Signs of Life (5 page)

Another time, we were walking in the countryside talking about some friends of Johnny’s: this couple looked exactly like each other, same height, same build, same square face, same wide
eyes, same fair straight hair. I thought this went beyond average levels of narcissism. But Johnny defended them: I think it’s good when couples are alike, I think it helps them stay
together.

Differences are good too, I said.

Yes, when they complement each other.

Well, then they’re not really differences, are they?

Carl took some of us from work to the climbing wall he used. It was in a large echoey hall that had the same feel as a school gym. The wall was dark red with half-moons and
other shapes screwed on in no discernible pattern and climbing at various heights were young men in black leggings with chalky hands and rubber slippers. Their bodies were lean and well
proportioned, like Carl’s, and they gave off a certain relaxed confidence, also like Carl. It was the first time I’d seen Carl as part of a group; he looked like them, he moved fluidly
like them – he was in his element.

He gave me a lesson but I didn’t like it much because I felt clumsy; I preferred to watch the way the best of them skimmed up effortlessly. When he saw I’d had enough, and that I was
watching the others, he asked me to hold his T-shirt while he practised on the most difficult part of the wall. We were there as friends with others from work, this was before we had kissed, and he
wasn’t the only one to be bare chested, but when he took off his white T-shirt and gave it to me, it was a message. I watched as he scaled the wall, the way his body could stretch and reach.
He was showing me his strength and agility and his lightness of touch.

When I complained to Juan about Johnny leaving the party, he told me:

He is a good man, it doesn’t matter.

Yeah, I know, I said, thinking that it
did
matter, and that it mattered every time Johnny told me off for having a cigarette, or told me to turn the music down, or disapproved of the time
and money I spent on clothes.

He loves you, said Juan.

I know, I said, feeling weary.

Later, Juan said something else to me about Johnny: If you
ever
leave this man, he began, and because of the way he started the sentence, with the emphasis on ‘ever’, I
thought I was about to be told off, I thought he was going to say, you are crazy, or you are stupid, or something like that, but I was mistaken because what Juan actually said was: If you
ever
leave this man; give me a call. So now the emphasis on ‘ever’ sounded more like impatience or frustration on his part and changed the meaning of the whole sentence.

I have to admit that I liked Juan. But what had I done to make him think he could say this to me? Danced with him, smoked with him – I suppose that’s enough. I didn’t want to
take Juan seriously so I decided that he was joking around and that it was probably more of a general appetite than a specific desire for me. Anyway, I never took it up. More than anything, it
would have been unbearable for Johnny – not just my betrayal of him, but Juan’s as well.

Johnny and I had one fight that gave rise to a moment that later seemed to be the end of a period of quarrelling and the beginning of our separation. Maybe this is the moment
that I have been looking for, the one where our relationship ceased to be possible.

While we were fighting at home on a Saturday, some friends called round and instead of pretending that everything was fine, I told them we were in the middle of a row. I remember their
discomfort and their efforts to be diplomatic. One of them suggested a game of cards and the other rolled a joint. They left soon after that, and Johnny and I resumed our fight. We began to argue
about how we were arguing: he made statements as if he knew the world inside out and resisted my ideas; I remember feeling that what mattered was his refusal to admit my viewpoint too. I saw that
when we laughed things off, it wasn’t really making up; it was avoidance. We were scared to disagree perhaps because it went against the idea we had of ourselves as being harmoniously in
love. I also believed, although this may not be true, that it was me who usually backed down and something inside me hardened into a refusal: this time let him be flexible, let’s see if he
can do it. He couldn’t, or at least didn’t, so I left.

Furious with Johnny, I went to Shirin’s flat. It took forty minutes’ hard walking to get there and I was even angrier when I arrived because all the way there I had been dredging up
examples of Johnny’s arrogance and what I thought were his other crimes against me. I explained things to Shirin, who was kind enough to listen closely. She liked Johnny but agreed he could
be a bit moralistic. Later that night as I was lying on her sofa bed, I had a realization:
I have to leave him.
There was no emotion attached to the thought, it just came, unbidden, with the
clarity of an instruction.

I stayed at Shirin’s for three days. I wanted Johnny to sit up and take notice. And I was enjoying being with her. The bolt from the blue about leaving him scared me so much that I talked
myself round: there’s no need to leave him; I just need to do my own thing, like I used to. For example, once I went to China for three weeks. There was a reason why Johnny didn’t come,
though I don’t remember it now. It was great travelling round on my own, if a little daunting, but this time I didn’t want to go to China. Maybe I thought I could overlook what was
wrong, maybe I didn’t have the courage to face it, maybe I just didn’t want the upheaval. In any case, I ignored the insight. All I have to do, I told myself, is see more of my friends,
go out more without him, anything to lighten the constant clinch we hold on each other. This is where Carl and Johnny first overlapped: I had just started getting to know Carl and I allowed myself
to believe that what I wanted was friendship.

Once, I was in a motorway cafe on my way back from a meeting in another city and I bumped into a man I knew through work. This man was a senior manager in a company we did a
lot with and quite a bit older than us, so I didn’t expect him to mess about, but while we were having a cup of tea he took out his phone and called Carl. Guess who I’m with right now?
he asked Carl, winking at me.

Once we made pizza and the dough was too wet and sticky. I left Carl with a pair of gloopy white gloves, and went to the shop for more flour so that we could rescue the dough
from his hands.

Another time, in a dodgy pub, he told me an intricate story about pirates that involved folding and tearing up the menu and at the end of the joke the menu was a little pirate T-shirt. I
remember wrinkled peas with that meal, so overcooked that they couldn’t try and escape the fork by rolling away. Peas are supposed to be plump but these ones were shrinking away from their
skin.

The fire door by my desk was open every day because of the warm weather. Carl would come and smoke on the fire escape. I started smoking more – having a cigarette gave us
a reason to be together. Sometimes other people joined us, sometimes we climbed the metal staircase to the roof. Under the guise of staying friends, we found out more about each other and work
provided endless opportunities for little chats, little lunches, little kisses. At first I didn’t tell anyone what was going on and because it wasn’t spoken about, it didn’t seem
real. One evening on my way home from work, I bumped into Delilah.

How are you? she asked.

I kissed someone from work, I said.

Oh!

More than once, I said.

Oh!

I’m not going to do it again, I said.

Right . . . Who was it?

This guy, Carl, we’re kind of friends, but, well . . . And he has a girlfriend.

And are you going to tell Johnny?

No.

But do you still want to be with him? Johnny, I mean.

Yes, I said.

Well then I wouldn’t tell him either, said Delilah.

If I had told my sister she would have put me right, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to have either one of them, or both of them, and for a while that is what
I had. I wasn’t seeing much of my family just then. At the time of my sister’s car crash, and during the weeks of her recovery, I saw a great deal of her and my parents, and maybe that
period was so intense that we all needed some time off from each other afterwards. Besides, a terrible thing had just happened to my sister’s friend, and my sister was busy looking after her.
The terrible thing was this: Her friend ended a long relationship because she’d met someone else and her boyfriend was so distraught that he hanged himself on a tree in front of her
house.

The reason I kept stopping the affair was because I was going to marry Johnny. We weren’t engaged; it was understood. Johnny proposed three months in. We were crossing a
stone bridge on a foggy wet evening, a romantic setting but gothic weather. Halfway over he stopped to face me and took both my hands in his, holding me a little way off so that our arms made
another bridge between us. The muffled light of a streetlamp was enough for me to see his face. He didn’t look nervous, in fact he was beaming as though about to give me something I’d
always wanted but he said my name a little too loudly and when he repeated it more quietly, it seemed as if the first time he was using my name to make a space to speak into, like someone clearing
their throat, so perhaps he was nervous after all. After he said, Will you marry me? I made a happy sound and hugged him tight, but I didn’t give him an answer. It was too soon. During the
brief silence while I squeezed him, I wasn’t feeling like all my dreams had come true, I was just hoping to stall him because I didn’t know. I’ve always assumed he took my
reaction as a yes because we never discussed it and he never seemed to have doubt, but maybe he didn’t take it as a yes, maybe he always wondered what it meant but was too afraid to ask.

I haven’t revisited this moment for a long time, and now that I have written it down I wonder whether the gap between Johnny and me, that I thought opened up around the time of the party
and the glass slippers, was always there. I think we were each afraid of falling into the space between us, and being lost. I think we wanted to close the gap and so we worked hard at our intimacy
with frequent visits, letters and daily phone calls even though we were at different universities, separated by hundreds of miles.

I suppose we must have grown more secure as time went by. Once, after we left university and were living together but long before I met Carl, we were driving through the streets in our little
silver car when I asked Johnny if he would be able to forgive me if I had an affair. He thought about it for a minute, and then sighed and said, Probably, as if he regretted that this was his
honest answer. Then he put the same question to me; would I be able to forgive him if he slept with someone else? No, I said, trying to see it and only being able to imagine murderous rage and
intolerable pain. I know, sighed Johnny.

I was curious about Carl. He was outside my experience. He told me that he once had sex with a girlfriend and then her sister, in the same day. He didn’t tell me, or I
can’t remember, whether the big sister knew about the little sister and vice versa. I was fascinated that he had had so many lovers because I had had so few. Apart from Katie, and the
sisters, the one that stood out was a girl called Lorna with bright red hair. I could tell he had loved Lorna more than he ever loved Katie because the few times he spoke about Lorna it looked like
it hurt him to remember. I asked why he and Lorna had split up if there was so much passion, and he said things between them were too extreme. They fought a lot. He told me she hit him a few times.
I asked if he had ever hit her back and he said no, but once, during a particularly vicious fight he shinned up a Stop sign at the end of the street and battered it until the metal buckled. After
he told me that, I had a good look at one of those signs to see if it was possible to dent the metal with bare fists, and I think it was, although he must have hurt himself. When Johnny left and
Carl and I were together, he confirmed that yes; he had been completely in love with Lorna, but now he loved me more.

I don’t remember what I ate, only what I didn’t eat, like the bag of chips I dropped on the promenade, and the wrinkled pub peas.

After my sister told me what her friend’s boyfriend had done, the image kept flickering in my mind. I could imagine the rope: old and scratchy, the colour of wet sand. I
imagined him making the noose before he left home, testing it with his arm. I imagined him tying the rope to the tree outside her house, how it gripped the branches. It would not give. He could
see, with a part of his mind that felt distant, that the rope would burn and cut his neck, but he knew, with the bigger part that was driving him, that this did not matter.

The image was there and I think it was a factor each time I broke it off with Carl. But it didn’t work as a deterrent because each time, after a few days or a couple of weeks at most, it
started up again.

The strands I remember are knotted so tightly together. I want to single out my part in it: single out Johnny’s part: single out Carl’s part: single it all out.

The softest moment of the whole brief affair had a soundtrack. It wasn’t the first moment; we had kissed once, several days before. I had already told him it
couldn’t go on. Nobody else knew. We were sitting side by side on a long blue sofa at his friend’s and the friend had gone out of the room, probably to fetch another bottle of wine, and
a song came on with words that startled me with their aptitude. I lowered my head to hide from his sight, perhaps because I didn’t want him to see the words of the song make an impact on me,
which would have showed us both that I was thinking about him, or perhaps because I wanted to kiss him again and couldn’t admit this, yet. My hair was covering the side of my face. I could
feel all of his attention on me, not in a burning, oppressive way, which it later became, but more tentative, as if he were calling me, unsure of being answered, and he leant over and gently moved
my hair. It wasn’t a flick. The movement was too slow to call a flick, which would have been playful, possibly. It wasn’t playful. His fingertips did not touch my face; I so wanted them
to. This was a fat moment, full of yearning, on both sides, yet so small, maybe ten seconds in the course of a four-minute song.