‘I love you because you put a triangle of Toblerone in my suit pocket.’
‘You know the expression “a New York minute”? It’s like the shortest measure of time ever but still so much can change within it? Well, that’s what it was like. Forget Cupid and his arrows – I was harpooned by Erin Fitzgerald!’ My eyes narrow. ‘Are you listening to me?’ I’m pointing a finger at a toy elephant. ‘She was dancing,’ I explain, ‘a hippy thing where her body just swayed, and she reminded me of a tree – tall with long, coppery hair, longer limbs, slender fingers.’
It’s raining outside, gloomy, relentless rain that started late morning and would have any June bride weeping. Our own trees in the back garden, two majestic oaks, a white blossomed japonicus, and a scattering of silver birches are clinging onto their leaves and blooms as the deluge pounds. I’m killing time before Lydia’s party talking to Maisie’s favourite toy, a threadbare, one-eared grey thing that still sits regally on one of the armchairs – I’ve never really understood why.
‘Anyway, there she was, this autumnal sycamore rooted firmly in the middle of the old swirly carpet, and all I could think of was what it might be like to feel those fingers rake through my hair or grip my back.’
I stare at the elephant. ‘I’m boring you …’ My head shakes and I refuse to see this scene as it is. A middle-aged shadow of the man I used to be speaking to a stuffed toy about how he met his wife.
‘I called her “Tree-Girl” …’ The elephant is tilting to one side and I straighten him up. ‘And she was Lydia’s new flatmate, so I suppose it’s down to her that we ever met?’
The beat of the rain makes me think of my sister’s disappointment today when her birthday barbecue has to shift indoors.
‘Erin made me a coffee and we ate chocolate from the fridge.’ I’m addressing Elephant again. ‘Toblerone. Hers. But my absolute favourite.’
My sigh is long. ‘Neither of us ever believed in that love-at-first-sight crap, but …’ I glance behind me. The neon clock on the wall says two more hours until I can leave for the party.
‘But,’ I reach for the elephant and slump into the sofa. ‘The thing is, that was then, and this is now.’
The elephant’s grey glass eyes look up at me from above his curled trunk and dirty tusks and for a New York minute, I think he understands.
‘In between we were happy, really happy. Sure, there were times …’ I hesitate, unwilling to confess my part in bad times, even to a soft toy. My eyes land on the leather book sitting on the coffee table in front of me. I never did put it back in the drawer. ‘And even through the shit, we loved each other, you know? And our children couldn’t have asked for a better mother. Honestly, she …’
The grey eyes seem to stretch, and I reply to the imaginary unasked question. ‘Me? Yes, I’ve been a good dad too. I think they’d both say that. They should be there tonight,’ I add. ‘Yes, I’ll probably see them there tonight.’
Two more hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. I seem to spend my time waiting for time to pass. Maybe I should just count to seven thousand two hundred.
‘Erin always had this thing,’ I’m still addressing the elephant but am mesmerised by the swaying trees outside, ‘she had a thing that I thought she’d trapped me.’ I laugh out loud. ‘Mum thought that for sure, but the idea never crossed my mind. Pregnant or not, all I wanted was to be with her. I think she got it – eventually …’
Elephant has fallen over. ‘She wasn’t always easy, you know. Back then she worried all of the time. God, she could sweat the small stuff, but managed to hide it well. I suppose we all have our disguises.’ I place him upright again. ‘What I’m trying to say is the good bits far outweighed the bad.’
I lay my head back on the sofa, try to ignore the fact that I’ve spent the last ten minutes – six hundred seconds – talking to an inanimate object. My eyelids lower.
In my sleep, I dream. I dream about Erin on our wedding day. I dream of Maisie. And I dream about elephants in the room.
THEN – January 1998
Erin drove … She drove faster than the legal speed limit told her she could, the needle on the dashboard sliding past eighty. It was only Maisie’s waking cry from her seat in the back that made her take her foot off the gas.
‘Sssh, darling.’ She reached behind and finding the baby’s lower leg, stroked it. ‘Nearly there, sweetheart.’
Maisie, the happiest child since the moment she first drew breath, gurgled a giddy response.
Erin angled the rear-view mirror and sang a nursery rhyme from her own childhood, something about Miss Polly having a dolly who was sick. Indicating off the M3, she smiled at the irony. Sick. Poor Dolly. Poor Erin.
In the narrow street outside the home she’d been raised in, Erin parked behind her father’s car. Fitz’s Toyota, with its thin layer of overnight frost still in place on the windscreen, seemed as old as him and she struggled to remember a time when he’d had another car. A mechanic by trade, at fifty-seven Fitz still worked full time and maintained that car engines were like human hearts. They needed looking after; loving, nurturing and occasional tuning. The front door to the house was open before her hand was off the wheel. Her father was opening the rear door cooing at the baby and removing her from her seat before Erin even had time to say hello.
‘You can go now,’ Fitz said as he walked off with his grandchild. Erin swung the baby bag over her shoulder, locked the car door and as soon as she saw her father’s hand reach back for her, she grabbed it, grateful.
‘Joking, of course. It’s always great to see my baby girl,’ he said. ‘Seeing her baby girl too is a bonus. Have you eaten?’
Erin nodded, her eyes cast downwards, sure that if she looked up she’d be caught in her lie. She’d fed Maisie. That was all that mattered. The thought of food today made her want to vomit.
They sat in the small kitchen at the rear of the house. Gone was the shiny pine table she and Rob had sat at for family meals and homework. Whoever had purchased it from the charity shop her father had donated it to would have had to sand away its wounds – some pen or felt-tip messages etched in the wood, her name where she had stabbed it for posterity with the point of her compass, the large dent that the frozen turkey had made one Christmas when her mother had dropped it. In its place was a strange-looking desk-like thing with the longer side placed up against the wall. Two odd chairs, one with stuffing oozing through a small hole, were parked at each end. There’s nothing worse, her father had once told her, than eating alone at a big table. Erin took the nearest chair and sat rocking Maisie on her lap.
‘Tea,’ Fitz announced, filling the kettle.
She breathed in the familiar room with its wallpaper of patterned tiles, each ‘tile’ with a different vegetable image. In the corner, a box containing stacks of What Car? magazines stood waiting to either be read again or passed on to someone who might want them. Beside it sat a smaller carton spilling with paperchains
