Signs of Life (7 page)

The flat opposite has been wrapped in plastic, completely covered in whitish opaque sheets like a dead body. I think they will demolish it soon. I hope it doesn’t take
long. I don’t miss my old place but sometimes I forget where I am, imagine I am there again. By writing down what happened, telling even the most difficult parts that I have never told
before, I am hoping to be released from the pressure of this story, hoping to shake it off or out of me, to stop it crowding my mind, pushing all the way to the front and all the way to the sides
so that there is no space. Yesterday in a busy station I saw a man coming towards me who looked enough like Carl that I put my head down, spun around and walked away fast. When I was sure I would
be out of his range, I turned, breathed, and looked for him in the flow of people. Then I remembered that the man could not have been Carl because Carl is dead.

Today is incredibly sunny and windy. A biggish tuft of dry moss is scooting about on the empty terrace. A full ten days have gone by since I last wrote anything. I am waiting
for them to tear down the flat opposite – waiting is not an adequate distraction. I’ve been to the pool a couple of times to take my mind off it. Yesterday I swam behind a man doing
very fast freestyle, his out-breath rushed back towards me like bubbles in champagne.

A scene from the aftermath of the affair, but before I was hospitalized: I am on the floor in the corner of my tiny kitchen with my back against the humming fridge, cramming
dry cereal from the box straight into my mouth, each pale flake a crater from the moon, bubbled-up and blistered-looking, my mouth dry as it crunches the flakes and turns them into moon-dust which
scrapes and scratches my throat as I shovel in more and more and Good! because I deserve it.

You can’t tell everything at the same time. I tried but I couldn’t make it work. I thought I had to tell everything to answer the questions. This is what the people
in the hospital told me, and I believed them. I found it impossible. Everything mangled together: this was my sense of it. But they insisted, and I could see why.

One problem with telling the whole truth is that it takes such a long time. The ‘whole’ deadens the ‘truth’. All the little side stories creep up and
sneak in. Boring little facts crush the truth out of the story. The more I tried to tell everything, the more I seemed to get away from the quick of it. I felt this straight away, but I ignored my
instinct.

And I think, but I don’t know for sure, that the wordless back of the mind feeling is where truth lives. It’s a push-you-pull-me zone (I know but I don’t want to know) –
way too spacious. I need to introduce boundaries so that I can start somewhere and finish somewhere else. There has to be some structure to pull me through the fog.

I met my next boyfriend at the hospital, on the roof, smoking. He was sitting on a breeze block with his back to me. I knew he was a doctor by his white coat, and I could tell
from the side of his face that he was terribly handsome. I felt myself blush as I asked him for a cigarette and wished I was wearing something other than pyjamas. He stood up. He said: What are . .
. How did
you
get up here? I tell him, he relaxes. He is taller than Johnny, much taller than Carl and he has dark, short hair. There is conspiracy between us already because we are where we
shouldn’t be, doing what we shouldn’t do and we especially shouldn’t be doing it because he is a doctor and I am a patient. We are on different sides. Despite this, or because of
it, or both, he is attracted to me, I can tell by the way he looks at me a second longer than required, it’s a reflex, he can’t hide it, also he drops his shoulders just a little, opens
his chest slightly.

Going out with this doctor was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. He shouldn’t have asked me and I shouldn’t have said yes, but he did, I did, and there we are, or were. We saw
each other for a couple of years. It didn’t work, but that’s another story. I say it was a bad idea, but actually the first six months were wonderful. I knew I was raiding my internal
drug supply but the high got me over some of the worst bits and anyway, he was a doctor, he could get me more. And I don’t want to sound cold, but here was a handsome man who wanted me and I
wanted him and though it didn’t last, and it wasn’t love, we had our moments.

Because I haven’t lived here long, each time I go out, to the pool, or the tube, or to walk along the canal, I am struck by how different North is to West. It’s a
whole new tone and texture.

The frenzy of sun and wind continued all day. The moss-ball blowing back and forth was getting on my nerves so I decided to remove it. To do this I had to drag my desk back
from the doors and find the key. The black tarmac was hot under my feet, I expected the moss to be silky but it was brittle and crumbly. I dropped it off the side. The terrace feels much bigger
when you are outside. In between here and the church I spied a small courtyard with lots of different sized containers, a round flowerbed in the middle, a white wisteria in flower (I wish I could
smell it) and honeysuckle climbing the walls.

I’m not sure about all of the questions, but I know one of the answers: sex. There was one business trip, quite early on, where Carl and I ended up in bed together. We
didn’t, in fact, have sex but we were in bed together, and we may as well have done because afterwards it made no difference. It made no difference to the fact that we were now on a new
level, one from which there was no turning back, and it made no difference to Johnny when I eventually told him – he was just as hurt and angry.

Carl orchestrated the whole thing. One morning, I kissed Johnny goodbye while he was in the bathroom, and stepped out of our front door to Carl, who was waiting for me right outside in the work
car, engine running, music playing. There was a long drive and a full day of meetings or presentations, about which I remember nothing. Knowing that it was going to be too late and too far to
travel back home, Carl had arranged for us to stay at the house of a friend of his, who I also knew vaguely through work. This friend had one spare room with a double bed in it, which I was to
have. Carl was going to sleep on the sofa. We drank a great deal of red wine with this friend. Sometime after we all went to bed, Carl knocked on the door and said he was cold on the sofa and could
he please just sleep in the bed. At least I think that’s how it happened. We spent the night on separate sides of the bed, I slept; Carl slept. I woke early to find him very close to me, I
was lying on my back and he was on his side, I could feel his breath, his arm and erection touching me. He was still asleep. I want to blame Carl, I do blame him, but of course it was not all his
fault. On this May morning for example, in the bed in his friend’s house, it was me that woke him with a kiss.

I didn’t want to leave Carl after we’d spent this night together: I felt close to him and the sexual tension was cranked up high. And so I didn’t see Johnny until evening.
He’d been expecting me home for lunch. He knew I’d been on a business trip with Carl, and he must have been suspicious when I said I’d be back late. Johnny and I were going to a
party and he wasn’t pleased when I called to say I would meet him there. He tried to read me when we reunited, I didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want him to see my face. The
party was dark, loud and crowded, which gave me some cover but the feeling that there was something wrong spiked every exchange, coded every movement. It was as though we’d gone for dinner at
our favourite restaurant and found the white tablecloth spread over the candlestick and glasses, wine bottle and water jug, transforming the familiar into a miniature mountain range, and we were
sitting at this table, refusing to acknowledge the strange landscape between us.

Alongside my attraction to Carl, there was my love for Johnny. But my love for Johnny was dying because I was putting all my attention into Carl and the only energy I spared
Johnny was to hold him at bay.

The first time I had sex with Carl, Johnny had left me only the night before. I last saw him in the silver car, drinking his beer and driving away. I was shocked to see him go
and spent a miserable night, but I was also a little relieved; at least we didn’t have to keep pretending. The next day Carl and I had another long drive (sometimes I think none of this would
have happened if it hadn’t been for work taking us all over the country). It was decided to stay somewhere en route, to avoid the morning rush hour and reach our destination on time. The real
reason was that we intended to spend the night together.

The town where Carl and I went also happened to be the town in which my grandmother lived. The streets were so familiar. I had been going to Peterborough three or four times a year for my whole
life. My sister and I call it Peter-boring. My grandmother was eighty-eight and her philosophy about presents was this: if I can’t read it, eat it or put it in the bath, I don’t want
it. So we would take fruit and cake and biscuits and eat together on her big squashy sofa. I was close to her and it was strange being in that town and not going to visit her.

The hotel was on a long narrow road near the train station. There were several hotels along the road; I can’t remember how we chose this one. Asking for a double felt unnatural. There was
none of the secret elation of the time we’d shared a hotel room before. The whole journey had been awkward. I couldn’t stop comparing Carl to Johnny: the way Carl gripped the steering
wheel with one hand at the top of the wheel, where Johnny held it loosely with both hands at the bottom; the way Carl avoided making eye contact with me as he walked back to the car after paying
for petrol, where Johnny would have smiled in through the window. Because of this constant comparing, Johnny was more present on this journey than the other times I had been with Carl when I had
shut Johnny out of my mind.

The hotel room was small. Along one wall was a fitted wardrobe with mirrored sliding doors and you had to squeeze around the end of the bed to get into the bathroom, which had a shower but no
bath. The mirrored doors were probably intended to make the room look bigger but since all they reflected was the bed, it seemed as though the room was taken up entirely by this looming bed with
its pale pink cover.

I didn’t want to be with Carl. I didn’t want to touch him. When we walked from the hotel to a Chinese restaurant I left a gap big enough for another person to walk between us but
that other person had left me and I didn’t think he was coming back. All my desire had evaporated, and yet I knew that I was going to do it anyway. Sex was the destination our affair had been
leading to and now, with Johnny gone, there was no reason not to. Carl showered before bed, and when I showered after him, it felt like a ritual.

It happened in the middle of the night. Carl said, Look at us, and gestured to the mirrored doors where I saw us, naked, having sex. Here I am with you, said Carl, pausing to savour the moment.
I was already self-conscious and now I had to watch. I don’t like remembering this, and although I have successfully forgotten many details of that first time, such as how he initiated it,
whether I thought about Johnny, what we said to each other afterwards, how easily I managed to get back to sleep, I am left with this picture of me and Carl having sex in that vast pink bed.

I didn’t fall in love with Johnny: I jumped. I said I was wary of him when we met because of the other girl he’d been with that summer, and that was true, but I was
also wary because he was so good looking, so popular, and because the place was so romantic. I didn’t trust all this and so I held back, watching, waiting, until a few months later when
Johnny was staying with me. We’d been to the cinema on a mid-week afternoon. Afterwards we walked through a park and sat on a bench, watching people scurry home as the evening came down. The
feeling between us was like warm blue water, very wide and very deep. I suppose that neither one of us wanted to break that feeling because we stayed as it grew dark. I remember Johnny smiling at
me: his mouth twitched slightly, as though he was so happy he just kept pouring into that smile and it became so full that it overflowed into these twitches at the corners of his mouth. How good it
felt to be the subject of such a smile. The rush of people thinned out. Through the middle of the park was a path with streetlamps spaced at regular intervals. The streetlamps had come on without
our noticing. A cyclist rode along the path and there was a rhythm to how the rider moved through the darkness, dipped into the light, moved through the darkness and dipped into the light. Johnny
was already in love with me, and I could see that it would be all right to love him too. It was as though I didn’t really have a choice because I
knew
it was right, but maybe I knew
because somewhere inside I’d already chosen. Despite this, I hesitated: I was afraid, but I also knew that if I wanted to meet him there, I had to jump.

One evening, when they pinned me down, I explained my dilemma to Shirin and Delilah: Johnny is the perfect man for me, but it’s not the perfect time, and therefore how
can he be the perfect man? It wasn’t a proper question, but I wanted an answer.

Delilah said: Johnny is not the perfect man.

Shirin said: You’re too hooked on perfect.

Both of them knew, now, about Carl and though they never met him or even saw him, they didn’t think he was the perfect man either. In fact, everything I said about Carl disturbed them.
They didn’t like the sound of Carl, they didn’t like the situation I had put myself in and they didn’t like what I was doing to Johnny.

Shirin said: I’m worried about you, you should stop it with this guy or else what’s going to happen?

Delilah said: You should tell Johnny. Or stop. But you should probably tell him now anyway, it’s gone that far.

But it was clear that I wasn’t going to stop and that I wasn’t going to tell. Delilah and Shirin told me later that after this talk they were even more concerned. They didn’t
know what else to do so they called in the big guns – they told my sister.