His eyes can’t find mine. He is twitching, mouth forming silent words, hands trembling at his sides.
‘I have to go back. I’ll run you home, then get going.’
I drop the cigarette, cross my arms around my body, and lower my head. I watch the end of the cigarette burning on the tarmac, a thin trail of smoke wending its way upwards, disappearing to nothing.
‘Yes. Of course.’ Two stray tears sting my cheeks and I turn away so he can’t see as I drag my sleeve across my face to dry them.
He fixes his gaze straight ahead as he drives back towards Penzance on the A30. I don’t know what to say. Without even being aware of what I was doing, my body moving on autopilot triggered by nostalgia, I’ve crossed a line and it’s clearly shaken him. I could kick myself. Stupid of me. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says then. ‘It’s… I don’t know…’ He hesitates. ‘What… what happened that night. Fuck. Jesus,’ he whispers. ‘Fuck. I need to get away from here. I shouldn’t have come back. I should have put Alex on the train. I don’t know what I was thinking.’ His words have turned to almost incoherent muttering. The way his body is flinching and twitching is unnerving.
This is my fault.
My fault.
For the last fifteen years I’ve lived with constant guilt. It runs through my veins with my blood. But what I’m feeling now, the nauseating thickness of it, is suffocating. I can’t put any of it right. I can’t fix it. Raking over old ground won’t do any good. Nor will reminiscing. Nostalgia is an enemy dressed up as a friend.
Sitting in the same car seat I sat in fifteen years ago when I was frozen with shock and chilled to the bones of me, I know there are no words I can say, no apologies or explanations I can give that will make things better.
It’s as fucked now as it was back then.
We get to a mini roundabout and Cam flicks the indicator on. The ticking keeps time with my heartbeat. He reaches for his cigarettes, taps the packet and manoeuvres one into his mouth, presses the car lighter and, when it clicks, holds it up to light it. A car horn sounds from behind us. He ignores it, waits until the cigarette is lit, before pushing the car into gear. I catch the angry face of the driver behind as he overtakes on the inside of the roundabout. Cam doesn’t seem to notice him. If he does, he doesn’t care.
‘Help yourself.’ He gestures at the packet.
I don’t take one; Nathan will be home soon.
Cam winds down the window and rests his arm on the sill of the door. He draws on his cigarette, squinting against the smoke. ‘I still see his face everywhere I go,’ he says then. ‘In my dreams, on the streets, in crowds. Sometimes he’s beside me on the sofa or behind me while I brush my teeth.’
The stab to my stomach takes my breath. I see him too. I hear him. He inhabits my dreams; his body, waterlogged and pale, suspended in a sea that’s saturated with blood.
We pull up outside Trevose House and he turns off the engine. His hands don’t leave the steering wheel.
‘I loved you so much, Hannah. Did you know that?’
My hands knot around each other in my lap. I want to get out of the car. I don’t want to be here.
‘I thought we’d be together forever.’ He laughs bitterly, quietly. ‘Jesus… I got it so wrong, didn’t I? It broke me when you chose him. After everything we went through? I didn’t understand it. But I’m glad you have this good life. This house. Nice things.’ He winces and draws in a breath. ‘I was never good enough for you.’
I turn my head to look at him. How can he think these things? How can he think I want this house? That I’m interested in nice things? ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I say, trying hard to keep from crying. ‘I hate this house. I hate it all. It’s just… It was too hard. To see your face. To be reminded all the time.’ I stop myself talking and remind myself for the thousandth time I chose Nathan for a reason. That reason was to protect Cam. ‘We couldn’t be together after what happened,’ I say then. I’m not looking at him now. It’s too hard. Instead I keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead and talk as if I’m reading from a script, monotonous and calm. ‘You see that, don’t you? How could we have stayed together? Please, know—’ I pause when my voice cracks. ‘Please know how sorry I am. Truly. I fucked it all up and I’m sorry.’
It’s all I can say.
I’m sorry.
His face contorts. ‘You’re sorry? It’s me who should be sorry. Not you. I was an idiot. Got jealous. Angry. I’ve been over it all a million times in my head. It wasn’t your fault, Hannah.’
I’m hit then by an unbidden image of that man, out there in the water, bones picked clean by the fish, crabs scuttling in and out of the hollows where his eyes should be.
Whose fault?
‘I wanted you to be happy,’ I say. ‘I wanted you to get away from Newlyn and make a life for yourself. Away from the shit. I couldn’t see you to go to prison.’
‘Sometimes I wish I had. When things got harder, I thought prison would be a relief. A warm bed. Three meals a day. Would have been nice. But they’d have come for you too.’
I’ve lost count of how many times I lay in bed waiting for the knock on the door. Waiting to find the police on the doorstep. Waiting for the metallic bite of their handcuffs.
‘Have you been happy?’ Would this make it easier? Knowing he’d had a life, and that it was the right choice to drive him away.
‘Happy?’ He considers it. ‘There were moments of happiness.’ He pauses. ‘I married briefly.’
I should be pleased, but instead I’m hit by an irrational stab of jealousy. The thought of someone else sharing his bed. Touching his body. Talking to him about the things closest to him. Listening to his secrets. His confessions, even. Did she know about me? Did he tell her the truth about why he left Cornwall?
‘It didn’t last. She was bad for me. Drugs and drink. I was on a road to self-destruction. We both were. And I was having these dark – dark, dark – thoughts. You know?’
Yes. I knew.
‘She couldn’t hack it. Wasn’t strong enough herself. I was too much for her to cope with and she met somebody else…’ He sighs. ‘When she left I spiralled. Hit rock bottom. Stopped working and missed a couple of rent payments and got evicted. Ended up on the streets for a year or so.’
I inhale. ‘Oh Cam…’
‘It’s all a blur. I guess I’m lucky to be alive.’ He smiles. ‘In a way you helped me through.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was thinking about everything. What happened. What we did. And then I had this weird feeling that you were watching me, looking at me in the state I was in, dirty, sleeping in a doorway, and hating me—’
‘But how could you think that?’
‘It’s hazy. I can’t remember it clearly, but I don’t think it was you I was really thinking of. It was me. Me hating myself, thinking I was weak and pathetic, seeing myself with your eyes. Imagining what you’d think of me. I don’t know, hearing that out loud sounds strange. It doesn’t matter now, what matters is it was enough to get me to a drop-in. They set me up with a counsellor. Helped me kick the drink. The drugs. Put me back on track.’
We fall silent. Both drowning in a sea of regret. For a moment I consider taking his hands in mine and telling him how I really feel, like lead characters in a schmaltzy Hollywood romcom. But it’s short lived. This is real life, not celluloid. Real life is messy and complicated. Our relationship comes with too much baggage. Too much risk. How long would it take for our crimes to be unearthed? Nothing has changed. I won’t let Cam go to prison. Not then and not now. And I won’t hurt my son. Alex might be too old for Nathan to take away, but he’s not too old to hate me.
All these years spent fantasising about a different life with Cameron Stewart. But that’s all it was. A fantasy. Trevose House with its ghosts and nightmares is my reality.
Cam opens his mouth as if to speak, but I silence him with a shake of my head. ‘No,’ I whisper. ‘Don’t say anything else.’ Tears well in my eyes as I open the car door. ‘Thank you for bringing Alex home to me.’
When I reach the gate, his car starts, I breathe deeply, fighting every urge I have to turn around and run back to him. His gears grind, the engine revs aggressively, and his car screeches as he drives off at speed.
The front door closes heavily behind me and I collapse against it, hands covering my face, knees so weak I crumple and slide down to the floor. My head is filled with that night. Cam’s arms around me as we walked, trembling and trancelike, to his car, where I sat shivering and staring out at the darkness, the coat he’d wrapped around my shoulders doing nothing to repel the biting cold. I had no idea how long he was gone. Time stood still. When he returned, when he opened the door, the car filled momentarily with wind and waves. He climbed in, closed the door, and everything stilled.
I didn’t ask what we were doing. I didn’t speak. At one point he stopped the car and got out. He walked to the edge of the road, bent over, and vomited. We ended up at Lamorna Cove. The car park overlooking the sea was empty. He explained in monotone we’d be there until morning. We would tell our friends we’d driven there to have sex. People did. It’s quiet and romantic with cliffs rising in vertiginous walls providing an illusion of privacy. He leant over me and released the lever to lower my seat. He did the same to his own and we lay in the car, like terrified babes in the woods.
‘I’m so sorry,’ was the last thing I heard him say.
I’m so sorry.
Neither of us slept. Shortly after eight there was a sharp knock on the window. It was the man who ran the café, his irritated face mouthing words, jabbing angrily towards the sign: No Overnight Parking.
‘We fell asleep. We’re sorry. We’ll leave now.’
The man trudged off and we watched him unlock the café. Cam turned to me and rested his hand on my arm. I flinched.
It’ll be OK, Hannah.
Ha! What did Cam Stewart know?
It was going to be anything but OK.