‘Yes,’ she says.
The waiter tops up our wine. I take a sip. Then another.
Camille looks at me with forceful eyes. ‘Now you. You promised. I need to know your story.’
‘I want to tell you about myself,’ I tell her, still unsure of how much truth I will eventually reveal. ‘But there are some things that it is better for you – for anyone – not to know.’
‘Criminal things?’ I feel like she is teasing me.
‘No. I mean, well, there are a few of those as well. No. I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.’
‘Philip K. Dick wrote that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’
‘The sci-fi writer?’
‘Yes. I’m a geek. I like science fiction.’
‘That’s good,’ I say.
‘You like it too?’
No.Iamit, I think to myself.
‘Some.Frankenstein.Flowers for Algernon.’
‘I want you to tell me about yourself,’ she says. ‘Tell me, at least, what you were going to tell me. Let me know if I am mad.’
It is tempting, right then, to put an end to it by sayingyou are mad. But instead I say, ‘Before I tell you about me, you have to tell me about you.’ I sound firmer than I had intended.
Wide eyes. ‘Do I?’
I inhale deeply. This is the moment. ‘I need to know how you recognised me. I need to know why you mentioned Ciro’s. Ciro’s closed eighty years ago.’
‘I am not that old.’
‘Exactly. I didn’t think so.’
A song comes on in the background. She tilts her head. ‘Ah, I love this. Listen.’
I listen. A warm, sentimental melody I recognise. It’s ‘Coming Around Again’ by Carly Simon.
‘My mother used to love Carly Simon.’
‘And Michael Jackson?’
‘That was just me.’
She smiles, and there is a moment of awkwardness when she realises it is her turn to explain herself. And in that moment I imagine being with her. Like I had in the pub. I imagine kissing her. I have an urge to run away and to get Hendrich to book me a plane and to disappear somewhere else, somewhere I will never see her again. But it is too late.
She is ready.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Je vais m’expliquer.’
And she does.
She tells me she started having seizures when she was seven. Her parents safe-proofed the house. Soft carpets. Table corners blunted by glued-on napkins. Finding the right medication had taken a while. And she slowly became agoraphobic. ‘I was scared of life, basically.’
When she was nineteen she’d become engaged to a handsome, funny web designer called Erik – ‘with a K’, his mother was Swedish. This was the Erik I’d seen online. Facebook Erik. He had died in 2011 while rock climbing.
