One Winter Morning Page 3

  Hayley jumps as a scatter of rain hits the skylight above us. It has been raining a lot recently, a series of downpours stripping the last of the late autumn leaves from the trees. Soon the landscape will look as it did the day Anna died, and I have no idea how I will bear it; how I will stand to feel the icy wind against my cheeks, and the sight of snow on the ground. My world has become a minefield of reminders, and I am powerless to escape it.

  Or am I?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Hayley says, looking from the skylight back to me, and I know how impotent those words must feel to her.

  ‘Do you remember how we used to talk about going backpacking together?’ I say then, noting her look of relief at the change of subject. ‘We had that map stuck up on the wall at the yard, and we used to plan our route while we cleaned all the tack.’

  ‘Of course I remember that,’ she says. ‘We ended up spending all the money we’d saved on those dressage saddles instead, didn’t we? I left mine over Magnum’s stable door and he chewed a hole in it, the cheeky beggar.’

  I chuckle.

  ‘Why do you mention that now, anyway?’ she enquires, sliding a finger inside her thermal sock to scratch her foot. ‘Are you planning on taking a gap year a decade too late or something?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I begin. ‘But there is something about this Bonnie woman that I haven’t told you yet.’

  ‘Oh?’ Hayley lets go of her foot and gives me her full attention.

  ‘She doesn’t live here in England,’ I tell her, pausing while Hayley takes this in. ‘If I really want to find her, then I’m going to have to travel much, much further away.’

  Thoroughly intrigued now, Hayley scoots along the bed until half her bottom is resting on my toes.

  ‘How far are we talking?’

  For a brief second, I look past her, towards where last year’s calendar hangs like a confession of guilt on the wall, still open on December, the month Anna died. If I went away, there would be no memories waiting to ambush me. If I got on a plane, I would swap a cold and harsh winter for a warm and fresh new world. It would allow me the space to breathe, and to think, and maybe even to get some answers about who I am, and why I was given away in the first place. Because no matter what David and Anna told me so reassuringly over the years, the facts remain the same. My birth mother did not want to keep me, and I want to know the reason why.

  ‘She is about as far away as a person can be,’ I say. ‘My real mother lives in New Zealand.’

  4

  One of the gifts Anna bought me for my twenty-first birthday was a five-year memory book. Bound in smart navy leather, it has gold lettering on the front, and is small enough to slip into a generous coat pocket. The idea is that you write a few lines each day, marking down anything of note, so that you are able to refer back to it later. So, rather like a diary, but with added meaning and fewer humdrum details.

  I was useless at remembering to fill it in at first, but Anna never gave up encouraging me. David eventually joined in, too, merrily repeating what Dr Seuss said about never knowing the value of a moment until it is a memory. Thus inspired – not to mention keen for David to stop lecturing me – I started to fill it in every evening before bed. Soon it became a habit, like taking my multi-vitamin and applying night cream. If I ever went away from home, which was rare, considering how much I loathed to be parted from my horse, the little blue book would always come with me, and when I filled that one, I bought another the same.

  Anna confided to me that she had been keeping memory books since she turned twenty-one, too, and would sometimes read me snippets as we sat curled up together on the sofa in front of the fire.

  Given the limited space in the book, my adoptive mother had developed a real skill in summing people up in just a few words, and while they weren’t always the most complimentary of descriptions, they were always amusing in their simplicity.

  Her ex-boyfriend, who she spent two years with before she met and fell in love with David, was referred to as ‘Bum bag beard’ throughout, while the neighbour who lived in the flat above her first London home was ‘Mr Anvil’, on account of his clodhopping feet.

  My favourites among Anna’s memories, however, were the ones involving the two of us. She had scribbled down a memory for every single day we had spent together, and would delight in choosing pages – and years – at random, before recounting them to me.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she would cry, hooting with laughter. ‘I had forgotten about the time you mistook a tube of mustard for one of toothpaste and chewed a hole in it.’

  Apparently, as a baby, I liked nothing more than taking items out of her shopping bags one by one and testing them with my emerging teeth. Anna said she could leave me on the floor for hours, but that every single apple, banana or nectarine she ever put into the fruit bowl would be decorated with tiny fang marks.

  At one of my little friends’ fifth birthday parties, I was so scared of the clown they hired to do tricks for the kids that I squeezed myself into the airing cupboard up on their landing and got myself stuck behind the water tank. At the end of her memory for that day, Anna had written, ‘Comic Relief may pose problems!’ and later explained that my resulting terror of all-things red-nosed had even stopped me from wanting to visit Santa’s Grotto at the local shopping centre that Christmas, for fear of running into Rudolph.

  There were more recent memories, too, of trips to the cinema, dinners out, and even the odd line or two about arguments the two of us had. With the addition of both time and hindsight, both Anna and I were always able to laugh these away with ease, bickering instead over which of us had been the more foolish in said row, then getting the giggles as we realised the irony of what we were doing.

  In the weeks after Anna died, I floated around the house like a leaf on the wind, tumbling down to howl in corners and weep across chairs. Occasionally, David and I would find ourselves in the same room, desperate to comfort each other but unable to find the right words. Instead, he would clutch me to him with a fierceness that frightened me, and I would stand there, stock still, my arms by my sides, immobilised by sadness, and with no idea how to bridge the metaphorical gap that had opened up between us.

  I didn’t forget Anna’s memory book so much as not allow myself to think about it, just as I fought not to recall any details about her, or our life together. For a long time, it was easier to remain in a state of flux, somewhere between shock and acceptance. To give in to the grief was too terrifying a prospect, the pain it promised too devastating.

  David must have agonised over how to give Anna’s most recent memory book to me, but in the end, he did the simplest – and sneakiest – thing and slipped it into the bag I had packed for my flight to New Zealand. Anna had so many folded pieces of paper stuffed in amongst the pages that it didn’t stay shut without an elastic band around it, and it was this that I fingered absent-mindedly as I waited to board. There was no way that I could bring myself to open it – not yet. If I turned to the last entry, would I see what Anna had written about that awful final day? A memory that was destined never to be amended by the passing of time, or by the simple beauty of hindsight. How would I ever bring myself to look at it – or at any of her words for that matter?

  As well as the book, David had hidden an envelope containing five hundred New Zealand dollars, a credit card and a slip of notepaper bearing my birth mother’s name and address. There was also a note from him, which read:

  Darling Genie,

  The enclosed is for emergencies, but if you run out of money, just call and I can top up your account. I know you’re worried about leaving me alone over Christmas, but don’t be. This year was always going to be a strange one, and I’ve had plenty of invitations to spend the day with friends. If at any time you want me to be there with you, let me know and I will get on the next plane. I’m so proud of you for having the courage to do this by yourself, my darling girl, and I know Anna would be too. I have sent her words and love along with you (see zip pocket)
, which I hope will help. If you feel afraid, just ask yourself what Evangeline would do – she is there with you, too, urging you onwards, as she always has been.

  All my love,

  Dad xx

  If someone had taken me to one side a year ago, and told me that in twelve months’ time, I would not only have lost one mother, but I would end up travelling to the other side of the world to find another one, I would have scoffed with disbelief. Yet, here I am, in that exact situation.

  There is a crackle of static as a member of the Qantas staff steps up to the desk in front of the gate and leans over the microphone. It is time to begin boarding. As the business class passengers file importantly through the entrance to the jet bridge, I reach into my bag and extract my own memory book. I know without looking that my last entry was 23 December 2017. I know that it reads: ‘Suki threw shoe, waited for Billy, so still no presents bought! Will go tmrw.’

  And I know what came next.

  Firmly folding over to a new, clean page, I note down today’s date – 11 December 2018 – then write underneath: ‘Fly to New Zealand.’ I am about to close the book and stow it back in my bag, when I am struck by a need to acknowledge my missing mum somehow. I want her to know that she is with me in this decision, that she is always with me, and that she has been every moment since she wasn’t.

  Opening the book to the same page, I hastily scrawl: ‘Days without Anna: 352.’

  I hadn’t even realised that I was keeping count.

  5

  Having a time-travelling literary character based on you brings with it a certain number of assumptions – the main one being that I myself am an avid traveller, just like Evangeline.

  People meeting me for the first time just presume that I went off backpacking in my gap year. Because I must have, right? I am fearless and intrepid; I seek adventure; I wander the world without a backwards glance. I am Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. Except that I am not.

  In truth, I have always been content to remain in the small and secure pocket of my life just the way it is, close to where I grew up in a village outside Cambridge, with more fields and bridleways than buildings and pavements. I consider a two-hour flight to be extreme in terms of distance, so getting myself here to New Zealand has been quite a trial.

  I boarded a flight at Heathrow Airport that took me to Dubai, where I wandered, bleary eyes stinging under the many artificial lights, until it was time to go back to the plane. I watched the safety video for the second time, raised polite eyes as the stewardess demonstrated which toggle to pull on the life vest, and wondered if anyone realistically believed that there would be time to place said item over your head in the case of an emergency.

  Once we took off again and there was nothing beyond the oval window but blackness, I closed my eyes, twisting the jade-stone ring Anna gave me on my twenty-first birthday around on my finger as I listened to the whirr of the engines, the sporadic ping of call buttons and the muffled suck-whooshing sound of the toilet flush. Time had ceased to matter while I was up there, marooned as I was in the dark, my fate purely dependent on thousands of moving parts over which I had no control. Like life itself, it would only have taken one thing to go wrong for the rest to fall apart.

  Now, the luggage carousel below me shuffles and groans into life, and I stare down at the scalloped pattern of the black rubber surface until suitcases, pushchairs and rucksacks begin to roll past. David gave me Anna’s old backpack to use on this trip, which is khaki green and covered in sewn-on patches. Unlike me, she was quite the adventurer in her younger years, and explored most of Europe under her own steam. Anna and David’s big retirement plan had always been to travel the world together; now they will never get the chance.

  Shouldering the heavy pack with a groan, I make my way towards the exit. My journey so far has taken me from London to Dubai to Melbourne to Auckland, and from there down to Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island. I currently have no idea what time it is in the UK, or how many hours I have been in transit, but I do feel relieved to have finally made it. I am here, I will do what needs to be done, and then I will return to whatever is left of my life back in England.

  Outside, the sunshine beats down on me, so strong and sudden that it causes me to stop in my tracks. I know it’s summer here in the southern hemisphere, but the ferocity of the heat still takes me by surprise. The jeans I travelled in feel all at once constrictive, and I peel off the thick pashmina that kept me snug on the numerous flights, bundle it up into an untidy ball and stuff it into my rucksack.

  All I can see of New Zealand so far is clear blue sky, concrete pathways and the leaves on distant trees. The air is dry and crisp, and as I stand for a while, taking it all in, couples and families filter out past me. There are groups of older teens carrying backpacks, their tanned skin the colour of toffee and their wrists adorned with leather bracelets and coloured twists of string. They all seem to have somewhere to go, or people to meet, and watching them stride around so happily prompts a hollow lurch inside.

  I know what David would say if he were here, his head on one side and his bespectacled eyes full of parental encouragement: ‘Come on, Genie – think what Evangeline would do.’

  That other Evangeline, the natural traveller, the version of me who has always been the bolder, brainier, better. She can sod right off.

  The journey from the airport to the centre of Queenstown turns out to be a short one. The taxi driver chats away to me as we speed along, but I can barely muster up more than a few words of response because I’m so bowled over by what I can see through the windows. I have never seen mountains so large, or skies so vast. Trees and shrubs look greener here than those in England, the earth beneath them appears somehow richer, and there is a clarity to it all, as if Mother Nature herself has applied a filter to the landscape.

  As we join the main highway, I glimpse a rapidly tumbling river far below the road, and high above it, a precarious-looking wooden structure that can only – shudder – be a bungee-jumping platform.

  ‘There she is,’ the driver announces, not without pride.

  An enormous expanse of water has just come into view in the middle distance.

  ‘That’s Lake Wakatipu,’ he informs me. ‘People around here will tell you that she’s the largest lake here on the South Island, but it’s not – Te Anau is the queen.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, and the man nods.

  ‘Of course,’ he continues, ‘Lake Taupo is the real beast, up in the North Island – you could fit Singapore inside her.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I reply, trying and failing to envisage this. The driver smiles assuredly at me in the rear-view mirror.

  Queenstown itself sits sprawled between Lake Wakatipu and the vast hills that overlook it, and I know already from my limited foray into the guide book that it’s regarded as New Zealand’s main party town, and that during the winter season, the area transforms into a bustling ski resort. Beyond that, however, I don’t know very much about my home for the next two weeks, and while my desire to explore has never been that great, I’m nonetheless intrigued to have a poke around and acquaint myself with the place.

  My rental apartment is situated on a steep road not far from the main hub of the town, and after collecting my key from a central reception area, I pop inside just long enough to dump Anna’s backpack on the floor, text David and Hayley to let them know that I’ve arrived safely, and then have a quick shower and change into a simple black sundress. The loneliness that crept over me at the airport continues to linger like an unwanted house guest, and I don’t waste any extra time bothering with make-up.

  It’s nearing five in the afternoon by the time I head off down the hill, but the sun is showing no signs of burning itself out. I was carefully liberal in my application of factor fifty, but I can sense it is a completely different heat here to the fuggy humidity that limps through an English summer – this sun feels almost abrasive in its ferocity. With my blue eyes and pale
skin, I’m a prime candidate for burning, and by the time I reach Queenstown’s busy Shotover Street, I have resorted to hurrying from one shaded patch of pavement to another.

  Car horns honk, buses sigh under the weight of their human cargo and mopeds weave around backpackers as they swarm out unsteadily from numerous bars. Crossing the street to avoid them, I get caught up in the tail end of a very long queue leading into a takeaway restaurant called Fergburger, and lose a few minutes trying to battle my way out of it. The town’s party atmosphere is apparent at every turn, and it’s impossible not to notice the mischievousness on the faces of the people I pass. I envy them their freedom and uncomplicated happiness, and it makes me wonder briefly what they see when they look back at me.

  I need something to take the edge off what has been a very long and rather surreal day. Heading into the first pub I come across, which has a collection of tatty dark-wood furniture and the same sticky floor as my local back home, I approach a friendly barman who directs me up a set of stairs and out on to a wide, open roof terrace, which has been strung with multicoloured lanterns. There are around twenty people already seated in small groups around low tables, but the tall stools that run along the front of the terrace are unoccupied. Collecting a frothy pint of beer from the bar in the corner, I carry it to the seat furthest away from the other drinkers and clamber up, resting my sandal-clad feet on the metal rungs.

  The sun is finally starting to weaken, and a warm breeze jostles the loose strands of my hair that have escaped my ponytail. I take one sip, and then another, enjoying the sensation of the cold beer as it slips down my throat. I sit there on my stool for what feels like hours, chasing away memories and watching as the sunlight streaming across the rooftops turns from the brightest white to the palest gold. More people arrive, and music starts playing from speakers that have been fixed to the walls. I wait until there’s a gap at the bar to get up and order another beer. And then, as the volume on the terrace increases, another.