Before You Go Read online

  ‘Great. Shall we go to Clapham Common?’

  I frown. ‘I can’t go out like this. Do you mind if I go home and change first? Then maybe we could go to Ally Pally?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’ His eyes roam up and down my body and I feel myself blushing. ‘Anyway, I don’t know why you need to change, I think you look pretty hot in just my shirt.’

  ‘Why, thank you young man.’ I flutter my eyelashes ridiculously and Ed throws his arms around me and pulls me tightly to him until I can hardly breathe.

  ‘But you’re not going anywhere yet. We’ve got loads of time for this first.’ And then his lips move down my neck and across my nipples and I gasp, lost in the moment all over again.

  It’s gone midday by the time I let myself back into my flat, Ed in tow. We’re holding hands, giggling like teenagers, and I’m relieved to find Jane out. He waits in the living room while I jump in the shower and get dressed and I hope for his sake Jane doesn’t come home and find him there all alone, prime for interrogation.

  Half an hour later we’re ready to go. I’ve shoved bread, cheese, crisps and wine into a bag and Ed hoicks it onto his back, then we set off through the sun-baked streets which wind up towards Alexandra Park. We hold hands all the way and his touch feels as though it’s burning my skin, but I won’t let go. I can’t let go.

  The park is busy on this hot, bright Sunday lunchtime. The sky is a hazy blue, the heat making everyone feel lazy. Roasting bodies glisten in the rare summer sun, hungrily soaking up the rays, while the odd person half-heartedly throws a frisbee or a ball through the thick, sticky air. From a couple of hundred metres away comes the sound of laughter and screams as a group of friends squirt each other with water pistols. We stop and spread out our towels on the grass in one of the few free areas of shade we can find, and Ed unpacks the food as I take in the familiar view. The rows of Crouch End houses in the foreground, reaching out to central London, dotted with spots of green parkland and trees, all the way to the soaring skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and, on a day like today, a hazy, shimmering south London. It’s so stunning it takes my breath away.

  ‘God, I’m starving,’ Ed says, grabbing a piece of bread and shoving it into his mouth. Crumbs spray all over the towel as he struggles to chew the enormous mouthful.

  ‘Oh, that’s a lovely way to impress a girl.’ I roll my eyes and attempt to flick crumbs from the towel where they’ve sprayed like bullets.

  ‘Sorry,’ he grins mischievously, his cheeks puffed out like a hamster.

  I grab some bread and cheese too and start making myself a sandwich, the heat making every movement feel like an effort. The air is full of a soft buzzing sound, a mix of distant lawnmowers, chatter and the odd wasp flying lazily past. I peer through the darkness of my sunglasses and take the opportunity to have a proper look at Ed while he can’t see my eyes. He’s still chewing furiously, the muscles of his jaw working hard to get through another huge chunk of bread. His hair, slightly sweaty, is stuck to his forehead, three dark strands trailing in his eyes so he has to keep pushing them away. His skin is lightly tanned, a mixture of sun cream and sweat making it glisten in the sunlight. He turns his head away to watch some kids playing a game of frisbee nearby and I allow my gaze to move downwards, taking in his strong, lean arms beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt, the soft hairs lightened from hours in the sun. I blush as my eyes travel down further, trying not to think about what’s under those clothes, instead checking out his legs peeking from the bottom of his shorts, the muscles taut. His head whips round and I tear my eyes away, hoping he’ll mistake the redness flooding my face for overheating rather than embarrassment at being caught ogling him.

  Ed leans back on his elbows and watches me.

  ‘What?’ I feel awkward under his gaze, scared he’ll see right through me and know everything that’s going on in my head.

  ‘Nothing. Just enjoying the view.’ He grins, then lies flat on his back, his hands behind his head. I follow suit, watching the leaves above my head rustle gently in the almost non-existent breeze, my mind full of questions – questions I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer. Ed’s body is so close to mine and I long to reach out and touch him. I shuffle round so my head is leaning gently on his thigh, and his hand reaches down to play with my hair. A shiver runs through me and I know, before it even happens, that sleep is going to take me away, leave me stranded in this moment. But I don’t even mind because I’m so happy that even if this is my last moment with Ed, then it’s OK. And then tiredness overtakes me, my eyelids droop and I’m powerless to stop them . . .

  5

  20 January 2000

  I open my eyes and almost jump out of my skin. I can’t see anything apart from a face extremely close to mine: tiny stubs of dark hair sprout from the pores of his chin like cacti in a desert landscape, and a slightly stale odour comes from his open mouth when he breathes out. I move away very slightly and study the tiny hairs that move in his nose as his nostrils flare, and the shine of his skin which is slick with sweat in the heat of the room. As I move further back still he starts to become a whole face, dark lashes splayed across his cheeks as he sleeps, a lock of hair stuck to his forehead, his lips squashed and full as his cheek sinks into the pillow.

  My heart bursts with happiness at the sight of Ed, and the sudden rush of memory from the last time I was with him, in the sun in Alexandra Park. He’s here, which means my little speech about not wanting children didn’t scare him away.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve studied Ed’s face in this much detail – have I ever done it? – and I’m making the most of it now, trying to commit every single detail to memory so that I never lose the image again.

  After a few moments he stirs and shifts and, worried he’s going to wake up before I’ve had the chance to orientate myself, I take the chance to look around the room.

  From the bed I stare up at the ceiling. There are gaps in the plaster, and a single lightbulb hangs from the light fitting in the middle of the room. There’s a door to my right, with a bolt across it and some fire safety instructions. I’m in a hotel of some sort.

  I sit up and cast my gaze round the rest of the room: an open door in front of me through which I can see a toilet with the seat up, a picture of Jesus on the cross on the pale yellow wall, a wardrobe with the doors shut, a rickety wooden chair with a rucksack and a couple of jumpers hanging over the top of it, and that’s it. I know where we are! A cheap hotel room in a town called Arequipa in Peru, where we stayed the night before heading to Lima. If someone had asked me what this room had looked like I couldn’t have described it, but now I can see it I know exactly where we are. I shiver with excitement. Ed and I took some time out from work a few months after we first got together to go travelling, ticking something off my wish list, to see the world. I loved Peru, and I’m thrilled I’m getting to see it again.

  But why this day? What was so significant about it? I can’t work it out yet, but I’m sure I’ll soon find out.

  There’s a notebook on the bedside table next to me and I pick it up and flick through it, leaning on my elbow as I read snippets of the diary I kept as we travelled around the world. I haven’t read this for ages and it makes me smile.

  Oh God!!!!!!! Today has been MORTIFYING. We went to see the Taj Mahal and halfway back to the hotel this evening I got a belly-ache. By the time we got there I knew something bad was happening and I had to race to the loo. Without going into TOO much detail, I was in there for some time and it wasn’t pretty. But the worst thing was, Ed was just outside the thin, flimsy door and could hear EVERYTHING. I mean, I know we used to share a house, but the poor bloke’s never even seen me on the toilet, let alone seen me with my insides FALLING INTO THE TOILET! And the smell. Dear God, the smell. In fact, oh God, I think it might be happening again. I have to go, I’m des—

  The entry ended and even now, reading it back, I blush. I remember that day. It was probably safe to say it was the day that our relationship chang
ed for good, the day he saw and heard and smelt me and my Delhi belly. I’d been utterly mortified, but Ed tried everything he could to make me feel better about it.

  If only I’d known then that that was just one of many times all dignity would be thrown out of the window, with illnesses and fertility treatment stripping us of any reserve that might have lingered.

  I put the diary back just as a muffled voice comes from beside me: ‘What time is it?’ I turn to look at Ed and am confronted with a pillow instead of a face. I don’t know how he can stand to put that thing over his head; it’s rank, musty.

  I reach for my watch.

  ‘10.30.’

  Ed’s body jerks awake and suddenly he’s sitting up, looking at me, panic-stricken. ‘Shit, we’re late!’

  ‘Late for what?’

  He frowns at me. ‘The bloody bus,’ he says, pushing the blanket off him and jumping out of bed. The sight of his naked body sends a shiver through me which I try to ignore. He strides across the room and starts rummaging in the pockets of his rucksack. I try not to stare at him. Then he pulls some crumpled-looking tickets from a plastic folder and squints at them.

  ‘Shit,’ he says again, and thrusts the tickets at me. ‘The bus leaves at 11.30. We have to go.’

  I leap out of bed, not sure exactly where we’re going but aware of the urgency. We throw some clothes on and clean our teeth, then shove everything else in our rucksacks and head to the hotel reception. The woman behind the counter doesn’t seem to understand what a hurry we’re in, taking ages to count our money and return our passports. But eventually she does and we run into the street and down a dusty pavement. I follow Ed blindly, across wide roads filled with ancient cars, past brightly coloured shopfronts, pretty churches and soaring palm trees, hoping he knows where we’re going, and finally we turn a corner into the bus station. People are rushing around in the fume-filled air shouting loudly in Spanish, arms waving, buses beeping, suitcases being thrown about. How on earth are we going to find our bus?

  But minutes later we’re there, climbing on, our rucksacks being thrown into the hold while we settle ourselves into our seats. I pull out my Walkman and stick in the mix tape Ed had made me, then lean back and watch the chaos outside from the air-conditioned bus, breathing a sigh of relief. It’s been a while since I went anywhere apart from London and it’s been a bit of a shock to the system.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Ed says, fiddling with the overhead fan. ‘Couldn’t afford another bus fare.’

  I say nothing, waiting for him to carry on.

  ‘Only one more day left in Peru; can you believe it?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  He glances at me. ‘You OK?’

  I nod. ‘Yes, fine. Just tired.’ I yawn to prove my point.

  We sit for a few minutes in comfortable silence. Then finally the bus starts to move, pulling out of the bus station and swinging towards the road. I sit back and watch the half-built houses whizz past the window. I listen to the hum of the engine, the muffled voices and the occasional shout in Spanish, and the rustle of the crisps Ed’s eating beside me, and I feel myself drifting off.

  It had been Ed’s idea, this trip.

  ‘Let’s tick something off your wish list,’ he’d said over drinks just a few short weeks ago. There’d been a few of us – Jane, a couple of friends from work, and a cycling buddy of Ed’s, Josh – squashed round a table in a pub in Camden after work. Our happy-hour drinks were lined up precariously on the sticky table in front of us, Blur’s ‘Charmless Man’ pounding from the speaker right next to our heads, our voices getting louder and louder to compete with Damon Albarn’s dulcet tones and the shouts of people around us.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s see some of the world. Let’s go travelling.’

  ‘I can’t just go travelling – I’ve got a job to go to, rent to pay.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Zoe, they’re the excuses you’ve always made, which is why you’ve never done it.’

  I leaned towards Jane slightly as a dreadlocked man balancing three pints barged past our table, nearly knocking us all flying.

  ‘Yes, but they’re not excuses, they’re reasons. It’s different.’ I felt cross at the implication that I didn’t really want to go, or was scared, despite there being more than a grain of truth in it.

  Ed rolled his eyes. ‘Pedant. You know what I mean. I can get time off easily; there’ll always be gardening work around. And you can get time off work, and we don’t have to go for months and months. Three months tops, that’s totally do-able, right?’

  Jane, next to me, nodded. ‘He’s right Zo, you can totally do this. Even if it does mean you have to abandon me, leave me all alone in that flat sobbing into a cold tin of beans every night . . .’ She feigned crying, and I punched her on the shoulder.

  ‘But what about work? I can’t just up and leave. I’ve worked hard for this job. I’m in the middle of a campaign.’ The excuses came thick and fast, but Ed batted them all away.

  ‘Listen, Zo, you can only ask, and they can only say yes or no. But think about how amazing it would be, seeing some of the world together. We could go to South America, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, climb mountains, take elephant rides, swim in the ocean. It would be amazing . . .’

  My stomach contracted at the mention of all these places. Previously, I’d thought about travelling in the same abstract way you think about winning the lottery – something I hoped might happen one day, but just assumed never would. Now, faced with the reality of a list of places and a list of reasons for actually going, I felt terrified by the prospect. I took a large gulp from my glass of cheap white wine and banged it down on the table. Wine sloshed over the top, soaking into the beer mat and leaving marks on my jeans.

  Sensing my reluctance, Ed turned to Josh for moral support. ‘Josh, tell Zoe how awesome South America is.’

  Josh’s face lit up. ‘Oh man, it’s truly amazing. Had the best time of my life when I went. What do you need to know?’

  For the next half hour the pair of them regaled me with stories about places they’d been, people they’d met. I’d been left feeling I had no choice, and so when work had agreed to give me the time off, unpaid, there was nothing else for it but to say I’d go.

  And now here we were, and Ed and Josh were right. I was having the time of my life. I was grateful for the push.

  Next to me Ed shifts and I lift my head, my neck stiff. I must have fallen asleep on his shoulder. Ed’s dozing so I look out of the slightly grimy window and watch the scenery change, rubbing my sore neck. The run-down houses have turned into dusty fields and scrubby trees, miles of nothingness either side of us. Slowly, the road starts to wind up into the mountains and the trees turn greener, everywhere more lush. On the left-hand side of the bus the sheer cliff face rises up into the clouds, while on the right it drops off terrifyingly steeply into nothingness. There’s only a flimsy-looking crash barrier between our bus and the enormous drop.

  I try not to think about it.

  We climb higher and higher into the mountains, and as we do the light mist thickens and becomes a dense, smothering fog until I can hardly even see the cliff edge at all. We still seem to be travelling fairly fast and I can’t understand how the bus driver can see well enough to go at such a speed.

  And then I gasp as a memory floods my mind.

  This is the day we almost died. Or at least we truly thought we were going to. Blood rushes to my head and I grab hold of Ed’s hand. He opens his eyes and smiles at me.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Yes. But Ed?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm?’

  ‘Look out the window.’

  He glances out and I feel his body tense.

  ‘How can the driver see where he’s going?’ I try to keep my voice steady but even I can hear the tremor.

  ‘Well, he must know the road pretty well.’ Even Ed’s voice sounds unsure, and that makes me even more scared. He doesn’t panic often. He tightens his grip on my hand and I squeeze
his back until my knuckles turn white.

  ‘Ow, you don’t need to squeeze the life out of me just yet.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I loosen my grip and he moves closer so there’s not even the tiniest space between us.

  For the next few minutes we sit in silence, watching the bus’s progress up the hill. It’s slowed right down and every now and then the lights of an enormous lorry loom out of the fog ahead of us, and it feels as though the wind it creates is about to blow our little bus off the side of the cliff. Each time I hold my breath, certain that this time this is it – but every time we get past unscathed, our little bus going slower and slower as the driver is able to make out less and less of the road in front of him through the thickening fog.

  ‘We could die up here. You read about bus crashes all the time. It could easily happen.’ My voice shakes uncontrollably.

  ‘I know,’ Ed says.

  He doesn’t try to reassure me, or change the subject, or make a joke out of it, and that makes me feel worse. Instead he puts his arms around me and pulls me even closer. My ear is pressed against his chest and I can hear his heart beating quickly beneath the thin layer of his T-shirt. He’s so alive, and he’s here and I’ve got a chance to do something right now that I didn’t take last time. I don’t even stop to think about it.

  I move my head so I’m peering up at him and he looks down, our eyes just inches apart. The blue of his irises has darkened to a deep, inky blue-black and his face is etched with worry, a crease lining his forehead.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I love you.’ It’s hardly more than a whisper but I know he’s heard me as his expression changes, softens. The words that I’ve longed to say to him since the day he died – that last time we took this journey I held back from saying despite being head over heels because I wanted him to say them first – they’re out there and hanging in the air between us, taking away the terror and the fear and leaving nothing but us, me and Ed.

  He lowers his face until our noses are almost touching and I can feel his breath on my cheek. It smells vaguely of mint and the warm, musky smell that I’ve missed so much it’s like an ache.