Cathexis (10 page)

An awful transaction.

“I'll pay you back, Nancy”.

She tutted and moved her hand to ruffle my hair but thought better of it, no longer her boy. There was nothing now, nothing more to lose. “Nancy, I'm begging you”. I linked my hands together on the breakfast bar.

“No, Minette” she said. “My mind is made up”. I closed my eyes so as not to witness for one second more her sang froid.

Driving home, fiercely stuffing down the onset of a panic attack, while resisting the urge to crash headlong into the next oncoming vehicle. Everything swimming before me, as if the bath plug had been pulled – the swirling vortex dragging me under. I flailed about, fighting for air. It took hold properly once I'd collapsed on all fours in the bed/living room, wretching out pitiful, wounded sounds, attempting to fend off the enormous descending black slab that would crush me. Foetal now, on my side. It hadn't killed me yet, simply settled on me like a velvet shroud. Waking some hours later in the darkness staring into nothing.

The following day at work, I said one sentence, once only: “Nancy's dumped me”. That was all I said, that day and the next.

A small manilla envelope on the communal doormat when I got home.

'Minsk', it read. Inside, a poly bag containing a substantial amount of weed and a note 'enjoy R x'.

That evening I smoked myself into oblivion.

Chapter 17

If only I could see you again. When someone you love doesn't love you any more, it's worse than if they'd died. If they had, at least you'd be secure in the knowledge you were loved till the end. It's as if they've been body snatched.

I'm sitting in Fritz, watching Nancy take out the recycling. She is jouncing down the steps, her hair lifting in the breeze. I recalled an old sci-fi film about aliens who invade people's bodies. The people look the same, but they are subtly altered. “That’s not my Tommy” says a mother beseechingly to a doctor. “That's not my Nancy”.

I'm no longer within her, coursing through her, influencing decisions. I've been purged from her system. But that part of me doesn't know where to go; it's been set adrift. I can't assimilate it because it didn't exist before Nancy. I'm the negative, it is the photo. It wanders uninvited through her house in a hidden dimension. When it waits on the sofa, I imagine her lowering herself onto it and briefly, it embraces her, before she shoos it away like a cat.

This is what a memory is, but I am not a memory. I exist in the here and now, I am a fact. Nancy, why can't you see me like you used to? Perhaps that's the key. I will have to re-present myself – me, but subtly altered, a version that doesn't yet exist. When I've moved on, I will bring new things to your table. I will be familiar like family
,
but different and intriguing. And when you composite the past and the future, I will be perfect. Nancy, we weren't ready, this was a dress rehearsal. One day it will come round again, I know it.

In the meantime I had a legitimate connection. There was a debt to honour.

Having made sure the Saab was absent, I climbed the steps of 12 Palladian Road, clutching an envelope containing a birthday card and a cheque for £200.  The door was still the door.

My heart jolted as the sound of a particular gearbox shifted into reverse and particular tyres steamrollered a plastic pop bottle languishing in the kerb, prompting a hollow whip-crack that ricocheted off the house and punctured my throat.

Like Lot's wife, I turned, foolishly drawn by the destruction of Sodom. The Jezebel's eyes flashed at me with what? Fear? Irritation? It started in my ankles, an uncontrollable trembling that in no time had reached my lips. I banished the fear with the slam of the car door. It's only Nancy, I kidded myself. But it wasn't only Nancy anymore; it was a serpent headed gorgon, a behemoth of black uddered basilisk.

“Happy birthday” I said to the beast, offering the envelope.

“Thanks” she said, kissing the air next to my head. I loped down the steps nonchalantly.

“Minette”
she said, “take care”.

It was only Nancy after all.

Over the next week, I prodded my pin number into the cash machine at least three times a day, needing to know the cheque had been cashed, something of mine going into something of hers.

After seven days I texted 'Sent cheque for £200 please concur'.

'Have received nothing' came the reply.

'It was in the birthday card'.

After time had elapsed and I knew there would be no further exchange, I pondered what this meant. Was it her intention not to cash the cheques?

“No” gloated the dark voice. “She threw the card in the bin unopened.”

Meanwhile, a new situation was unfolding, Remy, maintaining contact via notes thoughtfully placed in poly bags under Fritz's windscreen wiper. They started off benignly enough.

'Hi Minsk, just spotted your car and wondered how you are doing? R x'.

'Hi Minsk, TJ said she saw you and you looked sad. Hope you are OK. R x'.

And then in an altogether more sinister vein: 'I know you fucked someone else. You will pay, bitch'.

I hoped her dope-addled brain would lose its train of thought before following through with the fatwa. I'd never intimidate Nancy this way.

“Salt and pepper?” enquired Candy, the Portuguese proprietor of 'Tummy Time', where I normally fetched the team's lunch order. Candy and I had flirted outrageously for years, though I was almost sure she was straight, given the bleached, preppy pony tail, orange pallor and silver shadowed eyes. She sparred with men just as relentlessly – some women will flirt with anyone.

Thanks to M8 kissing one of our leaflets before posting it through the letterbox of a prestigious, double fronted house, we'd landed the biggest job of our career to date.

“Chilli sauce on the wrap, babe?”

“Yes please”.

“Yeah, a girl needs something hot inside her on a day like this, innit?” she giggled suggestively.

We'd taken on more staff, but Clive was becoming increasingly morose and distant, often disappearing on spurious errands. Our opinions about running the business were diverging. He wanted to expand, running jobs in tandem with several teams, competing not just locally but London-wide. This would be unmanageable, I argued; we would be unable to ensure quality. My view was we should remain high end, specialised, bespoke. The business should be us and not some blokes in a van reading The Sun.

The wheezing sauce bottle raspberried rudely. Candy smiled.

“Remind you of anything?”

“Yeah, yoga class” I said.

“Oh babe, she sighed, stopping her rigid eyelashes with her wrist
.
“You're funny, you are”.

The ace of spades reminded me of Nancy's pubes, as I turned the cards in clock patience. Kings were undesirable.

Although I appeared to function within normal parameters, as soon as I got home and shut the door
...I didn't. My sorrow would steadily increase through the day, the nature of my work allowing me to dwell on it. Utilising only a small portion of my brain. I was able to saw, mix, carry, measure and even converse successfully. That left the major part to analyse and probe my pain, worrying the wound until it flooded me with renewed voracity ...my only connection. I tortured myself, recalling loving gestures, heroic sex and private things that passed between us. At times anger attempted to bristle my chest, but it really wasn't me and evaporated into a gnawing desolation so acute I could do nothing but cry, all promises annulled. These complex
,
repetitive internal dialogues always ended the same way – an overwhelming yearning for Nancy, whatever her incarnation.

I would talk to M8 and cry.

“She's not real” M8 would say.

“She was real”.

“Only because you made her real M8. You were her finest moment, you brought something out in her that was too brilliant to sustain because she's just a boring straight lady. She'll never be lost and lonely like us, she doesn't have the capacity”.

“M8, why am I now hearing 'Pearl's a Singer'?”

“I don't know M8, but since you are, it's like Nancy tried to stand up when she played the piano, but she couldn't so she had to sit down again, it's as simple as that”.

“Thanks M8”.

Chapter 18

Angle-grinder, circular saw, cold chisel. I was making entries in the bought ledger, something which gratified my obsessive compulsive disposition. Why was Clive buying all these tools when we already had them? Plus, without discussing it with me. It could only mean he was expanding the business under my nose and not very stealthily.

“What's on your mind, Clive?” The telepathy had gone. Rain drummed the contemporary summer house we'd just finished, in which we were now sheltering. Cornered,
he removed his cap, ran his hand through his clotted hair and rubbed his stubble, fingers trembling.

“I'm exhausted” he said.

“You and me both”. I wasn't about to let him off that easily. “Now, what is it?”

He put his head in his hands.

“Min” he sighed, “I can't do this anymore”.

I thought of Nancy, but dragged my focus back to Clive's fidgeting Timberlands.

His intention, it transpired, was to take Matt and Quincy and start up his own business, essentially cutting me out. He would graciously recompense me for the tools he'd been stock piling and pay me a fee for the gardens I'd designed which were scheduled. I could keep the maintenance round and take my pick from our current tool stock.

Incandescent with rage
.
“You fucking cunt” I spat. “After all these years”. I wanted to kick him in his pathetic excuses for balls (how had this weasel made a baby?), but instead I booted an 80 litre bag of peat.

“You'd still be delivering pizza leaflets if it wasn't for me, you utter, utter cunt!”.

“I know” he said, hanging his head in shame.

I drove home sobbing, “Fucking arse! Fucking tit wanking arsehole”. The fear had come home.

I slept for the next 36 hours and dreamed of impossible landscapes where the sea was higher than the land and of tall trains, the steps of which I was too exhausted to climb. Then I would be on the train with a party of people who insisted they knew me even though I didn't recognise them. Next, dashing around with a slimy fish in my hands, barely alive – its repellent cartilage lips distending into a tube, desperate for its own element. After turning on taps that didn't work and approaching puddles that evaporated before me, I was again in the impossible landscape, the sea before my face, posting the fish into the upright water. I watched it swim off, turning and glinting in the vertical waves. Nudged to the surface by a persistent ringing. A lobster see-sawing in the cradle of an old, black telephone
; a transition from sleep to waking Dali would have approved of. Grappling about for the shell, I put it to my ear, clearing my throat.

“Hello?'” I croaked.

“I'm with you, Min” said Quincy.

Each installment of the £2,800 of my severance package Clive and I had agreed went to Nancy – the cheques duly banked.

“We've got a problem guv, this cement's not setting ...it's freezing”. Quincy and I attempting to partially pave a strange, sinister garden in Islington. Now December and a tiny frozen stalactite hung from the tip of his nose. He pinched it away and cupped his hands before his face.