of carpet leading from the garden into the marquee is an ironic red, flashbulb-ready, another of Andrew’s jokes. And it seems obvious, predestined, that at exactly this moment, when I stand inhaling the night air, Jack returns to the tent alone, so that it is just him and me face to face, no Celia, no Liv, no Harry or Ling or you to take the edge off the intensity of this meeting.

‘Catherine.’

He chucks a glowing cigarette onto the red carpet, crushes it with his foot. His beautiful dark grey suit is spookily similar to the one you’re wearing, you his perennial benchmark. Still copying you, I think, still impersonating you all these years later. Perhaps I should pity him the way I pitied him once before, this boy who would go to any lengths to get your attention, to be just like you. But my head is full of the last time we were together, me standing in the kitchen doorway, Jack by the kettle, the slow and steady collapsing of my world. The shame I always feel is there, but beneath it anger too. Jack made sure I could never see you again.

I think, like his father, he has a fatal tendency to overreact.

Why couldn’t Jack have been the one to leave; why did it have to be me? Why did he let me get so drunk? Why didn’t he have the sense to stop, to know that the two of us together was something that would break you?

‘You haven’t told him, have you?’ Jack says, eventually.

His voice is softer than usual; he’s hard to read. I shake my head.

‘If you had, I’d know by now. If you had, he’d probably kill me.’ He laughs. ‘Well, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.’

It’s hard for me to look at Jack without the memories rushing back in. They’re unshaped, half formed, the way drunken memories often are, but his body is clear, those sharp blue eyes in the darkness, teeth that shone, his arms taut as he held himself above me. When you have a memory you wish to avoid, it’s easy to float away from it, easy to disconnect. No, no, you say, I’m not dealing with this. I did it when my mother died. So my father tells me.

‘Catherine?’

I do hear Jack’s voice, I do understand that he’s trying to talk to me. But I have no words. Not for him. And after a while, perhaps a minute, perhaps a little longer, I watch as he walks away.

Fifteen years earlier

My mother picked me up from the station and I cried all the way home, staring ahead through the windscreen, allowing myself now to sob like a child.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘You were so happy. He seemed so lovely. What can have gone wrong?’

My father placed a mug of hot chocolate in front of me, so sweet that gesture. In the good old days it would have sorted everything out. Not now, though. Not now I was a two-timing slut. On the two-hour journey from Bristol I had learned the shape of self-hatred, its vocabulary, its dark internal burn.

‘Please tell us what’s happened,’ my father said.

‘What’s happened is that we’ve broken up and I hate myself. That’s it, that’s all there is to say.’

They knew me so well, my parents, they knew when to leave me alone. My mother slid her hands across the kitchen table and took hold of mine.

‘We love you. We think you’re wonderful. Weknowyou’re wonderful.’

You rang, of course. You spoke to my mother twice, myfather once. On the last phone call my father asked you, politely, to leave me alone.

Then there was Liv, with her daily bulletins, phone calls that always ended the same way.

‘Please talk to him, Catherine. It’s the least you can do. He’s going out of his mind.’

But I knew I couldn’t talk to you, I couldn’t hear your voice, the sound of your breathing on the other end of the phone. The moment I did, I knew I’d lose my resolve.

All I had to do was think of Jack’s words.

I think it might push him over the edge.

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