It was two days later when Hannah’s phone buzzed with a text. Autumn seemed to have officially started, having thoughtfully held off till after Emily’s wedding. The ground was littered with leaves; reds and golds that flittered through the air as Jemima kicked them with her boots.
They were walking to school together and when Hannah saw Harry’s name appear on the screen of her phone she put it back in her bag, didn’t want to taint the journey with anything he had to say. Jemima was swirling and whirling, jumping in puddles, stretching to reach conkers from their branches and trying to catch sycamore helicopters as they fell.
Hannah was trying not to think about Harry. Trying not to think about the way he had made her feel at the bar. Stripping away every chat, every conversation, every look, every glance that had ever passed between them with some stubborn stupid words.
Up ahead, Jemima had paused next to a flattened hedgehog in the road.
‘Can I take it into school for show and tell?’
‘No,’ Hannah said, trying to steer her away from the poor animal.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s dead and decaying and dirty,’ Hannah said. ‘Come on, let’s go, we’re going to be late.’
‘You’re so mean,’ Jemima huffed.
Hannah made a face. ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said, but Jemima was already off up the road kicking leaves in a sulk.
Hannah paused where she was by the squashed roadkill. The exchange making her think of something Holly had said in her hand-fasting speech.
She had talked about the woman, Enid, seeing beyond the tantrums and the anger, looking behind them to find the cause.
This incident was clearly on a much smaller scale, but she knew all Jemima wanted was to show off her flattened hedgehog and Hannah had dismissed her without thought. As she caught up with Jemima she said, ‘It’ll still be there after school, maybe you could show your friends then. It’ll be better if they see it in context. You know? On the road and with all the leaves.’
Jemima looked momentarily unconvinced, but then she gave a solemn nod and said, ‘OK.’ She slipped her cool hand into Hannah’s and added after a couple of paces, ‘I don’t think you’re mean.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hannah, who was trying to push away the new and niggling idea that she should have tried harder with Harry. That if, as she had thought, there was a connection between them – that she could see in him someone that others couldn’t, perhaps not even himself – then surely she owed him the possibility of looking beyond the tantrum to find the cause?
That didn’t mean excusing him his behaviour, but perhaps she should have tried harder to understand it. At the wedding her focus had been on him liking her dress, or rather her in her dress, and then on the hurt she’d felt after their chat. She hadn’t once, really, thought about Harry. Wondered why he’d turned up quite as bad as he had. Yet she’d been quite certain that he hadn’t been the Harry that she’d walked with, drank with, laughed with in New York.
At the school gate Jemima kissed Hannah goodbye and skipped into school with her handful of conkers and a story about a dead hedgehog.
Hannah had some distracted chats with the other parents at the gate, thinking only of her phone and the text waiting to be read from Harry. It was another ten minutes before she was alone again, walking back down the road, past the hedgehog, and getting her phone out of her bag.
Whatever he had to say, she thought she would use the opportunity to suggest a coffee. Face to face she could question him on his behaviour, see what he was ready to reveal, if anything. At least then she would feel as if she had tried, as if she had done everything she could.
Just as a friend, of course, she reminded herself.
It turned out, as she opened the text, that she needn’t have bothered with her convoluted thinking process. The answer had been on her phone all along.
I’m really sorry. I’m a dick. My only excuse is that my dad died that morning.
Hannah leant against a garden wall.
Her phone buzzed again.
I don’t know who to talk to. Will you meet me?