Love Is a Thief

by Claire Garber

  Jane clapped her hands together and laughed at a joke I didn’t get.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were a fan of Take That, Peter?’ I said, looking at the shiny tickets up close.

  ‘That concert has been sold out for months,’ Jane said, taking the tickets from my hand.

  ‘It is sold out, and I’ve liked Take That for a long time,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘Since I was young, younger, I’ve been a fan.’

  ‘What’s your favourite song, Peter?’ Jane asked, barely suppressing a wave of strange laughter.

  ‘There was a song that came out a few years ago that I really liked. I don’t recall its name. I don’t have a good memory for trivia, Jane,’ he said, studying the ceiling of the dance studio.

  ‘Oh, I think I liked that song too.’ Jane beamed.

  ‘Peter, I’m going to France this weekend. Grandma has booked everything and Chad wants me to write an article about it. The working title is “How love can totally fuck you over and make you look like a giant twat”. Well I assume we’ll change the title before it goes to print.’

  ‘Well, that’s great news, Kate. Great, I’m sure it will be great.’ Peter looked around the dance studio, hands on hips. ‘Well, I have to go now, so have a good one and I’ll see you soon.’ He strode off towards the double doors.

  ‘Peter, your tickets,’ Jane said, holding them in the air.

  ‘Keep them, Jane,’ he said, bursting through the doors of the studio, marching past Julio, who took one look at Peter and jumped back against the wall as if in a G-force simulator. He slid along the wall like a mime artist before scurrying past Peter Parker and into the studio.

  ‘OMG!’ he mouthed as he reached Jane. ‘OMG he’s so hot!!!!’ He was all swinging hips and blushes.

  ‘Don’t OMG he’s so hot me—where the bloody hell have you been?’ screamed Jane.

  ‘I’ve just been to an audition,’ said a beaming Julio. ‘And I got it! The first one I have been to in nearly 18 months!’

  ‘Was Edmundo there?’

  ‘Yes, Jane, he was there. We were competing for the same part and I got it.’ He sort of collapsed in on himself with giggles.

  ‘Was he horrible to you?’

  ‘Actually after I beat him and was awarded THE LEAD ROLE he came straight up to me and asked me on a date!’ Jane and Federico started jumping up and down on the spot, squealing and clapping. So I did the same. But they both stopped and just stared at me.

  I will never be accepted into the world of dance.

  the blind side

  I have a friend who’d been dating his new girlfriend for about six months. When I asked him how it was all going he said,

  ‘Well, I finally met my girlfriend for the first time last week, as opposed to the version of herself she’s been choosing to show to me for the last six months, and the real version is a little bit messy, if I’m honest, and a little bit of a self-obsessed bitch. And I’m not entirely sure she was impressed with the neurotic narcissist she woke up with on Sunday morning. It’s going as well as can be expected under the circumstances of us finally being truthful.’

  At the beginning of a new relationship we are always blindsided. Everything is so heady and golden that there are things you just don’t notice; things you just don’t see, or if you do you are so vision-impaired you let them slide. But these are the warning signs, showing you the beginning of what will be the end. And the following is the truth about what happened to me.

  The first few years with Gabriel were like living in a dream. The night we met, in a bar on the mountain, we seemed to radiate towards each other like magnets. I was aware of only him. We talked and we drank and we danced but mostly we just stared at each other, all night, just staring, taking in every tiny detail of each other’s faces. And I remember his mum calling him that night. He was sitting opposite me when he answered the phone and he looked at me and he said to her, ‘Maman, I have found her. I have found the woman I am going to marry. She is here.’ And that was the start of our life together; we never left each other’s side. We lived high up in the mountains in his chalet. Every night we would fight sleep to keep staring at each other. The mornings were like a reunion. Our world was just about each other: skiing together, being together, cooking for each other, reading to each other. And it remained that way for an incredibly long time.

  A few years into the relationship he started hanging around with a different group of friends. They loved to party, they openly took drugs all the time and very occasionally Gabriel would too. But the recreational became frequent, as did the drinking. At the beginning of our relationship any drinking we did seemed to be in the spirit of new relationship; going out for dinner all the time, having champagne, having mulled wine before lunch on the ski slopes. But these were my warning signs, and I’d missed them. His pre-lunch drinking became a daily occurrence, as did smoking weed, which he did every day at work in between ski lessons. Suddenly I found myself with a man whose entire existence seemed to be under the influence of something. But he was fit and he was healthy. He held down a good job. I was still in love with him and confused by the incongruous juxtaposition of health, vitality and great sporting ability with the clandestine drug and alcohol consumption that had somehow become a part of our lives.

  I tried to explain my concerns. I found studies and books on the effects of marijuana, on alcohol dependency, even on depression and its expression through drink and drugs. But his personality had already started to shift. If I tried to talk about it, it made him worse. He started staying out all night. He wouldn’t come home at all if he thought he’d be coming home to a disappointed and angry girlfriend. Unless I could promise to laugh about the fact that he’d been so drunk he’d fallen asleep on the floor of the ski school; or laugh as he dented his car on a post; or laugh because he was too drunk some mornings to go to work. I was ‘not nice’: because his friends all laughed; they laughed with him; but me, I was spoiling everyone’s fun, a concept of fun that I totally didn’t understand.

  For about twelve months I lived in a constant state of confusion with two completely different men: a charming, doting boyfriend who I wanted to start a family with, and a lairy, abusive drunk. If we fought he could rarely remember it the next day. He’d wake up confused by my anger. He’d blindly apologise for mistakes he didn’t remember making. He never once questioned his behaviour or thought for a minute that he should stop drinking or taking drugs. That was never once considered. His friends had normalised it. I had become the abnormal one.

  It’s all very cliché. I know that. And I still feel a great deal of shame that I ended up in that kind of relationship, because doesn’t it normally happen to someone else? But I really didn’t see it coming. I was blindsided. Perhaps it was my human need for a relationship that overruled my rational mind? Or my attachment to the cherished dreams I had for my future with him? Or maybe he had filled my void? Whatever it was, this bad relationship had crept up on me like a cancer. It made me doubt my judgement, doubt myself, which paralysed me further, preventing me from walking away. I kept asking myself:

  ‘How is it possible I’ve ended up in this position? I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I’m not seeing things clearly. This wasn’t how my life with him was supposed to turn out.’

  It was a mathematical equation I couldn’t make sense of. So I kept rechecking the calculations, in the same way Jenny Sullivan had. I just kept looking at Gabriel, the man I’d fallen in love with, and thinking how he still looked the same; he still sounded the same; he still smelt the same. But he wasn’t the same.

  Eventually, I did leave. And I left with nothing, arriving in London with no money, no home, no job and zero self-confidence, and I think I blamed myself. You should always be able to save the person you love most in the world. Isn’t that what they teach us in the movies? But this new version of Gabriel, Gabriel 2.0, didn’t want saving and Gabriel 1.0 had got totally lost; the love of my life had totally disappeared.

  To this
day I still can’t make sense of any of it. I still can’t do the maths. I left him. I’ve never been back and most of the time it just feels like a really really bad dream, like maybe it didn’t happen at all, like maybe he is still out there somewhere, my Gabriel, as he was. And if he is still out there, as he was, then he is still the man I want to be with. And that is what I can’t let go of, that hope, that possibility. That is what I need to go back and see. I need to know which one of them survived. And I need to let go of the guilt, the guilt that I didn’t protect him, that I didn’t save him, that I didn’t stand by and help the man I loved. I just left. And I still wake from nightmares about him being trapped somewhere in pain, or him crashing his car when he’s too drunk, or him hurting himself when he is unable to keep himself safe.

  So until I admit that all these things did happen to me and that it wasn’t OK, it was scary and heart-breaking; until I forgive myself because it wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t my job to fix him; until I trust myself enough to know that I will never let it happen again; until I go and see which Gabriel is left, then I’m not sure I will ever be able to move on. Because right now Gabriel still defines me by the very fact that everything I do, every day, is about getting over him, piecing myself back together again and trying to save everyone else along the way. So Jenny is right. Now is the time to end this chapter of my life. It is time to move on. I need to go backwards in order to move forwards. I can see no other way of truly getting over him.

  going backwards to go forwards

  french alps

  Arriving in the mountains was like being dropped into a movie set of my own life. The flight back to France was the same. The drive up the mountain was the same. Our chalet looked the same from the outside; the shops, the buildings, the mountains and streams, all as they were. Even the air smelt the same: fresh, clear, unpolluted, a hint of wood-burning fires and pine. Everything exactly as I had left it.

  It was late by the time I arrived. I stayed the night in a local hotel. In the morning I walked through the village to my favourite coffee shop. The mountains surrounding the village were white with snow but the sky was blue, the sun out, warm enough to tan, warm enough to wander through the village without a coat. It was my favourite time of year; white snow, yellow sun. As I wandered back through the storybook of my previous life, like a giant picture book, I was searching for one thing and I knew exactly where I would find him.

  Gabriel and I both love the morning. The best part of the day occurs before 8 a.m. when no one else is awake and the mountain feels like your own. Just as I had expected I found him reading a newspaper at a table outside our favourite coffee shop. As I approached, with a normality that bewildered me, he smiled, closed his newspaper and got up to greet me. He gently held my shoulders as he leant down and kissed me on each cheek, each kiss lingering dangerously close to the edge of my lips. We looked into each other’s eyes and I struggled against a volcano of emotions that seemed to have erupted in my chest. All I kept thinking as I looked at his face was, ‘He’s alive. He’s still here. He’s real.’

  ‘I knew you would come here, Kate,’ he said in a soft French voice. He looked tanned, relaxed and healthy. His thick dark hair ruffed, fresh from waking up. He was wearing a top I’d bought him. He wore the same aftershave. ‘It’s been a long time, non? You want a coffee? I think you want a coffee. Sit, sit.’ He darted off to get me a drink. I sat down at the table. The situation felt totally … normal. He came back with an espresso for me and sat down next to me, shifting his chair close to mine.

  ‘Look at you,’ he said, smiling, taking me in, taking a deep breath as he studied my face, shaking his head. ‘You look just the same, Kate, just the same.’ He took my hands up in his, squeezing them gently between the palms of his warm hands, kissing them, holding them to his lips and kissing them again. ‘And your skin smells the same. You feel the same. It’s so good to see you, Kate. I’ve missed you.’

  He kept hold of my hands in his lap, gently squeezing them, and looked up at me, the same big brown eyes, the same face, the same everything. He was in touching distance but at the same time he felt totally untouchable. For a moment I tried to breathe him all in, my brain scrabbling to store up the image of him, his voice, his smell, his touch.

  ‘I think I know why you are here, Kate. I called you the other night and I’m sorry for that. It wasn’t fair of me.’ He took a gentle sip from his coffee, then his hands went back to hold mine. ‘She come home and tells me she’s pregnant. I didn’t expect it. It was a shock.’ I assumed the she was the new girlfriend. ‘You know I chose to be with her because I wanted something a bit more simple, you know, nothing complicated, after you and me, and she chased me, you know. She was so nice to me all the time, and, I was so sad about you, oh, my God, you can’t imagine how I was sad about you. So it was easy, you know? But now she is pregnant, so it’s not so easy.’

  He was talking in such an oddly detached way, like describing a preferred bus route. ‘I stopped taking the number 47 because the traffic problems, the number 6 suits me better because it goes across town.’ I felt totally disempowered by his ability not only to reference our relationship in such simplistic emotionless terms, the most significant relationship of my adult life, but also to have thrown his new relationship immediately into the conversation. How could he be sure I wouldn’t just burst into public tears at the mention of his new girlfriend? Any other guy would have danced around the subject like Michael Flatley before leaving at the crucial moment, high-kicking his way out of the room just as you finally got up the courage to ask if he’s seeing someone then braced yourself for the agonising pain. But he was vomiting it all up like scripted reality TV. And he didn’t seem the least bit distressed by my leaving or by me turning back up. It was as if I had just popped out to the utility room mid-conversation, popped back in, and we carried on where we left off.

  ‘I know you, Kate. You are thinking about something. What is it?’ He pulled me by my hands closer to him and gently stroked the side of my face. He was a breath away from me, my face, my lips. ‘Hey, Kate, don’t look so serious, eh.’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’m here, it’s OK, you can tell me anything, anything.’ He put my hand on his chest and held it there. I could feel his heart beating. ‘You know me, Kate, you know me. Speak to me.’

  ‘I just—’ My voice immediately broke. I tried to swallow back the tears and focus on what it was I wanted to ask. I hadn’t prepared myself for Gabriel 1.0. I had prepared myself for Gabriel 2.0, and an argument. ‘Why didn’t you ask me to stay?’

  I felt pathetic as soon as I’d said it. He gently wiped away the tears from my face and kissed my cheek, staying there, cheek to cheek, breathing me in. ‘You didn’t try and fix things, Gabriel,’ I whispered. ‘You didn’t try and fight for me to stay.’

  ‘Kate,’ he said, staring into my eyes, cupping my face in his hands, hands that I had held, hands that I had kissed, hands that used to hold me as I fell asleep every single night. ‘Kate, you were so angry with me, all the time.’ He shook his head. ‘Really, you were so unhappy with me.’

  ‘Because I didn’t understand what you were doing. I didn’t understand any of the choices you were making.’ I could barely speak through the tears.

  ‘Kate, my Kate.’ He kissed my cheek again and again and again, his hands in my hair, pulling me close to him, gently rocking me back and forth. ‘Shh, my Kate, shh, it’s OK, it’s OK, I am here, I am with you. I am here.’ I pulled away and wiped away the last of my tears with the back of my hand.

  ‘But you are not here, Gabriel. You are not with me. You let me go. Now you are with someone else.’ I took a deep breath, grounded myself and, for once, I didn’t fill the silence.

  He sat back in his chair, letting go of me for the first time since I’d arrived, and just stared at me. We just stared at each other. This was the fork in our road.

  ‘I didn’t want to be by myself after you left, OK. I don’t want to be alone. It’s not funny to be in th
is tiny village alone without you.’ He signalled for the waiter to bring him another drink and started fidgeting in his seat. ‘You know, Kate, there was a lot of pressure for me when you were here. I mean, you moved country to be with me, you know?’

  ‘Gabriel, you asked me to move to France to be with you.’

  ‘I know, because I love you. And I want to be with you. I still love you, Kate, but it was too much for me, all your friends and family in England. And what am I, eh? Some stupid ski instructor? Not exactly what your grandma want for you, I don’t think. I think she wants you to be with a nice English boy who wears suits and plays chess. I don’t want to feel like that, Kate, like I am a disappointment to your family. I don’t want that on my shoulders.’ He was upgrading to 2.0. ‘It’s too much pressure, Kate. I don’t want that pressure. I don’t want to be responsible for someone like that. Can you imagine the pressure?’ He whistled loudly for the waiter. ‘Hey!’ he said, yelling towards the bar. ‘Do I need to come and make my own drink? Seriously? I don’t care if I do, just tell me, OK? Then I don’t sit here waiting like an idiot.’ He turned back to me. ‘I am simple man, Kate, you know that. I am a simple man. And I want to do what I want to do. And my new girlfriend, she lets me do what I want.’ The waiter arrived with a large glass of wine and Gabriel threw some money at him. Gabriel 2.0 was fully installed. He caught me staring at the wine. ‘Eh, don’t pull that face at me, Kate. I am always in the wrong with you. You see. You see! We are together five minutes and you are already annoyed with me. I want to be free, Kate, you know, like a bird. I want to be free like the animals in the forest. I want to go out all night if I want. Be with my friends if I want. Not come home if I want. You always want me to come home or call you to tell you where I am. It’s too much.’ Gabriel 2.0 was revealing himself like a Venus flytrap, only this time I didn’t have my head halfway inside the toothy flower. ‘The animals are free to do what they want, Kate. No one asks the animals in the forest where they are going. I don’t think anyone calls a bird and says, “Hey, bird, where are you? Why have you not come home for two nights?” I don’t think so, Kate. I don’t think so.’