The House Swap(87)

‘I think so,’ I say. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

‘I guess we’ll see.’ He hesitates fractionally, then leans forward, drawing me against him and kissing the side of my mouth in a belated hello. I kiss him back, our lips not quite touching. Three months on, we’re still careful with each other – careful to the point of slight awkwardness. We don’t quite fit together yet, but it seems that the rough edges are being sanded off, eroding and smoothing into something more than serviceable.

Another brief pause, and then he nods towards the phone sticking out of my shirt pocket. ‘Anything today?’ he asks, his voice light.

I shake my head. ‘No. Almost a week now.’ I think of all the messages Amber has sent me in the past few months; dozens, maybe even hundreds. At first I thought she was practising the principle of keeping your enemies close, but lately I’ve started to wonder if the reason she wants to keep these links alive is because, just as I once saw an echo of myself in her, she now sees herself in me. I’m the only other one who’s been close to the person she loves, and she’s starting to realize that what she’s taken on isn’t easy. I never reply to her messages, but I haven’t blocked them, either, and I know exactly why. I think that, someday, I’ll be strong enough. That I won’t want this connection any more.

Francis lets it pass without comment. ‘I’ll get the lunch started,’ he says, raising his bag of shopping. ‘Eddie, do you want to come and help out?’

Eddie scampers after him to the kitchen, still chattering about the film they’ve seen. I listen and feel a smile lifting the corners of my mouth, feeling suffused with love for him, and hot on its heels is the dark weight of guilt that is its chain reaction; the fear that what I have is so much more than I should and that this precarious tightrope of luck is one I don’t deserve to walk. I’m used to this now. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, and wait for it to lift.

When it does, I wander over to the balcony window and look out on to the street. The young couple are still waiting at the bus stop down the street, bodies turned towards each other, chatting animatedly. The woman’s hands are making shapes in the air, as if she’s slotting the pieces of a puzzle into place.

I think of her face as she stood here, the sudden vacancy of it and the way she shivered. It could have been a coincidence, but deep down I believe that some trace has been left, some remnant that won’t be purged by coats of paint or pretty lampshades. I feel it often in the middle of the night, this force field. The presence of the woman who was once here, the pull of it drawing me magnetically to this window from my bed in the dark. And sometimes, I wonder if the same is true in that other house, hundreds of miles away and just across the road from where you still are; if some hint of the few days I spent there lingers, and if some ghost of me shakes whoever lives there now awake from uneasy dreams, filled with love and loss.