Girl Unknown Read Free Page A

she was telling me. I kept thinking of Linda with a baby – my baby. How could she not have told me? How could she have gone through all of that alone?
    ‘This must be difficult,’ she said, regaining her composure. ‘It’s got to be a lot to take in.’
    With a slim frame, all wrists and knees, jeans clinging to thin legs, heavy oxblood-red boots, there was something vulnerable about her – even if she had just lobbed her grenade and set me reeling. ‘A lot to take in? Yes, you could say that.’
    ‘I know,’ she said, an uneasy smile spreading across her face. ‘But you have to know that I don’t want anything from you.’
    ‘You don’t?’
    ‘Nothing!’ she said, laughing nervously. ‘It’s just I thought you should know.’
    ‘And that’s all? There’s nothing else?’ I asked.
    She shrugged, and started to pick again at her frayed cuffs. ‘Just to talk, I suppose.’
    ‘To talk?’
    She squirmed, grew sullen. The shield of hair had fallen over her face again. She made no effort to push it back. Quietly, from behind it, she said: ‘I just wanted to get to know you a little.’
    It was a reasonable request, I supposed, but I resisted. ‘Did Linda put you up to this?’ I asked. ‘Does she know you’ve come to see me? Did she tell you to come?’
    In retrospect, I see how foolish I was – how ridiculous I must have sounded – to think an old girlfriend hadspent the last eighteen years hatching a plan to bring about my undoing.
    ‘My mother’s dead.’
    Dead? Said so matter-of-factly, and with such certainty that there was no room for doubt. Still my initial and irrational response was to contradict her, even though I had had not one scintilla of contact with Linda since I had seen her last. Linda, my old flame, dead. I couldn’t quite believe it. Briefly, I remembered, without wanting to, the first time I had kissed her: she had dared me to. ‘Go on,’ she had said that night, as I walked her home from an evening guest lecture. ‘You know you want to.’
    I had played dumb, but all the time, I was stepping closer to her, and she was stepping closer to me, until her hands gripped the pockets of my coat and my hands found their way to her waist. It had not been a lingering kiss. She had pulled away quickly, and I followed her, feeling I had been on the brink of making a terrible mistake but not knowing if the mistake was to follow her or to let her slip away.
    And now she’s dead? I was stunned by the revelation, numbed. How strange and unreal it is to hear of an old lover who has passed away. To think that the time you shared is no longer a common memory between you, no longer a testimony subject to agreement and dissent, no longer a space of contested but cherished moments already gone – like the rising smoke from a bonfire on a Hallowe’en night that we’d stood beside in Belfast. Gone – like the fading autumn light at sunset. It’s like a sudden pull in the heart, a brief awakening, and the realizationthat their life has continued all the time you were apart, all the time they were forgotten; still they remained, creating their own history. A sudden burst of memory, the brush of old and tender feelings, then it fades.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ I told her. ‘What happened?’
    ‘Ovarian cancer. It’s just coming up to a year.’
    Now it made some sort of sense to me: a young woman whose mother has just died seeks some kind of replacement to make up for her loss. It’s possible. Psychologists might call it transference, and stranger things have been known to happen, certainly, on this campus. But I was curious. ‘And when did Linda tell you about me?’ I asked.
    She pushed back her hair. ‘It was towards the end.’
    ‘Is that why you came to this university?’
    She blushed, shifted in her chair. ‘I dunno. Maybe. I’ve always liked history and, with Mam gone, I just wanted to get away, you know. Start again somewhere new.’
    Whatever the truth of her claim, I couldn’t