‘Then get back in touch. There’s no excuses these days with social media.’
‘I can’t contact someone out of the blue.’
‘You found me on the internet.’
‘That was different. That was professional.’
Jim registered a disappointed sinking feeling but he didn’t want to show it.
‘It’s weird, I remember that afternoon as if it was yesterday. It’s a bit like how I can remember every song lyric from every record I bought in the eighties, but ask me what I had for lunch today and I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Maybe it’s because everything was so new and exciting and hopeful when we were young. It’s like printing memories with better ink,’ she smiled.
‘It’s such a shame you never did anything with this, Jen,’ said Jim after a few minutes. ‘It’s still not too late, you know.’
‘Don’t be silly. Who’s going to be interested in a housewife’s old home video?’
‘It’s a social snapshot of Generation X at the height of their disillusionment,’ he replied as she gave him a playful tap on the shoulder.
‘I know what you should do with these tapes,’ he said, an idea slowly percolating.
Jennifer frowned anxiously. ‘What?’
‘You should get in touch with all these people and interview them again. This footage is great, but as it is, it’s all conjecture. People don’t want to just hear that Johnny Boy wants to be an astronaut or a stockbroker. They want to see if he makes it.’
‘Nice try, but I’m not sure there’s a place for TV like this any more. Not when people have got a heap of nostalgia on their own Facebook page.’
‘Facebook isn’t about nostalgia,’ said Jim ruefully. ‘It’s just people boasting about the best one per cent of their lives. Your documentary is about hopes, dreams, disappointments. Come on, Jen. Think about it. All the kids in this film were twenty, twenty-one when you filmed it. Now you’re revisiting them twenty-one years later. And hey, look, you can even interview my dad,’ he said as Bryn Johnson flickered into the picture, pompous, expansive, as if he were hosting his own late-night arts programme, enjoying his moment on camera. ‘He’s just landed a visiting professorship at Columbia. Says he wants to rent a place on Washington Square. I told him it’s not like it was during the sixties out there, but he wouldn’t listen; he thinks it’ll be all Breton tops and Ban the Bomb.’
‘It’s easy to keep living in the past, though, isn’t it?’ said Jennifer, switching off the camcorder. ‘Nicer to remember yourself when everything was an opportunity rather than a disappointment. When you had no responsibilities. Time is a great airbrush; you can edit out all the bad bits.’
‘Do you ever think about us?’ he asked, sensing his own moment for reminiscing. It was a question he’d been wanting to ask all night.
‘I need a drink,’ she said, standing up.
He looked at her and noticed that, despite the coffee, her eyes were not quite focused. How long had she been at Domina before he’d arrived? he wondered, remembering what Connor had said in Baruda.
‘Wait,’ he said, stopping her from leaving. ‘That summer. Do you ever think about it?’
‘Sometimes. A lot lately,’ she said quietly. She looked at him hopefully, seeking reassurance that she had not been having these thoughts alone.
‘So do I,’ nodded Jim in solidarity. ‘I think about what would have happened if you’d picked me and not Connor. How our lives might have turned out differently.’
‘It wasn’t a case of picking one over the other,’ she said, sitting back down.
‘You did,’ said Jim, desperate to make his thoughts heard. ‘You told me to go back to England. You said that if I cared about you, I should get on the plane and not contact you again. And then you moved to New York with Connor.’
‘I was grieving,’ she said, not looking at him.
‘Not when you wrote me the letter.’
She didn’t say anything.
Memories flooded back in Technicolor. He’d also written to her once he’d returned to England, but she hadn’t replied. He didn’t blame her.
‘I almost didn’t get on the plane that day. And looking back, I shouldn’t have done. I should have fought for you. I should have been there for you. I never stop asking myself the question: what would have happened if I’d gone back?’
‘I’d have made the same choice,’ said Jennifer evenly. ‘Staying with Connor, moving to New York, I knew that was what my mother would have wanted. I suppose it was my way of saying sorry.’