The island wasn’t Donald’s saviour.
Dearest Marcy,
I hope you are well and the gossip is not taking too much of a toll on you. I’m staying in Betws-yCoed for the next few weeks while the inquest is heard. At present, what I feel is confusing and I don’t know how to make sense of it. Julia was my wife, but she wasn’t the person I thought she’d be, but I never thought she was unhappy enough to take herself off a boat and into the ocean.
I keep wondering if she’d worked out how I felt about you and that was why. But I’m not sure she had noticed it. She was so wrapped up in her own maladies.
I’m sorry. All I want right now is to be with you, but then I feel guilt for wanting that. Maybe we can meet in Llandudno next weekend, if you can escape the guesthouse. I can book a hotel for us.
If you’d like that.
Kindest,warmest regards,
Yours forever,
Don
Anya
October
Ichecked my phone and saw a text from Gabe.
Have fun this evening x
Simple, straightforward, non-committal. We’d message each other several times a day. Mornings; break times at work; lunch times when I got five minutes away from my pupils - usually in the bathroom; before after school meetings started and then, in the evenings, we’d speak to each other. Just about our day, or the letters, or the projects he was working on and his paintings. Me moving home.
I stood in line on the escalators, dropping down steeply to the Tube. London during rush hour was now my least favourite experience: outside was cold, the underground hot. There was an inevitable rush as the tide of people caught every passenger as if they were driftwood and I ended up with an uncomfortable sweat.
No one spoke on the Tube or made eye contact. If someone stumbled when the tube took off like it had been rubbed in Vaseline, no one acknowledged it, pretending that it hadn’t happened.
I was on my way to meet up with my colleagues and I was the reason for the meet up. We were heading to a swanky restaurant called The Mount Street Social and I’d been told I wasn’t paying for even a slice of bread. It was my leaving celebration. I had one more week left to work at my school and I’d be back to the island, back home. I should’ve finished at Christmas, but I’d come to an agreement with the head teacher to leave early. A previous teacher at the school was looking to return to work and could easily step into my role, which meant the dreaded half term of counting down the days wasn’t going to happen.
The Tube was littered with adverts on the walls, one after the other, equally spaced. I got bored of looking and instead glanced at the people travelling in the opposite direction. A man with long hair caught my eye. He was checking his phone, a huge backpack on his back. Blood was fed through my veins faster than it needed to be.
Gabe.
Gabe was in London.
As soon as the escalators ended I took out my phone from my bag. No signal as there never was on the underground.
The journey took forever, the dully quiet sea of people making me long for the Welsh lilt and chatter that was constantly there. And I wanted to phone Gabe, find out if it really was him I’d seen or if my imagination had conjured it up in a fit of hope.
He hadn’t said he was planning a visit. But I’d gotten the impression that he was trying to step out of his comfort zone quietly, not announcing it beforehand in case he had a false start. I got that. I’d told very few people about my interview at the school in Bangor until I found out I had got the job. There was no point in letting people plan for a future that might not be able to exist.
I walked quickly up the escalators and scanned out of the Tube station, heading for the first quiet place where I could use my phone. I hit his name in my favourites’ list and waited for him to pick up, half expecting to hear the sounds of the bar behind him, familiar voices putting the world to rights.
Instead I heard the sounds of a train.
“Hey.” His voice was quiet, as if he didn’t want to be overheard.
“I think I just saw you. Coming up the escalators from the Tube at Euston.” I didn’t know whether to be excited or upset that he hadn’t told me.
“I think you did. I’ve been to a gallery. They wanted to speak to me in person about showing some of my work, but they couldn’t travel up to the island. The owner is in a wheelchair.”
I felt my chest stretch, my heart the size of Australia.
“You had no problem getting there? How did you get to the station?” There was no train station on the Island. He’d have had to have gotten a lift to Bangor.
