And he’d written,I love you, too, Cass.My God, he had. So much. But to protect her from a loser like him, he’d lied and pretended he didn’t love her anymore. Was this his chance to atone? Not to get back together but to apologise and maybe explain? Would she even want that?
‘I presume Carli thinks I won’t be here,’ Niall asked Eilidh.
‘Yeah, no offence, Noo Noo, but that might have been a bit of a deal-breaker.’
‘Okay, none taken.’ Niall had an idea. It wouldn’t fix the problem of him and Carli, but it was something useful to do. He examined the itinerary, checked the time zones on his phone to work out the time difference, then pushed his chair back and stood up. Waving the piece of paper in the air, he said, ‘I have to make a phone call. Is it okay if I use your library, Mum?’
‘Of course, darling. Take as long as you need.’
Niall walked through the dark, winding corridors of the house until he found the library. Always a place of peace and solace. There was a landline there that would be far more reliable than any mobile out here at the semi-remote location of his folks’ house. And privacy to avoid looking like a pathetic excuse for a man clamouring for redemption with a minuscule, try-hard gesture.
Amanda’s library was a large-ish room with walls lined from bottom to top with romance novels, spanning decades. His mother had been an avid fan and collector of the genre since she was young.
Today, the room was still and cool. Niall went over to the large desk in the far right corner. He granted himself a moment to stare out the window into the garden where a blackbird was pecking at the grass and a squirrel was scampering up the sycamore tree. The damp autumn day meant even the swell on the sea was temperate. He was too tired to surf anyway, although Sean would try to persuade him otherwise.
Although everything was muted and so much darker than Sydney, it suited him. The sky was bruised rather than brilliant, and the foliage deep, sodden russet, crimson and apricot. Niall loved the warmth of Australia, waking up and chucking on a t-shirt and shorts, but he missed this. It was atmospheric, spoke to his soul somehow. Not everyone gotit, but Scottish weather made him feel human and safe. Like the world was full of possibility, and here for a hug if you needed it. Sunshine was incredible, and it wasn’t always glorious in Sydney, but nowhere made wild and windy as strikingly seductive as Scotland.
Niall sat on the large leather chair at the wide desk and punched the digits onto the landline keypad, then waited for the line to connect.
As tinny hold music played, the room sucked him back into the past. Saying goodbye to Carli in this room was like having half his being hollowed out. And as a sixteen-year-old boy who’d never been in love, Niall had no idea what to do with the sensation of being completely off balance. Having raw feelings tug him around like a wave he’d been caught under, churning and tumbling, trying to get to the surface and breathe air again. Undoubtedly, he’d executed some wrong moves in the process.
A voice on the other end of the phone cut in.
Half an hour later, the phone was back in its cradle and he let out a huge breath. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
‘Did you make your phone call?’ Jamie asked when Niall appeared in the kitchen again.
‘Aye. All good. Hey, who’s picking up Carli from the airport tomorrow?’
Eilidh, lowered a glass of wine she’d been about to raise to her mouth, an expression of slight alarm on her face. ‘Me. Why?’
‘Will you tell her I’m here? I’m going to make myself scarce for a bit, until she’s settled in. We can’t avoid each other, but she doesn’t need me in her face the minute she arrives.’
‘Very noble of you, Noo Noo.’
‘Not noble, the right thing to do.’ Part of sorting out thepast meant manning up and doing what was right. Give Eilidh a chance to explain to Carli and Carli a chance to sort out the idea in her head that they were both about to be rewound seventeen years into their impassioned and messed-up past. Although, it was he who had to be prepared. He was the one with the explaining to do.
After dinner and a fantastic evening catching up with everyone, Niall went upstairs to his old childhood bedroom, now a spare room cleared out by his mum. Except for one thing. The remaining drawer of things from his boyhood, that he stalled on throwing away. How many guests had stayed in here and poked around where all his precious memories were? He pulled at the top drawer, only to find it locked. A small mercy.
The key wasn’t hard to find in a little ceramic box on the mantelpiece.
Niall opened the drawer, ready to be slapped across the face by the past.
Letters. Mostly, the drawer was filled with different coloured letters. A rainbow stack of love. All those Carli had sent from Australia. Maybe he should have thrown them away but if doing that now jarred, there would have been no way he could have in the past.
Niall lifted the letters out of the drawer and laid them on top of the chest. Peering into the space, there were other items. Curled in a dark corner, a frayed leather bracelet Carli had made him and a bunch of spares because she’d kept making them. He retrieved the leather band and laid it round his wrist again. But the bracelet was like a lasso around his waist, tugging him back into the past. There he was in maths class fiddling with the softcontours of the band to calm himself down or surfing until the sun set with a little bit of Carli on his arm. And when she’d left Kinshore, he hadn’t taken this off until it had fallen off and had to be put away for fear of being lost forever. His gut coiled at that memory.
Lost forever.
He’d lost so much more than a bracelet.
Niall moved onto a school jotter, stolen from the cupboard at school when the teacher wasn’t looking. It was covered in pictures of Robert Burns. He nearly laughed out loud at the kid he’d been. He’d printed off those pictures on his dad’s printer, Jimmy perplexed at why he was interested in photos of Scotland’s national poet. Niall had cheekily asked his dad why hewouldn’tbe interested and how many of Burns’ poems could he recite off hand. His dad had almost managed the whole ofTo a Mouse,with Niall finishing it and leaving his father even more bamboozled at his son, who was by all accounts failing English yet seemed to have a grasp of some of the country’s most revered poetry.
Niall rubbed the pages of the jotter apart to read all the poems he’d written for Carli. Okay, the poems Rabbie had written and that he’d carefully selected for their meaning and copied out in his best handwriting for her. The lines fromAe Fond Kissthe fondest.
But to see her was to love her.
Love but her and love forever.
