Signs of Life (9 page)

Johnny’s friend Robbie was ironing a shirt in the sitting room, watching television at the same time. I had got to know Robbie and his girlfriend while I was with Johnny; we had been on
weekends to the country. I was sure that Robbie must be angry with me because of what I had done to Johnny and I was relieved that the TV was on because it gave him something to look at so that if
he snubbed me it wouldn’t be so awkward, but Robbie looked up from his ironing, and greeted me in a friendly way, and I was grateful for that.

Robbie and his girlfriend were sporty, and their house was littered with bikes, helmets, paddles, waterproofs, walking boots. There was a canoe propped on its side in the hall. I had been in
that canoe on one of our weekends away, borne down the river, enjoying the motion until the canoe tipped over and I fell in. Momentarily I was trapped underneath in the water. I kicked myself free
and came to the surface, cold but exhilarated.

Johnny’s room was small and decorated with faded yellow wallpaper. The door was flimsy, made of something like wood but without its weight. Boxes of Robbie’s papers were stacked
against one wall and I remember feeling cross that they hadn’t cleared the room for him. Johnny’s stuff was piled against the other wall. He couldn’t have needed his toolbox, his
tent or his records while he was staying with Robbie. I didn’t know at that point that the records in the box were mine and that his records were still in the flat. He could have kept
everything there, but I suppose he didn’t want to leave his things around me. Maybe he wanted to remove himself completely, be separate with his place and things elsewhere. But now his place
was a small yellow room stuffed with useless things that belonged to him and still more useless things that didn’t belong to him and I felt I had buried him there.

Soon after we bought our flat, Johnny brought home a large wooden ‘R’ for Rachel, painted gold. Some months later I saw a large golden ‘J’ and bought it
for him. We stuck the two gold initials, the ‘R’ followed by the ‘J’, above the doors to the garden where they stayed for years, gathering dust. One day, the ‘R’
fell down. I found it while Johnny was out. The wood had split, but not in two; I picked it up off the floor, climbed on a chair and stuck it back in place above the door. You couldn’t see
the crack unless you knew it was there.

Every morning before the medical training began and every afternoon when the teaching ended I would walk in the Forest of Maibie (that such a place exists!) questioning what to
do. It was not a beautiful place. There was no bird-song. The trees were dense, so not enough daylight came through to the forest floor, and the paths were not very wide, more like animal tracks,
so there was this feeling of being closed in. I thought I should pick a course of action and follow it, but I was stuck. The secret of the affair could not be contained for much longer, in fact I
suspected that Johnny had already guessed. Despite this, I couldn’t formulate a plan about how or when to tell him. Maybe I thought that if I did nothing the problem would somehow disappear,
and I didn’t want to face Johnny’s hurt and fury. I paused every now and then to look up but I couldn’t get far enough away from any of the trees to gain a clear view. The thin
trees towered into the sky and then bent in towards each other and the tops wove themselves into a mesh of leaves and branches. The forest seemed to be holding me, and not in a sheltering way.

Carl and I crossed the line at work many times and would have been summarily dismissed had any of the bosses found out. Once, we were entrusted with thousands of pounds in cash
to set up a staff development weekend – we were supposed to buy food and drink, pay for accommodation and certain team-building activities such as orienteering and pot-holing. The event was
to take place deep in the countryside. We drove to the nearest big town and spent the night so we would have the whole next day to prepare. Carl brought a deck of cards and we played poker on the
floor of our hotel room – I remember wonderful stacks of cash – and drank whiskey from the bottle, until Carl said, What we need now is some drugs, and he took some of the cash and went
out into the night. He returned with a small amount of cocaine and a lump of hash, and we stayed up most of the night playing cards, doing lines with rolled-up fifties, smoking joints. The next day
I forged a receipt for the amount he had spent on the drugs. After this, we often shared a joint while driving back from meetings in work vehicles, and sometimes we stopped the car somewhere quiet.
I would like to say I felt guilty, making such use of company resources, but I was excited by our bad behaviour, and at the prospect of getting away with it.

Once, before the first kiss, Carl wore a green shirt to work that I admired. It was a new shirt and he was pleased when I noticed. A couple of days later, he presented it to
me, washed and pressed, and after some protest I took it home and showed Johnny, who barely raised his eyes from the paper.

As teenagers, my sister and I made up a game called ‘Am I prettier than?’ There were two answers: ‘Yes’ or ‘Same As’. (There were only a
handful of exceptions, where the answer ‘No’ was allowed. I suppose we had to have some ‘No’s to give the game gravitas, to make us feel it was serious, and it was serious.
Even when played lightly.) We started with girls at school, going from average to the prettiest and most popular, and branched out to girls we didn’t know (Am I prettier than Victoria?
Nicola? Natasha? Yes, Yes and Yes. Am I prettier than the girl who works in the bakery? Yes) and then to famous people and icons (Am I prettier than that newsreader? Yes. That actress? Same As. Am
I prettier than Princess Diana?). As I remember, we would play for hours, but that can’t be right because it’s quick to get through even twenty other women. Maybe it was an ongoing
conversation that we kept picking up over a number of years, which is why it feels like we played it for so long. The only taboo, never broken, was to ask: Am I prettier than . . . you?

Since they struck gold here once, the builders have developed more of an interest in my window. This past week, there has been a lot of looking (but no waving, from either
side). I can see them clearly; they are only about twenty metres away – if I threw something, they could catch it; if I shouted, they would hear me. I have to admit I am tempted to walk naked
in front of my window as my sister did, just to see if I get the same reaction. Right now, there are four builders looking at me, one from each of the four windows. One of them is leaning out of
the window, smoking. One of them is holding a mug, empty, I think, by the way he is tilting it. One, with a fat face, has a phone to his head but he is not talking, maybe he is listening or maybe
he is on hold or maybe he is waiting for someone to answer his call. One of them is just standing, doing nothing except look at me. He is the youngest and the one I like best. I would choose him,
if I had to. Each of the four men is unaware that the other three are also looking at me. The fat-faced builder holding the phone begins to speak. He turns away from the window. The spell is
broken.

Maybe because Carl was older, maybe because he was new to me, I felt he knew something I didn’t, a secret that I wanted to know too. Now I don’t think it was as
defined or as sealed as a secret, it was more open-ended, to do with how he approached life as an experience where finding yourself and losing yourself is the same thing.

I said ‘spell’ but it was not magical nor even particularly charged, this moment with the four builders; no intent at all, or not that I could feel – and I
think you can feel these things. It was absent-minded, idling. They were on a break and I was something, a woman, to look at, or on, or through. Or was I four women?

I returned from the Forest of Maibie to the city by train and Johnny was there to meet me in our car. I let him fasten his seat belt but before he could start the ignition I
started telling him about Carl. Small dark words flew out of my mouth like bats. As soon as they hit daylight they darted away for cover, but I knew he heard them because his whole stature altered;
he bowed his head slightly and rounded his shoulders, closing in on himself. He kicked the floor below the dashboard very hard, once. Then he started asking questions. He looked out of the
windscreen, over the large car park, to the buildings and bridges beyond, and asked his questions. How long has it been going on? When did it start? How many times? Where? Who else knows? What did
you do with him? Did you touch his cock? Johnny didn’t ask what I felt about Carl. He didn’t ask what I felt about him. I saw that Johnny was assessing the damage, and that not having
had sex with Carl was irrelevant to Johnny because the line, for him, lay somewhere else, and I had crossed it.

Johnny didn’t leave as soon as I told him about Carl. He drove us home. He asked me to choose. I chose him. He marched me to a phone box to call Carl and tell him it was
over. I didn’t ask why we had to go to a phone box, but I think it was because Johnny didn’t want so much as Carl’s voice in his home. He stood guard outside the phone box as I
made the call, which was short. The phone call didn’t change anything; there was no sense of relief, Johnny’s mood didn’t lighten. That evening there was a wide and empty silence
like a canyon between us. Words had to be launched into it, and mine were so puny that most didn’t make it to the other side. I made an omelette but although we sat down at the table, we
didn’t eat and after a few minutes Johnny got up and went into the bedroom. Eating had become an act too intimate to perform together. When I cleared the meal away, the omelette slid off the
plates and landed with a surprisingly heavy thud at the bottom of the bin. Johnny came back into the kitchen and stood in front of me holding a Stanley knife in one hand, and a wire hanger with the
shirt that Carl had given me in the other. He sliced through the shirt without hysteria, until it was a banner of green ribbons. The only noise was the sound of fabric ripping and shirt buttons
pinging onto the floorboards and rolling away.

In high summer, when Johnny had gone to live in Robbie’s house and Carl was staying with me almost all the time, there was a street festival near my flat. Carl suggested
going but I said no. I didn’t want to bump into anyone I knew while I was with Carl; I didn’t have the energy to explain him. Instead we spent most of the weekend inside. For something
to do, I washed and treated his hair. Because I used my own shampoo and conditioner his hair smelt like mine and I found that off-putting. I loaned him a dressing gown, wrapped his hair in a towel
and he lay down in the middle of my bed so that I could massage his face. I remember studying him as he lay there: his closed eyelids were straight, like hyphens, and the lashes sparse. As I
smoothed cream across his eyelids I felt his eyeballs move like quail’s eggs under the surface of his skin. I wasn’t used to seeing him so relaxed. Without the usual tension binding him
together he looked older. No one’s ever been so nice to me before, he said afterwards and I had a twinge of guilt because I hadn’t felt as tender towards him as I had acted by giving
him the massage. It was one of the few times we were close physically without being sexual, and I have to admit I didn’t like it much. It made me uncomfortable when Carl said no one had ever
been so nice to him before; there was something in the way he said it that made me sure he meant it, and in that instant, I saw that he was someone who had not been loved enough, that he wanted me
to fill those caverns, and that I wasn’t going to because I didn’t love him enough either.

After this weekend, I was at home alone one evening and I found a strand of Carl’s hair on my pillow. At first I thought it was one of mine because it was a similar colour, but something
stopped me before I brushed it off the pillow and when I examined it, I saw it was a paler brown than my hair. I picked up this single hair between my thumb and forefinger and carried it from the
bedroom to the bathroom where I dropped it out of the window.

The night I told Johnny about Carl was awful. Somehow we got through the evening, the uneaten omelette, the knifing of the green shirt, and went to bed. In the middle of the
night I woke up, realizing first that I was cold because the cover had gone, and second that Johnny wasn’t there. There were muffled sounds coming from the kitchen, but no lights on. I walked
quietly across the floorboards avoiding the ones that creaked. The duvet was bundled up in a big ball in the corner and underneath it was Johnny, crouched on the floor, quietly sobbing. I knelt
down and crawled under the cover where he allowed me to stay in the quilted darkness and hold him and whisper, I’m sorry, I’m sorryI’msorryI’msorry, until the words stopped
making sense.

Carl and I were walking down a street on the way back to my flat after an evening out. He suggested meeting the following night and I told him I had already arranged to go out
with some friends. He was quiet for a minute and then asked why I hadn’t invited him. I said I didn’t think of it. He demanded to know why. He said he wanted to meet my friends; he
wanted my friends to like him; he wanted to be in my life properly. He was tight with anger. Lashing out, he punched the wing mirror of the nearest parked car. The mirror sprang back and there was
a smash as the glass shattered on the pavement. We walked the rest of the way in silence. When we got back to the flat he apologized. I stroked his bruised hand, told him that I liked being with
him, but even as I said the words, I felt myself shrinking.