A Hundred Pieces of Me (40 page)

Gina is sitting outside the Athertons’ house in Janet’s Fiesta, watching the bay windows for signs of life. It’s hard to see much because the trees provide a barrier and the front garden is long. So far, she’s spotted a couple of shadows passing behind the curtains in the top left-hand bedroom but that’s enough to reassure her that someone is in.

She’s here because four weeks have passed without a single letter returned to her mother’s house. Janet’s pleased, but not for the same reason as Gina. No letters mean Kit’s maybe reading them, at last.

‘I hope this means you can draw a line,’ she observed, but when Gina opened her mouth to explain that, no, far from giving up, it was a very good sign, she had held up her hands. ‘We’ve all been through a nightmare, Georgina. But there comes a point when you have to get on with your life.’

Gina doesn’t see the point in trying to make her mother see that the life she wants is with Kit, and now that’s half gone, she’s stuck. Poor Terry is dead; Janet has no choice but to move on. But Kit isn’t. Kit’s still here. It’s too awful to say aloud, but it’s painfully clear to Gina that there’s a big difference.

Their shared grief hasn’t brought them closer. Just as Gina thinks there isn’t a comparison between their situations, Janet is livid at any suggestion that Gina’s loss is anything like hers.

Gina sits up in the car as the front door opens and Anita Atherton appears, in a calf-length grey dress covered with a long cardigan, a plaited leather belt slung around her narrow hips. Gina’s timidly impressed at how stylish she looks, even in the current circumstances. Her long hair’s swept into a bun, and she cuts a tall figure against the door, just as she did the first time Kit brought Gina home.

Anita pauses for a moment, then fixes her eyes on Gina, and starts marching across the garden.

She gets out of the car, wanting to meet her halfway, but Anita’s quicker: she’s at the gate before Gina can reach it, barring the way to the house. ‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses.

Gina summons up all her politeness and bravery. ‘I’ve come to see Kit.’

‘You’ve come to see Kit.’ The voice is neutral but there’s a fine sheen of anger shimmering around his mother, the way heat bends the air around a fire. ‘Why?’

‘To talk to him about my letters. I know he’s been reading them. He’s been getting them.’

‘And what makes you think that?’

‘Because . . . because I haven’t been getting them back.’ As she says it, Gina realises how flimsy her hopes are.

Anita gives a completely mirthless laugh. ‘Or have you considered that maybe I’ve had better things to do lately than return them to you?’

Gina is floundering, desperate to say the right thing. But she doesn’t know what the right thing is any more. Until this happened, she did. She had a good girl’s knack for pleasing but now everything she says seems to be wrong, and she desperately doesn’t want to offend this woman any more than she already has.

But he was
mine
too, she cries inside her head. My future. We should be in London right now. Or driving across America. Or swimming in Sydney.

The wind shivers through the trees around them, an early morning chill, and shakes some of the copper leaves from the branches. They float lazily down on an invisible breeze, all the time in the world.

Gina tries to make her face appealing. ‘Can’t I see him? Not even for ten minutes? Just to say—’

‘To say what?’

Sorry? I love you? I haven’t stopped thinking about you for a single hour of a single day?

Gina had prepared what she was going to say as she was driving there, but now she’s faced with Anita Atherton’s scorn, her impassioned speeches seem babyish, and she’s ashamed but still determined to battle on because with nothing to lose. she doesn’t care how stupid she looks.

‘To say that it doesn’t matter what . . . that I love him . . .’

Anita’s patience is running out. ‘I think that would be the absolute worst thing for everyone. I meant what I said at the hospital, Gina. It’s better this way.’

‘Then just tell me how he is!’ Gina begs. ‘Please. I need to know. Doesn’t he ask about me? Doesn’t he wonder why I’m not writing to him?’

It’s the not knowing that’s driving Gina mad. No one will tell her anything. She has no memory of the sequence of events that abruptly curtailed the happiest day of her life, and now she doesn’t even know what’s happened to Kit. She’s run through every possibility in her mind since the hospital: Kit partially paralysed but with the hope of recovery; Kit on crutches, learning to walk; and, her favourite, Kit still asleep like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the torn muscles and nerves in his body to knit back together, to sit up in bed suddenly one day, right as rain. It does happen.

Gina swallows. What’s been tormenting her in the middle of the night is the idea that he might have no memory of her, of their cinematic, once-in-a-lifetime love – the favourite songs, the gigs, the in-jokes, the laughter in her car, the experimental spag-bol dinners, the skinny dipping, the midnight phone conversations, the happiest, best years of her life that only Kit knows. She can look at Kit in any state and still love him, as long as he can remember that. Without it, without him, they’re gone, and so is she, because Gina knows she’ll never be as happy again, not without him.

Anita stares at her, pitying, then reaches into the deep pocket of her cardigan and brings out four of Gina’s letters, held together with a red elastic post-office band. It bends them, creasing the paper as if they’re junk mail. ‘The reason you haven’t had your letters back is because we’ve been away.’ She sounds as if she’s said these words too many times now, to too many people. ‘We saw a specialist in California who works with spinal-cord injuries, and I’m pleased to say the signs are promising.’

‘He’s making a recovery?’

Anita’s face twists. ‘He’s never going to walk again, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s probably never going to live an independent life. He’s never going to dance, or play real tennis, or swim. All the things he loved doing most. But he’s alive.’

Gina didn’t even know Kit played real tennis.

She
was one of the things he loved most.

‘But hasn’t he asked about me at all?’ she blurts out, and is ashamed at once.

Anita’s shoulders rise up around her ears and her whole body tenses beneath the woollen clothes. She covers her face with her hands. Gina is left looking at the tight tendons of Anita’s neck, and the hands that have aged so fast, the skin crêping. Her rings have gone.

After only a moment the hands are lowered and Anita fixes her with a bitter look.

‘Please don’t! He’s important to me!’ Gina is forcing out the words through the ringing in her ears. ‘I know how you feel.’

‘How can you know how I feel? You don’t have the first idea. Not until you lose something precious to you, and even then I don’t know if you’d understand.’

Gina wants to say, Yes, I do. I lost my father. And my stepfather. And the love of my life. They’re dead, and Kit’s going to live. If she were older, more confident, she would say it but something in Anita’s face makes her feel small and the pain just backs up inside her.

‘It’s because of you that Kit’s where he is now.’ Anita pauses, to let the words sink in. ‘Don’t come here again. And please. No more letters. Get on with your life.’

Gina’s heart breaks inside her, a sharp, winding pain, and she can’t think of a single thing to say as Anita walks back up the path and closes the front door behind her.

Gina stands there.
Because of me. All this is because of me
.

Gina woke on the Sunday morning after Willow’s party with a headache.

It was raining outside, hard drops clattering loudly on the windows, but the headache was her own fault. After Nick had dropped her at home, Gina had tidied up two more boxes of junk, chucking out the entire contents without even looking at them, trying to avoid the mental image of pregnant Bryony, daddy Stuart, lonely old Gina. Meanwhile the knot in her stomach grew bigger and bigger until eventually she couldn’t ignore it. She’d drunk a bottle of wine and sobbed with frustration on the sofa while Buzz hid in his basket, then fallen into bed fully dressed at about ten.

Now it was four in the morning, the rain was accompanied by distant thunder, and the crushing headache seemed to have spread over her entire body.

Gina stared up at the featureless ceiling and felt so lonely she ached.

Everyone else’s life was moving on. Hers was stuck. It didn’t help that she had to take her mother out later: their annual Sunday lunch on what had been Terry’s birthday.

As she was mentally running through the few acceptable lunch venues (nowhere with loud music, ‘garlicky food’, dubious hygiene, etc.) Gina heard a soft brushing noise, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the door open a crack, letting in a pale slice of light from the hallway.

She turned her head, but not her body, and watched as a long black nose nudged its way into the space, pushing it wider, to be followed by Buzz’s narrow head and dark grey shoulders. Silently, the dog edged through the small gap, gliding on his noiseless paws like a ghost into her room, then hesitated, as if he was making sure she was really asleep before creeping in.

There was a distant rumble of thunder and Buzz cringed, then scuttled into the shadows of the room.

Gina kept still, but inside her heart was hammering. This was the first time she’d ever seen Buzz do anything of his own accord for himself. He was a totally passive creature, waiting to be told he could eat or go out, watching her for signs with those anxious eyes. At night, he’d always just gone to sleep in his basket – grateful, she guessed, to be inside. This was the first time she’d seen him dare take a tiny chance.

Something uncurled inside her, and she rolled over to let him know it was fine for him to be there. But as she moved, the usual shiver of fear rippled over the dog’s coat and he shied back, ears flattened.

‘It’s OK,’ whispered Gina. ‘It’s OK.’

They stared at each other in the morning half-light as the rain drummed on the big window behind the curtain. The whites around Buzz’s jet eyes slowly disappeared as he read her face and saw only encouragement there.

‘It’s OK,’ she whispered again, and with a quiet groan, he sank down against the door and tucked himself into a ball, his nose buried in the solid muscles of his hind legs. Close. But not too close.

Gina lay on her side and watched him pretend to sleep, then sleep for real, as the clock beside her bed edged out of the small hours and into early morning. The rain began to sound soothing. She was inside, warm, safe.

Without warning, at a quarter to six, Gina dropped off to sleep.

At some point in the thirteen years since Terry’s heart attack, it had become a tradition for Gina to take Janet out for lunch on the weekend nearest his birthday, then over to the cemetery at St John’s Church to put some flowers beside his headstone.

Stuart had never been included in the annual lunch: it was just Gina and Janet. And, in a strange way, the spirit of Terry. It was one day of the year when mother and daughter made more effort than usual to be generous to each other, in conscious memory of his years of quiet peacemaking.

This year, Buzz wasn’t invited either, and to make up for his morning at home Gina took him for the longest of their walks, then treated them both to a Sunday bacon sandwich at the café that let dogs in. It was a particularly good bacon sandwich – fresh white bread, lots of tomato sauce, crispy smoked local bacon – and she stopped at the gates of the park to balance it on the brick wall so she could take a Polaroid of it with Nick’s camera.

Gina had noticed plenty of things on the way there, but this was the first moment she wanted to use up a frame of film on. It wasn’t so much the sandwich, she thought, warming the photo under her armpit to speed up the developing chemicals: it was everything. The softness of the morning air after the previous night’s rain, the lingering drops on the leaves, the fact that she was only out at this hour because she was walking the dog, the fun of eating something messy and delicious outside. The whole thing was just . . . enjoyable.

Gina’s head was still thick, but she was surprised by the glimmer of optimism she felt when she looked at the leaves, the sky, the sandwich. Small things, but satisfying; things she knew Terry would have appreciated, in his way. It was like the sun coming out, even though the clouds were still there.

She glanced down at Buzz, and smiled at the ketchup-stained muzzle peering up at her, a twinkle in his eyes as he licked his chops to get the final taste of bacon from between his gappy teeth.

Gina took another Polaroid of him, doing his doggy smile with the leafy park in the background.
That
was the moment.

As she and Buzz walked up the path towards the woods, Gina found herself half hoping she might see Nick. She told herself it was so she could show him that she’d started using the camera already, but it wasn’t that: Gina wanted him to see her in a normal state, not the frozen-faced mess she’d been when he’d dropped her off at her house the previous afternoon.

Gina couldn’t remember whether Nick was even in Longhampton today. There’d been some mention of London, of talking to Amanda about the summer house idea. She’d been concentrating in the car on not crying till she got home, and hadn’t said much while Nick had chatted to fill the uncomfortable silence. He’d suggested a film but she’d got the distinct impression he was feeling sorry for her. She hoped she hadn’t seemed rude.