Signs of Life (8 page)

Something else made the first sex with Carl awful, although it didn’t happen until two days afterwards. Other colleagues were attending the event we were driving to,
including three friends of Carl who knew about our affair. We arrived late at the hotel and Carl’s friends had already gone; we wouldn’t see them until the next day. Carl pinned a note
to the door of their room. He didn’t fold the note or put it in an envelope, so I read it. At the end, he wrote, ‘P.S. The Good Life.’ When I asked, he said this was just a joke
with the lads.

The next day I had breakfast with these work mates while Carl stayed in bed. One of Carl’s friends alluded to the fact that Carl and I had finally had sex. I was surprised he knew because
Carl hadn’t seen his friends since we arrived. It turned out that Carl’s P.S. was code and they all knew what it meant.

I returned immediately to our room to tackle Carl. I was angry at his laddish trumpeting, angry that he’d speculated and discussed it with them all beforehand, and angry with myself for
getting mixed up with this idiot. I told him it was over between us. He cried and begged me to forgive him. I remember him sitting in bed, propped up by lots of pillows like an old lady, his lank
hair and red eyes, and wanting to kick him. Hard.

The flat opposite is to be saved after all: the plastic sheeting has been taken down, most of the scaffolding is gone, and the place is swarming with builders. I don’t
mind all the noise and activity because they are signs of life and anyway, I am prone to daydreaming and the sudden bangs bring me back with a jolt.

Every choice involves a loss. By following Carl, I lost Johnny. Or I gave him up. I knew about choices such as which assistant to hire, which car to buy, whether or not to
ignore the comments of builders shouted from the scaffolding (not the builders opposite; they are part of the ‘Considerate Builders Scheme’, there’s a sign up that says so)
– these were decisions made at the top of the head. What I didn’t acknowledge was that some choices are made at other levels and it can take the conscious mind a while to catch on. Like
when I tried to jump from the waterfall: the top of my head was saying I could but my feet had already said no. I don’t know whether my body made the choice or whether the choice was made
deep in my mind and my body simply informed me of it.

After Carl’s ‘Good Life’ note, I didn’t want to travel back with him and I certainly didn’t want to be alone with him. There were three vanloads
of people leaving that event in convoy. I made sure Carl was in a different van to me. An hour or so into the journey, Carl’s van – he was driving – made an unscheduled stop.
Seeing him pull off at a garage, I felt abandoned, which took me by surprise. Twenty minutes later, someone in my van said: Look, here they are! Carl’s van came up very fast behind us and
overtook. I was annoyed; yet more foolish antics, but also slightly relieved that he was back. I was sitting in the front passenger seat and I noticed that up ahead, Carl was dropping one white
flower after another from the van window making a trail of flowers on the road that our van gobbled up. This went on for a few minutes. Everyone in the vehicle had something to say about it, but I
knew this was his apology – or rather, because I was so pissed off, the beginning of one. On a long straight stretch of dual-carriageway, Carl slowed his van to parallel ours so that he was
alongside me, with only a metre of fast moving tarmac between us. Carl held out the last white flower. Take it! Take it! yelled everyone in my van. I rolled my window down and took the flower.

I didn’t want to let go of my first feelings for him, I wanted to stay inside the crush, and I suppose I didn’t want to deal with my life; the job I had grown bored
of, the flat that I couldn’t quite afford and now, with Johnny gone, learning to be on my own. Even before the affair, when Johnny and I were fighting a lot, Carl was where my mind went. The
disenchantment with Carl was only a couple of days old. There had been several months of feeding the fantasy and the habit of thinking about Carl and wanting him was still there and, I found, easy
enough to resurrect. It’s not like I hadn’t seen the warning signs. I ignored them because I liked what he gave me. I thought I could dabble. It was like the beginning of an addiction,
to kryptonite.

The intensity with which Carl looked at me took me by surprise at first. Once I even looked over my shoulder to see if there was another, more glamorous, woman; I didn’t
believe he could mean
me
, and this wasn’t because I didn’t think I was attractive, but rather that there was a wide gap between the kind of attention Carl paid me and me as I saw
myself in my workaday life.

In a dream, I am at the top of a tall tower with a group of other people. The group leader, who is on the ground, yells up and a young man climbs over the railings at the top
of the tower and jumps. He is in the air for a long time. The jump becomes a fall – his body tips forward, his head goes back, his knees bend up behind him – it looks like he is about
to start spinning. He manages to right himself just before landing heavily on his feet. His legs buckle beneath him and he staggers away on the hard earth. Now it is my turn. I climb over the
railings and I’m in a perfect position to let go, but I am terrified. I don’t have a good handhold or a good foothold. I take off one of my hands to try and get more stable and that
makes me even more precarious. I don’t want to do it. The railings are tall and there’s nowhere to put my feet. I struggle back over onto the solid tower.

I said I remembered Johnny’s twitchy smile as we were sitting in the park but now I realize I could be wrong about that. I couldn’t have seen his smile in the dark,
so perhaps he gave me that smile on another occasion. Or maybe the memory of this smile is a composite of all the other times he smiled at me like that, and not attached to any particular time or
place, in which case it’s not really a memory but a floating image. I also say I loved Johnny and yet I treated him so badly, while still claiming to love him, that I have to wonder whether I
did love him at the point at which I started with Carl or whether my love had disappeared, like street-lamps fading into daylight and switching off without anyone noticing.

I still have all the letters and cards Johnny sent me, though I’ve never re-read them, and I thought I’d also saved the heart-shaped stone pendant, but it turns out
I was wrong. The only other thing I kept was his records, and that was an accident: when he left, he picked up the wrong box and took my records instead of his. We intended to exchange the records
but that never happened, and now I still have his long after we lost touch. I never listened to them, partly because I stopped playing records, and partly because they are his. Once I took out the
box intending to drop it off at the charity shop and ended up looking through the records. They were like postcards from Johnny’s life, showing where he’d been and what he liked –
up-beat African and South American bands, blues, independent labels, classical music I never heard him play. I took most of them to the charity shop in a carrier bag but selected a few to put back
into the box and then returned the box to its place in the cupboard. I don’t know why I’m keeping them. I wonder if he still has mine.

For my birthday, Carl gave me a coffee pot, cup and saucer each decorated with a Man Ray image of a milky-skinned, long-limbed woman. Even though we’d just split up,
Johnny sent me a book by an author I liked. Inside the front cover, wrapped in white tissue, were some pressed flowers: a buttercup, a daisy, a sprig of cow parsley and a pink campion. The cow
parsley had dropped its tiny white petals leaving a green skeleton and the gold had drained from the buttercup so that it was more like a ghost of a buttercup. I loved the inexpert way Johnny had
carried out his sweet idea. I was comforted by his tenderness but mainly his gift made me sad because it showed me what I’d lost, or thrown away.

On the evening of my birthday, Carl and I sat in my garden drinking cool white wine; it was another hot night in a long line of hot nights. We could hear the clatter from a
nearby restaurant and at one point the whole crowd sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Listen, said Carl, they’re singing for you! I smiled, but I remember feeling lonely. Homesick, even
though I was at home.

Carl and I visited a grand country house. We’d been driving on the motorway and needed a break. Carl looked on the map and suggested this detour: there was bound to be a
tea room, it wasn’t far and it would make a change from motorway services. As we drove down the gravel road, a sand coloured mansion came into view. You should live somewhere like this, Carl
said.

At the entrance a stout man in a brown uniform refused to let us in because it was closing time. Carl asked if we could whiz round: No. Could we at least get a cup of tea in the cafe? Look in
the shop? No. The man got down from his tall stool and drew back the iron bolts holding the huge wooden doors open. He closed one side. Carl stepped over the threshold asking for ten minutes. The
man refused politely. There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Carl was standing in a gentle dip in the flagstones and I remember wondering how many centuries of footsteps it takes to wear away
stone. The man started to close the second door. Carl came out of the house without complaint but I could see that he was frustrated. The doors were shut against us, the man inside. When I turned
to go back to the car, Carl erupted: he shouted and beat the doors with his fist. I watched, feeling entirely separate from this red-faced, spitting creature. His anger spent, he followed me back
to the car, rubbing his knuckles. I
wanted
to take you there, he bleated.

He went to smoke a cigarette in the tree-lined car park. I watched a blackbird dart from a tall green tree. I could tell by the way Carl drew the smoke into his mouth in hard
fast pulls that he was still agitated. The blackbird flew back to her nest. How good to be a bird, or lighter than a bird – a small cloud, or thistledown, borne away on a breeze, no choices
to make, no business with others, no obligations other than floating. It was a regal tree, with smooth grey bark, elegant branches reaching up into a clear sky.

The blackbird appeared again. Carl finished his cigarette, and crushed the filter into the gravel with the toe of his boot. I had no interest in him at all. Maybe he sensed
this because he wandered away, head down, fists in pockets. I looked for the highest leaf on the tree, a habit of mine since childhood, but the wind was moving the uppermost branches, so I
couldn’t find it.

One night last week, my sister stayed over, unplanned, and after showering the next morning, she went to find some clean underwear to borrow. It was such a bright morning
– impossible not to be cheerful about the day ahead and the possibility of a whole summer of days like this. I was making coffee when I heard her scream. I met her dashing, naked, from my
room.

Fucking
arseholes!

What?

Fucking
ARSE
-holes!

What?

Go and draw the curtains!

Ah: bonanza for the builders. I went to draw the curtains, as instructed, and in the flat opposite was a window-full of builders, grinning and waving. I couldn’t blame them. I waved
back.

Fucking cunts, she said, with a towel wrapped around her even though she was nowhere near the window now and the curtains were shut anyway.

Wankers, more like, I said, but she was too pissed off to hear the joke.

They
cheered
. And
clapped
, she said.

Well, they are on the ‘Considerate Builders Scheme’, I said and then, to placate, added: And anyway, who wouldn’t cheer, seeing
you
naked? (My sister is very beautiful.
We have a system of acknowledging this.)

Because we worked with groups of young people in isolated locations, it was company policy for all managers to do a wilderness medical training course called ‘Far From
Help’. I was away when everyone else did it so I had to catch up. The course was a long, long way away from London but the thought of an overnight train to the north of Scotland and three
days and nights alone appealed to me and so did the name of the place: the Forest of Maibie.

This happened earlier, when Carl and I were on and then off, on again, off again, on again, and I knew I had to break that cycle, and also that I had to decide what to do about Johnny. I needed
to decide whether or not to tell Johnny, and if I did tell him whether I was going to try and stay with him, if he still wanted me, or whether by telling him I would also be breaking up with him. I
needed to consider whether the whole affair with Carl was just a painfully long-winded way of breaking up with Johnny.

The course was in a log cabin down a long track in the middle of the forest, accommodation in adjacent cabins. I remember nothing about the other people on the course and I don’t remember
much of what I learnt, though I passed the test, but I do remember the session on the recovery position: me turning inert bodies over and bending limbs into the correct pose, other people turning
my inert body over, bending my limbs into the correct pose.

I went to see Johnny where he was now living. He had a room in a friend’s house in a town an hour away. The house depressed me as soon as I saw it. Actually, the street
depressed me first; it was a wide, curved street and so far from anything with any zest to it that the place felt dead. The house was pebble-dashed and the bay window had a mini roof of red tiles.
There was nothing to see out of this huge window except other ugly houses. It horrified me, but I see why Johnny might have shored up in such a place, to hide and heal.