“How did you find out for sure?”
Nicola takes a careful mouthful of carrot, chewing slowly.
“Well, he came back,” she says softly. “He could have stayed on, found graduate funding and tried to write. But he wanted to help your grandparents, and he wanted to be with me. When he finished his degree, he said we should get a flat together and it was my turn to focus on school. I was so shocked! Straight to living together. Uni instead of marriage. What a scandal,” she says. Oliver is hanging on every word, drinking in the images of them as he’s seen in old photos, terrible haircuts and healthy, handsome faces. He has a thousand more questions bubbling up inside him, but he doesn’t want to risk stopping her from goingon. He’s not sure they’ve ever talked like this before, as Nicola the wife and Oliver the son. It’s always been the nurse and the footballer, no ghosts to speak of. It was safer that way, almost like it never happened. “I think it made me nervous how much I wanted to say yes. I didn’t want to tie him down, I was afraid he’d feel trapped. Everyone gave him quite a bit of trouble for leaving, for going to Oxford. They thought he was up himself, with his literary salons and his big degree. But he was just smart, he loved learning. He wanted to read everything. I didn’t want him to come back to prove anything, I wanted to be sure it was for me. So I told him I’d go to school wherever I first got an offer, and if it was London he had a deal.” It’s pragmatic, such a grown-up and feminist sensibility. It’s soNicola,every inch the mother he knows. “But he was so happy when Royal Free came calling. I knew he loved me then. I told him, ‘What are the odds?’ and we moved right in, engaged a year later. I didn’t admit it until later, but University Hospital in Southampton accepted me a week earlier.”
“What?” Oliver gasps, shocked into laughter. “Seriously?”
“When I got the letter, I was so disappointed!” She has such a pleasant laugh, giggling like a schoolgirl. Nicola is flushed with wine and reminiscence; Oliver feels like he’s getting gossip he isn’t quite supposed to know. “I knew then, what I really wanted, for me, was to be where he was. So I decided to hedge my bets…I just wanted to be on his team. I wanted us to choose to live our life together. To choose our life in Camden.”
“Team” thumps and echoes, soft in Oliver’s ears like his own heartbeat. Who wouldn’t want that? Even if it scares you, even if it’s a risk. Maybe especially then.
“If you knew then that it would mean you’d be alone now, would you do it again? You don’t have to tell me, I mean—I just—” He has to know, even if he doesn’t have a right to. Was it all worth it to her? If he lost something like Dad, would hesurvive it? Nicola did, somehow, but she’s always been stronger than everyone else.
“It’s all right, Ollie,” she tells him, staring him down with the same green eyes as his. “You’re allowed to be curious, my love. I’m happy to tell you. It was hard to learn to do everything all over again, without his company. I’d be up half the night crying and then at two in the morning I’d make a cake for you to have after school, just to keep my hands busy. I’m sure everyone thought I was raving. But we had each other. We weren’t alone. And you were so strong. I remember thinking, sometimes,Who’s taking care of who?”
“I mostly remember football, to be honest,” Oliver admits, shamefaced. “I just wanted to go to the academy. The more I ran, the less sad I was.”
“You were just a wee thing,” she murmurs. “I thought it was too much pressure, all that football right after the funeral. And I knew your dad didn’t want you to. I was afraid to betray him, his memory.” Oliver feels choked and guilty. He was afraid of that too. “But the academy offered room and board with your scholarship, and more than anything, more than school, I wanted you to have a stable place.” Oliver sits bolt upright, nearly knocking his water glass over. He didn’t know that’s why he got to stay, to keep playing football instead of grieving. “Everything felt like it was falling apart. We had some benefits, but I was terrified of making ends meet. Your grandparents wanted to help us, but they couldn’t. Then your youth manager, Alec, such a nice man, he came over here in person. You were upstairs with schoolwork and I wanted to send him away, I was so ashamed of the mess, but he asked for just a minute of my time.” Oliver can picture it perfectly, Alec in his tracksuit and his graying beard, those horrible nine-year-old days where, alone in his room, he counted the hours between training sessions and heard Nicola pacing all through the night. “He was so sorry to bother us, he only wantedto tell me it would be worth it. He promised to look after you. He said you had such a bright future with Camden. He said he thought you might be less lonely with a group of friends to play with every day. I felt he really cared for you. My little star…”
“I didn’t know about that,” Oliver murmurs. “I always thought I was so lucky you let me stay, like I’d gotten away with something.” The man he became, football star with a big bad secret, all traces back to that year, when he started at the academy, gaining a new life to make up for the ruins of the old one. Oliver retreated into football because he couldn’t get hurt on the pitch, not even when he was fouled or injured. Notreallyhurt, not in the same way he and Mum were, not in the way Dad was by the end. Looking back at it now, at the small version of himself in Camden green, he wonders if he’s still on the practice pitch, if he ever left at all, or if he’s been running drills alone after dark the whole span of his life. Maybe Leo was the first one to ever find him there and ask what he was up to. Even now, he’s not sure of the answer.
“Oliver,” Nicola says, taking both of his big hands in hers.
“I am lucky, Mum,” he tells her. “Lucky to have you. And to have had Dad. You both did so well by me.”
She squeezes hard and he squeezes back. In the compressed air between their palms he can feel Dad’s presence, holding them both together through time and space. He wonders what the other Oliver would think of him now: his hair cut and his house and his pace on the ball. He wonders what Dad might think of Leonardo Davies-Villanueva.
“He’d be so proud,” Mum whispers, answering his silent question. “He would have beenthrilledthat he was wrong. You playing for England, the pride of Camden—you could have held it over him forever. He loved you, Ollie, more than anything. He’d have given anything to watch you grow up.”
“I can feel him with me,” he says back, just as quiet. He can see his father on the touchline, watching all the many matches he’s played in. He wants to go to him, even though it’s impossible. “There’s so much I want to tell him.”
Nicola blinks the last of her tears away and nods insistently, shaking their joined hands in tune with it.
“He would have wanted to hear it all. And you know he would want to know every detail about all your love life. That’s why I have to be nosy now, in his memory, you see. So who is it? Tell me everything!”
Her excitement slips over his skin like water, choking and drowning him. The voice in his head, the one who is beginning to sound suspiciously similar to Willem, asks:Why have you never told Nicola?
If she didn’t know,Oliver replies bitterly,then at least no one else has to be as secret-keeping and duplicitous as I feel, yeah?It’s something for him to deal with alone; he’s not asking anyone to lie but Maggie, sweet Maggie, who’s always been just what he needs her to be even when he can’t be anything for her in return. And Leo. His Leo, who has stars in his eyes and no temperament for shame.
Nicola observes his silence, his lack of enthusiasm for the change in subject.
“Well,” she says briskly but not unkindly. “Anyone who caught your eye must be rather striking.” She rises from the table and touches his shoulder on her way to load the dishwasher, leaving him silent but feeling like a liar anyway. Nicola spoke so carefully, not a gendered pronoun in sight, no use of “pretty” or “beautiful,” though Leo is of course both of those things. It would be so simple to tell her, even to allude to it. The opening is right there, a door swinging on its hinges. He can’t do it. Mum doesn’t press him, just lets him follow with the glasses,wondering why he’s such a coward. When the kitchen’s clean and he says good night, Oliver reaches for her so he can give her a hug, breathe in the particular washing powder and antiseptic scent, something comforting in his memory and in the here and now.
“I’ll come to the Everton match, shall I?” she asks in the foyer.
“If you wanted, you could come to the derby instead—you’d be an away fan, at Kilburn, but I could get you a nice seat, we have a block in the away stand. No Rovers allowed.”
“The great battle of North London,” she says in a somber voice. “I haven’t been in ages. Oh, there’s nothing quite like it. I’ll be there with bells on.”
Oliver kisses her cheek and gives her one more hug, a nice tight squeeze, just because he can. Then he pedals away, he takes himself south of Regent’s Park, bumping down the cobblestones all the way to Maggie’s door, whacking the buzzer until he can hear footfalls on the stairs. She answers in her dressing gown, peeved and wreathed with cigarette smoke. He waves it away from them irritably, but when it clears, the hardness in her jaw makes him almost miss the stench.
“If you’ve shown up with bad news, please go home. I was in the bath.”
“I meant to stop for flowers,” Oliver says dumbly. “To bring you a bouquet, like.”
“Ollie,” she replies, sighing so heavily it shakes her shoulders, her beautiful features wan in the single flickering entryway light. “That’s not your job. You’re going to give my other suitors the wrong idea.”
He probably deserves that.
