You and Me by Nicola Rayner

Author:Nicola Rayner [Rayner, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-08-26T17:00:00+00:00

33

I can’t stop looking at Caroline’s beer. She arrived at the café in Waterloo before me and ordered first and now I’m behaving as if I’ve never seen a pint before. It’s my fault. The café I suggested has morphed into a late-night drinking spot. I dropped in with Mother years ago and enjoyed a custard tart and a cup of tea, but now, after dark, it’s different. The lights have been dimmed, candles lit in jars on the small round tables, cocktail menus laid out. The pale features of Caroline’s face are shadowed in candlelight.

‘It’s nice to come for an adult night out,’ she says, looking around us at the speakeasy style of the place – old gramophones and bric-a-brac, fairy lights and bare brick walls.

I wanted her to like the place, to admire it in the way she is, but the drink in front of her is so distracting that the thought of it has inflated like a balloon, pushing out everything else in my mind. Fiona was right, after all, and Caroline’s not even trying to hide it. But perhaps she trusts me in a way she doesn’t trust Fiona.

The words on the menu blur in front of me, as I imagine the things we can’t talk about stacking up on the table between us. Fiona. Charles. Dickie. Her drinking. I wish we could sweep the secrets away. I wish we could start again.

‘How was your day?’ she asks.

‘It was fine, quite busy at this time of year. How about you?’

‘Lovely.’ There’s a flush to her cheeks, probably the alcohol. ‘It was my day off and we went swimming and then to Baby Boogie in the afternoon.’

I imagine her driving around Ealing with Daisy in the back of the car. My eyes keep returning to the glass on the table, a ring of condensation gathering at its base. I know I shouldn’t be looking but it keeps drawing my gaze back.

‘We need to keep busy at this time of year,’ Caroline is saying, as if everything is just the same. ‘With Christmas coming up, it’s going to be difficult.’

‘I always find it hard too,’ I agree. ‘On my own.’

It’s true. I struggle at Christmas. It’s the one day – as Charles Dickens demonstrated so well – that we can’t escape ourselves. Where the reality of my life is held up to me like a mirror – no Mother, no Ellie, no Rose. There’s so much I can forgo – so much I have forgone. Stockings and crackers and shared jokes and quarrelling over the meal preparations. Mother’s bread sauce recipe, which I inherited, handwritten on a yellowing scrap of paper, but which never tastes the same now she’s gone. I would give up every single Christmas accessory – all of it, I barter silently, if I could have them back.

‘We’ll be on our own too,’ Caroline says, turning the glass in her hand.

Anger tingles in my arms, my belly. The fact that Caroline says, ‘We’ll be on our own,’ says it all.

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