50 Reasons to Say Goodbye (19 page)

I park the car and walk around to the front of the restaurant.

Two friends from the club are stamping their feet against the cold, talking into their mobile phones. I push inside and the noise and smoke and heat of the restaurant are momentarily overpowering. I force through the gathering towards the coat-stand, creaking, overloaded with heavy motorcycle gear.

As I wriggle out of my jacket and reach to hang it on the top of the pile, he's suddenly there, grinning at me. He says, “So where's the crash helmet?”

I feign embarrassment, bite my lip. “Sorry
…
Car,” I say.

“Shame on you.” He holds out a hand. “Hugo.”

I freeze; I stare. I know that this is him. Even as I think it, it strikes me as ridiculous, but it feels like truth. It feels like someone somewhere in the universe has heard me, I grin stupidly and shake his hand.

He smiles at me, and he winks. He actually winks.

When the time comes to eat, I manoeuvre myself, or more precisely we manoeuvre ourselves, side by side. Hugo contributes by giving up his seat to fetch his wallet from his jacket. When he returns, the seats between us have been taken; he sits down next to me.

The meal is terrible but then they always are. “This is a motorcycle club not a gastronomic one,” I say to someone who starts to complain. I don't care though, I am happy.

Hugo is a dancer and he's very funny. A touch of camp, a little finesse in every gesture, but also a biker, a drinker and a smoker, a great buzzing contradiction of humour, blokeiness, and elegance.

Someone is talking about organising a party – he needs go-go boys. “Hey what about Hugo?” asks Jean-Paul. “He is a dancer after all.”

I grimace with embarrassment. Hugo tries to explain that contemporary dance isn't quite the same thing as gogo dancing.

I smile, warmed by his efforts to explain this without making his aggressor feel stupid. I feel as though I am sitting next to a log fire, as though I am warming my cold, frosty body next to it. I realise that I have been on the edge of hypothermia. Hugo is saved when five of us decide to join in, to jokingly conspire to harass him.

“Well it
is
dance, and it
is
contemporary,” we say, “after all.”

Jean-Paul cottons on, exaggerates along with the rest of us to demonstrate that, in fact, he was actually joking as well – that he intentionally initiated the joke and
Hugo gives in, stands on his chair and shows us just how well he
could
do the job.

It's nothing; it's a mere joke. But we're all impressed by the roll and the groove of his body. Personally I am awe-struck.

“Hey, do you strip as well?” asks Jean-Paul.

Hugo slides back into his chair with a laugh. “Sure!” he says. “I'll strip. But I never go further than my flowery boxer shorts.”

We laugh.

“Oh, and flip flops,” he says. “I
never
dance without flip flops!”

We laugh, we drink, we fool around, and once or twice he mockingly pinches me.

As I drift off to sleep, I think of him, see his face, see the movement of his body, imagine stroking the smile lines around his eyes.

I know that I'm in love again and the world is transformed from a terrifying desolate winter into a playground of possibility, of snuggling in front of coal fires, and walking side by side through the frost. I think how hard the fall will be if this doesn't happen.

I try to stop hoping, try instead to work through all the reasons why it might not happen in my mind. But as I lie awake, revelling in the mere thought of him, as I hear the rain start again, I think it sounds beautiful.

The next day I call the club secretary. He gives me Hugo's surname: Damiano.

Monday is shopping day, it takes all day to find exactly what I am looking for. The name rolls around my head. “Hugo Damiano.”

In the evening I look him up in the phone book, pack up the gift and seal the brown, padded envelope. I scrawl the address across the front. I remember, too late again, that it's easier to write while the envelope is still empty.

Tomorrow I will post them, and he will, or will not
understand – it's a test. A test that this is truly the man the universe has sent, that he has noticed me, that he knows only I could have sent that package.

It's a test that he has the sense of humour to find it funny and more than anything that he can fall in love with someone who sends him flowery boxer shorts and flip-flops through the post.

I will not call though. He has the gift, and if the test fails then it must fail.

A week drags by. I cave in and call.

A man answers. “He's in Sweden. Working. Sorry,” he says. “He'll be back on Friday though.”

Funny that. I had thought of lots of reasons it might not work. But I never even imagined that he might not be single.
“How dumb. How stupid. How typical,”
I tell myself.

“It's his brother,” says Isabelle when I call her. “Or a friend, or someone he lent his apartment to.”

I hope, but I don't really believe. The week passes slowly. Finally Friday arrives. It grinds past like a bad film in slow-motion.

Saturday is worse.

Sunday, I start to feel like I'm getting over it.
“If he can't even be bothered to reply,”
I tell myself,
“then he's not worth worrying about.”

But I feel sad. I feel surprised and disappointed – I hadn't imagined this ending at all.

Monday evening arrives and I've pushed it from my mind. I put some pasta on to cook. Enough for one, again.

The cat sits on my lap in front of the fire, wide-eyed at the spitting wood.

The phone rings, I look at the number on the display; I stare at it, a
local
number. I wait till the last ring, the final ring before it goes onto voicemail then swipe it from the cradle.

“Hi it's Hugo,” he says. “Do you remember me?”

“Hi,” I say, “I erh
…
”

“I just wondered if you wanted to come to dinner, tonight, with some friends?” he says. “It's a bit late I know.”

I shower, I shave, I tidy the bed.

I tip the pasta into the bin and push it down to hide it behind the rest.

The friends are actually half of the dance company. They are clever, pretty, and wild. They drink a lot, smoke a lot, laugh loudly and put me at ease.

The menu contains one hundred percent meat dishes, so I eat lettuce and raw carrots. Hugo says I'm,
“Qu'un villain lapin.”
– Nothing but a naughty rabbit.

I manage to be funny, witty, and irreverent, I reflect my surroundings. I had forgotten just how “up” I can be. Red, smiling faces beam at me from around the table.

Everyone says goodnight, including Hugo. The company are invited somewhere for drinks; they are leaving me behind.

I stand nonplussed, next to my car, watching them climb into theirs, and then, just as Hugo lifts a leg to get into the last car, he changes his mind. He runs across the car park and kisses me, deep and hard. I am so surprised that I don't move.

He grins. “I'll call you tomorrow,” he says.

And thus it starts. We sleep in his house; we sleep in my house. We build towering inferno log-fires and roll around in front of them.

We drink too much, argue about everything, agree in the end, and have sex again. He loves my mess; I love his heaps of junk. It feels relaxed and easy and right.

“I had forgotten how easy it could be,” I tell Isabelle.

We hang out with his friends from the company. I feel like a student again, feel the way I did before, when I
was young, when all that mattered was having a laugh. I feel the way I felt before I started shopping at
Habitat
.

I realise that my life has been so empty. That living in the middle of nowhere, being made redundant, and being single, huh! No wonder I was feeling depressed, Hugo is my very own universal solution.

He fills my mornings, my lunchtimes, my evenings and my nights. He's so hyperactive that I need the time when he's working just to catch up on my sleep quota.

We spend half of our time alone, the other half with his friends, his colleagues, his family. When he goes away, sometimes I get to travel with him: we go all over France, to Amsterdam, to Prague, to Seville. When he gets complimentary tickets to some cultural event he takes me with him, and he gets
a lot
of complimentary tickets.

His friends turn up at my house just to play ping-pong. His life fits me like a glove.

I tell Isabelle, “I have never been so happy.”

But she's worried, and she's right. “Isn't it all a bit much though?” she asks, inarticulate, but accurate as ever.

“I don't know what you mean,” I say.

She shrugs. “I don't know,” she says. “It all just seems a bit
…
unsustainable.”

I have folded into this relationship and I'm disappearing fast.

Isabelle is right, it can't be sustained, but I can't do anything else. My own life is a big blurred mess, I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing, so we live Hugo's life instead and it suits us both – one size fits all. I am so happy, so busy, so overflowing with joy that I can't even be bothered to think about the implications of any of this.

When summer arrives, Hugo has time off and we languish in bed until twelve. We walk in the forest; we diet together and drive to the mountains to buy more
hens.

When we have dinner parties, some of my friends reappear, tempted to travel out to me by the chance to escape the heat and overcrowding of Nice in August. They seem to love Hugo almost as much as I do. “Try to keep this one a bit longer,” they say.

I awaken in the mornings, snuggle to his back and he stretches, yawns and snuggles into me.

One morning in September, he rolls onto his back instead, stares at the ceiling. “How long have we been together now?” he asks sleepily.

I count. “Feb, March, April, May. Nine months,” I say.
“Nearly
nine months.”

Hugo moves away, it's barely perceptible, but he definitely moves away.

“Why?” I ask, propping myself up on one elbow.

He pauses a moment. “Does that mean that we're a couple?”

I can tell that this is multiple-choice. I know deep down, that it's a trick question, that there's a right answer and a wrong answer, and that the obvious answer may not be the correct one. I can sense that there's a lot to lose.

In panic, I go for honesty. “I suppose the fact that we've slept together almost every night for nine months could imply that we're a couple, yeah. So? What's wrong?”

Hugo says, “Hm.”

He gets up; he dresses. Saying, “Sorry, but I need some space today,” he leaves without eating breakfast.

I sit and wait.

Isabelle says, “C'est normale!” “A break after nine months is normal. Just give him some space.”

“But is it just a break?”
I wonder.
“Let it just be a break,”
I pray.

A week drones by, I give him space. The emptiness in my house is overpowering, as if everything is frozen,
everything is on hold.

I swear even the plants stop growing.

I sit and wait and bite my nails.

Hugo has taken everything: the friends, the cuddles, the sex, the laughter. It's still summer, but I can't be bothered to do anything, so I sit indoors waiting.

It feels like winter.

It takes two weeks for him to get his thoughts together.

One afternoon I glance out into the garden and he's there stroking the cat. I run out to him, run
at
him. “Thank God!” I say.

But the expression on his face tells all: panic and pain. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I don't understand myself, but I
…
I guess I need a break, I need time to think.”

“I thought we
had
a break,” I say. “I thought that's what we were doing.”

His eyes shine, his hands are trembling. “A month,” he says. “Give me a month to work out what's going on.” …

He walks around the house, collects his remaining stuff and rides away.

I wait six weeks before I go to see him. He sits me down, holds my hand. “I'm sorry,” he says, “but what we have, well it's not what I want.”

Which is funny really, because it's
everything
I want.

He hands me a bag with, “some things” of mine.

When I get home, I angrily empty the bag onto the bed. It contains every gift I ever gave him, oh and my spare toothbrush. The toothbrush makes me weep; the toothbrush strikes me as
really
final.

But deep down, I always think he'll come back.

I'll guess I'll always expect that call.

I drag through the classic trauma cycle, only this time it takes longer than usual. Denial: he'll be back; it was just too wonderful. Anger: I bet the bastard's actually shagging someone else. Depression: toast, cigarettes, rosé and chocolate. Rebound: diet, swimming pool, gym, reading the personals all over again.

These are promising as always, so I answer a couple, but it's the usual mirage in the desert, lots of guys who sound hopeful, who seem even better in the contact email, but who when I call them either say, “Come round now, I'm nude and waiting with my throbbing tool in my hand,” or “Yeah I really like your voice, I'd like to meet you tomorrow, and hey, if it all goes well we could we live together!” If all else fails then, the voice, when I call, sounds like Tinky Winky on ecstasy.

I will not get depressed, I will not give in, I will survive. I will, yet again bounce back.

I force myself to go to the pub, to attend bike club meetings, secretly hoping to see Hugo again or if not, another, better Hugo. Could such a thing exist?

The night I meet Laurent I am drinking with friends from the bike club outside La Rusca. The bikes are lined up along the pavement.