‘We were so happy, Daddy and me. And when you came along – wow. Both of us were writers and neither of us could find enough words to describe how much you meant to us. You were our world, Charlie. You always will be.’
He looks at me quizzically. ‘Did Daddy have a favourite ice-cream shop in London?’
Clever. Just like Daddy.
As we join hands and run towards the tube station, our laughter bounces off cobblestone pavers in a side alley, another memory in the making for the pages that will fill chapter upon chapter of a new story.
It’s not a fork in the road, I realise. It’s just the road. There’s no Story A and Story B. There’s one, imperfect, meandering direction.
Cam would want us travelling light, sucking the marrow out of every stop, living this trip and whatever comes after it as though our lives depended on it, which they really do. We’re not here to half-live our remaining days, always partly in flashback.
We’re in a buggy in Hyde Park, having a horse-and-carriage tour, when my phone beeps with a message. It’s an alert from the Aurora Advisory Service I’m subscribed to in Senja, Norway.
There’s been a massive solar flare, one of the biggest this century and, within forty-eight hours, scientists predict the most vivid aurora in living memory.
I book us flights, then and there, on my phone from the carriage. ‘Charlie,’ I say, barely able to control my elation, ‘we’re off to see the lights!’
This is it. Top of my bucket list. The perfect alignment of everything that really counts. I can’t help feeling on some inexplicable level that Cam is responsible – as if he controls the sun’s behaviour and our proximity to the best place in the world from which to see the one thing that’s tantalised me most since I was sixteen years old.
Of course he’s not doing that, but try telling that to the romantic in me.
I touch the pendant hanging around my neck. I wear it all the time. Perhaps it’s the pendant bringing us luck, infused with Hugh’s ability to make things better and easier for me, ever since the day I met him.
Charlie throws his arms around my neck. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ he says. ‘You’re a magician!’
I laugh. ‘What do you mean?’
He turns to me with his big eyes, lit up with the optimism of youth and says, ‘You always make amazing things happen. All the things we’ve seen already and now you’re turning up the lights!’
Turning up the lights. I remember the advice of a good friend just after Cam had died. She’d lost her baby daughter, stillborn, and had decided Georgie’s short life would turn the lights up in her family’s life, not down. It’s only now that her advice is sinking in.
It’s not Cam pulling the strings.
It’s not Hugh.
It’s me.
Every choice I make either brightens our lives or darkens them. I remember the night Cam died, and my first observation being the extent to which I was still here.
Alive.
Breathing.
Death is a wisp away at any moment. Our grasp on our lives is so precarious, maybe we need to cherish every chance we’re given.
As our plane lands on the tarmac at night in Oslo, I imagine I can see the aurora out the window. The city lights are too bright here, but I want to. Reports are coming in already of strong beams in Senja, just under a two-hour flight from here.
I pull down our bags from the overhead lockers, and reach for Cam’s heavy winter coat, which I’ve brought with me. I’ve been wearing a lighter one of my own until now, but if I’m going to see the lights without him, I’m going to see them wrapped in his warmest jacket.
And when the coat pulls free from under someone else’s bag, several pieces of paper float out of the pocket and onto my face. Pink and orange sticky neon notes, covered in Cam’s handwriting.
I feel my heart thud in my chest. He must have put these in his pocket one day and forgotten about them. I’m standing in the aisle of the plane, packed in with other passengers, about to fulfil my lifelong dream, and this is the least convenient time to have a grief crisis.
I’m scared I’ll drop them getting off the flight, wrangling all of our stuff, and the doors aren’t even open yet, so we’ll be a while. My hand is trembling as I turn the first one over.
It’s dated 5 August. I know exactly when that was, and what an achievement it would have been for Cam to have figured out the date. It’s the same day that Hugh went AWOL. My stomach lurches and I’m hot and flustered and I reach and rotate the air-conditioning vent to blow in my direction, which of course it cannot do from here.
‘Asked Hugh,’ the note reads. ‘He gets Gen.’
He gets Gen? What does that even mean?
The note makes no sense at all. I can’t read these now, not in the aisle of this plane. I stuff the notes back into the inside pocket of the coat, my hand shaking, check I haven’t dropped any, and zip the pocket up, tight. I suspect I’m carrying the explanation of the secret between Hugh and Cam. The issue that tore both of them up and tore Hugh and I apart.
But, right now, I need to make a conscious choice not to let these men and their history get in the way of the one experience I’ve longed for more than any other, for most of my life.
41
Sometimes you can only see the aurora through a camera. Not tonight. We can see it out of the bus window as we’re driving to our hotel after the next flight.
The bus draws up to the entry and we pile out. I can barely grab our bags fast enough, race inside, check in, dump everything but the camera and our coats and rush back outside.
It’s freezing cold and we stand in the garden of the hotel, entranced as iridescent greens and purples dance quickly and silently across the sky. No one second is the same. The patterns shape-shift and, in this moment, my heart is fuller than it’s ever been.
As I glance down at Charlie, I can see the lights reflected in his wide eyes. He can barely believe what he’s seeing, and I love that I’m sharing this with him.
I think of Cam, and how he’d have loved this. And I touch the pendant again. Hugh’s choice. But mostly I think of me, and how immeasurably glad I am that I made this happen. Put myself first. Prioritised this dream over all the others. At least this once.
I take out the bucket list from my bag, and a pen. I cross off number one on the list: See the Northern Lights. While I’m at it, I cross off See a Broadway show and Gondola in Venice, Christmas Market in Prague and Solo trip overseas. Charlie’s with me, of course, but I don’t think a five-year-old counts.
The further down the list I go, the more I realise I’ve done. Write a book is still there, but that’s underway. Live by the beach – of course. I still haven’t found a house, but that will happen at some point.
It’s now almost midnight, and getting even colder, and Charlie’s tapped out. I suggest we go inside, have hot chocolates and get snuggled in bed. We can leave the curtains pulled back in our room and watch the lights until we can’t keep our eyes open.
‘I’ve never been allowed to stay up so late before,’ Charlie says, thrilled at this plan.
An hour later, he’s fast asleep. I take out my laptop, sit by the window and try to capture the vision in words. I feel like I’ll never have the vocabulary to do it justice. I also can’t think straight, knowing those sticky notes are in this room.