The Atlas of Us

‘I’m sorry. How old were you?’

‘Sixteen. Looking back, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. He’d started taking all that marching off the edge of the map stuff too literally, banging on about needing to leave behind societal pressures – which, in the end, meant his family too.’

‘Where did he go?’

Claire shrugged. ‘No idea. We didn’t hear anything from him over the next few months, not even on my seventeenth birthday or at Christmas. It felt like he’d thrown us away like a piece of rubbish. Mum said we needed to accept we might never see him again. My sister Sofia grew bitter. She’d never been as close to Dad as I was, but that really changed things for her. She pretended like he was dead.’ Claire looked down at the tiny globe hanging from her bag. ‘But I refused to give up on him. Six months after he left, I used the money he’d left in my savings to go find him.’

‘Brave,’ Milo said softly.

‘I was brave back then.’

‘Not now?’

Claire shrugged again.

‘So did you find him?’ Milo asked.

‘Not then. I carried on travelling for a year or so, making money from articles. My mum met a new guy, moved to Hong Kong with him – she’s still there now. Sofia started training to be a solicitor, the very job my dad despised. It was only me who followed his path, travelling, writing. Then my uncle passed away. Mum couldn’t track Dad down to tell him, so I did some investigating and …’

She paused, hearing the smash of rain against glass from the day she’d found him. She quickly swallowed down more cider.

‘You okay?’ Milo asked.

She nodded. ‘I – I found him dying in a flat in New York. Turned out he’d been living there the past year, dying of liver cancer, refusing to bend to societal pressures and get medical help. He died in my arms a few days later.’

‘Jesus, I’m so sorry, Claire.’

They were quiet for a few moments as Claire remembered how it had felt to see her dad lying there. She remembered thinking, Is this what marching off the map does – drives people apart, leaves people dying in pain all alone?

She’d cared for him over the next few days, reading his favourite books to him, sharing memories from her childhood. The third night, he’d gestured towards one of the drawers in his room. Inside, Claire found a sky lantern, just like the ones they used to send skywards each New Year’s Eve, all the troubles and negativity of the year before written down on notes attached to them and sent away forever. He scribbled a note with trembling hands: his name, Bo. She hadn’t understood at first. But when he drew his last breath and her world felt like it was ending, it dawned on her: he wanted her to let him and all the negativity associated with him go.

So that very night, she did what they’d done every New Year before: she sent the lantern skywards, her father’s name attached to it.

‘I went back to the UK after,’ she said, sighing. ‘Talked myself into a university course—’

‘Talked yourself?’

‘I’d been home-schooled, remember? Dad said education was just society’s way of brainwashing children so I had no qualifications. So I wrote this long rambling letter to a bunch of admissions directors at various universities and one recognised something, got me in for an interview and that was that. I worked my arse off, came away with a first-class degree in English, got the job at the magazine, got a mortgage, life insurance, the works, everything Dad once despised.’ She forced a smile onto her face as she took a sip of cider. ‘And now here I am.’

‘Why did you do everything your dad despised?’

‘Seeing him like that scared me. I realised if I followed the path he had, I might end up dying alone too. I chose a safer path.’

‘Are you happy with that decision?’

She swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know. I can feel it pulling at me sometimes, the desire to just let everything go and fly with the wind.’ She paused. She’d not admitted that to herself properly, like the nights she’d feel the urge to just throw open the window and breathe in the wind, Ben protesting it was too cold as she imagined climbing out and leaving.

‘What about your husband?’ Milo said, his eyes flicking to her wedding ring. ‘Is he a writer too?’

She froze. She’d purposefully not mentioned Ben to Milo, aware of her growing attraction to Milo and what a betrayal it might be to her husband to utter his name in front of him. ‘No, he’s an engineer.’ Her voice cracked and she turned away, feeling tears start to well up.

‘Are you okay?’ Milo asked softly.

‘I’m fine.’ She smiled to show she was okay but it just made her feel even more upset, her smile turning into a grimace.

‘Claire, what’s wrong?’ Milo asked, leaning towards her and trying to look in her eyes. He hesitated a moment then sighed. ‘I saw you crying before I shot the stag.’

She looked up at him. ‘You saw that?’

He nodded, his brown eyes full of emotion. ‘I know we hardly know each other but sometimes it helps to talk to people who aren’t so close to the situation.’

‘It’s more complicated than you know.’

‘Try me.’

She looked into his eyes. They were open, curious, full of feeling. Maybe he was right?

‘My husband and I are having problems,’ she said. ‘He suggested we take a break.’

Milo took in a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I don’t want you to think my marriage is a shambles,’ she said quickly. ‘It was good at first, really good. We met at uni, and though we’re completely different – I was studying English, my husband was studying engineering – we clicked right away.’

Claire thought about the first time she’d met Ben. It was just a few months into her first year at university and she was starting to regret her choice. It all felt too restricting and regimental, lectures at particular times, meetings with professors, special clubs and different cliques. One night, when it all got too much, she got horribly drunk on snowball cocktails at a party and had to make her way back to her room in the dark. That’s when Ben turned up, driving alongside her in his Renault Clio and offering her a lift. Anyone else and she might have steered well clear. But there was something about Ben: an honesty in his soft green eyes, the neat turn of the collar on his shirt, the polite way he talked in his Home Counties voice. When he helped her into his car, she felt instantly safe and on the car journey to her room she unburdened herself, telling him how stifled she felt at university, even confessing she wanted to quit, something she hadn’t even admitted to herself. The next day, he talked her out of packing in her course over lunch then asked her out for dinner. And that was that.

‘What went wrong?’ Milo asked, pulling Claire from the memory.

‘We started struggling to conceive.’

She paused, checking Milo’s expression. But he looked the same, willing her to continue with his eyes.

‘My fault,’ she said. ‘My insides are a bit of a mess, blocked tubes and dodgy eggs.’

She didn’t tell Milo her blocked tubes were caused by swelling from the chlamydia she’d caught from a man she’d met in Paris while searching for her father. She’d been devastated when her GP had told her: yet more proof that travelling off the edge of the map was the wrong thing to do. She’d had an op to unblock her tubes but, when she still hadn’t fallen pregnant a year later, more tests revealed she had low quality eggs. IVF was her only chance of ever becoming pregnant.

‘We tried IVF,’ she said to Milo. ‘Three rounds, each one a dud. The last one was two months ago.’

‘Claire, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard IVF can be very difficult.’

‘The physical stuff I could deal with,’ she said, fiddling with her glass. ‘Sure, having your flesh pierced with needles each night isn’t exactly a ball. Being poked around by doctors, I guess you grow used to that over the years when you’ve been through what we’ve been through. And the effects of the hormones, the headaches and the nausea and the crazy outbursts … it was bloody hard, don’t get me wrong. But the worst part was how it affected me emotionally.’

She could hear the tremor in her voice but ignored it. She needed to get this off her chest. She’d turned down the counselling that had been offered to her, thinking she could cope. And she’d always put on a brave face with family and friends. As for her and Ben, they couldn’t talk about it, not properly, because then they’d need to admit how difficult and painful it all was. This was her chance to vent and she was grabbing it with both hands.

‘The idea of never being a mother,’ she said, ‘never holding a baby in my arms and leaning my nose in to smell its sweet head, never feeling the tickle of its soft hair on my cheek.’ She shook her head, eyes filling with tears. ‘It’s unbearable. I’ve never been one of those girls whose whole life revolves around the idea of being a mother. But I’ve always wanted children. And the more you fight for it, the more you want it, you know?’

Milo nodded, his face very sombre. Claire looked out towards the stretch of beach below, the hill they’d walked along earlier spreading out to its right. Two children splashed into the shallow water in their wellies, a little dog jumping up and down, yelping in excitement as their parents watched from nearby.

‘Seeing other people’s kids grow older,’ she said, ‘that’s been hard too, especially kids who are the same age my child would be if I’d fallen pregnant straight away.’