Azim said Callum was a really good friend of his from law school.
Law school?Callum? Although to be fair he does now look very lawyer-like.
Azim told me that Callum is very sensible, very sober, very clean-living and very hard-working. I’m pretty sure he used those exact words.
My Callum Harding was none of those things.
Azim also described him as mint and someone who would never take advantage of a lone female in a camper van, and to be fair those thingsdoapply to my Callum Harding.
But going back to the sensible, sober, hard-workinglawyerthing… I mean, no.
Do a slim-fit Ralph Lauren shirt and suede loafers lie, though?
I don’t know. It really is incomprehensible. But anyway. Here we are. Staring at each other in a back street in a not-very-fancy neighbourhood in Rome.
From the way Callum’s eyes are on stalks, his Adam’s apple’s moving but he’s making no sound and he’s gripping his casewhite-knuckle hard, I’m certain that he recognises me. Which of course he does; unlike him I have not morphed into a completely different external persona. I wonder for a split second whether heknewhe was getting a lift withme, and then I realise that, no, of course he didn’t. If he’d ever wanted to get back in touch there are wiser ways of doing it. A quick coffee on neutral territory for example would be a lot better than several days of close proximity far from home. Plus, he’d have to be an amazing actor to fake the speechlessness and wide eyes.
We have been staring at each other for a very, very long time.
‘How are you?’ he asks eventually. And, yep, that’s Callum Harding’s voice. Deep, with a slight Scottish accent that I love. Loved, I mean.
How am I? Erm, shocked and pissed off.
‘I amgood,’ I say, surprised that my voice is working. ‘How are you?’
I realise that I do mean the question. I have – obviously – thought about him from time to time (quite a lot) over the years. I might also have googled him a few times (quite a lot) too, but there are alotof Callum Hardings and I’ve never found him. Maybe because I did not know that my search should include the wordsneat and tidy-looking lawyer.
‘Also good,’ he tells me. ‘Thank you.’
It’s weird. It’s like watching an actor that you’ve always seen in similar roles suddenly playing someone completely different. Like Ewan McGregor not being theStar Warsperson but the dad in the secondNanny McPheefilm. Very confusing.
His voice is the same, though. Although entirely sober and somewhat horrified. I’d never heard him sound horrified until the last time we spoke. That last time stuck with me.
‘Great,’ I say, and then we resume our staring, until I remember the traffic and the fact that I hauled myself out of bedway earlier than usual to make sure we wouldn’t get stuck in the Rome rush hour.
Most of me wants to get into the van and drive off without Callum. A tiny part of me, I realise, wants to know everything about what he’s been doing for the past twelve years. How my Callum turned into this version of himself. Mostly, though, I really do just want to run away from him and not go there again.
‘Sooooo.’ I produce a really big smile that I do not feel. ‘I need to get going.’
‘Of course.’ He smiles back. When he used to smile at me when we were young, the smile always started in his eyes before his lips moved. Now his lips just go kind of sideways and back again. It annoys me that justthinkingof how much I used to love his real smile makes my stomach lurch a bit. ‘I really need to get back to London. And I have no other options. I fully, fully appreciate—’ he sounds both incredibly earnest and fairly miserable, which, ridiculously, I find quite cute ‘—that you probablyreallydon’t want to travel with me, but I’m kind of desperate, so if you’re still happy to have me, I’d be incredibly grateful for the lift.’
Dammit.
I do not want to spend several days with him.
I do not want to spend even severalminuteswith him; I’m already feeling all stomach-churny, heavy-shouldered miserable as memories swirl around my mind.
What can I say, though?
All the news channels have been saying that flights could be off for weeks, and if I’m Callum’s only option and he’s desperate to get back…
‘Of course.’ Clearly, there is no other answer I can give. ‘I’m all ready, so shall we go, so we don’t get caught in the morning rush hour?’
‘Great. Fantastic. Thank you so much.’
This is so weird. If you discount the past twelve years of not seeing each other, we’ve gone straight from mutual horror that we’ve split up for at least the time being to mutual horror that we’re going to be sharing this trip for the next four days. And that is just odd.
At least we can have breaks from each other when we aren’t driving. We don’t even need to stay in the same place overnight. He could book a hotel if he can afford it. And never judge a book by its cover but his super-smart clothes and shoes do indicate that hecouldafford it especially given that his travel is now very cheap. (In the only text we exchanged beyond the very basic he said in very strong terms that he couldn’t accept the lift if I wouldn’t let him pay for fuel so I agreed to let him pay half, but that won’t be much compared to a flight.) Okay so I’m cheering up a bit. Four hours’ driving a day isn’t long. We have twenty other hours to be apart each day.
