The first crack in the wall dividing fantasy from reality appeared an hour after we got home on the Sunday night. I checked my e-mail and there was a message from Angelina, sent the previous day. All of her earlier messages, bar that one wassup? from her phone, had been sent on Wednesday evenings.
Have you got Skype?
I e-mailed back:
Yes, but I can’t use it at work.
I thought that would be the end of it, but the next morning there was a reply.
Doesn’t have to be in working hours. I’m by myself this week. What’s your user name? Mine’s The-Angelina-Brown.
Cop that, Equal Opportunity Commissioner Brown and Newspaper Columnist Brown and all the other Angelina Browns around the world. The former actress from Mornington Police is The Angelina Brown. I e-mailed back.
Mine’s Nine-Inch-Pianist
I hope you don’t use it for work
It’s my hand span
I’m sure it’s that too. Seriously, people get fired for less. Rightly so
I’m having you on. It’s Bee-Flat
Later this morning your time? Or now?
At work in London. But home tomorrow. 10 p.m. your time OK?
Perfect. xxx
Tuesday at one P.M. in Norwich, I logged on to Skype. My location was still registered as the Netherlands from a trip to The Hague for work a few years earlier. I had not bothered with an avatar.
Angelina had a photo—a glamorous professional head shot. It would be ludicrous to say she had not changed, but she was immediately recognizable. I had only two pictures of her. One was the shot with Richard in the long-faded newspaper clipping that Jacinta had sent me. The other was Shanksy’s photo of her singing by the piano, his gift to me on the December morning when I caught the plane home. They had become so familiar that they no longer spoke to me.
Now I saw her again. She was older, but that made the image more compelling. I was looking at the real person that I was about to speak to, not some fantasy from the distant past. She had cut her long hair and her face had lost some of its youthful plumpness, if that’s the right word, but it was by no means sharp. It just made her eyes bigger.
The Skype photo marked the beginning of the ghost behind the e-mail messages taking on flesh and becoming not only a real person but the person I had known two decades earlier.
I went for a jog—out to eight miles now—and took a hard look at myself after the shower. My plan was not to show myself on Skype, but if the offer was You show me you and I’ll show you me, I wanted to take it up. It was only my face, I reminded myself, which looked like that of a forty-nine-year-old contract database architect. At least I did not need my glasses to read the screen. But there was one easy improvement I could make.
Scissors. Razor.
My chin looked a bit weak, as it does when you shave your beard after becoming accustomed to it. On the positive side, my face looked clean, professional, and distinctly younger. Straight nose, clear complexion, clear eyes. A full head of hair, with not a lot of gray amid the black.
At 10:40 P.M. Melbourne time, I gave up waiting for Angelina to call and hit the Voice Call button. No video. One thing at a time.
She answered, also without video. There was a short pause, then her voice in the speakers, clearer than a phone. She could have been in the room with me.
“Do you know ‘Because the Night’ by Patti Smith?”
Her voice was perhaps a little deeper, but it was unmistakably hers. It took me a moment to realize she was repeating the first words she had ever spoken to me, words that I had responded to in the accent that had given her reason to invent the Bring a Brit invitation and …
“And Bruce Springsteen,” I said. “They wrote it together.”
“Oh God,” she said. “You sound so … unchanged.”
“So do you.”
I wanted time to slow down, slow right down and stop. This could never happen again, this reconnection after so long. It was a huge step forward from messaging, a completely different experience. Perhaps she felt the same way, because the link went silent.
I turned my back to the computer, switched my keyboard on, and unplugged the headphones. I had not planned this, but it felt right. Though I was not going to attempt “Because the Night.”
I played Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” the song I was playing when she walked up to the piano that first night in the bar. I sang the opening words, asking where we had gone, what had happened to us when the rain came, and was overcome with a flood of nostalgia—for her, for Shanksy pulling me a beer, for the version of me that sang at a piano. It was a million miles away from the flirtation of our earlier exchanges.
I had to stop singing for a few bars to pull myself together. When I picked up again, my voice was shaky.
I finished the song and half expected to find she had hung up, but the connection was still open. She spoke first.
“Oh my God—it just takes me right back. Do you remember the day we drove to the beach at Point Addis and walked all that way with the picnic basket?”
“And it rained.”
“That’s what the song reminded me of. And we were huddled under that overhang of rock…”
We went on for an hour and a half, revisiting the things we had done, things I had not thought about for years. We were talking about events rather than feelings, but memories of how we felt, how we had been, sat behind all of them. There was just one reference to current times, or at least post-Australian times.
“You didn’t have children,” she said.
“Not through lack of trying.”
“I’m sorry. When you said ‘no children’ in your e-mail, I thought…”
“No. But I’m not sure we would even have tried if it hadn’t been for what you said to me that Christmas. So thank you.”
“Except—”
“No. Thank you. It was better to have tried.”
I realized it was true only as I said it. I had long acknowledged that Claire’s and my focus on a family had been at the expense of our own relationship. But if I had never stepped up and tried, encouraged Claire, our relationship would have suffered in a different way. And we would have been the less for not facing our fears.
Finally, she said, “Remember the night at the bar? When Shanksy bought us a bottle of champagne?”
The night I told her I loved her. And she told me she loved me.
I said, “Like it was yesterday.”
A long pause and then: “We were so young.”
The two of us said nothing for about a minute, and it seemed the right time to hang up. I went to click on the red button and saw that she had already gone.