Everything you felt about you and me, I felt, too. But you should stop messaging me. I’m not who you think I am. Or perhaps I’m who you think I’m not.
God, what a mess. What a terrible mess.
Eddie
✓ Deleted, 00:12 a.m.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After a mere four days with my parents in Gloucestershire, I returned to London. I was to lunch in Richmond with Charles, our trustee; then I would speak at the palliative care conference he had helped organize. I would stay the night with Tommy and begin my five-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey back to Los Angeles early the next morning.
I sat on the train up to London in quiet stillness, unable to tell if I was numb, or simply resigned. I said the right things to Charles over lunch, and at the conference I spoke with precision but no passion. Charles, as I left, asked if I was all right. His concern brought me to the edge of tears, so I told him about my separation from Reuben.
‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ I begged. ‘We want to announce it properly at our next board meeting . . .’
‘Of course,’ Charles had said quietly. ‘I’m so very sorry, Sarah.’
I felt a terrible fraud.
Tomorrow , I promised myself, as I headed back to Central London on the train. Tomorrow I would regain control. Tomorrow I would get on a plane and I would fly back to LA, where I’d rediscover the numb of the sunshine, confidence and my best self. Tomorrow.
My train pulled into Battersea Park Station and I rested my head against the greasy window, watching the scrum on the opposite platform. People were squeezing themselves onto a train before those on board had had a chance to get out. Shoulders were braced, mouths compressed, eyes were down. All of them looked angry.
I watched a man in a red-and-white football kit fight his way off the train, a suit folded over his arm. He walked towards the empty benches outside my own train, and I stared blankly as he folded his suit carefully into a satchel. After a while he straightened out and checked his watch, glanced briefly at me and then away, then hauled the satchel over his shoulder.
And then, as my own train began to pull away from the platform, I turned my head to follow his back as it walked off towards the exit steps, because I suddenly registered what it said on his football strip. Old Robsonians . Est. 1996.
In the hope of having another Google route to Eddie, I had tried many times to remember the name of his football team. Beyond the word ‘Old’, though, nothing had materialized. My train began to accelerate and I closed my eyes, concentrating hard on the memory of Eddie’s football trophies. Old Robsonians ? Is that what they’d said?
I remembered Eddie’s finger, sliding a snake of dust off the top of one of them. Yes! Old Robsonians, The Elms, Battersea Monday. I was certain of it!
I looked back out of the window, even though the station had long since fallen away. Behind an old gasworks, the skeleton of a huge construction block was being fussed over by dizzying cranes.
That man plays in Eddie’s football team.
Old Robinson footnalk , I typed, but Google knew what I was looking for. A website was offered. Pictures of men I didn’t know. Links to fixtures; match reports; an article about their US tour. (Is that where he’d been? The States?)
In the corner of the page, I scrolled through their Twitter feed: match results, banter, more pictures of men I didn’t know. And then, a picture of a man I did know. It was dated a week ago. Eddie, in the background of a post-match pub photo, drinking a pint and talking to a man in a suit. Eddie.
After staring at the photo for a long time, I selected ‘About Us’.
Old Robsonians played on an AstroTurf pitch right by Battersea Park Railway Station on Monday nights. Their kick-off was at 8 p.m.
I checked my watch. It wasn’t yet seven. Why had the other man been there so early?
At Vauxhall, I teetered at the door of the train, unsure as to what I should do. There was no guarantee that Eddie was in London, or playing tonight. And according to the website, the football pitch was in the grounds of a school: I either marched right up to the perimeter to brazenly confront him or I didn’t go at all. It wasn’t like I could casually stroll by.
The train doors rolled shut and I remained on board.
At Victoria, I got off and stood, paralysed, on the crowded concourse. People bulleted and ricocheted off me; a woman told me outright not to ‘stand there like a fucking idiot’. I didn’t move. I scarcely even noticed: all I could think about was the possibility that Eddie, in less than an hour, might be playing football a few minutes from where I was standing.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dear You,
Today is 11 July – your birthday! Thirty-two years since you forced your way out into the bright starkness of the world, stunned fists moving in the air like little tentacles.
Out you came, into the warm, blurred glow of love. ‘She’s too small,’ I cried, when they let me visit you. I could feel your ribs, a hopelessly fragile palisade around your tiny beating heart. ‘She’s too small. How can she survive?’
But you did, Hedgehog. I remember now as then the fantastical brimming of love for which I was so wholly unprepared. I didn’t mind Mum and Dad spending all their time with you. I wanted them to. I wanted your ribs to grow stronger, to strengthen and thicken around that tiny lamp of life in your chest. I wanted you to stay in hospital for months, not days. ‘She’s fine,’ Mum and Dad told me, again and again. Dad made me a banoffee pie because I was so afraid for you I cried. And yet you were fine. That heartbeat went on and on, through the day and through the night, on and on as seasons changed and you grew and grew.
Did you know it was your birthday today, Hedgehog? Has anyone told you? Did someone make you a cake, covered in chocolate stars, just how you liked it? Did anyone sing for you ?
Well, if not, I did. Maybe you heard me. Maybe you’re with me now, while I write this letter. Giggling about how much neater your handwriting is than mine, even though you’re younger than me. Maybe you’re outside, playing in your tree house, or reading girls’ magazines in your den up on Broad Ride.
Maybe you’re everywhere. I like that idea most. Up there in the pink-flushed clouds. Down here in the dampness of daybreak.
Wherever I go, I look for you. And wherever I am, I see you.
Me xxxxx
Chapter Twenty-Five
On my last night in London I turned up at a six-a-side football game in Battersea in the hope of finding a man I’d met once, a man who’d never called.
What I did that night would lie way beyond the splintered edges of sanity. But as I stood on the concourse at Victoria Station earlier on, trying to reason with myself, I had realized that I wanted to see Eddie more than I cared about the consequences.
And now here I was, crammed into a hot corner of the 7.52 to London Bridge via Crystal Palace, first stop Battersea Park. Less than two minutes’ walk from the station I would find an AstroTurf pitch, and on it – my stomach flipped like a February pancake – Eddie David. In a football kit, warming up for his eight-o’clock match. Right now. Passing to a teammate. Stretching his quads.
His body. His actual, physical body. I closed my eyes and crushed a surge of longing.
The train was slowing down already. The squeal of brakes, a pulsing wave of commuters forcing me down the steps, and then – suddenly, shockingly – I was standing on Battersea Park Road. Behind me, the amplified bark of ticket-sellers’ voices, an echoing busker’s guitar. Above me, the heave and groan of the train viaducts and thickset white clouds like beaten meringues. And ahead of me, somewhere up an unpaved lane, Eddie David.
I stood there for some time, breathing slowly. Two further waves of passengers poured out around me. One of them, wearing a red-and-white football shirt with ‘PAGLIERO’ written in black on the back, sprinted up the lane towards the pitches, trying as he ran to send a text message and affix shin pads to his legs. His green satchel swung round and hit him in the face, but he carried on running.
That man knows Eddie , I thought. He’s probably known him for years.
As the pitches slid into view, everything that I’d seen online was confirmed. The pitches were surrounded on all sides by high wire fences, train viaducts, buildings. There would be nowhere to hide. And yet here I was, all five foot nine of me, striding ever closer in my smart conference blouse.