Emily Winslow - The Whole World

I’d found truth for Gretchen. She didn’t want it.

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You’re not all here.”

“I had an uncle who drowned,” I said. This had little to do with the flow or point of the conversation. But I said it.

It was the intensity of Gretchen’s faulty memories, I think, that triggered the thought. It was the way my mother always told me how much I used to look like my uncle; but, from the pictures I’d seen of him, I don’t think I ever did.

“I never knew that,” said Peter.

“It was before I was born.”

He picked up the paper coffee cup and rolled it between his hands. “Are you going to be all right? I’m supposed to meet someone. But if you want to talk about Polly or Liv, or your uncle, or Kepler…”

“No. No, thanks. Really.”

“Just a bit of advice, though, all right? Whatever you’re not talking about-it’s not as bad as you’re making it.”

He would know, wouldn’t he. He’s always got a new girlfriend.

“Is it the woman from Fitzbillies?” I asked, flicking my fingers against the cup.

“I’ll phone her this weekend. Tonight I’m meeting an old friend. We were a pair back in the old days.”

Old days? Undergrad, maybe? “I’m really sorry that I mentioned your brother.”

“I know. It’s done.”

“No, I’m really, truly sorry…” Regret and sentimentality inflated within me. “That’s not how to treat a friend.” I meant that in so many ways. I’d been poison to so many people in the space of two days.

“Nick. You’re drunk. You should go home.”

“That’s what Richard said.” Hours ago. Maybe by now the Chander girls would be in their room, doing homework or reading in bed. I wasn’t up to facing their usual enthusiasm.

I got up.

Peter’s phone rang. While he chatted and organised his laptop bag, I looked hard at that rowboat scribble on the whiteboard. The colours were vivid-red, green, and sunbright yellow.

I remembered Wesley, a blind boy Peter and I had both known from a summer cricket camp. He’d been blind in the same way as Gretchen: able to see in his earliest years and then losing it. He couldn’t play real games with us-it would have been too dangerous for him. But he could train. He was a decent bowler, actually. He couldn’t tell what was going on in the field, but he could see people as “blobs.” As for throwing the ball, he was excellent.

We’d been roommates. He confided to me back then that his memory of colours was fading. The red he had that summer was less bright than the red he’d had five years before. I didn’t see how he could know it was less bright, since he would have to mentally compare it with the bright colour to notice. He repeated that he didn’t have the bright colour anymore-he couldn’t call it up in his mind-but he knew its absence. He knew that the red he used then wasn’t fiery or sharp or any other kind of feeling word that one might use to capture the saturation of a colour. He knew it like someone knows they don’t remember when they were one year old, or where they left their keys. So his memories were literally fading like an old photograph. Not a metaphor like most people mean-the details going away-but the colour actually draining. And these memories were his visual vocabulary, so his visual present and future and even his imagination were drained as well. I presume that Gretchen had had a similar experience. It put her attachment to her youth, and to the brightness of her early life, in perspective.

“Shall I go first, as a lookout?” Peter joked. I’d almost let myself forget that Polly’s mother was looking for me.

I laughed. Maybe I should have said yes.

I’d forgotten what the Georgian buildings on St. Andrews Street look like. They’d been covered for months, three cranes sticking out like antennae, while the new shopping mall was being constructed behind their facades.

I could have crossed at Emmanuel, but in my cowardice I craved the shelter of the scaffolding. I turned left down the pavement alongside the construction site and kept under it until I had to cross the street. More construction obscured me there, between Christ’s College and the bus station. I’d been under cover since coming out of Downing Street. The open green of Christ’s Pieces stretched in front of me. I hesitated to step out from the covered alley.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said out loud. I made myself step onto the path.

Approaching footsteps beat behind me, under the alley’s temporary roof. I quickened my pace to keep ahead of them. Once into the park, I looked over my shoulder, but couldn’t make out more than a silhouette.

It was a woman. I don’t think she was a student; at least, she didn’t come across as studenty. Maybe it was the hair. The hair seemed like it belonged to someone’s mother. Polly’s mother.

I walked faster.

She was as quick as me, quicker. The distance between us shortened, despite my longer legs.

When she inevitably caught me up I whipped around to face her. “What do you want?” I shouted. I shouted it into her face.

She stepped back.

“Why are you following me, Mrs. Bailey?” I demanded.

She stepped back again. She wore a tracksuit, with a stripe down each leg. She had trainers on her feet. She flicked earphones off of her head.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. Her glance flitted over all possible directions of escape. Back through the alley? Across the grass?

I pushed my hair off my forehead. “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else…” I walked closer, so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice.

She ran for the alley, probably because there was a homeless person in there. I suppose she thought I wouldn’t hurt her in front of a witness.

She wasn’t Mrs. Bailey-I realised that from her reaction-but she reminded me of Polly just the same. It was the turning and running.

I leaned over, hands on my knees, and tried to slow my breathing. The grass looked awfully close, closer…

“Nick?”

A soft, feminine voice. I sprang back upright.

“What? What do you want?” I spluttered. In that instant the voice was Liv, it was Polly and Gretchen and my sister. It was my mother, disappointed that I wasn’t staying home for dinner. I held my hands up in front of my face.

“I’m Miranda Bailey. Are you Nick Frey? Are you,” she asked, in light of the ridiculous outburst she’d just witnessed, “looking for me?”

She hadn’t followed me. Anyone with my address could guess I’d come this way. She’d simply waited.

“No, I, no…” I babbled.

“Are you all right?”

“Never better!” I flung my arms out wide. Then I started walking.

It was a public park. It’s not like I could stop her from walking beside me. It’s not like I could stop any of this.

We crossed the road together to New Square.

“Polly wrote me such nice things about you.”

“That’s very kind of her,” I said, staring straight ahead.

“I need to talk to you because you’re her friend.”

“You’ll have to ask her about that.” Polly had made it clear how she felt about me now.

“If you and Polly have been… intimate…”

“Good God, Mrs. Bailey.” I stopped in front of a rubbish bin. “I’m not going to talk about that with you.”

“There’s something you need to know.”

What? A disease? This was horrible. “Mrs. Bailey.” We faced each other. I put my hands on her shoulders. “You’ve got to stop. Please leave me alone.”

“You need to know that she’s a fragile person. You need to be gentle with her.”

Gentle. Had I been? I remembered pushing her up against the back of the lift.

She continued, “I think you’re good for Polly, you’re a good person. So I’m going to tell you this, so that you’ll understand what Polly’s going through, and why.”