What if I told you that this story won’t warm the cockles of your heart, it won’t give you hope or cause you to blame escaping tears on the sun cream as you lie by the pool reading this? What if I told you that the girl doesn’t get the guy in the end?
Knowing exactly how it ends, do you still want to read on? Well it’s not as if we don’t venture into things without knowing the end, is it? We watch Columbo knowing his misguided representation of himself as a foolish old man will help him solve the case; we know Renée Zellweger decides that she will be the one to go with Tom Cruise and the fish in Jerry Maguire every single time we watch it; Tom Hanks always sees Meg Ryan at the end of Sleepless in Seattle; James Bond always gets the girl; in EastEnders every once-happy marriage will end in death, destruction or despair; we read books knowing that the character will blatantly and predictably fall in love with the guy as soon as his name is first mentioned—but we still watch them and read them. There’s no twist in my story. I genuinely mean it when I say it, I do not live happily ever after with the love of my life, or anyone else for that matter.
It was my counsellor’s idea for me to write this story. ‘Try to keep an air of positiveness,’ she kept telling me. ‘The idea for this is to enable you to see the hopefulness of your situation.’ Well, this is my fifth draft and I’ve yet to have been enlightened. ‘End it on a happy note,’ she kept saying as her forehead wrinkled in concern while she read and reread my attempts. Well this is my last attempt. If she doesn’t like it she knows what she can do with it. I hate writing; it bores me, but these days it passes the time. I’m taking her advice, though: I’m ending this story on a happy note. I’m ending it at the beginning.
I’ll tell you, just as I told her, that my reason for doing so is that it’s always the beginnings that are the best. Like when you’re starving and it feels like you’ve been cooking dinner for hours, the smell is tickling your taste buds, making your mouth water, and it teases you until you take that first bite, that first beautiful bite that makes you feel like giggling ridiculously over the joy of having food in your mouth. You can’t beat the first relaxing slide into a warm bath filled with bubbles before the bubbles fade and the water gets cold, your first steps outside in a new pair of shoes before they decide to cut the feet off you, your first night out in a new outfit that makes you feel half the size, shiny and new before you wash it, the newness fades and it becomes just another item in your wardrobe that you’ve worn fifty times, the first half-hour of a movie when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and not yet let down by the end, the first few minutes of work after a lunch break when you feel maybe you have just enough energy to make it through the day, the first few minutes of conversation after bumping into someone you haven’t seen for years before you run out of things to say and mutual acquaintances to talk about, the first time you see the man of your dreams, the first time your stomach flips, the first time your eyes meet, the first time he acknowledges your existence in the world.
The first kiss on a first date with a first love.
At the beginning, things are special, new, exciting, innocent, untouched and unspoiled by experience or boredom. And so it’s there that my story will end, for that is when my heart sat high in my chest like a helium-filled balloon. That is when my eyes were big, bright, and as innocently wide and as green as a traffic light all ready to go, go, go. Life was fresh and full of hope. And so I begin this story with the end.
The End
… Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobes, doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. What had only moments ago been a room overflowing with sound and tension of pleas, of desperate begs for him not to leave, of sobs and squeals, wails and shouts coming from both sides was now a chamber of silence. Bags had been thrown around, violently unzipped, drawers were pulled open, clothes dumped into sacks, drawers banged shut, and zips making ripping sounds as they closed. More desperate begs.
Hands holding out and pleading to be held, hearts refusing, tears falling. An hour of mass confusion, never-ending shouts, boots heavily banging down the stairs, keys clanging on the hall table as they were left behind, front door banging. Then silence. Stunned silence.
The room held its breath, waited for the front door to open, for the softer surrendered sound of boots on the stairs to gradually become louder, for the bag to be flung on the ground, unzipped, drawers opened, to be filled and closed again.
But there was no sound. The door couldn’t open: the keys had been left behind. I slowly sat on the edge of the unmade bed, breath still held, hands in my lap, looking around at a room that had lost all familiarity with a heart that felt like the dark mahogany wardrobe, open wide, exposed and empty.
And then the sobs began. Quiet whimpering sounds that reminded me of when I was five years old, had fallen off my bicycle all alone and away from the safe boundaries of my home. The sobs I heard in the bedroom were the frightened sobs that escaped me as a child running home sore and scared and desperate for the familiar arms of my mother to catch me, save me and soften my tears. The only arms now were my own wrapped protectively around my body. My heart was alone, my pain and problems my own. And then panic set in.
Feelings of regret, gasps for breath in a heaving chest and hours of panic were spent dialling furiously, redialling, leaving tearful messages on an answering machine that felt as much as its owner. There were moments of hope, moments of despair, lights at the ends of tunnels shone, flickered and extinguished themselves as I fell back on the bed, the fight running out of me. I’d lost track of time, the bright room had turned to darkness. The sun had been replaced by the moon that had turned his back on me and guided people in the other direction. The sheets were wet from crying and the phone sat waiting to be called to duty in my hand, and the pillow still clung to his smell just as my heart clung to his love. He was gone. I untensed the muscles in my body and I breathed.
It was not supposed to end like this.
And so I won’t let it.
The Middle
… Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning. Twenty phone calls a day just to hear his voice, sex every night until the early hours of the morning, ignoring friends, favouring nights in curled up on the couch instead of going out, eating so much you both put weight on, supporting one another at family dos, catching roving eyes as they studied one another in secret, existing only in the world to be with them, seeing your future, your babies in their eyes, becoming a part of someone else spiritually, mentally, sexually, emotionally.
Nothing lasts for ever, they say. I didn’t fall in love with anyone else, nor did he. I’ve no dramatic story of walking in on him, in our bedroom with the skinny girl next door; I’ve no story to tell you of how I was romanced by someone else, chased and showered with gifts until I gave in and began an affair. You see, I couldn’t see anyone but him, and I know he couldn’t see anyone else but me. Maybe the dramatic stories would have been better, better than the very fact that living in a state of heartbreak, seemed more appealing to him than being with me.
We had one too many Indian takeaways on the couch together, had one too many arguments about emptying the dishwasher, I piled on one too many pounds, he refused one too many nights out with his friends, we went one too many nights falling asleep without making love and went one too many mornings waking up late, grabbing a quick coffee and running out of the door without saying I love you.
You see, it’s all that stuff at the beginning that’s important. The things that you do naturally. The surprise presents, the random kisses, the words of caring advice. Then you get lazy, take your eye off the ball, and before you know it you’ve moved to the middle stage of your relationship and are one step closer to the end. But you don’t think about all that at the time. When it’s happening, you’re happy enough living in the rut you’ve carelessly walked your
self straight into.
You have fights, you say things you definitely mean but afterwards pretend you don’t, you forgive each other and move on, but you never really forget the words that are spoken. The last fight we had was the one about who burned the new expensive frying pan; that’s the one that ended it. It stopped being about the frying pan after the first two minutes: it was about how I never listened, how his family intruded, about the fact he always left his dirty laundry on the floor and not in the basket, about how our sex life was nonexistent, how we never did anything of substance together, how crap his sense of humour was, how horrible a person I was, how he didn’t love me any more. Little things like that …
This fight lasted for days, I knew I hadn’t burned the frying pan, but he could bet his life on the fact he hadn’t even used it over that week, and of course he didn’t, seeing that I was the one who did the cooking around here, which according to him was ‘an admission to burning the pan’. Years of a wonderful relationship had turned to that? He went out both nights that weekend and so did I. It was like a competition to see who could come home later, who could ring less, who could be gone for the longer amount of time without contact, who could go longer without calling all their friends, family and police sick with worry. When you train yourself not to care, the heart listens.
One night I stayed out all night without telling him where I’d gone. I even turned my phone off. I was being childish; I was only staying in a friend’s house, awake all night turning my phone on and off checking for messages. Waiting for the really frantic one that would send me flying home and into his arms. I was waiting for the desperate calls, to hear ‘I love you’, to hear the sound of a man in love wanting to hang onto the best thing that had ever happened to him. As proof, as a sign that there was something worth holding onto. No such phone call came. That night taught us something. That I had stooped that low and that he hadn’t cared or worried as he should have.
We had an argument and he left. He left and I chased.
You know those moments at the end of movies when people announce their undying love in front of a gasping crowd? When there’s music, a perfect speech and then he smiles at you with tears in his eyes, throws his arms around your neck and everyone applauds, feeling as happy about the end result as you are? Well imagine if that didn’t happen. Imagine he says no, there’s an awkward silence, a few nervous laughs, and people slowly break away. He turns away from you and you’re left there with a red face cringing and wishing you’d never made that speech, taken part in the car chase, spent the money on flowers and declared your love in the middle of a busy shopping street in the lunch hour.
Well, where do you go from there? That’s something the movies never tell you. And not only is the moment embarrassing, it’s heartbreaking. It’s the moment when your best friend, the person who said he would love you for ever, stops seeing you as the person he wants and needs to protect. So much so that he can say no to you in front of the gathering crowd. It’s the moment that you realize absolutely everything you shared is lost because those eyes didn’t look at you as they should have and once did. They were the eyes of an embarrassed stranger shrugging off the begging words of an old lover.
A face looks different when the love is gone. It begins to look just how everyone else sees it, without the light, the sparkle—just another face. And the moment they walk away it’s as though the fact you know they sneeze seven times exactly at a quarter past ten every morning means nothing. As though your knowledge of their allergy to ginger and their penchant for dancing around in their underwear to Bruce Springsteen isn’t enough to hold you together. The little things you loved so much about a person become the little things they are suddenly embarrassed you know. All that while you’re walking away in that awkward, uncomfortable silence.
When you return home feeling foolish and angry to a house that’s being emptied you begin to wish all those dark thoughts away. I began to wish that we were still together and feeling miserable rather than having to go through goodbyes. He still felt part of me, I was still his, I was his best friend and he was mine, yet there was just the minor detail of not actually being in love with one another and the fact that any other kind of relationship just wasn’t possible. I begged and pleaded, he cried and shouted, until our voices were hoarse and our faces were tearstained.
Feeling desolate, I looked around the empty wardrobe with its doors wide open, displaying stray hangers and deserted shelves as though taunting me. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
The Beginning
He used to get the same bus as I did. He got on one stop after me and got off one stop before. I thought he was gorgeous the very first day I spotted him outside after wiping the condensation from the upstairs window of the bus. It was dark, cold, raining, seven o’clock in the morning in November, in front of me a man slept with his head against the cold vibrating glass, the woman beside me read a steamy page of a romance novel, probably the cause of the fogged-up windows. There was the smell of morning breath and morning bodies on the stuffy bus, it was quiet, no one spoke, all that was audible was the faint sounds of music and voices from the earphones of Walkmans.
He rose from that staircase like an angel entering the gates of heaven. His hair was soaking, his nose red, droplets of rain ran down his cheeks and his clothes were drenched. He wobbled down the aisle of the moving bus sleepily, trying to make his way to the only free seat. He didn’t see me that day. He didn’t see me for the first two weeks, but I got clever, moving to the seat by the staircase where I knew he would see me. Then I took to keeping my bag on the chair beside me so no one could sit down and moving it only when he arrived at the top of the stairs so he could sit down. Eventually he saw me; a few weeks later he smiled; a few weeks on he said something; a few weeks later I responded. Then he took to sitting beside me every morning, sharing knowing looks, secret jokes, secret smiles. He saved me from the drunken man who tried to maul me every Thursday morning. I saved him from the girl who sang along loudly with her Walkman on Wednesday evenings.
Eventually, on the way home on a sunny Friday evening in May, he stayed on an extra stop, got off the bus with me and asked me to go for a drink with him. Two months later I was in love, falling out of bed last minute and running with him to the same bus stop most mornings. Sleeping on his shoulder all the way to work, hearing him say he had never loved anyone else in his life as he loved me, believing him when he said he would never fall out of love with me, that I was the most beautiful and wonderful woman he had ever met. When you’re in love you believe everything. We shared kisses that meant something, hearts that fluttered, fingers that clasped, and footsteps that bounced.
Oh, sweet joy, the joy of falling in love, of being in love. Those first few years of being in love, they were only the beginning.
6 The Production Line
I hated Christmas. Hated every damn song, the sound of the bells, the twinkling lights, every stupid movie and every happy face looking as if it should be stamped with a damn Hallmark sign. It was a time for people either happy or pretending to be. I was neither. So at 10.30 a.m. on 24 December I clocked in at work like any other day. The machine punched a hole through my docket, the sound punching a hole in my pounding head. I was over two hours late, but I didn’t care who saw me trudging down the halls dressed in the same clothes as yesterday stinking of beer, sweat and smoke and minus my uniform.
Last night had started off like every other night—a few innocent after-work drinks down at the local drinking hole with my colleagues. And it had ended just like every other night with everyone saying their goodbyes after a couple of drinks, but as usual I didn’t leave. I didn’t or couldn’t drag myself off that bar stool and I didn’t or couldn’t drag my lips away from the beer glass. I woke up this morning not knowing where the hell I was, once again with goddamn Thumper sitting on my head. You see, I had no family to go home to; no one to convince me that dragging myself away from that bar stool and beer glass was worthwhile.<
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I could smell the alcohol seeping from my pores and the stench of stale cigarette smoke clinging to my clothes as I walked down the hall to my workspace. I saw the faces, the glances, the nudges, the looks of disgust and the smiles of sympathy. I knew what they could see; I saw it every morning when I looked in the mirror: a sad old man letting it all slip away. But that didn’t scare me because at least I had a goal. I’d lost the most important things in my life and, if I kept on going the way I was going, I’d lose everything else. What a result, what an achievement, a triumph of perseverance. I was a perfect advertisement for what you could do when you really put your mind to it. And there was a certain amount of bravery that came with what I was doing, I believed. Not many people have the guts to throw absolutely everything away. They’re always stupid enough to hold onto something small, selfish enough to think that one thing could be a small comfort. But it’s not: it’s a reminder that you used to be somebody, that you used to belong to someone and they to you. If you’re going to do something, do it right, get rid of it all. The first thing I lost was my heart, everything after that was a cinch.
But who the hell works on 24 December? I hear you ask. Us, that’s who. We leave everything until the last minute and then have to work all hours to get the job done, every single year. The boss says we can’t start earlier because the clients don’t start ordering the goods until the run-up to Christmas. The others thrive on the manic times, I don’t. But I used to.
I work in a factory. A great, big, depressing, monstrous warehouse with no windows. I have a theory on the lack of windows: while we’re working, we can’t see how many hours have passed and the beauty of the changing day. That suits me just fine.