Saying Goodbye
Part One
Out of my small window I can see Holby fade into the distance, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll ever see it again. If I do it certainly won’t be for a long time, months, years, I really don’t know. It saddens me to think that I’ll never return, that the goodbyes I have said will be the last things I say to all my friends but who knows what the future will bring? I certainly don’t.
Now I have an eight-hour flight ahead of me with nothing to keep me occupied but reminiscences about the past and dreams about the future. With all this time on my hands it seems sensible to update the chronicle of my life that I wrote when I was sick last year. An awful lot has happened that needs explaining, most notably the events that directly lead up to me being on this plane winging my way across the Atlantic to be with my son.
It was only a matter of months after I finished my therapeutic look back on my life in Holby City Hospital and went back to work there that Baz dropped her bombshell. She’d accepted a job in Toronto and she and Louis would be moving there almost immediately whether I wanted them to or not. She told me that it was only a three-year contract and after much arguing I had to resign myself to the fact that I would only see my family every few months. I can’t say I was happy about it but if I’m honest I’d known that things weren’t right between her and me for a long time and a part of me thought that perhaps a bit of space could do us some good.
She let me look after Louis while she got things set up in Canada, and it’s the sad truth that that was the first time I’ve ever really spent time with my own son, certainly the first time I’ve felt truly close to him. It was a real eye opener. Of course I’d always loved him but being with him all the time like that made me realise just how much. I had dreaded the idea of having to take care of him, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to cope, but when Baz called and said it was time I took him over to Toronto to be with her, I didn’t want to let him go. Especially since she also told me that she had been seeing someone else and now wanted a divorce. It was like having the rug pulled out from under me. My world, which had been teetering on the brink of collapse for some time, finally and irreversibly shattered. Not three years after I had made my vows to Baz, believing however implausibly that we’d stay together forever, we were heading for the divorce courts.
Coming back to Holby after that made me realise how empty my life is. Sometimes it feels like the only reason I get up in the morning is for my work, and much as I enjoy it and know that I do make a difference that’s just not enough anymore. I need my son in my life, not four thousand miles away where he can forget who I am. I tried to get custody of him but it was no use. Baz wasn’t going to give up without a fight and as my solicitor said, she had the upper hand. Me winning was a very long shot, and if I lost I stood to lose what little there was left of our relationship. It wasn’t an easy decision to make but I had to give up my fight.
Since then I have been relying on awkward phone calls and the odd video that Baz sends over to see how my son is doing. I can feel that already he is growing away from me and my greatest fear is that one-day he’ll forget me completely and accept Baz’s new bloke as his father. Or worse still that he’ll think I just don’t care about him, and nothing could be further from the truth. On my last visit, over Easter, I became acutely aware of how much he had changed. In only a few months he was visibly taller, had learnt so much and had begun to speak with an unmistakable Canadian accent, saying goodbye to him again was so hard. Seeing him crying, asking why his Daddy had to go away again. I don’t think there is any good way of explaining what had happened between me and Baz to a four-year-old.
I came back to Holby once more, sad and feeling even lonelier, I tried to cheer myself up by telling myself that I was getting a fresh start, I even bought myself a new flat. Or at least thought I did. It turns out that while I was away I was gazzumped and I was left homeless just like that. Max offered to put me up until I found a new place. Although there was a time when I hated the thought of even being in the same hospital as him, we’ve been getting on much better recently and frankly I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. It was Max or the Salvation Army Hostel. Unlike me though, Max is in the early stages of what appears to be a successful relationship and it soon became clear that I was just a third wheel, he said I could stay, but I like to think that I know when I’m not wanted.
The more I thought about it, the less point there seemed to be in me staying in Holby. My family isn’t there; I don’t have a home there and when I was off sick the department carried on without me quite happily. I’m obviously not as indispensable as I always thought! As Duffy said when I came back, what did I expect? I trained them all too well. It was becoming clear that if I wanted to spend more time with Louis I’d have to be in Canada, and it was also becoming clear that there was nothing to keep me in England anymore. After much deliberation I finally decided it was time I left my safety blanket of the hospital and did the right thing, rather than the easy thing. Which is why I’m on the plane now.
The most difficult part has been leaving my friends behind. I know that everyone moves on eventually but saying goodbye to them one at a time as they head off to pastures new isn’t the same as being the one going. And I almost changed my mind when tragedy struck a couple of months ago. Duffy’s husband Andrew was involved in a fatal accident just weeks before she was due to give birth to their third child. There’s just no way of describing how awful it was for her. I can’t imagine what she’s been through, is still going through, and I quietly pray that I never get a taste of it my self. I can’t say that I‘ve ever been that close to Andrew, although naturally I was saddened by what happened, but seeing Duffy’s face when I told her that he was dead was enough to break my heart. As it was I’ve watched her cry so long and so hard that I seriously wondered if I‘d ever see her smile again. I feel so guilty about leaving her alone but there’s not much I can do to help her. She has her family around her and I hope that she knows she can call me anytime day or night if she needs to talk. Leaving her is by far the hardest thing about this move and I have contemplated staying until she’s back on her feet. But how long would that be? I could stay another six months, another year and at some point something else would happen to make me put off my emigration. Procrastination is one of my worst habits. So reluctantly I have said farewell to her, and all my other friends in the hope that I’m going to get things right this time.
Duffy read the last paragraph with tears blurring her eyesight. When he had first told her he was upping and offing to Canada she hadn’t believed he’d go through with it. He’d only recently come back from another visit, and she’d shrugged it off as him just being reminded of how much he missed Louis. Even when he’d shown her his letter of resignation she still hadn’t thought he’d actually send it. Over the next several weeks it had become clear that he was serious, and Duffy's first instinct was to be angry with him for thinking of himself while she was still grieving. She’d done her best to play devil’s advocate to his grand plan, but she could see that he had made up him mind and nothing was going to change it. She knew it couldn’t have been an easy decision to make, he’d been in Holby for so long, and it had always been clear how much his job meant to him. He hadn’t left when Baz had moved the family to Birmingham and he still hadn’t left when she’d got the job in Toronto, but she could see in his eyes that being separated from his son was tearing him apart. So she had stood by and watched him walk out of her life just when she needed him the most. He’d made possibly the hardest decision he’d ever had to make and she didn’t have the heart to pile on the guilt and make him feel bad about leaving her. After all she was just his best friend; Louis was his son. There was no choice.
The doorbell sounded, calling Duffy away from her thoughts. She lay the papers back down on her coffee table, careful not to disturb their order or do anything that would crease them. Wiping the tears from her eyes with her sleeve, she walked to her front door, passing the large mirror in her hallway. She glanced in it casually to make sure that she wasn’t a complete mess and was surprised to see an old woman staring back. She had become so absorbed in Charlie’s journal that she’d forgotten that over seventeen years had passed since she’d said goodbye to him. She opened the door and found a familiar face staring back at her. It took a second before it sunk in to Duffy that it wasn’t Charlie standing there, but his son, Louis, all grown up and bearing a striking resemblance to his Dad.
"Hiya Mrs Bower" Louis called in his strong Canadian accent.
"Good morning Louis, come in" she replied showing him into her living room. He sat down on her sofa and made himself comfortable.
"Can I get you anything? Tea, Coffee?" Duffy asked, but Louis just shook his head.
"Your English drinks just don’t taste right" Duffy could understand that, she’d thought much the same about Canadian ones when she’d been over in Canada herself. She sat down beside him, still staring, mesmerised by the young man’s appearance. The first time she’d seen Louis as an adult it had sent shivers down her spine, it had been at Charlie’s funeral some two weeks earlier, the first and only time she’d gone to Toronto. Louis wasn’t identical to Charlie, his hair was the wrong colour, a richer brown and straighter, too. He was also a bit prettier than she remembered Charlie to be; she assumed that was taken from Baz’s side. But there was no mistaking whose son he was. They had exactly the same eyes, and as she looked at him she had to keep reminding herself that he wasn’t her old friend, in fact she barely knew him.
"I see you’ve been reading Dad’s memoirs. How far d’you get?" Louis enquired.
"I’m up to when he left England"
"You already read 15 years worth? Wow you must be some speed reader!" Duffy looked down at the vast pile of papers laid out in front of her. She hadn’t been sure at first whether she should read them. It seemed all too personal, and she wasn’t sure that had the roles been reversed she would be too keen on Charlie reading her diary. Eventually though, as she ran out of things to watch on telly she had found herself drawn to that pile of papers that Louis had delivered to her the previous day and once she’d started to read them she’d found it all but impossible to stop.
The first section had clearly all been written at the same time, just after Charlie had suffered the pulmonary embolism that had nearly killed him. It said at the beginning that his GP had suggested that it might help his recovery to take stock of his life so far, and so he had written about various events in his life starting from just after they’d all begun working on the permanent nightshift. It was all neatly word-processed and looked like it could have been the manuscript for a book. After that, starting with the entry that Duffy had just finished reading it became a sort of on-going journal. Scribbled thoughts on a variety of different scraps of paper. The way they had all been neatly bundled together in a large blue folder suggested that at some point Charlie had decided that they should be kept as a proper chronicle of his life perhaps to be formally written up at some point. Interspersed with his own musings were occasional photos and the odd newspaper clipping from his time in Holby. Duffy had been quite surprised that he’d kept them, she never had him down as the sentimental type. She had always tried to save mentions of her work at the hospital, but over the years she’d moved house and lost most of them. Reading about Charlie’s life was in part like reading about her own life, incidents that she’d long since forgotten were clearly and vibrantly spelled out in front of her, and as she read through the entries she lived through the highs and lows all over again. It was all highly emotional.
"It’s pretty gripping stuff. I never realised how interesting our lives were!" Duffy laughed.
"Tell me about it! I had no idea the sort of scrapes Mom and Dad had gotten into before I came along. They’ve always been, you know, just boring old Mom and Dad to me."
"I’m sure my kids would say the same! But didn’t either of your parents tell you stories about what happened to them?" Duffy knew that she’d regaled her three children with hundreds of stories about the hospital and her and Andrew’s work there. So much so that they were bored of them, and didn’t seem to believe all of them anyway.
"They didn’t really talk about England much. Mom always said ‘ask Dad’, and Dad always said ‘ask Mom’. I think that Mom was too busy trying to start a new life with my stepfather Paul and didn’t want to keep bringing up her relationship with Dad, and Dad would get all weird about it. From what I’ve read in there I figure he was too homesick, it made it difficult for him to talk about it."
"I see" Duffy didn’t really see, how can anyone not talk about their past?
"I only found these papers when I was clearing out Dad’s apartment. You know he didn’t have much personal stuff. It basically boiled down to two boxes. One with that folder, a stethoscope and things like old security passes and name badges in it, the other with some of my old toys and drawings and some photos of me growing up. Oh and there was the wedding album too. But that was it. I feel like I’ve only gotten to know him through his journal. I wish that I’d got to read it when he was still alive." Duffy could see the genuine sadness in his eyes, and she wondered if it would be appropriate to put her arm around him the way she would have done if it had been Charlie.
"I thought that Charlie moved out to Canada so that you two would get to know each other?"
"Yeah, but it never really worked out that way. I still lived with Mom and Paul most of the time, and Dad had to work twice as hard to establish himself over there. I guess it was hard to make time for me" There was a distinct note of bitterness in his voice and Duffy thought she should stick up Charlie.
"I’m sure he tried Louis. I think I know how important you were to him, and his journal seems to back that up"
"Yeah, which is why I wish I’d a chance to read it earlier. He shoulda told me that stuff not written in some damn book!"
"Louis… at least you know now…" Duffy realised that it was probably of little comfort. Louis had obviously grown up resenting Charlie for not spending enough time with him, for not loving him enough only to find out once it was too late just how much he really did care.
"I wanna know more about him Mrs Bower, about what he was like, what kind of person he was. Mom’s no help, and when I saw how often Dad wrote about you…I just had to get in contact."
"It’s a shame it wasn’t in better circumstances," Duffy thought back to the moment she’d received Louis’s phone call. She hadn’t heard from Charlie in years, they’d just sort of drifted away from each other. But when he’d said that Charlie was dead it hit her every bit as hard as if the news had come twenty years earlier. It had been a heart attack, Louis had said, the second one in as many months. The results of too many fry ups and too much scotch no doubt. It seemed that Charlie had never got any better at looking after himself. Louis had asked her if she’d like to attend the funeral and without hesitation she’d said ‘yes’. As soon as the call had finished she’d got straight onto the airline, booking herself a ticket to Toronto. She had felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that she’d never made the effort to go out there and visit him before, travelling out there for the funeral was her inadequate way of making it up to him.
It had been at the wake that Louis had first approached her for more information about Charlie. She hadn’t understood why he would be so interested in anything she had to say, but she had mentioned, as a kind of aside that he might learn more about Charlie if he came to England, saw where all the big events had taken place. Louis had disappeared after that and Duffy hadn’t had another opportunity to talk to him. She’d returned to Holby, to her own family and her own life and all but forgotten that strange conversation until the previous day when Louis had turned up on her doorstep with a folder full of writing and asked her to read it.
"I really don’t know how much I can help you Louis. I haven’t...hadn’t seen Charlie in years. Wouldn’t you do better talking to a…um…more recent friend?"
"I don’t think he ever had another friend he was so close to. He thought a lot of you; that’s plain for anyone to see. If you can’t help, I don’t know who can" Duffy smiled inwardly, she thought a lot of him too, even after all this time.
"OK Louis, I’ll help if I can. What do you want to know?"
"Everything!" Louis said enthusiastically.
"Well why don’t we start with a tour of the city? I’ll show you the hospital, where his old flats were, that kind of thing." She suggested.
"I guess its as good a place to start as any" he replied and leapt off the sofa to the door. Duffy followed him and soon they were out in the street.
As Duffy went to unlock her car, Louis noticed a pretty young woman approaching them. She was wearing a simple but extremely flattering black dress, with long strawberry blonde hair spilling over her shoulders. It was quite clear that she was only just returning from a night out somewhere. Louis watched her as she came closer. He guessed that she was still in her teens, but there was something about her that grabbed his attention and wouldn’t let go of it. She stopped a few feet from him and looked him up and down, a quizzical expression on her face.
"Mum, what’s going on?" she asked Duffy.
"And what time do you call this for coming home, young lady?"
"I was staying at Laura’s, the party didn’t finish until late and I knew you wouldn’t want me coming home alone at that time of night. I did try to ring but got no answer, I suppose you were already in bed" She flashed a smile and tried to look both innocent and suitably apologetic. Duffy didn’t believe her for a second but wasn’t about to start a row in front of Louis or the neighbours.
"Yes well… I’m going out for a couple of hours. Showing Louis around the city. Oh I should introduce you two. Louis this is my daughter Andrea…"
"Andie" interjected Andie.
"…Andie this is Louis Fairhead, you remember I told you about him, your father and I used to work with his Dad"
"So you’re Louis, I’ve heard a lot about you." But not how handsome you are, Andie thought to herself.
"Pleasure to meet you Andie, I hope we get to know each other better whilst I’m here" Louis smiled a brilliant white smile at her and Andie could feel herself go weak at the knees.
"Yeah, me too!" she said twisting a strand of hair around her finger coyly.
"Right are you ready Louis?" Duffy said getting into the car and starting the engine. Louis jumped into the passenger seat.
"Guess I’ll see you around then Andie" he said waving to her.
"Yeah" she called back, admonishing herself for not being able to think of anything more intelligent to say.
Duffy waved goodbye to her daughter and drove off. Andie stood in the street and watched the car disappear from view before letting herself into the house. She closed the door behind her and slumped against it, beaming to herself.
"Oh my God! I have got to call Laura!!!"