‘Good ones?’
Were they? Childhood images of me throwing up in the car after eating a giant bag of pick n mix my dad had bought me on holiday in Harrogate one year, my brother and I shovelling sweet after sweet into our mouths as we traipsed, bored, round Ripon Castle; hours spent agonising over whether to splash out on a 10 pence Wham! Bar, a twenty-pence piece clutched in my damp palm; Greg presenting me with a bag of Haribos for our first year of being together, slipping the ring sweet onto my finger and asking me to marry him.
‘Mostly,’ I said.
‘Good.’
He set the bag down on the bench between us. ‘Help yourself.’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Please. I can’t stop once I start. You’ll be doing me a favour.’
‘Well, if you put it like that,’ I said, diving in once more and grabbing a few soft chews between my thumb and finger, holding them in my palm.
It was unexpected, this moment. It wasn’t often I spoke to strangers, and especially not to men. Since Greg had died more than two years earlier, I’d locked myself away from the world, and certainly didn’t welcome chats with random men on the way home from work. Rachel, my best friend, said it was because I was terrified of someone asking me about Greg, but it was more than that. Since Greg died, I didn’t feel as though I had any room inside me to take on any more people. What if I let someone in and they did even more damage? I’m not sure my poor, fractured heart could cope with that.
Yet there was something about this man that felt calming; that felt as though sitting in silence, chewing sweets together, was all that needed to be happening at this moment in time. It was a surprise.
I watched a bird hop across the patch of grass in front of us. The sun had dipped even lower now, behind the row of trees, and I shivered as a breeze made its way through the gaps between the slats of wood.
‘Would you like to borrow my jumper?’
‘Sorry?’ I turned to find him holding out a blue sweatshirt. I was on the verge of saying no, on autopilot, when instead I blurted out, ‘Thank you.’ I took the jumper and slipped it over my head gratefully, the scent of washing powder filling my nose.
The kids were packing up their game of rounders now, pulling on coats, picking up bags and heading in differentdirections across the park. I should probably be going home too. But something was holding me here a little longer.
‘I’m Nick by the way. Nick Flynn,’ the man beside me said, holding his hand across the gap between us. I looked down at it for a moment, then held my own out. As our skin touched I felt a jolt of something, like a spark of static, and I flinched. I wasn’t sure whether he’d noticed anything. His skin felt cool to the touch, and something inside me felt odd, a little out of place.
‘Emma Vickers,’ I said, tucking my hands beneath my legs against the cool grain of the wood. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You too. So, you said you’ve just moved in round here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How are you finding it?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s fine.’
‘You don’t sound too sure.’
I sighed. I never talked about Greg. It hurt too much even to think about the hole he’d left inside me. Rachel told me it would be good to tell people about him, that talking about him, about how much he loved me, about the happy times we had together, would be much better for me than keeping everything all scrunched up inside. But somehow I just couldn’t find the words. How do you tell someone that you’ve lost the person who made you you, without sounding like you’ve gone insane?
‘Sorry, I don’t mean to pry,’ Nick said, and I realised I must have been quiet for slightly too long.
‘No, it’s okay,’ I said. ‘I lost someone and needed a fresh start.’ It sounded so trite, so insignificant. And yet that one word, ‘someone’, contained everything.
‘I lost someone too.’
‘Oh?’ I turned to face him and he was still looking down at the ground, not at me. When he did finally turn his head, there was a pain in his eyes that I recognised. ‘My wife died. Two and a half years ago.’
I stared at him, at the dark glow of his eyes, the shadows on his cheeks in the fading light of the sun, and I saw him. Really saw him.
Sorry wasn’t what he needed to hear, I understood that from the endless times I’d heard it from well-meaning friends and acquaintances. All it did, for me at least, was make me feel more alone than ever.
‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’
His eyes widened and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards and I knew I’d said the right thing. He gave a nod and looked down at the paper bag of sweets on the bench between us, his long eyelashes creating spider-like shadows on his cheeks.
