Signs of Life (10 page)

Soon after, Carl went to Switzerland to go climbing. He was gone five days. It was a great holiday: I went clothes shopping, had a haircut, bought lovely new books. I drank
wine at lunchtime and read and smoked in bed. Apart from the phone calls, from Carl and from Johnny, I enjoyed myself.

I visited Johnny at Robbie’s house. We were getting on quite well that evening, a little shy in each other’s company perhaps, but not too strained. We had a meal,
and a drink, and then he drove me to catch my train. But something changed as we got closer to the station, and when he pulled over to let me out, he started to cry. He didn’t turn away from
me but he didn’t want me to comfort him this time, and he didn’t try to stop. He sat forward in the driver’s seat, with his elbows resting on the steering wheel, his face hidden
in his hands, his shoulders shaking, and cried. I sat in the passenger seat, witnessing his hurt, knowing I’d inflicted the wound. It was awful to see him like that. But even as I watched him
cry, self-pity crept up and smothered my sympathy. I had my own sadness but I still found room to envy his; at least he was innocent; his pain was pure. My pain was twisted around guilt.

When Carl returned from Switzerland he was full of the snowy peaks, the mountain meadows, the heights they’d scaled, the sun he’d caught. The thing that seemed to
have made the greatest impression on him was his friend’s home, with his wife and children in a chalet in the Alps. Carl described the kitchen: white walls, big windows, stone work-surfaces
lined with jars of coffee beans, homemade pickles and jams, bowls of fruit, bottles of wine, and always a big round loaf of the most delicious white bread; soft and moist, dense but not doughy.
They ate this bread every day; toasted for breakfast, with slices of ham and cheese and tomatoes and lettuce for lunch out in the mountains, with soup and red wine in the evening; there was always
enough. More than anything else in the house, this bread seemed to hold the magic for Carl; all the enchantment of someone else’s life concentrated into the loaf.

Once, Carl and I were driving back from a meeting out of town and I told him to pull over. Why? he asked. Just pull over, I said. We got out of the car and climbed over a fence
into some scrubby parkland where we found a clump of bushes and we crawled underneath the prickly branches to a space not even big enough to kneel up in, and had sex. I feel embarrassed recounting
this now, but this is what it was like between us – greedy sex, with terrible table manners.

Other times, I felt repulsed by him. For example, at night, his snoring would wake me. When Johnny snored, I would poke him and whisper, You’re snoring, and he would mumble, Sorry, turn
onto his side and I would snuggle up to his warm back and we would both continue sleeping as if uninterrupted. It was different with Carl, not because his snoring was so much worse, but because I
hated to wake up and find Carl instead of finding Johnny. I wanted to punish Carl for not being Johnny, because I still thought I should be with Johnny even though I had broken Johnny’s heart
and pushed him away. I didn’t want to poke Carl because I didn’t want to hear him grunt as he turned over, or worse, have him wake up. And so I would sit up on the pillow, listen to his
loud curly breathing, like a pig’s tail, and look at him lying there in my bed.

Johnny and I decided to carry on but a few days later he packed up and left. For ages I believed Johnny had changed his mind, or that he had mistaken his mind in the first
place so that having thought he could handle my betrayal and, in time, move on from it, he found after a few days that he could not, or would not, and so he packed his things into the car and left.
But then I ran into Robbie in a bar and we were drunk enough to talk about Johnny. Robbie said that just after Johnny had decided to try and work it out with me, I stayed out late again with Carl.
Being sneaky came easily. If I had bothered to look, I would scarcely have recognized myself next to the person I was before. Qualities emerged that had not yet fully developed: I was selfish and
narcissistic, cold and mean. I didn’t like being this way, but I continued behaving badly. It was shocking how far I was able to deceive myself: while I was a liar and a cheat to Johnny I was
busy being Carl’s perfect woman. In fact it was by lying and cheating that I made space to be that other woman. At the time I didn’t see the contradiction, or if I did, I didn’t
care. I was quietly thrilled by my ability to be cruel and I wanted to be somebody’s femme fatale, maybe it didn’t matter whose.

The first attempts at writing this story sank partly because I had mistaken my project in the first place. I was wrong when I thought my project was to answer the questions by
telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, because the very notion of the whole truth is a myth, and I was wrong again when I switched to trying to tell the truth as objectively
as possible, because the idea of objectivity is another myth. The whole truth, the objective truth: such attractive ideas. I couldn’t get inside using these routes. Someone else may have been
able to, but not me.

The second visit to the coast, when we stayed the weekend in Carl’s mother’s house, we went out for a drink on Saturday night to get away from Our Kid. The streets
were full of people, some in couples like us but mainly in single-sex groups of four or five, and although there was a sharp wind coming in from the sea, I remember seeing a lot of bare legs and
bare arms. We drank something in one bar and moved on to the next. I drank red wine, served in very large glasses, and noticed that nobody else was drinking this although lots of other women were
drinking white wine out of the same very large glasses. Like most of the other men, Carl drank pints. I smoked more than usual, which means I chain-smoked. I was bored. I wonder if he felt bored
too. We had been together constantly for three days at this point and although, later, I was often bored when I was with him, unless we were eating or drinking or having sex, this was the first
time I was aware of it.

I recall thinking that the cigarettes I was smoking, not my usual brand, were the only visible point of contact between me and the people here. I displayed the packet like a badge or VIP pass.
It lay on the table and every time I reached out to flick open the lid or picked it up to pull out another cigarette, I noticed that the same blue and white packet could be seen in dozens of other
hands, poking out of shirt and jeans pockets, in handbags, imagined it on tables in pubs and bars across this large and unfamiliar town, to which I would never gain, nor want, really, membership,
and so on me, this packet was a form of fake ID.

And each time, without fail, Carl would light my cigarette with a lighter he kept in his front jeans pocket. He was smoking too, though not as much as me, so he kept digging into his pocket for
the lighter and then replacing it. He could have put the lighter on the table, or I could have bought my own, because this one, a small transparent yellow plastic lighter, was nearly out of fluid
and was increasingly difficult to ignite, but our arrangement, the arrangement that surfaced, was that he held on to the lighter and each time I took a cigarette, he lit it for me. If we were
outside or sitting close to an open door in a breeze, I would cup my hand around the end of the cigarette and he would place his hand around mine with our fingers overlapping, his thumb resting on
mine, so that as I pulled air hard through the cigarette to get it alight, our hands were together in a kind of loose prayer position, protecting a feeble flame.

After two or three bars we drove out to the sea. Probably the intention was to have sex on the beach, but I don’t remember now if we did that or not because when we walked back up from the
beach something was happening that took over the rest of that night and most of my memories of it. The car park where we left the van from work had been deserted when we arrived, and unlit. Now it
was full of noise and light. There were cars all around the edge facing into the centre with engines running and headlights on full beam. Doors were open and people were either sitting inside or
leaning on their cars, some were sitting on roofs. I don’t know how many cars were there but I guess it was between thirty and forty. The night was cold now, so as well as the exhaust fumes
smoking up, there were frosty swirls of air lit up by the headlights like dry ice on a stage.

The show that everyone had gathered to see was what seemed to be a race between two cars driving in fast, tight laps round the space in the middle of the car park. I saw that the contest was not
so much a race as a fight and underneath the festival-like mood, the bright lights and the excitement of the crowd, I picked up a bass note of bloodlust. Something gladiatorial was taking
place.

The look on Carl’s face told me that the situation was not good. We were standing on the edge of whatever it was, and nobody, yet, had noticed us, but our white van – work’s
white van – was trapped at the back of the car park with no way out except by reversing into the middle of the ring interrupting proceedings and then requiring about six other cars to move to
allow us access to the only exit. The white van stood higher than the other vehicles and was the only one actually parked, with its engine off, and facing away from the centre; a tall, pale geek
ostracized by a ring of short school bullies. It seemed better not to associate with the weakling.

Carl explained what was going on. They’ve got two stolen cars, he said, and they are going to trash them. Trash them? Race them, smash them up and set fire to them. It happens here
sometimes, he said, I just never thought it would happen tonight. We’ll just have to wait it out, I’m sorry. He took off his sweater and passed it to me. It’s not your fault! I
told him, and gave it back but he insisted – he was good at these small acts of gallantry – and I was grateful because we had been outside for over an hour now and it was cold. I took
out a cigarette and Carl did his best to light it for me, but the little yellow lighter spluttered and died. Carl approached a couple standing close to us, who were also huddled together against
the cold, and the man lit our cigarettes and his girlfriend smiled at us. With Carl’s sweater on and his arms around me, standing at the edge of this thing, smoking like one of the crowd, and
with this friendliness from the couple next to us, I relaxed a little and even began to enjoy myself.

Helicopters arrive. Police. They hover over the car park and take it in turns to lower over the crowd pressing us down and out. Some people yell angrily at the helicopters, others scuttle to
their cars. We are like a disturbed anthill. Carl takes me by the arm and keeps me close to him and he steers us towards the white van. He has taken control, and I am glad of it, glad of him. A
puny strain of music can be heard amid the running engines. There is a queue to get out of the car park, or not a queue, just cars crowding towards the exit and it seems whoever can cram forward
fastest gets out first. Carl uses the full height and size of the van and crushes on until we are out. Will they follow? I ask, meaning the helicopters. No, he says. Why aren’t there any
police in cars? I ask. Because they’d get fucking lynched. Not if they sent enough, I say. There aren’t enough, he tells me.

The next day we drove past that car park and, at my request, Carl slowed down because I could see, and was fascinated by, the twisted corpse of one of the cars sacrificed the night before. A
blown out front window left a gaping hole like an eye socket and the door had melted over a frame distorted into a jawbone and so the wreckage had the appearance of an enormous blackened sheep
skull.

I’m in love with the garden down the street and I think it
is
love, or at the very least a massive crush, because just looking at it makes me want to buy new
clothes, eat better, get fit. It’s just a little walled garden, but it fills me with desire to reach out; there’s something about it I want to claim, or join with, in some way.
Everything in it is flourishing. It’s wild
and
well tended – I love this combination.

I’ve been out on the terrace to look at the garden at least once every day since I first saw it. I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to sit on the low wall at the edge so
I just stand. And it’s a pain dragging my desk back and forth in order to open the doors so I found a new position for the desk, and have left it there. When it gets hotter I’ll want to
have the terrace doors open more anyway.

I made three mistakes. The first mistake was to kiss Carl in the bar, because that broke the sanctity of what I had with Johnny. The second mistake was to accept the perfume he
gave me, because that led to the affair. And the third mistake was to take in his cat, because as long as Molly was living with me, the affair could not be ended cleanly.

Long before I told Johnny about Carl, Carl’s girlfriend Katie guessed about me and when she confronted him, he didn’t deny it. That same evening Carl set up a bed on the floor in
their sitting room. He told me later that their relationship had already dwindled to platonic and that’s why Katie accepted his passion for me even though she didn’t like it. Neither
Katie nor Carl could afford the rent on their own so they agreed that until Katie found somewhere she wanted to move to, they would stay there like that; Katie in the bedroom, Carl on the sitting
room floor.

By the time Katie found another place to live, Johnny had left me to go and stay in the yellow room at Robbie’s house and I was living alone. Carl found a room somewhere, but there was a
dog in the house so he couldn’t take Molly. When Carl told me he would have to move, I thought he was going to ask if he could come and live with me, and when he asked instead if I could take
Molly for a while I was so relieved that I immediately said yes.

Carl asked me if I was a dog person or a cat person. Neither, I replied, which are you? Both, he said. And then he told me about Scooby, the dog he and his brother had when
they were growing up. They loved him dearly from when he was a tiny puppy, but Scooby was a greedy dog and used to eat scraps of food he found on his walks. One day, Scooby found some chicken on
the pavement and wolfed it down before Carl could stop him. A bone got stuck in Scooby’s throat and he started choking. A small crowd gathered and people were telling Carl what to do, and
Carl, who was only twelve and couldn’t reach the bone, started getting upset. A man stepped forward, burly, lifted Scooby up and with both arms around his chest, and Scooby’s little
legs sticking straight out in front like table legs, this man performed the Heimlich manoeuvre and the chicken bone flew out of Scooby’s mouth in an arc of spittle. The crowd cheered as the
bone hit the pavement and Carl thanked the man and carried his confused dog home. Unfortunately it turned out the man had broken two of Scooby’s ribs, and although the vet said the ribs would
mend, the dog went into a decline and died.