‘Grace, I’m a mess! Or I will be after this flight. Not from the air travel for once. I’ve never been more nervous in all my life. What if it’s too late? Oh! I have to turn my phone off. Love you. Ring Sophie from the office about the details, okay? Code word: Project Harry Styles. Not a word to Hugh!’
I sit back and pretend in front of Charlie that I’m not sitting here stifling a multi-pronged anxiety attack. As soon as we’re in the air and able to, I plug us both into the entertainment system and try to distract myself with rom-coms.
It always works out in the end. Isn’t that what I hated at Disneyland? The perfection of it all? Yet here I am coordinating something far more logistically difficult than meeting on top of the Empire State Building, right in the middle of the indefinite period of space and time Hugh has been diligently giving me. Too much space. Now that I’m on my way home, that space feels like an impossible chasm. What if he did as I suggested and didn’t wait? I have the worst case of cold feet I’ve ever experienced. Can I really put myself out there like this?
I switch the entertainment off. Charlie’s fallen asleep and I have a glass of wine. If I focus, I’ll have the first section of my book finished by the time we land. It’s not great, but the bones of it are there. Something to work with, anyway, and plenty of ideas. It has been cathartic getting it out of my brain and onto the page over the last few months. I’ve been sending it to Grace, chapter by chapter, and she’s been encouraging. But then, she always is. I wanted to write about grief but it’s landing on the page as so much more than that. Maybe because, even in loss, there’s so much more to life.
42
Eight thousand words and ten thousand miles later, we’re flying over Australian soil. The thought makes me cry. Or maybe it’s the sleep deprivation that does it. Could be the escalating nerves. In any case, I’m a wreck as we come into land at Melbourne Airport in Tullamarine.
During the ninety minutes between flights, Charlie and I wander the halls of the airport – a walking zombie dragging a whining, jet-lagged minion. We’re wrung out, hot, cranky and totally over it. I just want to get to the hotel, freshen up, hand Charlie and a whole lot of duty-free make-up over to Grace and throw myself into the frightening abyss.
I get a call from Sophie and it makes me instantly nervous. I hope everything’s gone to plan.
‘Okay, I know I was just supposed to arrange the flight and the hotel, but Kate – you know that scene in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere is looking for her and she’s in the bar in that black dress, waiting . . .’
Do I want to hear this?
‘I organised a dress,’ Sophie explains, having gone rogue. ‘And a bogus meeting with Hugh at 7pm in the bar of the hotel. Oh, and I’ve checked the forecast. It’s overcast tonight, so no point going to Cradle Mountain for the lights until tomorrow anyway. Grace is lined up to babysit Charlie. I think I’ve risk-managed the heck out of this, Kate. You’d be proud of me!’
When the shuttle bus rolls into the centre of the city and up the circular drive at the Grand Chancellor Hotel, Charlie and I and a pack of tourists tumble out of it. I fall straight into Grace’s arms, both of us sobbing uncontrollably despite our parade of exciting news. Well, potentially exciting, in my case.
‘I adore you!’ I say, crying. ‘Look at you!’
‘Don’t ever leave me again! I love you!’
The international tourists burst into applause and start filming us, as if we’re reuniting lovers. It only makes us hug even more.
We drag our bags through the doors and across the marble tiles in the lobby, and Charlie gravitates to a decorative fountain, splashing around despite my begging him not to, while I try to recall my personal details out of my jet-lagged brain.
‘Charlie! Why don’t you come with me and check out our room for a sleepover!’ Grace says, enticing him away from the water.
‘Bill your meals to my room,’ I tell her. ‘And please tell me I’m not making a huge mistake?’
It had seemed so romantic in Norway. But I was half a world away from the site of potential failure. The knowledge that Hugh is in this very building is the most comforting and hair-raising information I could possibly be turning over in my increasingly anxious brain. Ironically, he’s the one person who would know how to pacify me.
‘The only mistake would be not trying,’ Grace says, shepherding Charlie into the lift. ‘You’d regret that for the rest of your life. Now go. And have a shower! You look like you’ve been awake for years.’
I key the card into the slot and lean on the door to my room, pull my bags inside and flop on the bed. It pulls me towards it. Cannot fall asleep now.
I leap up, fling open the bathroom door and hanging there is Sophie’s cocktail dress. Sleek. Sophisticated. Cobalt blue ‘to bring out the auburn’， apparently. Everything you’d expect from the office fashionista.
There’s plenty of time to get ready, so I run the bath and fill it with the hotel’s lavender-scented oil. Hopefully it will calm my increasing jitters. Maybe I’ll try the guided meditation I use on Charlie when he’s fractious. The guy who recorded it has the most soporific, lilting Scottish accent. I set the alarm for one hour from now, just in case . . .
I only wake up because the water is stone cold. My phone is on the chair beside the bath, and I peer at the time. It’s eight. EIGHT! Our meeting was at SEVEN. In my jet-lagged state I must have set the alarm for AM. I leap out of the water and dry myself off partly, grab the white robe off the back of the bathroom door along with my bucket list and Cam’s post-its and flee the room.
Please be there, I chant as I run down the carpeted hall, wet hair dripping, and push the elevator button frantically, not that it makes any difference. Eventually I give up on the lifts and fling myself into the fire stairwell, taking the steps three at a time in bare feet, which hurts. I should have worn slippers. Who does this? Well, Julia Roberts, obviously. But she was nineteen and stunning, and not jet-lagged to Norway and back . . .
When I burst out of the fire door on the ground level, all eyes in the lobby turn to me. Is it really that newsworthy for a forty-year-old mother to be running around the Grand Chancellor in nothing but a bathrobe, like a lovestruck teenager? I find the bar, which is packed with conference attendees and locals having a drink before the theatre, and stand in the middle of it, spinning around, searching for Hugh.
He’s nowhere. And of course I dashed out of my room with only the essentials, which apparently didn’t include shoes, clothes, my phone or the room key.
I’ve comprehensively messed this up, after so much seat-of-the-pants planning from the other end of the earth. What would Julia do? She’d talk to the doorman. He’d show her how to use cutlery properly and phone his friend in an expensive clothing boutique. But this isn’t the movies. I’ll have to beg the woman on the reception desk for Hugh’s room number.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ she says. ‘But I can put in a call to his room.’
It will have to do. It’s just not remotely the Hollywood way I saw this unfolding in my mind.
‘Your name is?’