Signs of Life (3 page)

On my way into work I tried to avoid thinking about what I had done, yet images of Carl and me in the bar and in the housing estate kept crowding forward. I knew that I would have to see and
talk to Carl, but because I couldn’t bear to admit that I had betrayed Johnny, I couldn’t begin to prepare for that encounter. I had an image of the kind of life I would have with
Johnny – a big house, a leafy lane. The details were slow and suburban, though I didn’t see that then. I thought I could make my heart a private road: no speeding, no collisions, no
thoroughfare, no heavy load. No entry.

I met Johnny on a research trip, along with thirty other students, in a tropical paradise off the coast of Malaysia. We met towards the end of the project, and his reputation
preceded him so that when he arrived at the camp, I was wary of him and looking for faults – I decided that he wasn’t as gorgeous as I had heard, nor as laid back. But after a few days
he won me over and we got together by a fire on a beach in the moonlight. Our magical beginning was something we referred to as if it bestowed a certain grace upon us. But now that I think about
it, there were problems. Yes, there were the sunsets over the ocean, the dolphins swimming just offshore, the fresh coconuts, the fishing boats sailing past – but Johnny had already had an
affair that summer with a French girl, and it was camp gossip that they had been seen having sex on a beach. It was this that had hardened me against him to begin with. When the project ended and
all the students regrouped, Johnny received a lot of attention from the other men about the French girl and I became jealous and rejected him. Whenever he and I looked back we saw our beginning as
perfectly romantic and glossed over all of this. If I chose, even unconsciously, to remember the good and forget the difficult on this occasion then it makes me wonder how many other uncomfortable
memories my mind has suppressed.

Ivan’s note lay on top of the papers spread over my desk. He’d used thick black marker pen on a big piece of paper. The note said: Rachel, please call Johnny ASAP,
Ivan. I scrumpled it up quickly and threw it in the bin. I didn’t look up as I tidied my desk; scared that someone would meet my eyes and give me a look that would tell me they’d
guessed it all.

After my sister’s accident, the day I went back to work, I found a photograph in the top drawer of my desk. The picture was of the office manager, a man who took the
limited powers his job gave him very seriously. People laughed at him behind his back. Carl had written 666 on the office manager’s forehead. It made me smile. That same morning Johnny had
had to leave early and when I was getting ready for work I found a note on the kitchen table. The note said: Cheer up. I didn’t feel cheered, I felt I had received an instruction.

Carl and I went out together at lunchtime to a cafe I had never been to before and where we felt sure we’d find no one else from work. We sat opposite each other on
burgundy banquettes that were smooth enough to slide on except for the patches of silver tape over cuts in the leather. Carl looked tired and though he listened, he already seemed to know what I
would say. He didn’t protest when I told him it had been a mistake and must never happen again. I got the impression he felt strongly for me and felt I was leaving him and that he was taking
it hard, even though we had barely been together. I was worried that he would tell someone and asked him not to. I must have asked what happened when he got home, whether Katie had been angry that
he was so late, but I can’t remember his answer. The way Carl behaved made me think well of him and made him more attractive, though I couldn’t admit this at the time.

One reason I wanted to let Carl down gently was because I already knew about his family. Carl’s father died when Carl was six years old and his younger brother four years old. Their mother
never recovered from the loss. She slid into a depression from which she never fully emerged and, after a few attempts, she killed herself when Carl was fourteen, his younger brother twelve. His
younger brother, who I only ever heard Carl refer to as ‘Our Kid’, still lived in the house they had grown up in and where his mother died. It was in the outskirts of a city by the
coast that I had never visited.

A dream I recorded in my notebook around this time: I am standing in front of a large white house on a grassy hill that slopes down to the top of a white cliff far above the
sea. As if in a bowling alley, I am rolling balls of fire, one by one, down the slope and they drop off the cliff into the sea where they are instantly extinguished, steam hissing up from the
surface. The mood of the dream was calm, I remember it as pleasant though puzzling – what was the fire that I was extinguishing so methodically? Occasionally I still dream about Carl, and
also, though less often, about Johnny.

Carl chose all his clothes well. He knew what suited him and he didn’t mind spending a lot of money, even though he didn’t earn a great deal. I especially liked the
way he looked in blue jeans and heavy boots, the way the denim, soft and pale in places, showed off his thighs, which were strong and well shaped, not too broad. He wore reddish brown
workman’s boots, shiny with age and wear.

He was attractive because he was confident and I think he was confident because he knew he was good at sex. After the awkwardness of the first few times, we soon became fluent. For him I learned
to wear silk camisoles, tight cotton vests, to leave them on until he said, Take off your top – and then do this in one smooth motion. Although the way he watched made me feel like a goddess,
his fierce regard induced in me a kind of disorientation – a sense of discovery that didn’t lead anywhere; with him, I was never really sure whether I was more myself or less
myself.

I was nervous about living high up but in fact I like it better than being on the ground floor. I fantasize about growing strawberries and lettuce on the roof terrace, though
in reality I almost never go out there (I have my desk almost flat against the doors and so it’s tricky to open them). But I am trying other new things, like wearing my hair down instead of
always scrunched back and buying luscious shower cream instead of unscented blocks of soap and making tea in a pot with actual tea leaves. Living up here just suits me.

Johnny and I went camping in Corsica. We found a perfect place to stay; a little patch of flat, mossy ground for the tent, a river, shade. The day after we arrived there, I sat by the river,
reading. Johnny said he wanted to go for a walk and set off up the steep side of the valley. Whenever I looked up from my book, I could see him getting smaller as he climbed. Later he returned with
a small yellow flower. He’d seen the flowers high on the hillside through binoculars and decided to go and pick one for me.

During that holiday, my birthday came around making me feel low, as birthdays sometimes do. That evening, as it grew dark, Johnny crawled into the tent carrying a fruitcake with candles on it,
something he’d planned before we left England. I remember his face in the candlelight, especially his warm, wide smile.

Sometimes I would dearly love to see Johnny again, to talk with him, hear his sense of things. I don’t even have his phone number.

If I couldn’t make the kiss unhappen then I wanted it to have been a simple mistake, something that happened because I was drunk. But I had been drunk before, many times.
I didn’t have to decide whether or not to tell Johnny, I simply knew that I would not. Telling him would make the act bigger than it needed to be, and as I made myself see it, not telling
Johnny the truth was an extension of the mistake, not a separate act, and so I had only done one wrong thing. One wrong thing in five years of a good relationship didn’t seem so bad. If you
took the mistake and divided it between all the days and nights we’d had together the mistake became so small that it almost disappeared.

Because of what happened later, I destroyed or threw away everything Carl had given me. When it turned nasty I wrote down as exactly as I could, with dates and times, the
threats he made to me in case I ever needed them to use as evidence against him. But when it was all over I tore these pages out of my notebook. Now I wish I hadn’t. I am not a particularly
well-ordered person, and I wonder whether well-ordered people have accurate recollections and people like me have to put up with a jumble. I can never be bothered to put my washing away – I
just take what I need from the pile of clean laundry on a chair in my bedroom. This lack of order used to nag at me, and I would berate myself for not being a better person. Even though I now
believe that order is over-rated, my doubt over what happened, and when, presents a problem in writing things down. Sometimes this doesn’t seem to matter, but other times it does. For
example, the conversation with Johnny about new work-friends: I can’t remember when this took place so I can’t tell whether Johnny was looking for reassurance early on, before anything
had happened, or whether it was later. Although I have said I was sure Johnny was not suspicious the night of the kiss with Carl, the fact is I don’t know for certain. I don’t know very
much at all about how it was for Johnny.

I do still have a photograph of Carl. It is at the bottom of a box of pictures that I have been meaning to put into albums for years. I remember taking out all the other photos
– the envelopes at the top were dusty because the box has no lid – and laying the picture against the brown cardboard at the bottom, piling everything back on top. I did this quite
deliberately, as though I was hiding it from myself. The photograph is of a group of colleagues. We worked closely together for a time and there was a great sense of camaraderie between us, but I
am not in touch with any of them now. In the photograph, Carl is crouching on the ground and smiling up at the camera, squinting slightly against the sun.

I don’t know why I kept it. I thought I had washed my hands of the affair. Did I keep it as a souvenir of the darkness?

Yesterday, I went to the cupboard in the corner by my bed (awkward to open because the room is too small, really, for the bed, which I brought from the old place), found the box of old photos
and took out the picture. Thick grey dust stuck to my fingers, I was surprised how soft the dust was, I thought that’s how fog would feel, if you could touch it.

Johnny’s best friend Juan would have been able to tell me how fog felt because he was a climatologist involved in milking clouds to obtain drinking water. The technology
was basic: nets. I remember him talking about special atmospheric conditions that occur along the Pacific coast of Chile and southern Peru, where clouds settling on the Andean slopes produce dense
camanchacas
– perfect for milking. In the foggy season it is possible to collect enough water every day for a really big family. Juan was passionate about desert fog. His eyes lit up
every time he mentioned the mists of Iquique in northern Chile, where he now lives, I believe, possibly with a really big family of his own, trekking through the Andes with a giant net, catching
clouds.

The photograph was at the very bottom of the box, as I remembered, inside a plain brown envelope, which I don’t remember. Finding it didn’t solve or satisfy
anything. I couldn’t write afterwards. It has been an effort to write again today. There is something in the back of my mind, just out of sight, troubling me, something – like the
photograph – I have kept but can’t look at.

The week after I told Carl it had been a mistake, he asked me to go to lunch with him. I had misgivings, but since we started out as friends and had agreed to continue that
way, I went. He was quiet, almost shy, on this occasion. I still knew very little about him and I think he was aware of that and was being careful to show himself in the best light he could. He
apologized for what had happened that night in the bar and this pleased me because it meant I didn’t have to take any responsibility. He had bought me a bottle of expensive perfume and
offered it to me tentatively, perhaps thinking I wouldn’t accept it. The gift made me anxious straight away: there was Carl’s gesture, there was Johnny’s ignorance of the whole
matter, there was my surprise at being given this perfume. I have since become much better at saying no, but back then I found it hard because I imagined I was disappointing people. I got myself
into awkward situations where I said yes to an arrangement for the same time with more than one person and then had to try and combine the plans or back out of one. Since I was more confident
letting down the people I knew well, I got into trouble with members of my family and old friends for messing them about. Until they got angry with me I didn’t see what I was doing and then,
although I knew they were right, I resented being told.

I accepted the perfume from Carl, even though it was not the wholesome thing to do. I guessed that Johnny wouldn’t notice its
appearance on the bathroom shelf, and that even if he did he would assume I had bought it for myself. Just as it didn’t seem possible to refuse the gift, it never occurred to me that I could
have taken the perfume and kept it at work, or given it to someone else, or thrown it away. I am not saying that these would have been good things to do, just that they were options that I
didn’t see at the time. Although I may have felt bad for Johnny’s sake about taking the perfume home, I didn’t examine the guilt and I didn’t see how Carl was now in my
house, on my skin, or how I had put Carl’s feelings above Johnny.

Carl looked at me as if I were an international femme fatale. He didn’t care who else noticed, in fact there was something defiant in him, something daring others to try
and interrupt him.