by Luke Brown
I had been best friends with Sarah for many years before we got together, though from the very first day I met her it had been an ambitious friendship. I had wanted her, and I had always wished she would split up with whichever boyfriend she had at the time. If it was not an innocent friendship I began with Sarah, when I sat next to her and listened to her voice rise and fall, when I laughed involuntarily at her stories and character assessments, when I plotted our adventures together, our happy ending, then there was nothing corrupt in it either. It was never the right time for us: I was not as forceful then as I have been since, and she either had an unsuitable boyfriend or I had an unsuitable girlfriend and we were never in the same place long enough to make the unsuitability incontestable. Sarah couldn’t hold a job then (and perhaps now) for more than a year before she was bored and off somewhere – Korea, Brazil, India – to do another job and learn another language from another exotic boyfriend. These were years in which I could forget her except as a wistfulness, the warm promise of a distant reunion; make me happy, but not yet. I began to enjoy myself.
It was in the gap between one of Sarah’s disappearances that I finally confessed how I felt to her. I had been single for a year, but she had a boyfriend back in Brazil, an artisan potter (they were always people with extraordinary occupations), and in her laidback way she assumed they’d stay together without being able to articulate how. In the meantime she had moved to Edinburgh for a job at the National Museum of Scotland, and invited me up to stay for a long weekend. It began on Thursday in a pub near her flat in Leith, one you reached by walking down a narrow street lined with prostitutes. We played a game – I can’t remember who started it – categorising all our mutual friends by whether or not we wanted to sleep with them. I was delighted at how many people she didn’t want to sleep with. Perhaps I lied a bit to suggest my tastes were less catholic than they are. And then we could no longer avoid it.
Yes, she admitted, with almost entirely disguised shyness, she would.
Yes, I admitted, rapturously, I would, I would, I would.
The next day we climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat and stood braced against each other as the wind tried to tear us off. On the way down her feet slipped and I caught her under the arms. She turned and looked at me incredulously, as if she hadn’t noticed I had been with her until that moment. I had to say something but I couldn’t.
She never had the right clothes for the country she was living in. That day she was wearing a summer dress with shiny black tights and flimsy canvas shoes – a thick blanket of a woollen overcoat on the top donated by one of her new colleagues after she had arrived to work two days in a row in a soggy denim jacket. The cold rain began to hammer down as we reached the bottom and she was soon sodden. We took refuge in a pub. She had stolen a lipstick that morning from Superdrug and came back with cherry-pink lips and soaking hair. Her lips were so bright they seemed to belong to another dimension. She was wonderfully disorganised in the way she assembled herself and I expect she will always be like this. I hope so.
I couldn’t take my eyes from her. Something was going to happen, something was so obviously going to happen that I felt on the verge of being sick in case it didn’t. In the end it was the word itself, unspoken for so long, that brought us together. That evening she had taken us to an ecstasy dealer’s tenement flat and later, in a basement dive bar, dancing to house music, I had put my hands on her shoulders and said it: ‘I love you.’ It was the kind of thing you said on an E, but not in that tone. We knew what it meant. Its inevitability stunned her. She took a step backwards and smiled a smile that was without guilt, despite the boyfriend she would have to get rid of in the next month, and we kissed our first kiss.
We lay on her bed when we got home and she swam into a sharp new focus. She tied her hair back and I realised I had never seen her ears. They seemed enormous. She was suddenly a completely different person; her voice sounded more clipped than I remembered and I could imagine her playing hockey; she was a middle-class girl from the home counties, with a mother, a father, a brother and a sister; she owned and wore pyjamas; she thought her knees looked funny, her gorgeous knees pressed up against my jeans. It was fascinating to see her awkward, wondering if I should stay; she wanted me to, but she was a nice girl, a nice girl who shoplifted, and we decided we should take it slow.
I already had everything I thought I could ever need from her. She liked me, and I was lost.
Before I got up to go back to the sofa, I said something clichéd and untrue. ‘From the start, it was always meant to be you and me.’
We lay there looking at each other, our bodies at right angles, our faces side-on, curious.
‘I didn’t know you felt like that,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘No, I knew!’ She laughed and we looked at each other some more.
‘You’re not making any move to kiss me,’ she said.
‘I’m keeping still. I’m scared I might startle you.’
‘Just approach slowly. No sudden movements.’
I stayed where I was and carried on looking.
Her prominent ears. Her funny knees. Her hungry smile.
My life together with Sarah finally ended with a long Tube ride to Heathrow that afternoon. We hugged each other through a pole in the packed carriage. We couldn’t get the right angle to kiss. She still wouldn’t meet my eyes. The day before I had borrowed a shopping trolley from a supermarket to haul boxes of my books to the nearest charity shop. I didn’t even approve of giving books to charity – the publishing industry seemed in need of enough charity itself. But what was I supposed to do, bin them? I didn’t have such a strong stomach. The ones I couldn’t bear to give away I had placed, three boxes full, with my aunt. My friends had enough trouble finding space for their own books in their tiny London flats. Sarah’s parents were coming round the next day to collect her stuff and she was going to live with them for a couple of weeks while she decided what to do.
We arrived at Heathrow and as we queued on the concourse to check in Sarah told me once again how much fun I was going to have. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. For once, she looked back at me. ‘Please, Sarah, I don’t want to go without you.’
‘I’m moving home tomorrow,’ she said, looking away. ‘I’m twenty-nine and I’m moving home. I’ve got you to thank for that. If you don’t get on this plane, what are you going to do? Where will you go? My parents certainly don’t want to see you.’
We didn’t talk about her confession to her mother that I had lied to her, or about her father’s reluctant proposition then to beat me up. Her father and I had always enjoyed talking to each other. I wanted to ring him up and offer to help him kick the crap out of me.
‘Sarah, I love you. We’re supposed to be together.’
‘It’s just words, Liam. You’re just words. And not even very original ones. I can’t believe in them any more.’
‘I’m not a liar, I told you the –’
‘If you begin that again I promise that I will scream.’
‘Oh, please. We’re not simple people. We don’t have to obey a soap-opera’s sense of justice.’
‘I will scream and I will walk away and any slender chance we have of staying together will be gone.’
I was crying by now. Unless I specifically tell you otherwise, assume I’m always crying.
‘And stop pronouncing those tears.’
‘Is it that slender?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
I turned back after I had my ticket and passport checked on my way to the departure gate. She was still there watching me. We reflected each other across five years. There aren’t many looks in a lifetime like the one she gave me. You couldn’t survive more than a few. She waved. I waved. She mouthed three words to me. ‘I love you.’ Or, ‘Bye bye, Liam.’ I could not be sure and mouthed three words back and she turned and walked away. She turned back once, she turned back twice and I waited for her to turn bac
k again but that was all. Bye bye, Sarah.
Chapter 2
I had never been on a flight like the one I took to Buenos Aires. There was a stop-over in Madrid for eight hours and I used it to leave the airport, go to a bar in the city, drink ten small but powerful beers and compose a frantic letter to Sarah that during the time I was writing it convinced me I could make everything all right again. I posted the letter, got on the wrong Metro line back to the airport and nearly missed the plane. When I made it just in time I was drunk, but I was not alone. For the duration of the twelve-hour flight it seemed that nearly every passenger remained standing with a beer in their hand, wandering between other groups of upright and talkative Argentines. It was like a giant pub in the sky. I can’t remember if we sat down even for take-off; it wouldn’t surprise me if we hadn’t, or if there had been barbecues sizzling in the aisles. The first half of the trip was a blur. I woke up, four hours in, sprawled across three seats, and immediately had to be sick. No one seemed surprised as I ran to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Afterwards, I lay back down and hugged myself, crying freely but quietly, until an air hostess from the 1970s shook me and encouraged me into an upright position. We were about to land.
The taxi driver didn’t understand my painstakingly prepared phrase-book instructions. I was asking for the Avenida de Mayo, which I pronounced like –ayonnaise.
‘Que? Que?’
‘De Mayo!’
‘Que? Que?’
I pulled my piece of paper out and showed it to him. He read it and slapped me on the shoulder, spraying spit across the windscreen: ‘Avenida de Mazcho!’ And then he was off.
It was a bright sunny morning I did not belong in. The driver carried on a conversation with the radio as we sped through wide cracked roads lined with grand municipal buildings. It looked like Paris then Madrid then Milan; I couldn’t keep track but I felt like I had been here before. I began to cheer up but when I arrived at my hostel at 7 a.m. they had no idea who I was and explained to me, thankfully in English, that they were full up. That was that, then. I had done my best. I asked them to order me a taxi to the airport because I was going back to England. On hearing this, they rang around and found me a place at a sister hostel and so, another taxi ride later, I arrived at the Tango backpackers hostel in Palermo. I’m not sure how the driver knew it was the right one because I learned later that every hostel in Buenos Aires is called the Tango backpackers hostel. In the foyer was a small young man behind a reception desk. He looked up eagerly as I came through the door then looked disappointed, a look I thought was caused by my not being a woman. I felt sad for him too. Behind him was a wide bar, with fridges full of enormous bottles of lager labelled in the national blue and white. There was a music playing I had never heard before: chilled-out ambient beats and accordion solos. Electronic tango. At the time I found it quite beautiful, but I had been travelling for thirty hours and was delirious with strange emotions. I was to learn that no music but electronic tango played in the bar, for twenty-four hours, every single day of the week.
There was one private room left, a small white box just off the building’s roof terrace. It had a single bed, a clothes rail and a window almost completely obscured by an air-conditioning unit which didn’t work – a perfect monk’s cell for me to begin my penance.
I had half of my redundancy money left and had applied for an Arts Council writing grant. If that came through, I could live like this for months. I would redeem myself through hard work, honesty and self-control. Honestly.
For the first few days I kept myself to myself and didn’t explore far from the hostel. Without Sarah, I was in a state of shock, left to face head-on the reality of having lost my job and way of life. I suffered moments of vertiginous panic, but I can’t claim I spent all my time realising hard truths. It was confusing. The hard truths seemed to have nothing to do with my being here in this airy hostel lounge, sitting at a table listening to endless accordion over crisp backbeats and earnest conversations between Americans. Not that all the voices were American, nor even the loudest. There were Scandinavians, Israelis, Aussies, English, Europeans, all sorts. There were even some Latins, though they were mostly staff. Over those first few days I divided all the guests into two categories: the Kids and the Broken. Well, I had nothing in common with the Kids, with their tattoos and gym-muscles, their slender limbs and colourful clothes. They talked about mountains and beaches and marijuana. They were gap-year students, recently graduated and other idiots. I begrudged them their innocence, especially when they started to philosophise, which they did with a forthrightness that was difficult to ignore. But my greatest disdain was reserved for the inevitable moment when one of the Broken would take them seriously and offer his own opinion on the happy peasants of India. It was a point of faith for many of the Broken that there was nothing separating them from the Kids. The poor broken men (they were nearly all men). I refused to accept I was one of them in spite of the evidence. It helped that they were mostly slightly older than me, men in their mid to late thirties, fleeing lucrative careers in IT, accounting or management consultancy: lonely, dog-eyed men in checked shirts and baleful smiles looking all day for good news from Apple laptops, the very latest models, peering over the top for anyone to talk to. Looking at them, I realised that I had left a job and a life that I had loved. And so after two days of shock I could no longer bear to be around them.
I was staying in Palermo Viejo, an aggressively cool neighbourhood full of hipster boutiques, leafy streets and bar-lined squares where the late autumn sun dappled onto outside tables … all of that gloss. It would have been a wonderful place to be with Sarah. If she had been speaking to me. She had made me promise not to call her for the first two weeks and while there was still a chance she would forgive me I was determined to do whatever she told me. The nearest square to my hostel was Plaza Cortázar and I took this at first as a good omen, a perfect place to sit and read and write, to plant myself in the city’s literary soil and try to grow something. Unfortunately the right books I’d packed were completely the wrong books: translations of the Argentine masterworks I had naively assumed would help me feel at home on arrival. Borges’ gnomic, deeply un-reassuring stories made me want to weep every time I attempted them; there were times when I could not even get to the end of a story’s title. Cortázar’s supposedly read-in-any-order novel Hopscotch made me feel scared I did not know my way back to my bedroom, even when I was in my bedroom. I was too fragile and unplotted for either of them. I craved English realism to anchor me, but the books on the hostel’s shelves had been left by children and hippies and the only readable novel I could find was Bleak House by Charles Dickens, an enormous over-corrective to the Argentine canon and the worst book in the world to read while watching the sensuality of Buenos Aires streetlife pass by. Fog, soot, grotesque characters and a saintly narrator. I recognised none of this around me. The guidebook mentioned an English-language bookshop, but when I went to find it one day it had moved. Borges loves this about Buenos Aires, his imaginary city, the image of which he says is always anachronistic. I gleefully hated him and resigned myself to Bleak House.
Though I had yet to start my novel, I was nevertheless writing something: daily emails to Sarah. I should have taken more care with these. I can’t remember exactly what they said and I will never have the courage to look back at them in my sent items folder. But, hell, I know what they will have said, they will have said, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, and though I will have tried to be clever and present a compelling case for why it would have been better for her and not just me if she’d stayed, she would have seen straight through my manipulations to the real message: that I was selfish, that I was needy, that I was work. Whatever I was, I wasn’t what I had suggested I was to begin with. And so it was that after a week I received a devastating response.
Before Sarah told me that it was over between us, for ever, completely, she told me how ‘tired’ she was of my ‘silly romanti
c language’ that didn’t ‘begin to redeem’ my ‘excuses and lies’. I was ‘addicted’ to trying to make people ‘feel the way you want them to feel’, ‘like a politician rather than a boyfriend’ who couldn’t understand ‘making someone happy is not pushing the right buttons in the right order’ but being ‘true and strong and open’. ‘I don’t know who you are.’ It was over. ‘I want you to have no hope.’
Amid the agony of accepting and refusing to accept what I had always known was going to happen, I suspect I quite liked the portrayal of me here, the compartmentalised, enigmatic multi-man. It is a sort of fun being a dickhead, that’s why there are so many of us. It wasn’t unique to me – did other people really reveal themselves truly to others? Were they better than me or did they just make a better job of pretending to be? I didn’t believe it was only me who was so hungry, so weak.
What mattered actually was that Sarah thought there were truthful people around and that she was one of them, even if she was in a minority. There were better people than me for her to risk spending her life with.
I was desperate to go home, to make a dramatic gesture; I had to talk to her face to face, convince her she could believe in me.
I quickly saw how much worse this would make things. It was my constant presence in daily emails that had driven her to such a quick conclusion. She wouldn’t want to see me; she would be disgusted at my additional cowardice, at my throwing away the chance to write the novel I had been talking about for so long. Perhaps if I gave her time to forget the vivid recent pain and remember the pleasure, my devotion … if I stayed here and learned something, wrote something to show her who I was. It was my only chance.
