The Moment You Were Gone Read Free

to be your friend,’ she said, with a shy intensity. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes again and her heart was pounding against her ribs. ‘And nothing and nobody will get in the way. Not ever. Now give me that chocolate Bourbon before it melts.’

One
    ‘How did we meet?’ asked Gaby, smiling into the young face in front of her. ‘Ah, well, it was all a bit dramatic. We met by an accident.’
    ‘By accident?’
    ‘By
an
accident. I remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday.’
    Every couple has the story of how they met: they tell it to each other and then they repeat it, with improvised additions and interruptions, to family and friends. Their own story was wild, vivid, streaked through with someone else’s tragedy, and when they told it they would look across at each other and remember the sunken lane and the dark velvet of the night and they would seem to each other and themselves like figures in a Gothic painting. For they did not meet at school or college, or in an office or at a party; not through a friend, an evening class or a dating agency; not on a train or a plane or a beach; not even eyes meeting, breath thickening and the world slowing. They met because of a car crash. Their worlds were entirely separate and would have remained so had it not been for three drunk students driving an old and uninsured Rover too fast round a sharp corner and into the ancient horse-chestnut tree, whose massive trunk was barely marked. The car crumpled on impact likecardboard, folding up on itself in a screech of tearing metal and shattering glass, and someone’s short cry that sounded from a distance like an owl’s shriek. Three people’s stories ended that night – the two passengers’ almost at once, under the boughs of the tree, and the driver’s on the way to hospital, calling for his mates – and their story began.
    Over the years, Gaby had lost track of the difference between their two accounts. Connor’s memories of their meeting came to seem like her own; her memories belonged to him too. It was an uncanny sensation, like a bright and feverish dream in which she saw herself through Connor’s eyes, and felt Connor’s emotions inside her skull. Was this love, she would wonder, when you cannot separate the self from the other? The thought scared her, for she wasn’t sure that she should let herself disappear like that, be so dissolved by intimacy. She sometimes wanted her distinct story back, the one with clear lines and a single point of view. She needed edges or she felt she might fall apart. The night they met, Connor had found her and she – euphorically, unequivocally – had lost herself. As she listened to him tell their story, she felt herself plummet into the past and a kind of vertigo overwhelm her. Was this how it had happened?
    Connor was driving back to Oxford from a visit to his parents, just outside Birmingham. His father, a machine operator and a lifetime smoker, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. His mother, who had always felt that life had let her down, had taken to drinking in the daytime with the ferocity she applied to cleaning the house, bangingon the rugs with a broom to scatter dust in the backyard. Connor had been thinking about his parents as he drove: his father had been surprisingly cheery about the diagnosis, almost sprightly, with a malicious gleam in his eye as he took his regular swipes at Connor’s politics and his convict’s blunt-scissored haircut, while his mother seemed more wretchedly fleshless than ever and her eyes had turned a marbled yellow. He could still feel her fingers on his upper arms where she’d gripped him when they’d said goodbye. Although she was only fifty, she had seemed to him like a leering witch out of a fairytale, dragging him back into the stifling, dimly lit hovel of his childhood. ‘Come again soon,’ she’d hissed, cheap red wine and brandy on her breath, and he’d had to make an enormous effort not to pull away in