Come Again by Robert Webb

Author:Robert Webb [Webb, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2019-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The October air had turned sharp and Kate hugged her coat around her. She headed towards the centre of the campus, unwilling to return to the busy bar or her empty room, although neither could make her feel as lonely as the boy she’d just left.

It was as if her favourite movie was lost and she’d been forced to sit through its shittest imaginable prequel. As if someone had recorded over the only copy of Casablanca and replaced it with two hours of Rick Blaine standing in front of a shaving mirror, combing his eyebrows and failing to get his bow-tie straight; rehearsing his coolest lines and getting them all slightly wrong. ‘Here’s looking at you, krid’ and ‘We’ll always have Doris’ and ‘I think Ben Okri should go back to short stories to refresh his style.’

Why hadn’t it annoyed her the first time round? Luke’s weird lies and affectations? The goose crap on the path glistened and she looked up at the full moon for inspiration.

Well, the first time it was charming because she was in love. And being in love is when you truly live in the present: when every moment is a discovery, every tiny detail is pregnant with meaning. Grief though … grief is the opposite of meaning; grief is where the present can’t breathe; where the past is everywhere you look; where every new moment is dead on arrival. Grief is Groundhog Day.

Oh yes, that and the fact that she was furious with him. Furious for the dumb line about missing her. Just for that second in the bar she had imagined a glimpse of the man she knew was trapped in the body of the boy in front of her. But no. Luke really was a stranger and the man was yet to grow around him. And not just grow – the mature Luke would take work to build and Kate had a pretty good idea that it was she who had laid about half of the bricks. No, we don’t lie to people to sound cool. No, sounding cool isn’t very important in the first place. No, we don’t expect the person we live with to clean the flat because she was born with a uterus. No, we don’t go into a two-hour sulk when we’re upset and wait for someone to ask us what the matter is. No, being very serious does not make you clever. And being clever is less important than being kind.

Yes, I’m the Girl From the Future. I always was. I knew things. Why didn’t you?

And was she supposed to do it all again? For another twenty-eight years?

Kate took a left past Derwent College. The pendulum of her thoughts took the inevitable swing back to self-reproach. So how kind had she been today? How wise? What was she doing right now if not sulking? Okay, maybe these were extraordinary circumstances, but aren’t they always? Do you wait until you feel kind before you behave kindly or do

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