‘How old are you?’ I said.
‘I’m thirty-seven,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘I’m thirty-one. Which means in 2019 I’ll be fifty-one. That’s… that’s pretty old.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not that old.’
‘I bet you wouldn’t date a fifty-one-year-old.’
‘I would if it was Brad Pitt.’
‘Brad Pitt’s in his fifties?!’ I shook my head. ‘God that’s weird.’
‘How old is Prince William?’ Emma said.
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure. About fifteen I think.’
‘He’s married with three kids now.’
‘Wow.’
‘Oh, and is Our Price still a thing?’
‘Yes. Don’t tell me that closes down, too?’
She holds her hands out. ‘When people stop buying CDs and streaming music it all falls apart.’
‘What’s streaming?’
‘It’s when you listen to music through the internet.’
‘So, no more CDs?’
She shrugged. ‘Hardly any. But vinyl makes a comeback if that’s any consolation.’
‘It is a bit.’ I stared out into the park, my head spinning. The kids playing football had packed up and gone home now, and the twilight was beginning to pull across the sky, pushing the spring sunshine away. Shadows loomed and I shivered.
‘Let’s not talk about the future any more.’
‘Sorry. It must be freaky.’
I shrugged. Emma pressed her hand against my arm and as the usual spark juddered through me, I turned to her. ‘I’m not sure what this is or what it means that it’s happened, but I’m glad it has. I’m glad to have met you.’
‘I am too.’
5
EMMA
You wait two years to meet someone you can imagine a future with, and then they live twenty years in the past.
Of course they bloody do.
Nick and I talked endlessly that night, telling each other stories from our lives, about our likes and dislikes. I learned that he loved rummaging for treasure in charity shops, that he preferred baths to showers, that when he was eight he spent three months in hospital with a mystery infection, and that he supported Ipswich football team because his grandad did but had always been hopeless at playing football. I told him about my love for musicals, how I collected a programme from every one I’d been to see but always felt sad that I hadn’t gone further with my own acting career; I told him how Rachel and I loved to go to the cinema and watch sad films, but that Rachel always tells me I’m cold-hearted because it takes a lot to make me cry; and that I used to go horse-riding until I fell off and broke my leg at the age of eleven and never got on a horse again. We steered clear of talking about the twenty-year gap between us, and just focused on getting to know one another, as though everything was normal.
Later, as it got chilly, he told me a bit more about Dawn.
‘Everyone loved her,’ he said, smiling sadly. ‘She had such a big heart and I’m sure everyone only invited us to places because they liked her so much and I was just a tag-on. I remember this one time just after we got married, and she took me to a work do with her – she was a carer in a nursing home a few miles away from here. The old people adored her, but one of them, Marjorie, seemed to take an instant dislike to me from the moment I arrived. She was rude to me all night, gave me daggers across the room that were so sharp that I could almost feel them on my skin, and she turned away if I tried to speak to her. It didn’t bother me particularly, but Dawn was really upset. She loved Marjorie and she really wanted her to like me. So before we left at the end of the evening, she went over to have a word with her. She was over there for a few minutes, and when she walked back over she had a huge grin on her face. “Marjorie wants to speak to you,” she told me, so I dutifully went over, expecting the old woman to apologise to me or something. But when I got there and sat down beside her she looked at me and said, in a voice that carried across the entire room, “You’re far too pleased with yourself young man. You need to be a bit more grateful that you have such a wonderful woman and stop standing around looking so bloomin’ smug about it.”’
