There's No Place Like Here (28 page)

The aftershave I bought for him each of the six Christmases we had been together filled the room. I didn’t respond to him, I just laid my navy blue garda uniform out on the carpet, feeling each point for unusual bumps.

“Hello?” he sang out. “I was calling you.”

“I didn’t hear you,” I replied.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” I replied calmly, running my hand down the length of the navy blue nylon trouser leg.

“It looks like your clothes are being given a deep massage.” I felt him move further into the room and he sat down before me on the couch, wrapped in the robe I’d bought for him this Christmas, wearing tartan slippers I’d bought for him the previous. “I’m rather jealous,” he murmured, watching me smoothing down the pockets.

“I’m looking for my toothbrush,” I explained, emptying the contents of my wash bag onto the floor.

“I see.” He watched me. He just sat there quietly and watched me, yet this made me feel uncomfortable. His disapproving eyes on me made me feel as if I was sitting on the floor doing drugs instead of merely looking for something. A few minutes passed, searching without results.

“You know that you have a toothbrush upstairs in the bathroom already?”

“I bought a new one today.”

“The old one won’t do?”

“The bristles are too soft.”

“I thought you liked soft bristles.” He ran his hand through his tight beard.

I smiled for his sake.

He watched me for a little while longer.

“I’m going to make a cup of tea, do you want one?” He had the same method as my parents; they too used to keep an easy tone in their voices to pretend to me that everything was all right, to stop me from picking up negative vibes and panicking because something was lost. When I was younger that’s what I thought. Now that I was older, I had learned from Gregory that it wasn’t me he was trying to lighten the atmosphere for; it was himself. I stopped searching and watched him move around the adjoining kitchen as though he made cups of tea at two o’clock every morning. I watched him playing house and pretending that his on/off girlfriend was perfectly normal and correct to be sitting on the carpet half-naked while emptying her bag for a toothbrush she already had sitting in a cup holder upstairs. I watched him pretending to himself, smiling as I fell in love with another flaw I never knew existed within him.

“Maybe it fell out in the car,” I said, more to myself.

“It’s raining, Sandy. You don’t want to go out now, do you?”

He needn’t have asked, he knew the answer but he was still playing along with his own game. Pretending now, that his full-time, eternally faithful girlfriend was going to risk running out into the wet night to look for something. How unusual, how frightfully odd, how attractively kooky. Such fun.

I looked around the living room for a jacket or blanket to throw on. There was none. In this state, although I appear calm on the outside, inside I’m running around, screaming, shouting, looking in all directions, anxious to go, go, go. To run upstairs and throw some clothes on would take too long, would take precious minutes away from finding. I looked at Gregory, who was pouring the boiling water into a witty mug I’d got him for the previous Christmas. He obviously saw the desperate search in my eyes, the silent longing for help. He played it cool, as usual.

“OK, OK.” He held his hands up in surrender. “You can have the robe.”

I actually hadn’t thought of his robe.

“Thanks.” I got to my feet and walked to the kitchen.

He undid the belt and coolly shrugged it off his shoulders, and handed it to me, standing dressed now only in his tartan slippers and the silver chain I had given him for his fortieth birthday the previous year. I laughed and took the robe from him, but he held on to it, the robe firmly in his grasp. He turned serious.

“Please don’t go outside, Sandy.”

“Gregory, don’t,” I mumbled, tugging on the robe, not wanting this discussion again, not wanting to go through the same thing all over again, fighting about it, talking in circles, resolving nothing and apologizing for nothing but the insults fired between the main issues.

His face crumpled. “Please, Sandy,
please
can we just go back to bed. I’m up in four hours.”

I stopped tugging on the robe and looked at him, standing before me naked but revealing more in the look on his face alone. Whatever it was about that face, about the way he looked at me, the way he yearned for me not to leave him, the way it seemed so important that I be with him rather than away, something inside me stopped fighting.

My grip relaxed on the robe. “OK.” I gave in.
I gave in.
“OK,” I repeated more to myself this time. “I’ll go to bed.”

Gregory looked surprised, relieved, and confused all in one glance, but he didn’t push it, he didn’t question it, he didn’t want to ruin the moment, spoil the dream and chase me away again. Instead he held my hand and we went back upstairs to bed, leaving the clutter of my scattered clothes and wash bag on the floor by the door. It was the first time I’d turned my back on the situation and headed in the other direction. It was apt that it was Gregory leading me.

In bed I laid my head on his warm heaving chest, felt his heartbeat beneath my cheek and his breath on the top of my head. I felt loved and secure and thought everything in my life couldn’t possibly be any more perfect and wonderful. Before he fell asleep, he whispered to me to remember that feeling. At the time, I thought he was referring to us being together, but as the night slowly moved on for me and the niggling returned, I knew he had meant for me to remember the feeling of walking away and the reason that led to that decision. I needed to hold on to that, store it in my memory and call upon it whenever the moment raised its ugly head.

I was restless that night. I only meant to go back downstairs and tidy my belongings away. And then when I had done that, I only meant to go out into the wet night to search my car. But then when it wasn’t there, I forgot the feeling that I’d tried to hold on to while in Gregory’s arms and Gregory’s bed.

He woke up alone that morning and it pains me to imagine his thoughts when he felt around the bed and his hand rested on the cold sheets. Meanwhile, as he was asleep in his bed pretending in his dreams that I was alongside him, I had returned to a cold bedsit to find my toothbrush still in its packet, lying on the table. For once I got no solace from finding. I was emptier after finding the toothbrush than I had been before. It seemed the more things I found when I was with Gregory, the more I lost inside. I was alone in bed at five in the morning after leaving the warm bed of a man I loved, and who loved me. Of a man who would, as a result, no longer take my calls. A man who after thirteen years of wanting to learn all there was to learn about me had finally given up and wanted to know me no longer.

For a while, I gave up on him too until I became too lonely, too tired, and my heart became too sore from pretending I cared more about a whole series of nothings with nobodies rather than a single episode of
something
with
somebody
. I told myself that morning to hold on to that feeling, to remember the foolishness of leaving warmth to walk alone in the cold, the ridiculous loneliness of leaving something for nothing.

He took me back on one condition. That I recognize my problems and attend a monthly meeting of a group called the OCA. The first thing you learn while in OCA is that you can’t be in OCA for anybody else but yourself. It was a lie from the very beginning. Every extra month I attended the meeting was another month spent with Gregory, a happier Gregory, who was content knowing I was taking steps, twelve to be precise, to recover. He pretended to himself again because it was obvious to everyone that there had been no change in my behavior. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t the same as the others in the class. I felt it absurd that he would think I was among the likes of those who scrubbed and cleaned themselves for hours at night before going to bed until they almost bled, and hours in the morning before going to work. Or the woman who made tiny slits with a blade on her own arms, or the man who touched, counted, arranged, and hoarded every little thing that came into his path. I wasn’t like them. My
dedication
was confused with obsession. There was a difference.
I
was different.

Years and years of going to the meetings and I was still the same as the twenty-one-year-old who sat on the concrete steps opposite Dr. Burton’s office building every week, with my elbows on my knees, chin rested on my hands, watching the world pass by as I waited to cross the road.

Every single time, Gregory crossed over for me and met me on my side. I realize now, I don’t think I ever met him in the middle. And I don’t think I ever once said thank you for that.

But I’m saying sorry now, I shout it a thousand times a day from this place that he can’t hear me from. I say thank you and sorry and I scream it through the trees, over the mountains, pour my love into the lakes, and I blow kisses in the wind, hoping that they will reach him.

I went to the OCA meetings every month. I went because every month that I was there I knew it was another month of deserving to be with Gregory.

I missed it this month.

39

A
fter returning from an afternoon rehearsal at the Community Hall, Bobby and I sat around the pine table with Helena and Joseph in their home. Wanda sat opposite me, her head of messy black curls just about visible over the table, and her arms pulled up in a giant effort to clasp her hands together, imitating how I was seated. Joseph had just announced that the council had called a meeting for tomorrow night, which for reasons known only to the others around the table was a cause to become quiet and allow an atmosphere of impending doom to fall over us.

I don’t know why, but I found the day-to-day running of this place comical. I didn’t and couldn’t take their world and their issues seriously, however important they were. I hid my smile beneath my hand as I watched them worriedly looking at one another. I was completely detached from the problem, thankful that whatever was happening was happening to them and not me. It was as though their problems weren’t mine because I was an outsider of my own choosing, and I would do my utmost to remain in that position. Anything to avoid having to deal with the harsh reality of settling here. There seemed to be very little choice involved in that reality. So my feeling while I sat at the table was that my time here would be too short-lived to have to care about whatever it was that affected their world.
Their
world, not mine. Nobody had spoken for a while so I tried to break the frosty atmosphere.

“So what’s such a big issue that would cause a meeting to be called?”

“You,” Wanda said perkily, and I could tell her legs were swinging under the table from the way her shoulders rocked.

A chill went through me. I chose to ignore her, annoyed that a child was allowed to sit in on our conversation without being silenced, annoyed that she had transformed me from black sheep to piggy by snatching me from the outside where I felt comfortable and plonking me right in the middle of the equation. I looked to the faces around the table, still glancing worriedly at one another but still not speaking. The only one willing to look me in the eye was Wanda.

“What makes you say that?” I questioned the five-year-old, taking the fact that nobody had corrected her as either because it was the general consensus or they were ignoring her because she was bonkers. I hoped for the latter.

“From the way that everyone was staring at you when we walked from the Community Hall to here.”

“That’s enough now, sweetheart,” Helena said gently.

“Why?” Wanda looked up at her grandmother. “Didn’t you see how they all stopped talking and made way for her? It was like she was a fairy princess.” She revealed her gummy smile. Yep, bonkers.

“OK.” Helena patted her on the arm to signal her to stop. Wanda was quiet and I could tell her legs were still.

“The meeting is being called about me.” I absorbed this. “Is this true, Joseph?” I very rarely, if at all, got nervous for anything and, at the idea of this, curiosity was the only emotion that stirred within me. And yet it was still mixed with the bizarre feeling of thinking it was all very cute and twee. A funny little happening in a funny little place.

“We don’t know that it’s about you.” Bobby leaped to my defense. He looked at Joseph. “Do we?”

“I have been told nothing.”

“Do people regularly call meetings about new arrivals? Is that normal?” I asked. I squeezed the stone that was Joseph, for water.

“Normal.” He threw his hands up in the air. “What do we know of normal? What does our world and the old world, the world who thinks it knows it all, really know of normal?” He stood up and loomed over us.

“Well, do I need to be worried?” I asked, hoping now that he could at least reassure me.

“
Kipepeo
, one never
needs
to be worried.” He placed his hand on my head and I felt his warmth soothe my pounding headache. “We will be at the Community Hall at seven P.M. tomorrow. We shall test our understanding of normality then.” With a small smile he drifted out of the room. Helena followed him.

“What did he just call you?” Bobby asked, confused.

“
Kipepeo
,” Wanda sang, her legs swinging wildly again.

I leaned into the table and Wanda momentarily looked startled. “What does that mean?” I asked rather aggressively, but I was anxious to know.

“Not telling you.” She pouted and crossed her arms across her chest. “Because you don’t like me.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course Sandy likes you,” Bobby said stupidly.

“She
told
me she didn’t.”

“I’m sure you misheard her.”

“She didn’t,” I explained, “I told her directly.” Bobby looked shocked, so I made an attempt to wave the white flag. “Well, tell me what
kipepeo
means and I might like you.”