Ugh!Not Osian, not when I’m about to sleep. Now I’ll be up all night thinking about him.
I reach for my phone to turn on my music app and play something sleepy, and there, right on the lock screen, another email notification. From Osian.
Evie: the bringer of hope,
I still can’t make myself recall you from school, and believe me, I’ve tried a lot. I just can’t picture you.
But, Raff was talking to Ellen Jackson the other day, she’s a psychologist who comes to talk to some of thePerllans. They were discussing something they call state-dependant memory. It seems our memories are often linked to the emotional or physical state in which they were formed. With a traumatic or profound experience, memories from just before that event may become inaccessible.
I wouldn’t call going to the Argentinian Open traumatic, but it was bloody profound. It turned my life upside down.
Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to say. Despite my memory loss, I know for sure that we met. And I know you made a powerful impression on me. How do I know this?
I never buy cut flowers because they seem dead to me. I always buy flowering plants, and often rare or unusual ones. And when Kirsten was sick, I used to buy her something every week. A different potted flower, a small bush or even, once, a mini pepper tree. I planted every one in our small garden or in hanging baskets against the windowsill where she could see them.
Where did that interest in living plants come from, if not from you?
He’s right. I too think of cut flowers as dead. Could he be right, that our encounter planted – yes, planted – the seeds of gardening in him? I stay awake most of the night turning this idea around in my head. Letting it make me happy, then make me sad.
Two days later, there’s another email from him.
Evie: the bringer of hope,
Do you mind me calling you that? Seems to me you have always been like a light in the background to my life.
And a few days after that:
Evie: the bringer of hope,
People often ask why I left professional tennis.
It was never my passion, only something I was good at, and it was exciting. I loved winning. That fight against the odds when your legs feel like bricks and your back hurts with every movement. Your opponent seems so much better than you, but you make yourself go on. Play through the pain and force your legs to run after every ball until you win the game, the set and finally the match. There is nothing that compares to that victory. The only problem is that twenty-four hours later, it’s in the past.
Winning the cup today will not stop me crashing out of the next tournament in the first round.
Not plants.
Plants are forever. I have you to thank for finding my real passion.
I don’t know why I’m writing this. Except that I’ve never had a best friend until I met you. Some things you can only tell a best friend. Or your private diary. And I’ve never been the kind of man who keeps a journal.
Maybe you are my journal.
Chapter Fifty
He emails me most mornings. Sometimes a short message. Sometimes longer. And like a fool, I look forward to every single one.
Even worse. I answer him.
Only in my own head, obviously. But that’s worse. I spend the whole day thinking up things to tell him.
“Are you in love?” Sue, my boss, asks one afternoon in early September.
I nearly jump out of my skin. “What?” I hadn’t heard her come into the conservatory where I’d been mixing plant feed into the compost.
“You keep mixing and remixing that pot. I think you can put it down now.”
“Sorry.” My face heats with embarrassment.
