The Most Difficult Thing Read online

  If the worst came to the worst, Meg had told me one night not long after we arrived in London, then she would simply go back to Newcastle. She would take bar work there and stay with her parents while she worked on the book she was destined to write. Though we both knew it would never come to that. Meg was one of those people who appeared to create the existence they wanted, without effort.

  I imagined her mother, a shorter, squatter version of my friend – the same ready smile, fiery red hair. I thought of my own mother, thin with worry, her loss etched into the corners of her eyes. The years of silent dinners behind neatly pruned privets, hedging me in together with the memory of what I had done, or, rather, what I had not.

  The smile had been pulled tighter than ever across my mother’s lips the day I returned home, the day university – and its promise of escape – came to a crushing end. It clawed at the corners of her eyes as she watched me placing the box of my possessions onto my bed, the room having been stripped of any trace of me the moment I had left. Just as she had purged any trace of Thomas from the house within days of him leaving us.

  My breath sharpened as I thought of my parents. Them, the only alternative to this. An invisible tightening around my neck reminded me that I could not let this opportunity slip through my grasp.

  Meg’s voice cut through my thoughts, steadying my heartbeat as we stepped into the foyer where a TV screen was playing the BBC News channel on the wall above the reception desk.

  ‘Here you go.’ The receptionist handed back to us the security passes we were made to collect daily and wear around our necks at all times. Looking down at the hollow outline of my face on the paper print-out, my eyes moved instinctively to the word ‘Temporary’.

  We stepped into the lift and Meg moved her fingers to press the button for Floor 1, the newsroom, before changing her mind and pressing Floor 2 instead.

  ‘We’re at least having a quick fag before we go in,’ she said, stepping out of the lift.

  The smell of stale smoke hit us before the doors had finished opening. Turning left into the smoking room, there were plastic chairs edging the walls, rectangular metal tubs strategically placed across the blue carpeted floor.

  Meg leaned down to grab a copy of the morning’s paper from a pile by the door, before crossing the room towards a seat by the window.

  The room was airless, years of nicotine clinging to every surface.

  Silver bangles jarring against one another on her wrists, Meg pulled out a ten-box of Marlboro Lights, drawing one out for herself and another for me. The cigarette was thick between my fingers as I leaned into the flame, holding back my hair, which had recently been cut from waist to shoulder length in an attempt at sophistication.

  ‘That’s a fucking scoop,’ she said, pressing the fag between her teeth as she pulled her phone out of her pocket.

  My eyes moved over the front page of the paper. Below the headline ‘Exclusive: Leading Charity in Cahoots With Arms Dealer’, my attention was drawn by a small black-and-white headshot of a young man with thick, dark hair grazing his neckline. Next to his face, there was the name of the reporter on the piece – Harry Dwyer.

  Beside me, Meg’s phone beeped again, but I was distracted by the man’s face, the arch of his nose, the full curve of his lips.

  ‘It’s David. He’s started his job at that bank in Canary Wharf … wants to know if we’re up for a drink after work … Oi, are you listening?’

  It took a moment for Meg’s words to register and when they did I felt the familiar dull ache in my chest.

  There was nothing more daunting than the prospect of going out and spending even more money I didn’t have, before running to catch the last train home. Nothing apart from the prospect of home itself – the deafening silence a constant reminder of the person who wasn’t there.

  ‘You know David will be throwing cash around,’ Meg laughed, reading my mind. ‘Why don’t you stay with me at my cousin’s flat after? She’s not going to be there. Save you going all the way back to your aunt’s house?’

  I smiled, flushing at the memory of my lie.

  ‘Sweet.’ The silver ring in Meg’s nose rose up as she smiled, typing furiously into her phone.

  Pressing ‘send’, she stood. ‘Right, I’m going to have a piss before we start. You coming?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m just going to finish reading this. I’ll see you up there.’

  Something about the story, the man’s face, wouldn’t let me go.

  Following an extensive year-long investigation, this newspaper can exclusively reveal that members of a leading social justice charity accepted a series of bribes from arguably the world’s most prolific warmongers …

  After a moment, I stood and pulled the front two pages of the paper, Harry Dwyer’s piece in its totality, from the rest and folded it neatly, careful not to make an impression along the image of his face, as I placed it in my bag. Unaware of the chain of events I had, without the slightest comprehension, just set in motion; the wheels that were gaining traction, preparing to spin dangerously out of control.

  David was waiting for us outside the pub, when we arrived later that evening.

  ‘Jesus, man, what are you like? Couple of weeks in the City and this happens?’ Meg ruffled his hair, where the undercut from just a few weeks earlier had been replaced by an expensive barber’s take on short back and sides. ‘Still haven’t lost the leather bracelet though, I’m glad to see …’

  ‘What? I thought you’d be into it?’ David raised his eyes as he pulled her into a bear hug, the flame of the outside heater licking against night air. He paused before moving to me, his expression shifting into something softer.

  ‘Anna.’ He took my hand, gently, pulling me towards him, holding me as if I was something that might otherwise break.

  ‘Right – drink, bar!’ Meg slipped her arms through mine and David’s, squeezing gently, the three of us falling into rhythm as we moved through the pub door, and I squeezed back, grateful that we were simply there, all three of us. Knowing, in my bones, even then, that it was too good to last.

  ‘What have you done with my lighter?’ Meg was scrabbling around the empty glasses and crisp packets an hour or so later, in the pub garden, when I spotted him, seated with his back to us at one of the far tables.

  Despite the angle, I recognised him instantly – even from where I was sitting, which meant I could only see a sliver of his face, the same face I had studied on the front page of the paper that morning.

  He would not believe me when I told him this later. How is that possible? he would shake his head and laugh, though not unkindly. Maybe he was right. Maybe what I felt then was something deeper; not so much recognition as a sense of foreboding.

  Meg spotted him a moment later. I stayed where I was, rooted to the ground as she circled towards Harry Dwyer, in search of a lighter. I couldn’t see his expression as he held out the flame towards Meg’s face, but after a moment she pulled back, as if to get a better look, and as she spoke, a small smile curled at the edges of her mouth.

  ‘I’m Meg.’ The words blew off her lips, like kisses. My palms burned as he accepted her outstretched hand.

  ‘Come and join us.’ She was drunk, though she would have done the same thing sober.

  ‘Don’t be like that.’ I did not hear his reply but after a moment he stood reluctantly, his thumb scratching his cheekbone as he followed Meg back towards our table. His eyes were red and he looked tired. I wanted to hold his hand.

  ‘Guys, this is Harry. Harry works at the paper …’ Meg leaned into him, laughing. ‘He’s quite the star reporter, don’tcha know?’

  Harry muttered something I could not make out. He was drunk too, and weary. When he smiled, I could see he wanted to leave. I could hardly look at him and yet I could not look away; there was something so powerful in my response to him that I could not trust myself to speak. But then I did.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ My voice was louder than I had expected.

&
nbsp; He paused, looking at me for the first time, before nodding, his mouth breaking gently into a smile as the moon behind his head disappeared into a cloud.

  CHAPTER 4

  Anna

  In those early London days, the office was a bus ride from the flat Meg and I shared, a boxy two-bed above a kebab shop on Camden High Street. It was Meg’s cousin’s flat really. Although she had not lived there for months, Lucy’s presence was etched across the living room in cheap, colourful wall-hangings from her travels in Asia; ineffectual attempts to distract from the grubby off-white walls and the draught which rattled in from the road below.

  To the outside world, it was a dive. To me, it was home. Mine and Meg’s.

  It was a Friday night when Meg announced that Lucy had decided to stay on in Sydney with her boyfriend, leaving the flat in Meg’s care. The very same night that Harry landed back in our lives, like a bomb.

  The two events, unconnected on the surface, squeezed me in from either side.

  We were sharing a bottle of wine – my treat, courtesy of my new job – in the pub on Arlington Road, around the corner from Meg’s flat. As was her style, the offer for me to move in was presented not so much as a proposition but as a fait accompli.

  ‘How could you say no?’ She paused halfway through pouring my glass. ‘Even if the prospect of living with me isn’t enough on its own, which it obviously should be, then just think how much you’ll be saving on travel from your aunt’s house, presuming that’s where you were planning on staying … From the sound of it, your dad’s not going to be stationed back in the UK any time soon. I know it’s a tiny flat and it’s a shithole but it’s cheap – and you get to live with me!’

  The pub doors swung open, a bluster of wind edging through the heavy velvet curtain.

  ‘Look, Lucy isn’t charging me full whack. If we split the bills, you’d be doing me a favour, and I want you to live with me … Fuck sake, man, say yes?’

  Meg had this way of making me feel like I was the most important person in the world. I thought of my parents, the nights I had cried myself to sleep after it happened, desperate for one of them to hear my heart tearing above the sound of their own; for them to come to me and tell me it was not my fault. For a split second, my brother’s face flashed in front of me, but the spectre disappeared at the sound of Meg’s voice.

  ‘Shit, are you crying?’ She leaned across the table and took my arm. ‘I’m not that bad!’

  I pressed my sleeve briefly at the corner of my eyes, laughing, and when I looked up again, my skin bristled like a fox catching the first scent of the hounds. Harry: the man who would be the death of me.

  It was the first time I had seen him since that night in the pub in the shadow of Canary Wharf, though my eyes had sought him out at the office the following day, self-consciously pulling at the sleeves of the jumper I had borrowed from Meg – deep red with a slight scratchiness to the wool. I even stayed late, making excuses to move around the office, in the hope that I might spot him; propelled by a naive notion that he might be looking for me, too.

  Rather than giving up, something in me accepted his absence as a challenge. That evening after work, my legs moved more briskly than usual as I made my way back from Guildford station, energised by the thought of him. It was just past eight by the time I closed the front door and already the house was swallowed by darkness, a low light emanating from the living room.

  I walked purposefully across the hall so that they would hear my steps momentarily hovering outside the room, giving my mother the chance to call out, to ask if I had had a good day. But the door remained shut, the only sound the canned laughter clattering out from the television.

  Upstairs, at the end of the corridor I flicked on the lamp beside my bed, the featureless room coming into stark focus. The single bed, neatly made, a single chest of drawers uncluttered by anything other than a small make-up bag and a stick of deodorant, which my mother had pointedly removed from the bathroom and placed on my bed on my first day home, without a word. The spectacle of my return flaunted in our shared spaces was apparently too much for my father to bear.

  By the bed there was the computer I had been given my first week at Sussex, as part of my grant. Pressing the door closed, I turned it on, my fingers trembling as I typed ‘Harry Dwyer’ into the search engine, holding my breath as a photo appeared on the screen. The first image might have been a disappointment if I had not been so desperate for any trace of him.

  It was taken from a news conference: Harry in the crowd amidst a small throng of reporters. The image was poor quality, Harry’s face distracted by a scene just out of shot.

  After a moment, I pressed the arrow on the screen and another, less recent, photo appeared of Harry having just scooped the Young Journalist of the Year prize for a piece on internal wranglings at Number 10. He was twenty-three at the time, which made him nine years older than me. For a moment I thought of my own path: the year spent working at the chain bakery in town after leaving school with an unblemished if unremarkable academic record; fending off awkward advances from Tristan, the general manager, who snorted when he laughed, and stood too close behind me at the counter, making comments about the position of my hairnet by way of exerting his power.

  The three years at university, where my greatest single achievement had been meeting Meg and David and having, for the first time in my life, found both friendship and the space to breathe, space to become the person I was beyond the frameworks by which others interpret and define us. The fact that Sussex had accepted me onto an English and media degree without asking for an interview had not so much given me confidence in my ability as it had confirmed to me that I would get by better in life if people weren’t given too much information. On paper, the surface facts of my life – childhood in Surrey where my father ran a local business; my mother, otherwise a stay-at-home wife, lending a hand – were acceptable: I was acceptable. Delve any further, and … I inhaled hard, not allowing my mind to slip back to Thomas. Look forward, I reminded myself, focusing on Harry’s face, absorbing his successes, allowing myself to live vicariously through them, even if just for a moment.

  Admittedly, it was a long way from the life I was living now. If you were to line up our achievements side by side, and draw lines between them – a habit I found impossible to break – you would notice a distinct distance between where I was now – commuting four hours a day to transcribe other people’s interviews and make endless cups of tea – and where Harry had been at the same age. But a lot could change in a year; I was dependent on that possibility. Though of course back then I couldn’t have known quite how much.

  There was a stirring on the stairs, and instinctively I sat upright, pressing open a new tab on my web browser. Though I need not have bothered; as always I heard the footsteps speed up as they passed my door, despite my father’s attempts to make his feet lighter in the hope that I wouldn’t notice him, urged forward by his terror of being made to look me in the eye.

  Refusing to give my father another thought, I returned to the previous tab. With another click of the mouse, I was met by a brief journalistic profile of Harry and his time as a reporter at the paper, alongside the same byline photo that had first caught my eye on the front page that morning in the smoking room. And then, with another simple click, there it was, on the second page of Google, a brief mention in the media pages of a rival paper:

  Harry Dwyer was unceremoniously sacked today, just hours after his most recent scoop. The paper’s editor, Eddy Monkton, is believed to have seen off the Irish-born writer in characteristically pithy style, telling his former star reporter, ‘Dwyer – you’re fucked’. A talented self-starter, Dwyer rose through the ranks after dropping out of school and taking a job in the canteen of his local paper. Monkton refused to comment on the parting of ways.

  But … how? My mind searched for answers to the impossible question of how this could be. How our lives could have intersected as they had and then, just like that, have bee
n torn apart again. This had to be wrong. Determined to prove it so, I continued to trawl for clues until long after the light in the hallway had been clicked off – but there was nothing else to be found. No other mention of his being sacked, and no further explanation.

  It is a visceral memory, the sadness I felt in that moment; I can still feel it, the deflation at knowing that if this brilliant, beautiful man no longer worked for the paper, there would be no chance of bumping into him again. It was real, that memory, it is impossible to believe it was not – and yet I will question it later, just as I have learnt to question everything. In the darkness to come, I will ask myself if I could have felt so instinctively connected to him at this point – or was I simply retrospectively filling in the details to suit the version of events that I needed to create in order to justify what I had done?

  In any case, the sight of him in the Crown and Goose that night, his arm propped against the bar, a pint in front of him as he scanned the pages of the Evening Standard, seemed not so much astonishing as merely confirmation of the connection I had felt in the beginning.

  Of course, what I should have asked myself was, what were the chances of him turning up like that in our local pub? And the real question: if I had known the answer, would I have run for my life?

  ‘What are you staring at?’ Meg turned, following my gaze, a smile creeping over her mouth as she spotted him too.

  ‘No way.’

  I could not be sure if she was smiling for herself or for me. Despite the special connection I felt to Harry, it was clear I was not the only one to notice his rough impression of beauty. It was hard to ignore the looks he elicited as we all sat together in the bar that first night, the flutter of eyes noticing him as Meg stood and moved towards him, seemingly unfazed.