The Moment You Were Gone by Nicci Gerrard

Author:Nicci Gerrard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141900483
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

Connor ran. He started at the door of the hospital and ran up the road towards King’s Cross, jogging on the spot at the lights, then weaving his way through the pedestrians. Past the shop selling chess sets, over the arterial road thick with cars and loud with blaring horns. An icy drizzle fell on his bare forearms.

He ran four times a week, without fail. In blizzards and heatwaves, on holiday and during sickness, he ran, up hills, along canals, round training grounds, through fields and parks, by the sea and along the edge of a mountain. He had run since he was sixteen and sometimes he would think about the distances he had gone and the gradients he had pressed into his bones. He had the impossible sensation that all of his journeys were still inside him somewhere. If he ever missed a session, he would feel itchy and full of a restless, peevish rage that he knew was ridiculous but which gripped him nevertheless. On Tuesdays he had an hour free at lunchtime and always did a six-mile circuit of Regent’s Park, coming back in time to shower quickly and be at his desk, clean and virtuous, by two.

The first mile was always the worst. There was a stiffness in his muscles and a tightness in his thoughts. But gradually he relaxed. His stride lengthened and loosened; his mind, which had been full of neurotic lists and snagging anxieties, expanded and breathed; images sailed through him and the ideas with which he had been struggling flowed more easily, as if they had been silted up but were now unblocked. He dodged a cyclist and made his way through the gates and into the park. He found his rhythm. Some days, he would feel sluggish and heavy-footed, but today was good for running: he was light, quick; energy ran in a clear channel through him. He thought of the patients he would see that afternoon, and the lecture he had to give tomorrow; he would have to write it tonight, at home. He thought about Ethan and wondered why he had hardly talked to his son since he left home. Gaby had, of course, and she was always topping up communications with emails, texts and postcards with two illegible words scrawled on them. She hadn’t let go properly, and she missed him through details – the shut bedroom door, the emptier supermarket trolley, the napkin ring on the side, the evenings she now spent alone when once she’d often spent them with Ethan. Her energy had turned to a kind of restlessness, and Connor had noticed that she was more than usually distracted. Sometimes he would say something to her and she would stare at him with a wild vagueness, as if she didn’t know who he was or what he was doing sitting opposite her.

He felt a pang of guilt and tenderness when he thought of his wife, as if his heart was bruised. It had been more than twenty years since they had met.

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