Signs of Life (2 page)

When we arrived in Leeds it was already dark. After driving around for a while, we found our hotel, went in together and discovered they had messed up our booking, had given us a double and
didn’t have anything else. Carl suggested we have a meal first, but I felt uneasy about not having anywhere to sleep so we got back into the car and drove on. At the next hotel, cheaper
looking, Carl stayed in the car while I went inside.

The man at reception told me he didn’t have any single rooms left, but he did have a twin and would that be all right? I would like to say that it was the hotelier’s suggestion and
the lateness that made me think it might be acceptable to share a room with Carl, but I admit that something inside me leapt at the chance. I remember this feeling as a kind of excitement. Perhaps
it was an extension of the feeling I had when we drove away: that with Carl, life could take unforeseen turns. When I went out to tell him, I was elated. I had presumed it would be OK with him and
it was. I see now that my behaviour on this occasion added up to an admission of attraction, but somehow, just then, I was convinced of my own innocence. At that time, I did not know how well I
could lie. Once I knew what I was capable of, I stopped trusting myself and other people in quite the same style. Looking back, knowing I lied, I have to question everything.

A couple of weeks before the kiss, I felt it was time that Johnny and Carl met, and that I ought to meet Katie, Carl’s girlfriend, so we arranged to see a band that Carl
used to play with, he had been the drummer. It was strange, presenting my private self to my work colleague and seeing his non-work self, like showing each other part of our bodies. I liked Katie,
or else I wanted to like her and wanting to like her was enough like truly liking her to pass as the same thing. She had bobbed hair, thin lips, a sharp little nose echoed by a sharp little chin
and her eyes were made up with swoops of black liner. Overall, she seemed pointy. All evening I tried to measure how well Johnny and Carl were getting on and whether Katie warmed to me. Because I
was watching the evening more than I was engaged in it, I felt on the outside of what was happening. I couldn’t dance because I was too self-conscious, and when I saw Johnny dance in a
ranging, roaming way I cringed as if he were doing something embarrassing. On the way home I asked Johnny what he thought of Carl, expecting that my new friend had made as good an impression on
Johnny as he had done on me, but Johnny only said something like, He was OK, I suppose, a bit intense – the band was good though.

I found out later that Carl had already decided to pursue me and was only interested in meeting Johnny to size him up as a rival.

Is it possible to make something happen by wanting it enough? Can desire be that powerful?

Carl’s first impression was that Johnny was ‘a bit handsome’. Yet Johnny’s handsomeness didn’t put Carl off because Carl’s mind was set. Desire alone is not,
I think, enough to make something happen; you also need determination. I have experienced this in writing. Wanting to write is not enough. The trick, as P. G. Wodehouse said, is to apply the seat
of the trousers to the seat of the chair. And to get the seat of the trousers onto that chair, day after day, and keep it there, requires desire, but also willpower. Desire and determination cannot
guarantee the quality of the outcome, but they will get the thing written. Desire and determination were not enough to ensure a happy ending, but they got the affair started.

After the first kiss, Carl and I left the bar. The next bit I remember is walking through a housing estate not far from the office, a shortcut most of us used in daylight to
get to the High Street. Probably we had decided to walk to the High Street to get taxis from there. We seemed to be in that housing estate for hours. There was talking, but I don’t recall
what it was about. Mostly, there was more kissing. Who are you? I kept asking him, but he couldn’t answer me except with another kiss and each time that happened I asked him again, Who are
you? Maybe I was asking myself that question. Maybe I meant, Who are you, that you can lead me astray like this?

He told me he’d fallen for me, hard. I brought up our partners and he brushed the mention aside as though they were no matter and should not be allowed to intrude. Still, I lingered and we
held hands and walked slowly and kissed again and again. I was drunk enough to not watch myself, but not so drunk that the strangeness of the situation was entirely lost on me.

Looking back, even though those kisses were deliciously reckless, the best moment seems to have been before the first kiss in the bar, when an acknowledgement of the tension between us was
surfacing but still unconfirmed, and before I had done anything wrong. I see now that since I stayed on in the bar with him after that first drink, and stayed there for a long time, drinking and
talking and smoking, that what I was doing was prolonging that moment, and perhaps I was also waiting to see how the moment would culminate and where it would go.

When I got home from the bar, it was almost one in the morning and Johnny was beside himself. My phone was switched off so Johnny called the office after ten and got through to
Ivan the workaholic who was the only one left by then. Ivan said he had seen me working not long before and since my computer was still on and my desk was covered with work, that probably I had
gone to the loo or nipped out for something and I would be back soon. Luckily for me, Ivan had not seen me leave with Carl. Johnny asked Ivan to leave me a note to call home as soon as I got back
to my desk, which of course I never did, so at eleven thirty Johnny got on his bike and came looking for me. He cycled round the streets near my office and by the time he arrived home it was well
past midnight. I showed up just before he called the police.

I told Johnny that I had been in the pub with a crowd from work and that we had a lock-in and that I was sorry for being so inconsiderate. Incoherent, more like, he shouted. He could smell the
booze and cigarettes on my breath and in my hair. We slept far apart in our king-sized bed, managing to avoid even brushing toes.

I’ve always kept notebooks but sometimes I lapse, which is no good when there is something I want to get down and out. The other day, I opened the yellow notebook
eagerly, trawling for information. I saw we went to see Carl’s band on April 17th and today is 24th April (odd, that the dates nearly match) and the day after the band, I copied out lines
from a poem, ‘Elegy for a Drummer’ (I loved that title, love it still), and this extract from the journal of one of my favourite artists (having bits of other people’s diaries in
mine reminds me of a picture by Escher of a hand drawing a hand, going round and round, in and in):

Reading the quotes and extracts is like hearing old favourites come on the radio, things you can sing along to, but when I looked at what else I’d written I put it down quickly, bundled
out of my flat in a hurry. I couldn’t read the notebook, or not much of it, because as well as the unhelpful gaps, the me of ten years ago is intensely irritating to the me now –
whimsical, self-absorbed and whiney like an annoying younger sister.

I ended up taking a long walk by the canal, the farthest along the towpath I have yet been (I may even have reached Limehouse). After an hour or so I was getting hungry and
thirsty so I started back and it occurred to me that trying to get away from myself like this was a bit like running away from home when you don’t really mean it.

And, I suppose, that although she makes me wince, I do still like the bits of other people’s writing she wrote down.

Where I live now is a one-bedroom flat in Islington. It’s up three flights of stairs, which sounded too high and so I nearly didn’t bother to see it, but my sister
made me come and I liked it immediately. There is more daylight in the rooms compared to where Johnny and I lived in Hammersmith and I don’t miss the garden because I never gardened. I like
the little roof terrace I have here, which is reached by two French doors directly opposite my desk. What I can see through these doors is mainly the backs and roofs of other buildings. To my right
is a tall church steeple with a weather vane that catches the light on low, pink evenings and the bells ring out at the weekend at seemingly random times (I assume the bells are rung by machine and
I think the machine may be broken). There are three trees, but they are quite far away and not very tall and apart from the fact that they sway where nothing else does, they are unremarkable.

The building directly opposite is in a pitiful state. There is a tapas bar underneath that is well run and popular, but the two-storey flat on top has been forgotten. I haven’t seen a
light on. The black plastic drainpipe is broken and hanging down and flaps and bangs on windy nights and days and the wooden frames around the four windows are rotten and crumbling, the white paint
weathered away. A sinewy buddleia has taken root out of one crack in the wall and looks feral, like a half-starved urban fox.

Today I am counting things I remember. I imagined this would be like opening a high cupboard and a whole load of stuff tumbling out that had been shoved in there and forgotten
about for years. This hasn’t happened yet.

I have counted the number of arguments with Carl and categorized them (mild, serious, vicious), and the number of times we had sex outdoors or in vehicles, and the number of times I avoided
saying whether or not I loved him. (I didn’t.) We kissed first in May but it was over by September, so the affair was short enough to count almost everything that happened in it. There was
one birthday, mine. I turned twenty-four that summer, and something that seems curious to me now was that I thought of him as so much older than me because he was thirty.

We had one good-natured disagreement. It was about how many pistachios make the perfect mouthful. He said one at a time because then you keep wanting more. I said five, because the ratio of
shelling-time to size-of-mouthful yielded more crunching, but then I am the kind of person who rips open a bag of pistachios, trawls through for the freebies – the ones that have come out of
their shell by themselves – and gobbles them up. On one long car journey we experimented – I was shelling, he was driving – and agreed that fifteen was outrageous and ten too
many, which made me doubt my position but I stayed with five because by then it had become one of those bonding jokes you get at the start of something, like knowing you can’t win but
wrestling anyway because you just want any and all physical contact because you know it will end in sex. This movement between play and passion was the best; I don’t know exactly how it
shifted, but suddenly the humour would give way to tenderness and then the tenderness would grow edgy, and it made the sex bigger, somehow. But when I think of those early, fresh days now (so few
of them), it’s not just sex that comes to mind, it’s laughter. His laugh made a puppy out of me; it was something he threw out like a ball, hard to resist.

Almost all of my memories are fragments, impressions. For example, there was a conversation with Johnny about new work-friends – we were at home; I think it was a
weekend. Johnny told me that he had made a new friend at work. What’s his name? I asked, barely interested. Her name is Fiona, Johnny said.
Now
I was interested: Is she pretty?

Not really, he replied.

What does that mean?

It means you have nothing to worry about, he said. Then he asked: Do I?

Do you what?

Do I have anything to worry about?

I knew then, that he meant Carl, but I said: What do you mean?

Well you’ve got a new work-friend too, he said.

What,
Carl
? God, no!

Johnny relaxed into reading the paper again.

So now we both have new, non-pretty work-friends, I said.

Of the opposite sex, said Johnny. I never heard him mention ‘Fiona’ again.

I can’t bear it that the start of the affair was also the beginning of the end with Johnny, mainly because of the position that leaves me in, but also because I
don’t believe things were that clear cut.

When I got home from being with Carl that first time I had to deal with Johnny and so it wasn’t until he and I were lying far apart in bed that I began to think about
what I had done and the thought was so hard and heavy that I turned quickly away from it and my drunken state helped me to turn off the scene so that I fell asleep without any trouble.

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the cloying sweetness of alcohol only a few hours old and a dullness like thick liquid that had seeped into every crevice inside my head. I began
going about my morning: black coffee and toast, shower, drying my hair. Johnny barely spoke, still angry, which suited me because it meant I didn’t have to tell the lie again. I knew he
wasn’t suspicious, because he didn’t ask who I went to the pub with. I had never lied to him before.

Johnny and I did not argue much but I doubt there was genuinely less conflict between us than between other couples. If we wanted to be a couple who never fought, it was probably because we were
so young when we met that we believed it was desirable, even possible, to be in harmony all the time. I remember one fight shortly after moving into the flat we bought together. We were having a
break from decorating, sitting side by side drinking tea. An argument began, though I can’t remember what about, and as it got more heated I shook my empty cup at him. Don’t threaten me
with a teacup, he said, and then laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. Most of our rows were resolved quickly and amicably like this.