The Rift by Nina Allan

Author:Nina Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books

8

Lisa and I were good for a while, but it didn’t last. How could it, when I kept the truth of myself hidden from her?

“I feel like I don’t really know you,” Lisa said to me, more than once. This was near the end of our time together, when things were beginning to get difficult. I knew she’d leave eventually, or else I would – it just hadn’t happened yet. “It’s as if you decided to cut me out, right from the start.”

In a way she was right, but it wasn’t for any of the reasons she probably thought. Mostly when you try to hide something from someone you love it’s either because you feel guilty or because you’re afraid they won’t believe you. You’re scared some important aspect of your relationship is going to get broken and you’ll do anything to prevent that, even if it means breaking it yourself, in another way.

None of that was true with Lisa. If I’d told her what I’m telling you now, she would have tried to believe me, and even if she couldn’t bring herself to go all the way in that, she would have accepted my story as part of me, an odd part that needn’t do us any harm, even though she most likely wished it didn’t exist. The reason I didn’t tell Lisa had nothing to do with trust. I knew I could trust her, but I didn’t want to. I thought that if I pretended none of it had happened, then it really wouldn’t have. I wanted to inhabit a world where the lies I told Lisa were true, a world in which I’d come south to escape my troubles and to make a new start. A new start with someone exactly like Lisa.

If I could make Lisa believe this version of me, then would not this version, in some crucial sense, be real?

There’s a woman I know, an IT technician at the hospital. Her name’s Jenny, she’s worked there for years. Soon after I first started at the Christie, Jenny went to South Africa to visit her eldest son, who runs a vineyard there. Jenny had been saving up for the trip for ages. She and her closest friend – a radiography nurse named Sheila – were always talking about it: all the things she was going to do there, all the places she hoped to see.

While Jenny was away in Cape Town, Sheila had a massive stroke and died. It came completely out of the blue – there was nothing in Sheila’s medical records, no family history of any kind. It happened one lunchtime, in the hospital canteen, which was lucky if you think about it, although there turned out to be nothing anyone could do for her.

Sheila died on the Thursday after Jenny left, and the following Wednesday a whole load of us went to her funeral – anyone who wasn’t on shift, basically. The day after, another Thursday, the first of Jenny’s postcards arrived: a view of Table Mountain, and a short note, telling us about her flight and her safe arrival.

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