‘Shit, it’s not a woman is it? Tell me it is.’
I finally looked up. He was peering at me from over the top of his half-drunk pint, his gaze boring into me like a laser.
‘Sort of.’
He took another mouthful then slammed his glass on the table. ‘Who is she?’
I took a slow sip of my beer, trying to form the words to explain what had happened that afternoon. Andy watched me the whole time, the frown in his forehead deepening the longer he waited.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said. ‘I just got chatting to someone today.’
‘Right. Who? Where?’
I puffed out my cheeks. ‘At the bandstand.’
His eyebrows beetled upwards, his eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.
‘I went there, as usual,’ I continued. ‘Normally it’s empty, but today there was a woman sitting on the bench.’ I swallowed. ‘I sat next to her, hoping she’d leave. You know, let me have my space back. But she looked so sad that I just ended up asking her if she was okay.’ I looked up at him. ‘Turns out she’d lost someone too. Someone special. We chatted a bit, you know. About Dawn, and her husband.’
Andy studied me thoughtfully, as though trying to work out what to say. He might have been my twin but I definitely couldn’t read his mind right now.
‘And what did she look like, this woman?’
I thought about her hair, glowing like fire in the sunlight. About her porcelain skin, the firecracker spark between us.
‘She was pretty fit.’ I grinned, and the mood was lightened.
‘Good boy,’ Andy said, holding his hand up for a high five. I smacked mine against it obediently.
‘Seriously though, she was lovely.’
Andy nodded. ‘You know this is the first time you’ve so much as looked at a woman since you lost Dawn?’
‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘It probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s good to know I’m not dead inside.’
Andy leaned forward, pressed his hand against my forearm. ‘Tell me you at least got her number?’
I shook my head. ‘We’ve arranged to meet again next week.’
‘Where?’
‘Back at the bandstand.’
His eyebrows did their beetling thing again. I knew why he was so surprised. The bandstand was the place – apart from our home – where I felt closest to Dawn. Despite the graffiti, and the broken slat in the bench and the peeling paint across the roof, it had been a place that was always special to us. It was the place where we’d met and the place where I’d proposed. After her diagnosis – ovarian cancer, which explained why we’d struggled to get pregnant – we went there every week, just sitting on the bench holding hands as the rain hammered down on the rickety old roof, or the sun shone through the gaps in it, or a freezing wind chilled us to the bone.
Even now, I still went there at least once a week, just to sit and think about her, to remember her. Which was why thebandstand being the place where I’d met Emma was such big news to Andy.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It just felt like the right thing to do. I can’t explain it.’
He stood suddenly and I looked up at him. ‘I’m going to get us both another pint and then you’re going to tell me everything. And I want every single detail about the woman who has miraculously brought my little brother back to life.’
I watched as he disappeared towards the bar and tried to work out what I was going to tell him about a woman I still knew next to nothing about.
Hours later, back home alone and full of beer and curry, I lay on the sofa and stared blindly at an old episode ofFrasierI’d seen dozens of times. It had been one of Dawn’s and my favourite shows, and we could recite almost every word of every episode. Today, Daphne was still oblivious to the fact that Niles was in love with her – an early episode – so I turned the sound down low and let it wash over me.
I felt strange tonight. Out of sorts in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
But I also felt another emotion, one that I couldn’t seem to shake. Guilt.
