Only Forward (40 page)

Rafe and I tried this, in fits and starts, over the years. We tried concentration exercises, we tried to visualise. It didn't work, we lost interest, and bang went another New Age insight.

I realise now that we were moving apart even then, that before it all happened the ties which had bound us seamlessly together were already beginning to unravel. Shared experience and boyish friendship can take you a long way, but it cannot compete against the rest of the world, or even against yourselves.

By the time I left college I was an older boy, and sadder. I went back to live with my parents for a time, while I tried to sort out what I was going to do with my life. Rachel stayed on at college, to do a further degree.

I met Rachel in my first term at college, and we fell in love. It was as simple, and as wonderful, as that. We took our time, getting to know each other slowly, as if by some strange intuition we knew that would be the best way. It was months before the inevitable happened, but when it did we dumped our old partners like a shot.

When you want to say you love someone, how do you do it? I can remember so many times, so many little flickers of images. Sitting on the top deck of a bus and turning to grin at each other, speechless with the force of feeling. A warm room on a dark winter afternoon, a glow from the green; lights on the stereo in the corner and points of white from the lights outside the window. Walking with my arm round her and feeling the solidity of her body against mine as we turned a corner. Sitting at different desks, and then turning at the same time to smile at each other, to show each other that we were still there. Lying in bed behind her, my arm clasped tight against her chest by hers, listening to the cadence of her sleeping breaths.

Anyone can catalogue the bad times, but how do you tell the good? I can tell you these things but I can't make you see them. I can send you a postcard, but you can't come to stay.

I loved her. I still do. I always will.

It went wrong in our last year at college. Rachel was a very attractive girl, by far the most beautiful I'd ever been with. Unfortunately, other people noticed her too. I was insecure, and I was busy. We didn't glance at each other very often any more, and our arms lay only loosely around each other's shoulders.

We both made mistakes, both had our nights when someone else came to take control of our bodies, someone who took what was there in front of them, and didn't remember what it would be like in the morning. We loved each other so much still, and stayed together, patching and mending, bandaging and shoring up, but you can't do that, you know, not really. You can cover up the breaks with talk and promises, resolve and apologies, all the arguments and tears, but however transparent the glue is, however strong, it's still there. Underneath it all, the breakage remains.

It was worse when I left. By that time I was so insecure, so full of bitterness and distrust that I foresaw the worst in everything. I'd created my own world to live in, a world that was wallpapered with the colours of unfaithfulness and hurt. I was obsessed with Rachel by then, I think, obsessed with our relationship. I couldn't imagine myself without her, couldn't understand what that might be like. Whatever happened, I coped with it, tried to forgive it, tried to see the mitigating circumstances. I fought an endless, damaging battle against the inevitable, and she did too: I wasn't perfect either. And still we stayed together, weaving our sad world, filling each other up with curdling love and tottering on the stilts of our memories.

Increasingly desperately I needed something else, needed somewhere to go, something to believe in. I needed someone to come and whisk me off my feet, but no one could, because I was far too heavy inside. I was trapped, nailed to the earth, and I knew that Rafe felt the same. No woman had hurt him or let him hurt her, but the world had, had tried so hard to hammer him down. It had a little box waiting for him, and as everything he tried seemed to fail, he was shoe-horned a little closer into his slot.

I remember the times we spent together then, the dark nights spent searching for something within ourselves. Still we talked, and still sometimes we mentioned the band we now knew would never exist. The guitars which were once going to be the talismans of our success now became symbols of failure, as we realised how things were really going to be, realised that in twenty years time we would be clearing out our attics one day and come upon them, lying dusty and forgotten under dry years.

It may sound like a little thing, and we never articulated it to each other, but knowing this was a bitter twist in our friendship, a betrayal of the dreams we'd had together. We were each other's living proof that life wasn't working out the way we'd thought it would. When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else.

We shared a need, a rejection of everything around us. We needed a film to star in, needed Sigourney Weavers to fight by our sides as we backed down tumbling bridges in an everlasting final reel. It was a need amplified by years of understanding, by the torque of a friendship that was pulling itself apart under the weight of disappointment, and in the end I think it was the need which enabled us to achieve what we'd failed to pull off before.

That, and something else.

The watershed happened while I was on holiday, or just afterwards. A college friend of mine was getting married in New York, and I went across the Atlantic to see him off into connubial bliss.

It was a good time, actually. I really let myself go, something I couldn't seem to do in England. At home I felt for ever trapped in a web of facts and ways of being, walking the same tracks, thinking the same thoughts, endlessly patching and tearing the same love, again, and again, and again. At the wedding I escaped from that for a while, and despite what happened, I'm glad I did, because it was the last real time.

On the way over in the plane, I happened to look out over the ocean while waiting for one of the toilets to become free. I peered down at the sea, and I noticed that it looked almost as if it were one giant mud flat, rippled and humped, stretching out for ever. I was entranced, and found myself wondering what would happen if you lowered someone down on a rope towards it. Would they just fall into the sea, or would they find themselves on that plain, a land from another world?

I had to call Rafe about something while I was there, and I mentioned this to him. He was interested in it, as I knew he would be. I told him when I was flying back, and he joked that he'd head for the coast and see what happened, see if my mind could affect the world. I never thought he'd actually do it.

What happened at the wedding was that I met someone, someone who stood out, whom I noticed.

In all the time Rachel and I had been rocking back and forth, that had never happened before. I'd slept with ghosts and phantoms, girls who passed through me without ever touching the sides, though that was my fault, not theirs. Some I'd met through a drunken collision of bodies, the kind of traumatic sexual accident that makes you wish you'd taken out some form of emotional insurance. The rest were just events waiting to happen and needing some participants, and my contribution had never been more than the whirling part of my soul that never knew what it wanted and let everything slip through its hands, because it didn't know itself well enough to know what it should be grasping.

When you don't know what you want you clutch at everything, thinking that because it's new it will be better, and not realising that a nobody won't be happy with anything. But at the wedding it was different. This time it meant something. What happened wasn't just the invasion of my mind by whatever poltergeist it is that revels in one-night stands. It was me who did it.

And it was me who found himself in a hotel room afterwards, having missed my bus, wondering what the hell I was going to do about it. Rachel and I were still together, technically. The last time we'd spoken, in fact, she'd sounded warmer towards me than in a long time. Love had sounded as if it was coming at me for once, instead of just sitting bleakly in front of me. I'd screwed it up now, and I didn't seem to have much to show for it. I had no idea what I was going to do.

I went home when the wedding was over. On the way back I went and stood by the window at the back of the plane again, and I was pleased to see that the ocean still looked the way it had on the way over. I even wondered what might actually have happened if Rafe had gone to the coast, if we'd managed to be looking out onto the water at the same time, me from up there, him from below.

The first thing I did when I got back was visit Rachel. I had to. I couldn't keep secrets then, not the way I can now. I turned up at the tiny flat she rented and she looked so well and happy, glowing in a white cotton dress with a pattern of red and blue stripes. She was so pleased to see me.

An hour later I left, and we never saw each other again. There was no friendship afterwards. I lied about that.

That was the watershed, or the beginning of it.

When I got back home I found eleven messages from Rafe, alternately asking me to call him urgently and enquiring where the fuck I was. All I could see that afternoon was Rachel's face, the way it had reddened with her crying, and I couldn't face calling him back. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't have anything to say. Finally the thread which had always held Rachel and me together despite what happened had snapped, had been brutally cut. It had been severed by me, and now it was gone, I really didn't know what, if anything, was left inside me.

An hour later Rafe arrived at the house. He ran straight past my father when he let him in, and came pounding up the stairs to my room. I had only a moment to realise how long it had been since he'd been in there, to notice that my friend was now a man, not a boy, and then he told me.

He'd done what he said he was going to do. He'd gone to the coast, and he'd stood with his back to it for three hours, turning every now and then to look at the sea. He was beginning to feel a bit of an idiot, and attracting some strange glances, when suddenly he felt a tingling, an itch somewhere in his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to work out what the feeling was. When he opened them the front was deserted, the sky was charcoal grey, and an odd wind was slipping past his ankles. Slowly, so slowly, he had turned to look at the sea.

That was the way it was, the beginning of it. I lied earlier, another one. There were no lovers, just me and Rafe. The lovers version is for customers.

That's not true either. The lovers version is the way I wish it had happened. I wish it had been me and Rachel. But it wasn't.

Rafe and I stood staring at each other in my room, and deep inside I felt something shift. I knew he wasn't lying. There was no reason for him to. What I'd always believed, always known, was true.

Can you imagine what that felt like? Can you picture the two of us, standing there, not knowing what to do, not even able to move? The world had tilted on its axis, and we were the only ones who knew.

We'd found our film.

As I walked along the path I knew it would not last for ever. I was walking towards a meeting, walking back in time, and the end of recollection was not too far in the distance. The dark columns I walked through were parts of me, the edificial struts of memory. Far above was my face, the outside, the leaves my past supported. Between the trees was nothing, emptiness.

It took us a couple of days to get things together. We bought rucksacks, some food, boots for walking in, and we told our parents we were going off for a couple of days. I told mine, anyway. We didn't want to tell anyone about what we'd found yet. Partly we would have sounded deranged without any proof, and partly, I think we just wanted to keep it to ourselves for the time beings We didn't know what it was yet, but it was going to be ours.

We didn't give much thought to how we were going to get it to happen again. This time there would be no other person in a plane high above, helping us to see what was there, helping us to open the gate. I think we believed that because the two of us knew, that would be enough.

Maybe we were right. As it happened, something else took place which completed the watershed for me. Something which cut me off from what I'd been before, and shoved me out into the world with a 'We are closed' sign on my heart.

The night before we went I was at home, thinking about what we were trying to do, checking I'd got everything I might need, putting film in my camera. Rafe thought that it probably wouldn't come out on a camera, even if we did manage to get it to happen again, but I thought it was worth a try. The phone went, but I didn't go for it. My parents were nearer, and hardly anyone knew I was home anyway. Then Dad called up. It was for me.

It was Rachel. When I heard her voice I was immediately flooded with a confusing mixture of emotions. With Rafe's revelation, and our plans, I'd tried to push thoughts of Rachel to the back of my mind, and to hear her voice was to feel the opening of a container ship of worms. I wondered what she was going to say, whether she was going to go back on her request that I go to hell, and how I'd react if she did. Rachel always had that effect on me: I seemed always to be able to find another straw after the last one, even when I was the one in the wrong.

She didn't go back on her request. She just asked how I was in a tight-lipped voice that made the hair on the back of my neck rise. I'd never heard her speak like that before. I said I was okay, and asked the same of her. Without any lead-up she told me that there was something I ought to know.

She told me that when I'd seen her she'd been pregnant, and that she'd now had an abortion. She left a pause, and I put the phone down in it. I didn't do it to be hurtful. I just couldn't hear any more.

I sat in my room and cried, cried until I thought my head would split. After a few hours my parents came up to bed, and my father knocked on the door and said goodnight without opening it, as he usually did. If he'd waited a second longer outsider or if he'd opened the door for a change, I would have told him.