she was bored and off somewhere – Korea, Brazil, India – to do another job and learn another language from another exotic boyfriend. These were years in which I could forget her except as a wistfulness, the warm promise of a distant reunion; make me happy, but not yet. I began to enjoy myself.
It was in the gap between one of Sarah’s disappearances that I finally confessed how I felt to her. I had been single for a year, but she had a boyfriend back in Brazil, an artisan potter (they were always people with extraordinary occupations), and in her laidback way she assumed they’d stay together without being able to articulate how. In the meantime she had moved to Edinburgh for a job at the National Museum of Scotland, and invited me up to stay for a long weekend. It began on Thursday in a pub near her flat in Leith, one you reached by walking down a narrow street lined with prostitutes. We played a game – I can’t remember who started it – categorising all our mutual friends by whether or not we wanted to sleep with them. I was delighted at how many people she didn’t want to sleep with. Perhaps I lied a bit to suggest my tastes were less catholic than they are. And then we could no longer avoid it.
Yes, she admitted, with almost entirely disguised shyness, she would.
Yes, I admitted, rapturously, I would, I would, I would.
The next day we climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat and stood braced against each other as the wind tried to tear us off. On the way down her feet slipped and I caught her under the arms. She turned and looked at me incredulously, as if she hadn’t noticed I had been with her until that moment. I had to say something but I couldn’t.
She never had the right clothes for the country she was living in. That day she was wearing a summer dress with shiny black tights and flimsy canvas shoes – a thick blanket of a woollen overcoat on the top donated by one of her new colleagues after she had arrived to work two days in a row in a soggy denim jacket. The cold rain began to hammer down as we reached the bottom and she was soon sodden. We took refuge in a pub. She had stolen a lipstick that morning from Superdrug and came back with cherry-pink lips and soaking hair. Her lips were so bright they seemed to belong to another dimension. She was wonderfully disorganised in the way she assembled herself and I expect she will always be like this. I hope so.
I couldn’t take my eyes from her. Something was going to happen, something was so obviously going to happen that I felt on the verge of being sick in case it didn’t. In the end it was the word itself, unspoken for so long, that brought us together. That evening she had taken us to an ecstasy dealer’s tenement flat and later, in a basement dive bar, dancing to house music, I had put my hands on her shoulders and said it: ‘I love you.’ It was the kind of thing you said on an E, but not in that tone. We knew what it meant. Its inevitability stunned her. She took a step backwards and smiled a smile that was without guilt, despite the boyfriend she would have to get rid of in the next month, and we kissed our first kiss.
We lay on her bed when we got home and she swam into a sharp new focus. She tied her hair back and I realised I had never seen her ears. They seemed enormous. She was suddenly a completely different person; her voice sounded more clipped than I remembered and I could imagine her playing hockey; she was a middle-class girl from the home counties, with a mother, a father, a brother and a sister; she owned and wore pyjamas; she thought her knees looked funny, her gorgeous knees pressed up against my jeans. It was fascinating to see her awkward, wondering if I should stay; she wanted me to, but she was a nice girl, a nice girl who shoplifted, and we decided we should take it slow.
I already had everything I thought I could ever need from her. She liked me, and I was lost.
Before I got up to go back to the sofa, I said something clichéd and untrue. ‘From the start, it was always meant to be you and me.’
We lay there looking at each other, our bodies at right angles, our faces side-on, curious.
‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘No, I knew!’ She laughed and we looked at each other some more.
‘You’re not making any move to kiss me,’ she said.
‘I’m keeping still. I’m scared I might startle you.’
‘Just approach slowly. No sudden movements.’
I stayed where I was and carried on looking.
Her prominent ears. Her funny knees. Her hungry smile.
My life together with Sarah finally ended with a long Tube ride to Heathrow that afternoon. We hugged each other through a pole in the packed carriage. We couldn’t get the right angle to kiss. She still wouldn’t meet my eyes. The day before I had borrowed a shopping trolley from a supermarket to haul boxes of my books to the nearest charity shop. I didn’t even approve of giving books to charity – the publishing industry seemed in need of enough charity itself. But what was I supposed to do, bin them? I didn’t have such a strong stomach. The ones I couldn’t bear to give away I had placed, three boxes full, with my aunt. My friends had enough trouble finding space for their own books in their tiny London flats. Sarah’s parents were coming round the next day to collect her stuff and she was going to live with them for a couple of weeks while she decided what to do.
We arrived at Heathrow and as we queued on the concourse to check in Sarah told me once again how much fun I was going to have. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. For once, she looked back at me. ‘Please, Sarah, I don’t want to go without you.’
‘I’m moving home tomorrow,’ she said, looking away. ‘I’m twenty-nine and I’m moving home. I’ve got you to thank for that. If you don’t get on this plane, what are you going to do? Where will you go? My parents certainly don’t want to see you.’
We didn’t talk about her confession to her mother that I had lied to her, or about her father’s reluctant proposition then to beat me up. Her father and I had always enjoyed talking to each other. I wanted to ring him up and offer to help him kick the crap out of me.
‘Sarah, I love you. We’re supposed to be together.’
‘It’s just words, Liam. You’re just words. And not even very original ones. I can’t believe in them any more.’
‘I’m not a liar, I told you the –’
‘If you begin that again I promise that I will scream.’
‘Oh, please. We’re not simple people. We don’t have to obey a soap-opera’s sense of justice.’
‘I will scream and I will walk away and any slender chance we have of staying together will be gone.’
I was crying by now. Unless I specifically tell you otherwise, assume I’m always crying.
‘And stop pronouncing those tears.’
‘Is it that slender?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
I turned back after I had my ticket and passport checked on my way to the departure gate. She was still there watching me. We reflected each other across five years. There aren’t many looks in a lifetime like the one she gave me. You couldn’t survive more than a few. She waved. I waved. She mouthed three words to me. ‘I love you.’ Or, ‘Bye bye, Liam.’ I could not be sure and mouthed three words back and she turned and walked away. She turned back once, she turned back twice and I waited
