Page 42 of The Moment I Met You
He pulls away from me. He retrieves his crutches and his bag, and hobbles away towards the automatic doors.
I struggle to see him through the blurred vision of my tears. I watch him get into the cab. I see him look back, just once. I see the car pull away, and he is gone.
It seems like minutes and a lifetime since the moment we met. And now that moment has passed.
I stand alone in the lobby, and bury my face in the crumpled yellowI Heart TequilaT-shirt that is all I have left of him.
II
Nine years later,
Cornwall, UK
Chapter 17
Next year, it will be a whole decade since the earthquake in Santa Maria de Alto. A whole decade of life, of sleeping and rising, of sunsets and sunrises. A whole decade as the new us.
A whole decade since Harry was injured, and I met Alex, and the world fell on top of us all.
We are still together, Harry and I. We have built a life together, the two of us; a good life. We’ve both changed – him more than me, I feel – and we’ve both moved on. On the surface at least.
And now, we are here, in our quiet corner of England, living a quiet life, surrounded by natural beauty and the sound of the sea.
I like the quiet, and would be happy to ignore the ten-years-on milestone that is starting to loom ahead of us. I had my fill of publicity back when it all happened, and in the year that followed. Our wedding was a media event, and Harry has certainly never shied away from the spotlight if he thought it could help us – but I would prefer to stay under the radar, safe in a cloak of invisibility. Pretend it’s not happening and hope nobody else does.
It’s a vain hope, I know, and I’ve already been contacted by a woman called Em Hoyle, who is making a documentary about the Santa Maria earthquake. She is extremely tenacious and is doing her very best to persuade me to take part.
I have no desire to time-travel back to that particular place or that particular time. I have no urge to dig through the rubble of my memories, or poke the ashes of hindsight, or send out a search party to find the fragments of myself that I left behind. I am not up for playing a giant game of ‘what if’.
When her first email landed, two weeks ago, I read it, deleted it, and tried to forget about it. It was poking away at me a little, like a tiny pebble trapped in my shoe, because I knew that it would happen again – that in the run-up to that tenth anniversary, we’d become cool and interesting again.
People reading their morning paper or flicking through their newsfeeds or leafing through magazines at the hair salon will go, ‘Ooh, yes, I remember that … wonder what happened to them?’
Maybe one of the papers will go for a ‘where are they now?’ angle, hoping a few of us are dead so they can make it extra dramatic. Nothing sells quite like a ‘curse ofFILL IN RANDOM EVENT’ story, does it – it’s been selling since Tutankhamun’s tomb was raided, through the cast ofPoltergeist, and on intoStrictly Come Dancing.
So, while it was easy to delete that first email from Em, I knew that probably wouldn’t be the end of it – no matter how hard I wanted it to be.
Part of me even wondered if it wouldn’t be better to have some control over it – play along, and at least get the ‘where are they now?’ photos done when I’ve had a curly blow-dry and I’m in full make-up. The alternative is being captured unawares in my True Form: snapped leaving the off-licence clutching a bottle of wine, wearing a tracksuit and looking like I’m on my way to a horror film convention.
Em was contacting me well ahead of the pack, because she was making a TV programme – a serious one, she assured me – and that takes time.
She explained that she’d already started with the preliminaries, had spent almost a month in Mexico and the US tracking people down, and that she was now back in Europe taking it further.
Her project, she explained, wasn’t a smash and grab, the media equivalent of a quick ram raid into our lives – it was a ninety-minute documentary looking at what happened, what was learned, and, most terrifyingly of all, the impact it had on everyone involved. It would be done respectfully, without sensationalising it. It would betasteful.
She told me some of this in that first email. She told me the rest of it in the next four emails. I deleted all of them without replying, but that didn’t seem to put her off at all. The fifth email arrived this morning – I saw it on my phone while I was pushing a trolley around Sainsburys. I had wine in the trolley, among other things, and was indeed dressed in baggy tracksuit bottoms and looking like someone on their way to a horror film convention. Or maybe just something from a horror film.
Even seeing the email there on the screen was enough to make me glance around nervously, in case any rogue documentary makers were lurking surreptitiously in the toilet-roll aisle, hiding behind a mountain of Andrex.
For some reason, I haven’t deleted this one – I just left it there, like the jagged bit of a broken nail you forget to trim. The one that tears a hole in your tights when you’re already late for work. I haven’t deleted it because the subject title isSurvivor interviews – video. Somehow it feels disrespectful to delete it without even having the courage to take a look.
By the time I get home, my interest has been piqued. Or maybe I’m just bored, who knows? There’s nothing quite like unloading shopping and tutting at the short date on the chicken breasts to make you realise your life may be lacking a certain sparkle.
I retreat to my office – a glorified broom cupboard – and google her. It takes only a few seconds to realise she is one of those annoyingly accomplished young people who make my own generation feel like unambitious wage slaves.
Em Hoyle, it turns out, is somewhere in her mid-twenties – maybe the same age I was that night in Mexico, but a lot more focused. She makes documentaries that would probably be described as ‘raw’ or ‘gritty’, on subjects as diverse as sex trafficking in the suburbs and air pollution on school playgrounds.
On her pictures, although she is often shielded by a camera, she has hair so short it might be shaved, and dresses like someone from the cast ofTerminator. She has a long list of important-sounding awards to her name, and is a scarily impressive specimen of womanhood.
