The Butterfly Effect (12 page)

Unbelievably, I smile a little. That’s what I will do. When all this is over, I will take Nat on holiday. I don’t care how much it costs, I will get the money from somewhere. Maybe Mum and Dad will lend me some, when they find out what I’ve been through and what Nat did to help. We will go somewhere peaceful and chill out, or no, maybe not. Maybe we’ll go to New York, or Mexico City! Yes, that’s it! We will go somewhere exciting, and I will not be scared, as nothing could be as scary as this and, probably, I will never be scared of anything again if only I come out the other side.

I lie back on the bed and imagine this holiday. I think about walking down the gangway of a plane with Nat behind me, feeling the blast of heat from the tarmac, hearing the endless chirp of the crickets, but then I am gripped by sadness. What am I doing? I am fantasising about a holiday with Nat, but it is Richie I want to be with. Somehow, Greg has even stolen my grief. He didn’t take Richie away from me, we know that, but I have not been able to deal normally with his death because of this constant threat to my safety. So no, there will be no celebrations if I am saved. I will not go on holiday. I will find a way to lead some kind of normal life that doesn’t have Richie in it, as that is what he would want, but I’m not ready to feel happy yet and I don’t really want to.

***

I’ve no idea what happened next. Obviously the service continued, but I had to be taken outside, with all the eyes of the assembled crowd watching as Nat helped me down the path and to his car, and the next thing I can remember in any detail is being back at the flat and a doctor shining a light into my eyes.

I only took the tablets for about three months. I’ve absolutely nothing against medication, and it did help me get through the darkest times, but I wasn’t depressed, not in the clinical sense of the word. I was bereaved, and the only way to recover from that is to let time do its work and slowly, carefully, force yourself back into the land of the living. So that’s what I did, with an enormous amount of support, and by New Year I was beginning to lead some kind of a life again. Christmas had been terrible, of course, and New Year itself, as I couldn’t help remembering all the happy times we’d had last year and that we’d never got to spend Christmas Day together. Still, the human spirit is unbelievably robust and I taught my first class for nearly six months at the start of the new term. Somebody said it would be like getting back onto a bike, and that turned out to be true. I was a bit wobbly, but I was fine.

Somehow, it is morning again. I had a terrible night, waking with a jolt I don’t know how many times, thinking I could hear somebody at the door. I had a horrible dream in which Richie and I were on a beach, somewhere idyllic, and then he got up and said he was going for a swim, so I watched him, watched the white of his body dive dolphin-like through the waves, then tracked the arch of his arms, graceful in a lazy crawl until I could see him no more. I was not worried. In my dream I knew he was a strong swimmer, so I dozed in the sun until his shadow fell on my face and he lay down beside me, wet and salty, and we kissed long and hard, his arms pulling me closer and our legs beginning to entwine. Then something happened, and I realised, suddenly, it was not Richie I was kissing, but Nat, but I told myself not to worry, Richie wouldn’t mind, and we kissed some more until I shook myself awake, gasping with guilt and regret.

I’m no psychologist, but that dream does not take a lot of interpretation. I went to sleep feeling guilty about planning a holiday with Nat, and my dream was exploring that guilt, but I could not put the idea of Nat kissing me out of my mind. It was only the product of my imagination, but is there some ambiguity in my feelings for Nat? There is a huge amount of gratitude, a huge amount of dependence on his support, but there is also that feeling of being suffocated from time to time. Poor Nat, I can’t imagine how hurt he would be if he knew it, but I could never live with him, even as a friend, and it was so difficult to deal with when the issue arose.

***

It was Olga who suggested that we should get a place together. She said it must be difficult living in the space I had shared with Richie, especially as it had been his flat, and there was some truth in that. Most of the furniture had been his, and I hadn’t lived there long enough to really make it my own before we got rid of a lot of stuff in preparation for the move to Canada. A teacher called Jack had been going to live there as part of the exchange, and we’d had to de-personalise it as much as we could. So now it was a sad place really, with most of Richie’s things gone and aching spaces where they used to be. Olga was right. It was time for a move, and her lease was coming to an end in six months so she would have to find somewhere else. I didn’t know at the time, as I had been so wrapped up in my own problems, but she had been having a painful and secret fling with Anton’s brother, who had some sort of complicated on-off relationship with someone else, and it had all ended messily. However, Olga was too concerned about me to talk about her own problems. What was a dent to her self-esteem compared to what I had been through?

So we were looking for a place. Not that actively, as it was still some time before we could move in, but I was beginning to feel quite excited about it. OK it was no substitute for what I’d lost, but I would not even consider another relationship, and if it made sense to share, who better to share with than Olga, the best friend a girl could ever have?

I’m not sure whether I’d actually said anything to Nat about it. I suppose I hadn’t, given what happened. He had been incredibly kind, phoning almost every day, popping round with a takeaway meal if he thought I sounded low, sorting out so many things. He was like my big brother, or even my dad, although the extent of my own parents’ support was to say that it all may turn out for the best, as my career could only have suffered from taking a year’s break. No surprise then, that I chose not to see a lot of them from that point.

Still, it was more than a surprise, it was a shock, when he came round to the flat one evening with a serious look on his face.

“There’s something I want to discuss with you,” he said, handing me a bottle of red, “and I think we should do it over a drink.”

I had absolutely no idea what he was going to say, although I did wonder if he’d met someone and was worried about telling me that he would have less time to spend with me. I wouldn’t have minded about that, as there was nothing I wanted more than for him to find a partner. Although he could never be the man for me, even if I’d met him before Richie, there was no doubt that he would make a wonderful, caring boyfriend for somebody, and it was strange that it never seemed to happen for him. Richie used to say that it showed how superficial people were.

“They don’t see the real Nat,” he once said. “They can’t see what shines through. It’s a bloody travesty.”

So, there we were, sitting somewhat formally on the sofa, with glasses of wine on the coffee table in front of us, the TV off and something in the air. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but it was there.

“The thing is, my Great Aunt Ellen has died,” Nat said. I started to say something about being sorry, as you do, but he stopped me. “No, don’t worry, it’s OK. She was in her nineties, completely away with the fairies for the last couple of years. She’s been in a home for some years, and she has – had – a house in Camden that was rented out to pay the fees. I had to sort it all out when she started to lose the plot. Anyway, you don’t need to know about all that. The thing is, she looked after me when my grandparents got too old and nobody else could be bothered, and we became very close. She didn’t have any children of her own, and, well, she’s left me the house.”

I really wasn’t sure what to say. Why was he telling me this? Was it because he was sad really, but didn’t know how to express it? As if reading my thoughts, he took a swig of his wine, topped it up again and continued.

“Obviously there are tenants in there at the moment, but we’ve always operated short-term leases and I’ll be in a position to sell it within months. It might even sell with the tenants in place. Anyway, I was thinking about buying somewhere round here, and I thought why not get somewhere I could convert into two flats?” He looked across at me, as if for confirmation, so I nodded and smiled.

“Sounds great,” I said. “I imagine you’d get something pretty good round here if the house is in Camden. You could convert them to a really high standard, live in one yourself ...”

“... And you could live in the other!” he said. “Exactly! It’s the perfect solution. I wouldn’t charge you the commercial rent, obviously, and you could have complete control over the décor, the fittings, all that. I’d always be there for you, but you’d be completely independent.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. I had been going to say that he could sell the other flat. It hadn’t even entered my mind that I could live in it. I was already seeing myself ensconced with Olga, in a flat which represented our different but complementary personalities, a flat that was vibrant and homely, with Olga’s big, squashy sofa in the centre and the walls lined with our books and music. I didn’t want to live by myself , however beautiful the flat. I was still young, and I was looking forward to the fun and laughter, the queuing for the bathroom, the coming home to find someone had cooked dinner or baked a cake.

“Oh, Nat, that’s so kind, so thoughtful of you to include me in your plans. Another time it would have been perfect, but I’m going to move in with Olga for a while. We’re looking for somewhere at the moment, as she’s got to leave her place and I want the company. She’s my best friend, and we’ve lived together before. But thanks, thanks so much for thinking of me!”

That wasn’t all I said. I rambled on about what a good idea it was, how he should go ahead and do it anyway, but he left shortly afterwards and I don’t know what he did with the money from the house. Certainly he didn’t use it to convert any flats. That just shows the kind of person he is. The only reason he had for doing it was to provide me with a comfortable and safe place to live, and when I rejected that he lost interest. Poor Nat. He was obviously disappointed, but it didn’t affect anything. He was just as kind, just as thoughtful, in the weeks and months that followed and thank goodness for that.

So, I was taking my first tentative steps towards repairing my life. Obviously I was still very fragile, and there were times when the enormity of it all overwhelmed me or when I wondered whether it was worth carrying on, but there was always someone there to pick up the pieces. I would go round to Olga’s, or Nat would come round to mine. There would be tears, there would be anger at the pointless stupidity of it all, hours of ‘if only’ conversations in which they would listen whilst I berated myself for not preventing it in some way. Then they would help me to understand that I couldn’t have, that life and death really are randomly cruel sometimes, and that would work for a while, until the next low point.

Slowly, the gaps between these episodes of despair became longer and I became stronger. I got up on stage with Olga in March, not to sing alone, but it was a first step, and our flat-hunting became more serious. I had only a short notice period on my lease, as Nat thought that was best when he renegotiated it for me, but Olga had to be out by the end of June. There was never a day that passed without Richie popping into my mind, never a morning without the ache of realisation that he wasn’t there, but there were days when I could be almost normal, at least when I wasn’t alone. I spent more and more time at Olga’s flat, poring over the property sites on her laptop whilst she rustled up a pasta dish in that way that she had, making something tasty from an apparently unpromising selection of sad-looking vegetables.

When Nat made his regular calls to ask how I was, I could quite honestly tell him that I was fine. I hoped that he, too, would be able to start building up more of a social life. I was only too aware that I was not the only one who had been bereaved on that terrible night, and sometimes I felt guilty that he had done all the supporting whilst he must have needed support too. But I could not fill that gap for him. He had been Richie’s friend, not mine, and I could not replace Richie. That’s what I told myself as I hung up one evening, knowing that Olga was looking across at me with that ‘not him again’ look on her face, and I felt terrible about the slightly sinking feeling I would get when I saw his number on the display. What a heartless, ungrateful person I was, to feel this way when he had been so kind, so supportive. I would never have said anything to him, but I did cut him short from time to time.

It was just as well that we never fell out about it, that he didn’t give up on me as, completely out of the blue, Greg started to contact me again. I couldn’t believe it was happening, but there it was, a card in my pigeonhole at school. The address was printed on a label and the envelope was plain and white, so I didn’t think anything of it as I tore it open, but the elaborate heart on the front made my heart pound and I opened it with shaking hands. The inside was printed too, a piece of paper glued beneath the message, so the whole thing read:

To the one I love

I have missed you so much and have been thinking

of you in your time of unhappiness. Maybe I can

help you to move on?

Your friend always

I don’t know how long I stood there, with the card in my hand, reading it over and over again. How could this be? Obviously he would have known about Richie’s death – it had been in all the papers and on the local news – but why wait this long to make contact? If I thought about him at all, which was very rarely by then, I assumed he had forgotten all about me, found someone else. It was incredible, but it seemed he had been thinking about me all this time, watching and waiting for the time he could step into Richie’s shoes. I dropped the card, ran to the toilets, and was violently sick. This could not be true.

But it was true, and it was only the start of it. To begin with, I was strong, and I threw away any post with printed labels, or gave them to Olga to open. The staff at reception were given instructions to reject any flowers delivered for me, and there were strict procedures about divulging any staff email addresses in place by that time, so I thought I could manage it. I didn’t even tell Nat, as I was worried about him charging round to Greg’s house and making a scene. Richie had told me how brilliant he had been the first time, keeping the situation calm when Greg denied it all at first, making it possible for it all to seem like a misunderstanding, but I doubted it would be the same now. He was very protective of me, and I couldn’t predict what might happen.

I suppose it was no surprise that I couldn’t keep it up. It was less than a year after I had suffered a major trauma and I began to dread going into school for fear of what I might find there. I couldn’t talk to my colleagues about it as it seemed so ridiculous. Who was I to have a stalker? Was I claiming to be some kind of a celebrity? Of course I know now that there were many, many people in school who would have listened sympathetically and offered me support. I doubt that anyone would have thought I was being self-obsessed or any of the other things I worried about, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and that is what I thought at the time. I thought they would talk about me behind my back, or make light of it in that way that teachers do when there is something serious to worry about. I couldn’t bear the thought of being the subject of staffroom gossip, so I told the reception staff a story about an ex-boyfriend who was trying to win me back. I laughed and said it wasn’t anything serious, but could they just send any flowers away, and keep it to themselves? They may have told people, I don’t know. It wasn’t long before flowers were the least of my problems.

***

Today, I have eaten some granola with a little milk, and heated some water in the microwave to make tea. I had to make up the milk from powder, and it’s not the best option for tea, but now I feel fortified and a little stronger. It is hard to imagine that a third day will pass with no contact, so I turn my thoughts to the door. There has to be a solution.