Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Twenty
I’m not entirely sure I’ve got this, I’ll be honest. I feel like someone dragged me off the street and put me in charge of a small, unpredictable creature before fleeing. But after a little bit of a screaming performance outside a shoe shop (Petal, thankfully, and not me), I bobbed her on my chest in front of a basket full of cut-price flip flops and with a dummy and strange shhh-ing noises that made me sound part-vacuum, Petal managed to settle, and is now sleeping soundly in her pushchair. The weather’s turned in the last hour, a surprising chill in the June air every time the sun goes in, so Charlie wrapped her up gently and meticulously in a cellular blanket, like a little takeaway fajita, and I wished so much she could see what I see. Someone who cares so much about their child, they’re just so frightened of getting it wrong.
It’s nice pushing Petal along, soothing almost, and I cover so much more distance than I would if I was walking alone – through town, and around the park, and now, back through town, a bag of fresh roses in the basket underneath, from my favourite florist. I stopped to take photos in the park as Petal slept – huge masses, like clouds, of cornflower blue hydrangeas, their petals like resting butterflies. I uploaded it to my Instagram, something I’ve been neglecting lately, since taking the extra work at Sam’s dad’s, and seeing Ed, (who still hasn’t accepted my request), and added the caption: ‘Some say hydrangeas symbolise gratitude. Be thankful for the little things, always.’ It got ten likes almost instantly, and I felt like a classic internet fraud, the sort I mentioned to Charlie. Because I’m trying today, to feel grateful, to feel lucky to be here, but I can’t seem to grasp it. Something Charlie said keeps nagging at me, like someone pulling at my sleeve. ‘My life has started. I’m in it. It’s not something I’m waiting for any more.I’m here. And whatever I wanted for my life, was it this?’
Wasit this? Was this what I saw for myself? And what is it, that I wanted? Am I still waiting?
We pass a full bus stop, and an elderly woman with a coat the colour of figs looks into the pushchair, then at me, and smiles, and for a moment, I allow myself to zoom out, like a camera. View myself from a distance, pushing a baby along the old cobbled streets of my little West Country town. I wonder if Noelle Butterby of fifteen years ago would see this scene in a crystal ball, and assume the baby was hers. Mine and Ed’s. We’d talk about it sometimes, like we talked about everything in the future, as if we’d suddenly be different people when we got there. A house, careers, savings, two children, maybe three. A checklist really, and I watched Ed’s brothers as they ticked each box, but Ed and I seemed to lag behind. All the things on our checklist seemed to be waiting for us in the future, a future that never seemed any closer, even as time passed and should’ve brought it clearer into view. I’m not sure why. Was it me? Was I the only one holding us back? Ugh. Probably. That’s what my instinct says – that little voice on my shoulder. Ed’s a doctor. Ed went to Oregon. He’s living far more than I am. A fat raindrop plops onto my forehead, like a finger prodding me to stop making myself feel like shit.
Petal and I walk until we’re under the charcoal-bricked viaduct bridge as rain begins to spit from the skies, like sparks. A glimmer of a memory flickers into my brain, Daisy and I standing here sheltering from a sudden torrential downpour after shopping in town for eyeshadow and bras.
‘Lee is so cool,’ Daisy had said, the straw of her milkshake at her lips. ‘Like, you know those truly cool people who are totally autonomous? That’s Lee. He knows who he is and doesn’t care what people think. I love that.’
‘Well, when can I meet him?’ I’d said, and she’d beamed. Pretty and sparkling as she always was.
‘Soon,’ she said. ‘He’ll be at the time capsule thing, and he said about maybe giving me a ride, so obviously we have to make sure I’m looking totally off the charts for when I’m zooming off in his sexy little car.’
‘Obviously.’
‘How are you and Ed getting there? Train? Oh, maybe you can jump in with me and Lee. Me and Lee. Sounds right, doesn’t it? Daisy and Lee.’
I shake away the memory, because sometimes I can’t bear to think further than that. It’s an old, broken record, an old, well-trodden path, one that I know every step of and can so easily fall onto with the slightest nudge. How I might’ve been able to save Daisy’s life if I’d known. If I’d insisted she came home with me and Ed on the train, she’d still be here. If I’d got in the car with her, maybe I could’ve stopped Lee speeding or doing whatever it was that made what happened, happen. But if I’d got in, I would’ve died. Was I meant to get in? Was I meant to not?
A train shoots overhead and Petal stirs and I’m grateful to the noise drowning out the chatter in my brain, plonking me straight back in the present. I could go home with her. Mum would love to have a baby in the house, I’m sure. But then it’s quite a walk in the rain and I don’t want her to get cold. I could go into Neo’s but their steampunk coffee machines are loud and the music is always brash and I wouldn’t want Petal to wake before her feed and screw up Charlie’s routine.
The rain falls harder and I hover under the bridge. I unfold the rain cover from the basket underneath and secure it over the pushchair. The breeze whips it up into my face and Petal sleeps on.
‘You just lie there, oh queen,’ I say under my breath. ‘No, don’t mind Auntie Noelle in the wind like a knob head, struggling with this – thing. God, how does this even fix on?’
‘Noelle?’ I instantly recognise the voice and look up, and my body reacts before my stressed little brain has even registered that he’s here.
‘Hey!’ Sam jogs towards me, the fast-falling rain making him squint. My heart speeds up as if from a sudden jolt from jump leads, and there’s my stomach again, swirling like I’m nervous, like I’m seven and it’s Christmas eve or something. Ridiculous. What about Ed? What about Jenna? But it’s pointless. It happens completely involuntarily, every time I see him. Against my bloody will. Against all better knowledge and judgement.
‘Hiya,’ I say. ‘Fancy bumping into you, eh?’
‘I know, right?’ He grins broadly. ‘It’s all we do.’ He’s wearing a grey hoodie, dark tracksuit shorts and a sports bag, the thick black strap across his chest. ‘Cor,’ Charlie would say. (And so would I of course, if it wasn’t totally socially inappropriate.) ‘Hit me up, Captain America.’
‘I didn’t think you were back until tomorrow.’
He ducks under the bridge with us, rain from overflowing guttering above the station slapping the tarmac. ‘Change of plan. I got in last night.’ He looks down at the pushchair and smiles, wet hair falling over his eyes. ‘This yours?’
‘Yeah, forgot to mention it!’
Sam laughs.
‘This is Petal. My friend Charlie’s daughter. She’s not been sleeping so I thought I’d take her out for a walk. Give Charlie a bit of a break.’
‘Your good deed of the day.’ He smiles. ‘Do you wanna get out of here? You got plans or …’
‘I was just considering whether to go home, or to a café, actually, but the coffee shop’s really noisy and – well, I’m out of ideas. The baby whisperer, I am definitely not.’
‘Well, let’s walk,’ he says. ‘We’ll find somewhere.’
Sam and I sit in the launderette with two coffees from Neo’s a few doors down, with its cork walls, bearded baristas and neon lights twisted and bent into wanky motivational quotes on the wall. We are the only ones here. The air smells like laundry detergent and the coppery metallic scent of loose change and we sit side by side on a narrow wooden bench, the windows steamed up. We’d tried to get a seat in a quieter café, but there were no free tables and when we’d rushed by the launderette, the pair of us getting showered with rain, Sam had stopped and I had been completely wooed by the condensation on the glass and fairy lights around the frames, promising a warm, snug shelter. We’d gone in and sat down on the wooden bench, our skin quickly thawing, and the rhythmic whirring of the machines seemed to settle Petal too.
‘I really like launderettes,’ I say now, looking around. The walls are tiled half-way up in squares of duck-egg blue and weird out-of-place framed paintings hang on the wall, of beach towns and boats in a harbour. ‘I like the nostalgia of them, I think. The smells, the sounds. I don’t know. It’s comforting.’
‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ says Sam quietly, looking over his shoulder at the line of machines, a uniformed line of white plastic baskets on top of each one. ‘I guess I like the old-fashioned feel of it. You know, it’s kind of cool having somewhere that isn’t always manned. It’s a reminder that people can maybe still sort of be trusted, or something.’
I sip at my coffee, a raindrop helter-skeltering down a curl at my chin, and dripping onto my thigh.
‘No?’ he says, taking in my face.
‘I don’t know.’ I give a heavy shrug. ‘Feeling a bit jaded today. Do you ever get those days? Where you feel like a grumpy old man?’
‘You mean, like Frank?’ Sam chuckles, looks down at the cup in his hand. His long legs spread, his forearms resting on his thighs. He dips his head, in one nod. ‘But yeah. I guess we’re all allowed to feel a bit jaded sometimes, right? Anything you wanna share with the room?’ He smiles coyly at me.
And I tell Sam about Charlie, about finding her this morning the way I did. I tell him about the panic that almost overtook me, the deep breaths I took with my bloody ancient keychain, and I tell him about what Charlie said, about life and being in it, and my mouth moves so quickly, the words pouring out of me like the endless rain outside. Sam listens quietly, stoic in that cards-close-to-chest way of his.
‘It’s just – what Charlie said. I keep thinking about it. Like – I worry I’ve wasted time.’
Sam looks down at his coffee, then at me. ‘Wasted how?’
‘I was a bit like my mum,’ I say, and hearing myself say it out loud feels like a breath I’ve finally released, one I had no idea I was holding on to. ‘For a while. For a year or so. It hit me out of nowhere, but looking back, it was a perfect storm really. Ed was at university, my friend had died a few years before and I found out my dad – he lives in Australia, we don’t have anything to do with him really. Well, I found out he’d got remarried. And I think it all just caught up with me. I was in hospital for a while.’ Heat creeps up my skin as I say it – shame, I think, deep shame, that something that seemed to be confined to my mind, that seemed to be thoughts, landed me somewhere with beds and doctors in white coats, and I really wish I didn’t feel it, but I do. Sam though, he barely reacts. He just listens, a fixed, calm gaze. ‘But Mum looked after me and … to be honest, that’s why I understand. Why I don’t push her. I couldn’t have been pushed out of anxiety, out of depression. Nothing worked for me really, other than time.’ And there’s a part of me that believes the stress of that probably caused the stroke, I want to say, but I can’t bring myself to. I haven’t said that out loud for a long time. It used to frustrate Ed and he’d bombard me with cold medical facts which I think he thought would help, but of course, didn’t.
‘Everyone wastes time,’ says Sam calmly. ‘And it sounds like you’ve had a lot of stuff to fit in a small amount of it.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I’m stagnant.’
‘Nah.’ Sam stretches, pushes back his shoulders. ‘You don’t look stagnant to me, Gallagher. Not from where I’m sitting.’ He smiles at me, so warmly, so reassuringly, and it makes my cheeks glow, like someone just turned the heating up.
‘Thanks,’ I say, and I turn away, hide my probably bright salmon-pink face as I sip my coffee. I love being with him. I do. I really do. Every time I’m near him, I want to stop the hands of all the world’s clocks. I never want to leave.
A washing machine whirs and a group of shoed feet outside thunder past. Kids running from the rain, I expect.
‘I was taught that trick, by the way,’ says Sam. ‘The um – the square one.’ He draws a square with a finger in the air, tracing one of the dryers. ‘With the breathing.’
‘Really?’
‘Yup.’ He bows his head. ‘I would’ve been like … eighteen, nineteen maybe? Tried living with my dad for a while, and – God, it was the worst idea I ever had. Everything went wrong, things were hard at home, and I went for a run and had a panic attack, went home, thinking I was dying or something. I was sure of it. I always thought I was dying back then.’ Sam chuckles darkly to himself. ‘So, Frank whisked me off to the doctor and a nurse told me …’
‘A nurse told me too. I bet it was the same one.’
Sam laughs, then his face softens. ‘One little panic,’ he says, ‘doesn’t mean you’re going backwards. If that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I was. I thought it might be a sign or something, of things to come.’
‘Nah. Signs are bullshit. I don’t believe in signs.’
I don’t say anything, but I sit and run over his words in my mind. Do I? Do I believe in them? I look for them everywhere, I think, without noticing I do. Signs that things might change – get better, or worse. Signs about Sam, why he’s in my life, why we keep bumping into each other. Signs that Ed likes me, is glad to be home, still fancies me, missed me. Signs that he’s lying to me about Daisy and the camera – the way I thought I saw something in his eyes. Is that looking for signs? Or is that … I don’t know. Gut feeling?
‘So, you don’t believe in signs,’ I say. ‘But what about gut instinct? What does your wild mountaineering brain think of that? Ever smell a mountain bear at thirty feet?’
Sam takes the coffee away from his lips, and laughs. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do. The gut instinct, not so much the bear.’ He smiles, his cheeks pink from the rain. ‘But yeah. I believe when you just know something.’
‘Me too,’ I say.
‘Why, do you know something?’ I look over at him, his gorgeous brown eyes, his pink lips and I feel such a tug towards him that I almost tell him, almost say what is this that’s happening to me, Sam? Why does looking at you feel like looking at the fucking sun?
‘Come on, spill,’ Sam smirks, ducking his head closer to mine, dark hair falling over his eyes. ‘What do you know, Noelle?’
I swallow. ‘Nothing much,’ I say in a tiny voice.
But I feel like I know a lot in this moment. I know I’m meant to know Sam. I have no idea why, there’s no logic or reason – just that I’m meant to. In the same way I know there’s something about Daisy’s camera too, and that look on Ed’s face. I just don’t know what.
Petal snuffles in her buggy and I’m grateful for the distraction. I jiggle the brake with my foot, and the juddering settles her again.
‘She’s cute,’ says Sam, as if despite himself.
‘She is.’ I gaze at Petal in the buggy, tiny fists at the side of her chubby face. ‘A whole perfect, clean slate of a life ahead of her to live how she wants to.’
‘I know, right?’
‘Says you,’ I say. ‘The man who tries to cheat it.’
‘What? Cheat death?’
‘Yes. You said yourself, people die every year up on mountains and yet you just – fuck it and do it anyway.’
‘Say yes and panic later.’ Sam laughs, then looks down into the caramel liquid of his coffee cup. ‘Maybe it’s not cheating death, though. Maybe I’m just … looking it in the eye. Telling it I’m not scared of it.’
‘But why would any normal person want to do that?’
Sam cocks his head to one side, a wordless ‘well’ then blows a long breath out between his lips. ‘My cousin died when I was young. And you know, he was – wild, I guess? Took too many drugs, drank too much. But we lost him. Way too young. Took his own life.’
‘I’m sorry. That’s awful.’
Sam exhales, nods weakly. ‘Something about that makes you feel like it can all be over in a second, so what’s the point in fearing it.’ Then he pauses, ducks his head, and says with a small smile, ‘Plus. Who says I’m normal?’ and I know, with that joke, he doesn’t want to give away any more. And I get it. More than anyone, I understand.
Rain pummels the glass of the launderette, raindrops making trails down the glass between the mosaic of pamphlets and ads. We talk, and Sam tells me he’s got ‘a crazy’ few weeks coming up, and I’m reminded how busy his life is, compared to this tiny pocket of time in the cosy launderette. Work, a charity event in Scotland, and flying home, to Oregon. ‘I’m there about a week,’ he says. ‘It’s my mom’s birthday. She’ll be sixty. And then a friend of mine and Jenna’s – he’s getting married.’
I nod, but feel like someone just stuck a huge pin in my mood. Bang. ‘And how’re things going with Jenna?’
Sam fidgets, runs a finger under his black watch strap absentmindedly. ‘It’s – OK. Which – I don’t know if OK is OK, you know? I’ve known her my whole life and it’s so easy for us to just fall back into some sort of routine, of how it always was, but then how it always was is how we ended up in this mess, so … but she’s looking at visas.’
‘To move here?’
He nods.
‘I see,’ I reply because I don’t know what else to say, and he knocks back his coffee as if it’s something stronger.
Someone outside bursts into laughter and there’s the sound of a police siren – a whole world going on outside – and I suddenly feel all filled up with tears and confusion and emotions I don’t recognise, with nowhere to go.
‘And how’s Ed the Ped?’ Sam asks.
‘It’s – it’s OK.’ I force a smile. Easy, to fall into a routine, I think but don’t say, for us to crawl in and curl up in the comfortable hollows we left in the past, like indents on an old sofa. Easy for it to be how it always was. And that’s how we ended up in the mess we did too.
I check my phone. No text from Ed. Nothing from home, or Charlie. Nobody needing me for anything. So, we sit, quietly together, listening to the rain for a while, the sound of a button in one of the dryers, tapping like a tambourine, exactly every two seconds. Warm. Safe. Slow. Another Noelle and Sam bubble, away from the rest of the world.
Half an hour later, after Petal’s feed – which Sam and I managed between us by unpacking the entirety of the changing bag and barking orders at each other like people on some sort of game show – ‘no, not that bottle’ and ‘those are nappy bags, not wipes!’ and ‘quick! Quick!’ – we begin packing up and preparing to leave the warm little nook of the launderette. Outside, the rain has stopped, and the skies are blue, and I wheel the stroller back and forth on the lino beneath our feet, as Sam methodically re-packs the bag in the way a mountaineer does, I expect. Zipping it up, everything neatly packed and slotted in tightly. Then he holds my keys in his hand and looks down at them, jerking his hand so the keys fan in his palm.
He looks up at me slowly.
‘Noelle, where did you get this?’
‘What?’
He’s holding my heather keyring – the square. My old, little breathing square. And he’s looking at me, his lips parted in a quizzical half smile.
‘That’s my breathing square,’ I laugh, as Sam looks down at it in his hand, rubs a thumb over the clear resin. ‘It’s heather. Real, I think, in resin.’
‘I had one of these.’ Sam looks at me and then laughs – a surprised burst. ‘Seriously, I had one the exact same.’
‘Really? What, heather––’
‘Yeah! Heather, clear resin, silver chain.’ He looks down at it, swallows, and when he looks back up at me, his eyes are glassy.
‘I found it,’ I say. ‘I was about seventeen and I found it on the street—’
‘On the street?’
‘Yeah, not far from here actually. Outside the leisure centre, near Greggs of all places, which for me is predictable because … pasties.’ I laugh. Sam doesn’t. ‘Sam, are you OK?’
Sam shakes his head, as if shaking himself out of a trance. His chuckle is unconvincing. ‘Yeah, totally, I just – mine was exactly like this. My grandma gave it to me when I was like, seven or eight and – I lost it. It was heather. For protection. She believed in all that crap––’
‘Oh my God.’ I stop pushing the buggy and stare at him. ‘Do you think it’s yours?’
Sam pauses, then laughs. He puts the keys back in the changing bag, slots my phone in the side pocket. ‘No,’ he says. ‘But that would’ve been a turn-up, right?’
‘But I mean, it could be!’ I say, eagerly. ‘Did you lose it over here? When you were visiting your dad?’
‘I don’t know. Could have. But God, they must’ve made hundreds – it was cheap. From a museum gift shop.’ He’s hanging the bag on the handle of the pushchair now, adjusting the strap, making sure it’s secure. ‘Thousands of them, Noelle.’
‘But it’s quite an unusual thing to have, though, isn’t it? It’s not like it was a Disney keyring, or something completely mass-produced.’
‘Well, this probably is too.’
Sam pulls the launderette door and holds it open. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We better go while the rain is holding off.’ And I can tell he wants me to stop talking about it, for whatever reason, and so I do. But something is fizzing inside of me. Imagine. Imagine if that was his. That all along, I’ve been carrying it around with me, something that Sam once carried around too …
‘Noelle? Are you coming?’
‘S-sorry. Yeah.’
Outside on the pavement, the air smells earthy, the way it does after the sun comes out and warms the rain on the pavements, and Sam looks down at his watch. I suddenly want him to put his arms around me, but he steps away, throws his bag over his shoulder.
‘Well, thanks for the coffee, Noelle. And Petal.’ He reaches a hand down and strokes a finger over her chubby, peachy cheek. ‘See you around, OK?’ He turns and I watch him get smaller and smaller over my shoulder as I walk, two magnets pulling away.