The Lies Between Us

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Nothing changed otherwise. I was still left wondering when we’d see each other again, and more and more it was just to go to his house for sex. At work he never openly acknowledged that I was his girlfriend.

Call me stupid. I have.

3 (#ulink_f6f9c100-fc0f-571a-af31-681e47141966)

Eva

1987

‘Eva, wake up! Look at this!’

I wake with a start, blinking and disorientated, but within seconds it all comes flooding back; first the unbelievable chaos of last night, then Ed and me here, stranded together in this soft and springy bed, like a ship on the high seas. I stretch out luxuriously, my limbs heavy with sleep, then lift my head off the pillow to listen for the wind, and hear a silence so thick I think it could be the end of the world.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Come and look.’

Sliding from under the covers I suddenly feel self-conscious in a way that was notably absent last night. I pull off the top sheet and wind it round myself, then wiggle in it over to the window.

‘This is what they do in films,’ I say, ‘wrap themselves in a sheet and wander round in it. It’s harder than it looks.’ Ed has on his boxer shorts, and has tweaked the curtain aside.

The scene below is one of devastation.

‘Oh … my … God.’

It seems that everything is either broken, fallen, or leaning at a crazy, sometimes dangerous angle. Like the tree opposite that has crushed a car and is lodged on top of it, its branches spread all over the road. Or the canopy from a shoe shop that is attached only at one end, its other end lying smashed on the cracked pavement. Or the scaffolding from a building down the road, that has tumbled down around it like matchsticks. I have a faint recollection of hearing that metallic roll at some unearthly hour of the morning.

‘Jesus.’

For a moment we just stare, transfixed. Ed puts one arm around me and pulls me close.

‘We were lucky to get in here. It’s a solid Georgian building.’

‘If it had been full,’ I say, ‘I would have refused to budge and slept on the floor. There’s no way I would have gone out in that again.’ Then I add, ‘Wouldn’t have been as good though. Sleeping on the floor.’

He squeezes my waist, and we exchange a long, slow kiss that eventually takes us back to bed for a long, slow shag, and that’s where we still are when a knock on the door announces breakfast.

‘Leave it there,’ Ed calls. ‘We’ll get it.’

Later, we sit on the end of the bed to eat our cold full English, and watch Breakfast Time on the small TV that hangs on a bracket on the wall. It’s being broadcast from an emergency location because all the power is out at the BBC, and the presenters’ voices are shrill with a mix of disbelief and excitement. It seems that the winds ripped across the country in a swathe that travelled from south-west to south-east, gathering strength and causing more damage as they went. Some of the scenes pictured look like war zones; collapsed buildings, blocked roads, crushed cars and overturned lorries, and a forest in East Anglia that has been entirely felled. People interviewed talk of being ruined, their businesses destroyed, their houses without power or uninhabitable. There will be questions asked, an opposition minister says in a phone interview, about why the weather forecast spectacularly failed to forecast this. The words on everyone’s lips are what one weatherman said yesterday, about rumours of a hurricane on the way: Don’t worry, there isn’t!

‘He’ll never live that down,’ I say.

‘How could they have missed it?’ Ed looks at his watch, and puts his tray aside. Then he picks up the bedside phone, listens, presses buttons, shakes his head. ‘Line’s dead. I need to ring my parents, reassure them I’m still alive.’ From the news we’ve gathered that the north of the country escaped the winds, but he says they’ll be watching TV and getting worried. ‘And I’d better get home, see if my flat survived the night.’

I say yes, of course I need to go home too. Fleetingly I wonder if my own house has been damaged, and why I haven’t thought of that, or my parents, before now.

Then something occurs to me that starts to play on my mind. I know Ed moved here from Cambridge, which was badly hit last night. That’s where he had been living, and presumably where his ex still lives, with their child. Why isn’t he more worried? Why isn’t he trying to phone them now to make sure they’re okay? People have been killed, for God’s sake. I don’t feel I can ask, when Ed hasn’t even told me of the child’s existence, and maybe he won’t mention it for that very reason. But how can he just sit here, calmly eating breakfast, when anything might have happened? It nags away at me. I can’t be with a man who seems to have forgotten he has a child.

Then, listen to you, I think. Can’t be with a man. Who says you have the option?

We shower, and dress in last night’s clothes. Again, in the cold light of day, it’s somehow more challenging to be putting knickers on in front of Ed, than it was taking them off. I turn my back to him, and try to pretend I’m absorbed in the images on TV. There is no dryer, so I do what I can with my wet hair, and wish that I’d carried some make-up with me last night. Oh well, the natural look, I tell myself, wiping steam off the bathroom mirror, which is harshly lit and makes me look washed-out. I can feel a hangover kicking in.

Downstairs Ed pays up, while I loiter at the back of the foyer, avoiding the stare of the same unfriendly woman. She doesn’t refer to last night’s weather, as though every day she gives people shelter from the storm. And then we begin the walk home, as it seems that no buses or taxis are running yet. The air is still and calm; it’s as though the raging wind was never there, I think, as though some giant, malevolent hand created all this chaos as a joke. Picking our way around the debris, we take care to skirt anything that hangs or leans too alarmingly, sometimes having to step over obstacles in the road. We meet other people doing the same, and everyone seems to wear the same expression, of utter shock. Ed says something about the town centre being grid-like, and that it would have formed gigantic wind tunnels that the storm would have ripped along.

The shops that have escaped unscathed have opened up, their staff outside sweeping up rubbish and broken glass. There are stories being swapped, and people are beginning to joke, to make the best of things.

‘It’s that old wartime spirit,’ Ed says.

Although as we pass the boutique, on the other side of the street, we see a woman in a smart suit standing in the road, staring silently at the space where the window display was. She has both hands clamped over her mouth, and tears in her eyes. On the pavement the mannequins from the window lie bare, like casualties from some horrible accident; inside we can see that all the clothes rails are empty, not a single thing remains.

‘Been looted,’ Ed says.

‘Can you believe it? That’s awful.’

‘If being a reporter has taught me anything,’ Ed says, ‘it’s that people can be heroes, and they can be looters. Sometimes the same people.’ As we watch, the woman begins picking things up. ‘Come on.’

Two blocks on Ed finds a newsagent and buys the late morning edition of the Echo, which is full of photos of the storm. He finds his small report on page two. Stranded! is the headline, which Ed thinks is a bit unimaginative, but the report itself is faithful to how he told it over the phone. I take a look, and feel a small thrill of pride, that he wrote this.

‘It’s very good,’ I say. ‘I could almost imagine I was there,’ and Ed laughs.

The further we walk and the more we see, I begin to imagine myself caught in a little bubble of history, something I will tell people years from now. The great storm of 1987, and how I picked my way home through the rubble.

‘It’s like the world’s been shaken up,’ I say. ‘Like in one of those glass snowstorm things. And everything just landed anywhere.’

We reach the bottom of Ed’s road, a row of terraces on a slight hill, leading up and away from the main road. The street looks to be in one piece, as far as we can tell, apart from the now-familiar sight of rubbish, overturned bins, dented cars, and bits of vegetation strewn everywhere.

I’m wondering if he’ll ask me up to his house, and wait expectantly.

‘I guess you’ll want to get home, make sure your folks are okay,’ he says. I stare at him for a moment, then down at the ground, my throat tightening. There is a very long pause, during which I tell myself to just casually say goodbye, or, see you around, that kind of thing. ‘Eva.’ I look up. ‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea … for us to get too involved.’

‘You didn’t seem to think that last night,’ I say, screwing my fists tight inside my pockets.

‘Eva, last night wasn’t meant to happen. I was going to get us a taxi and take you home, I swear. But …’ He spreads his hands, as if to say, look what happened.

‘Well, I’m sorry for throwing myself at you,’ I say, hearing bitterness catch in my voice.