Signs of Life (6 page)

Anyway. I have heavy hair and straight away it fell back and the friend came back into the room. It was useless. The song was by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and although the lyrics were about
love and longing, the bad seed was germinating, though I would not have been able to put words on or even around this.

It is hard to tell where one part ends and another begins, and even if you can tell, there may be an overlap, and the overlap may not be evenly balanced on both sides. For example, it seems that
the affair and the breakup both became possible in that one flashcard moment:
I have to leave him
. I said I was scared by that moment, but it was also enlivening. It was a simple shift of
focus: instead of looking in, at what I had with Johnny, I started to look out, and what I saw was Carl. I thought curiosity about Carl came first, and desire came much later, but of course you are
only curious about things that already hold attraction for you. I wanted to see what he was like, to see how I was with him. Underneath all my protestations, then and now, I wanted him. It was
probably that simple but I had to complicate matters in order to let myself go ahead and act on my desire.

I still tell myself that I didn’t leave Johnny for Carl, even though I was with Carl as soon as I left Johnny. I tell myself this: leaving Johnny was
something I had to do anyway
.
What a marvellous coincidence that there just happened to be another man I wanted! For a long time I believed that the affair with Carl only became a possibility after things had already started to
go wrong with Johnny. This has been an excellent place to hide. I’m not saying it isn’t true; it may form part of the truth but sometimes part of the truth is no better than a lie.

I entered each of his habits as if they were rooms I had never been in before, looking around to see whether I might make myself at home. I didn’t like all of his habits,
but to begin with it may have seemed to him that I did because I was exploring with a fascination that held off judgement, if only for a little while. I discovered a way to get him out of a sulk.
Once, when things were not comfortable between us, Carl walked out of the cafe where we were having breakfast. I drank a second cup of black coffee to put off the moment I had to encounter him
again. It was sunny outside in the street, a beautiful fresh morning, like today. The car felt airless but I couldn’t coax him out. He sat in the driver’s seat with his back to me, I
stroked his head, combed his hair with my fingers. We stayed there like this for some time, two bored monkeys, until a strange closeness had grown up between us again.

I came home one evening, I don’t know where from, and as I turned into our street I saw Johnny drive up the road away from me. I didn’t know where he was going so I
ran back to the main road and down to the next street where he would almost certainly come out. Sure enough the silver car appeared. I waved, but he did not pull over. He stopped at the junction
with the main road. I saw then that he was leaving me because the car was piled high with his possessions. I went to the window, already wound down, and asked where he was going but he didn’t
want to say. He was unshaven, and the shadow made him look gaunt, unless he had lost weight during that time and I hadn’t noticed. What shocked me most was that he had a bottle of beer in his
hand and this was something that Johnny would never, ever do. He didn’t want my concern; he swigged his beer and drove off, leaving me standing in the road.

This picture of Johnny is still clear in my mind because although he was distressed, it suited him. He looked guarded, as if his only protection was to get away from me. I wanted him more then,
just as he was taking himself out of my reach, than I had in a long time. I had taken him for granted for so long that I had stopped seeing him. All the time I was carrying on with Carl I
couldn’t look at Johnny because I didn’t want to see what I was doing to him. It took him leaving me like this, his things in the car, drinking and driving, without telling me where he
was going, to wake me up to him again.

Something else has been bothering me about the young man who hanged himself outside his girlfriend’s house. It’s this: on some level, his death was to be her
punishment for leaving him. And she took her punishment: I saw her, she wept and wailed, she lost weight, she couldn’t sleep, she stopped work for a while. After some time, she began her
recovery, and a few years later she married. I’m glad for her, I am, it’s just that, from a distance at least, there was something formulaic about the whole thing.

Long before Johnny left, Carl and I were scheduled to go on a business trip together. We had already started and then stopped our affair several times. The trip had been
planned for months and would have been tricky to get out of without our director asking questions I did not want to answer. We were to have a week in Wales, making presentations to new funders and
meeting existing ones. The Friday before we left, I got Carl alone on the fire escape. Nothing’s going to happen in Wales, I told him. OK, he said. I had already booked and confirmed
reservations for separate rooms in each B&B or hotel.

On Sunday evening I drove to his flat to collect him, the first time I had been there. He and Katie lived on the fourth floor of an old red-brick building. The lift was broken and as I laboured
up the last flight of stairs I thought how if I lived there I would climb those stairs every day and what brilliantly toned legs and bottom I would have. Carl opened the door in bare feet; he was
still packing in the bedroom. While Katie was making tea, I scanned their front room. There were several climbing magazines, a few dried-out plants in brown plastic pots, and a bicycle leaning
against a wall. Evidence of Carl’s life intrigued me, as though I was surprised to find that he existed outside his allotted space in my world. Until then, the times we had been together were
dreamlike moments, blips that could be ignored, but seeing his home and his possessions made him much more real and I was relieved I’d ended the affair before it got out of hand.

Katie came back into the room followed by a large black cat. I looked at the cat padding along at her feet and noticed that Katie’s toenails were painted cherry red and that her feet were
soft and smooth. I was conscious of my own feet, dry and rough like Parmesan rind, but also aware that Carl was attracted to me despite this.

As we were leaving, Carl picked up the cat, Molly, and cuddled her while he gave Katie precise instructions on how to care for her. He spent ages saying goodbye to Molly, and this may have been
wishful thinking, but it struck me that Carl seemed to prefer his cat to his girlfriend.

We were walking past Cardiff Castle after the first meeting of this Welsh trip and Carl said, Let’s go in. We wandered around the Roman wall and battlement walk and the
rooms open to the public. I admired the painted walls and ceilings, losing myself in the faded murals of courtiers, kings and queens. I was aware of him being around without feeling the pressure of
having him next to me, looking at the same things. It was the first time I had been with Carl in such a relaxed way and the more we looked round the castle the more comfortable I felt with how
things were between us: it seemed to me that we’d at last managed to move past the attraction to become friends. I’m short-sighted like this with weather too: if the sun is shining when
I leave the house, I somehow think the sun will shine all day and I don’t take an umbrella even if the forecast is rain.

The picture of Johnny leaving me remains clear in my memory not just because he reminded me of Heathcliff but also a sense I have that it was staged. I don’t mean he set
up the whole thing, I don’t think he was waiting in the car, engine running, until I walked around the corner into our street before he drove away, because although he might have guessed
I’d try and head him off at the next street, he couldn’t have known it. His distress was genuine, and he really did leave me, at least for a few months. I think that he was probably at
home, drinking beer, wondering whether I was with Carl, because I was late and he knew about Carl at that point, and getting angrier and angrier until he decided to just pack up and leave. And so
he would have loaded the car quickly, which explains why he left things behind, and when he came to get into the car, he was halfway through another beer and because of adrenalin and the effect of
the beer he’d already drunk, either he didn’t notice the bottle in his hand or he thought, Fuck it. I don’t think any of this was planned. The staged moment came when I was at the
open window, trying to talk to him as he was waiting for a space in the traffic: it was the way he swigged the beer before pulling out onto the main road, as if to draw my attention to the dark
brown bottle with its red and white label, as if he were saying, Look what you’ve done to me. I may be wrong, but this is how it seems.

There have been lots of times when I have acted a part too. I remember once making love with Johnny when I was no longer attracted to him – I thought that if I went through the motions
then the wanting might come back, but it didn’t; it was awkward and sad all the way through. I had accepted by then that my involvement with Carl was a wrong against Johnny, although I still
hoped to get past that. What I didn’t know was how acting out feelings for Johnny that I didn’t feel any more was another kind of betrayal. Or maybe it was the same kind, but felt
worse.

Johnny found a heart-shaped stone on a cold beach. It was smooth and flat and grey and fitted easily in the palm of his hand. He bored a hole at the top, threaded it onto a
dark blue ribbon and gave it to me as a pendant. Although I saw the sweetness of his gesture, I only wore it once or twice, and that was to please him. It wasn’t just that the pendant
didn’t match my idea of what looked good; it was also that I didn’t want to hang a stone around my neck.

In the gift shop at Cardiff Castle, Carl bought a Welsh love spoon for Katie, and a teaspoon-sized one for Molly. I was encouraged, thinking that if Carl was comfortable buying
gifts for Katie in front of me, then things were settled between us. I bought a postcard of the castle to send to Johnny but I didn’t buy him a Welsh love spoon because I didn’t like
them, and in the end I didn’t send the postcard because I thought it might give him the impression I was having too much fun for a business trip.

I was being careful about how Johnny saw this trip to Wales and now I remember why: it was because of one night when I showed him a jacket the same as Carl’s in a shop
window. At the mention of Carl’s name Johnny withdrew, and stayed quiet for the rest of the walk home. I didn’t ask him what was wrong, because I didn’t want to hear it, but as we
were getting ready for bed in our tiny bathroom, Johnny said: Is there anything you want to tell me? I was sitting on the loo taking off my make-up and he was about to brush his teeth and he
stopped and asked me this question, looking at me hard, as if he wanted to search inside me and fish out the truth for himself. The tap was running but he didn’t turn it off to save water, as
he would normally, perhaps because it had taken all his energy to ask that question and now he was focusing all his attention on my answer and didn’t notice the running tap. I was wiping my
eye with a cotton wool pad and this allowed me to squint up at him without showing my whole face and fake a grimace that was meant to convey: What are you talking about? But Johnny waited, and the
tap was pouring water into the sink and down the plughole, and still he waited until I couldn’t stand the running water any longer and I stood up and turned off the tap and said, No! And then
I said again, more quietly, more kindly, more convincingly, No.

A pattern developed to our days in Wales: we had a meeting in the morning, visited the local castle, drove on to the next meeting and then to the B&B. We shared the driving
and in the car we talked; about work, my sister, his younger brother, his mum, we also talked a bit about Johnny and Katie, but never about us.

One of the castles we visited was a sprawling ruin of pale grey stone some distance from the nearest town. At first we thought we were the only ones there but then we came across a man in a
green jacket and a woman in a red anorak sitting on segments of newspaper inside one of the castle walls, drinking something hot from a thermos flask. Although they looked up at us they
didn’t say hello and neither did we. Apart from this couple and a few black wire litterbins, there was no indication this was a tourist attraction. The other castles had entrance fees, gravel
paths, roped-off areas and teashops, but this one was raw. It was like coming across a mountain after days of travel through tame pastures.

At one corner of the castle walls, near where the tea-drinkers were seated, stood a tower, about forty feet high, intact except for the roof. I walked towards it leaving Carl to do his own
thing. There was a narrow doorway and no signs claiming danger or instructing not to touch, so I went into the tower and saw a stone staircase leading to a high window, about thirty feet up. The
staircase must have been built for tourists because it looked solid and new, and I could see a wooden platform below the window, purpose-made to admire the view. At the top I looked out. It
wasn’t, actually, a great view because the window wasn’t high enough to see over the tops of the trees to the countryside beyond.

I heard scraping first, then hard breathing and a few little grunts as if great effort was being made, and it occurred to me that perhaps the man in the green jacket and the woman in the red
anorak were having sex below, but then a hand gripped the stone windowsill, the other hand came over, and Carl’s head and shoulders appeared. He climbed the last little bit and swung himself
in through the window onto the wooden platform. I remember the rising and falling of his chest and his blue T-shirt dark with sweat. He stood catching his breath, looking at me with intent. I felt
dizzy for a second, as if I might fall, but the vertigo was not because of Carl’s climb up the outside of the tower or because the platform was small and it seemed a long way down; this was a
feeling I’d had before with him. There was a delicious thrill of danger in it, there was fear of falling, there was the desire to fall. But my fear of letting go was greater.