Kate
I LOITER IN the drive, killing time before going back into the house. Aunt Laura and Grandad have a way of winding each other up, and I think the mood will be a bit tenser now she’s here. So I wait, scrolling distractedly through Facebook in the lee of the gates, and try to psych myself up to step back into the house and see how the two of them are getting on today.
I don’t know what to do about Sam. He’s let me down too often for me to feel sure he’s really any good for me, but I can’t help feeling there’s still life to be lived between us. I’m too patient with him when he flakes out, really, too forgiving, but it’s difficult to be anything else, because I owe him a lot, when I add it up. He’s the reason the most isolated and frightened time of my life has started to recede.
When I first saw him I’d been out walking for most of the night before. A bad habit from the past I still hadn’t quite broken, six months after going back to work. I used to walk whole nights sometimes after the accident, as if I was trying to be ghostlike, always lit by streetlight and moonlight and courting something terrible happening to me. I remember my first sight of Sam as a glimpse caught peering through the heavily caffeinated smog of a night without sleep. He walked into the call centre where we both worked, and smiled at me before he went to find his desk. As if he already knew there was a conversation we needed to have. He fancied me, I guess; perhaps there’s no need to dress it up any more than that.
I asked around about him, talked to the boy who sat in the cubicle next to him. I found out we came from similar parts of the world. He’d grown up thirty miles away from me, in Salisbury, and it felt neat, like we were a story, to learn that about him. The place he came from seemed somehow important. To my mind, it meant he might understand me a little. I don’t know why someone who lived near where you did would know you any better than anyone else, but that was what I decided all the same. I thought it might mean he saw things like I did.
He was a student, younger than I was, and working in the call centre at weekends to fund his drinking, as lots of students did. He was a funny-looking boy really, but he had a way of seeming to stand apart from everyone else, alone in the middle of everything, that meant he caught my eye. He seemed very solemn, despite his hair that stood on end, and his clothes that looked like he bought them all second-hand in charity shops. The long-limbed, hand-me-down gracelessness of him should have made him ridiculous, but I thought it was pretty obvious that he wore his bad and brightly coloured shirts as a kind of armour, a way of deflecting other people’s attention from the long hollow look he seemed to be taking at everything, and that didn’t seem at all ridiculous to me. I understood what that felt like all too well.
I never used to speak to anyone at work, and would never have spoken to Sam. But as I say, he must have liked me, because he made an effort, and tried to get me out of my shell. So we said hello when we passed in the corridor or on the street outside, and he shared a little of the news of his life sometimes, if we stopped long enough to talk for a minute. I stayed evasive about how little I had to show for living mine, how empty my evenings were. We would smile at each other when our eyes met, though I didn’t think at the time that meant there was anything really between us. Our eyes didn’t meet very often.
Then a day came when Sam tapped me on the shoulder just as I was about to go on a break. I turned round expecting to see my line manager, feeling hostile because my back hurt from spending too long in the chair. I was surprised to see Sam looking down at me.
‘What are you doing for the next quarter of an hour?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. Reading my book.’
‘Come with me. I wanna show you something.’
He led me upstairs to the abandoned floor of the office space above the call centre, and the noise of the day fell away as we stepped from the echoing stairwell into the long, bare expanse of carpet tiles, peeling walls and single-glazed windows drinking the day’s light.
‘Isn’t this cool?’
I looked around the room where we were standing. ‘It’s an empty office.’
‘Yeah, but isn’t it weird that it’s here above us, and there’s nothing in it, and no one ever comes here? You’d think someone would use it for something. I sometimes wonder whether people don’t know it exists. Come and look at the view.’
We went to the window and looked down, but there wasn’t really that much to see. It was the same view as the room below, only seen from a bit higher.
‘Cool,’ I said, not knowing what I was supposed to think, but feeling underwhelmed.
‘You think?’
‘Well, not really, no. It’s just Bristol, isn’t it?’
Sam laughed, and I laughed with him, and that was when we kissed. I don’t know who was responsible for that. I only know our lips met for a moment, and my eyes closed, and then we stepped shyly away from each other.
‘Well, that’s awkward,’ I said.
‘Is it? Why does it have to be?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t.’
He placed his hands over mine, stilling me. ‘I wanted to talk to you. That’s why I brought you up here. I wanted to say something to you.’
‘All right. What did you want to say?’
‘You always seem sad,’ Sam said, ‘and I’ve been wanting to tell you: I don’t know what’s happened to you. And you don’t have to tell me. I wouldn’t expect you to tell me; we barely know each other, do we?’ He laughed nervously, and looked back out of the window as if something out there might help him get the words out. ‘But the thing is … I’ve been wanting to say to you for a while, for what it’s worth, that I lost my dad not so long ago, so I guess, I dunno – I think I kind of know what it feels like to be so sad that nothing can make it better. I do feel like I know about that. So if you ever want a friend … I’m not saying I’d understand things, obviously, but I’m just … I’m here; no matter how useful I can actually be to you, I’m here if you want anything.’ He stopped to catch his breath. Then he kissed me again, I guess because it seemed less embarrassing than either of us saying anything more.
For the rest of the afternoon I broke every sales record that I or anyone else in the call centre had ever set. Something had been unlocked in me, I think, and it seemed as if two years of silence and sorrow fell from my shoulders for a few hours. Someone had noticed me, seen the trouble I was in and wondered where it had come from. Someone had cared, at least a little. It lit me up to know I had been noticed. I completed survey after survey, charming the people I spoke to on the phone, amazed at how easy it all suddenly seemed, how difficult work and life had been for me just an hour earlier when there was no trick to it really; it just needed to be got through, one foot in front of the other, for ever, it was as simple as that.
What if you dreamed of your body as a leaf, the bud of a leaf growing riper at the fingertip of some branch in a wood somewhere, and gathering its strength until the day when it opened, sang out its colour and drank in the sun? What if you dreamed of your life as threads that would one day gather together into some greater garment? I had been living as if the world had ended, when it had been going on all the time. When Sam and I started spending time together, all of a sudden I saw the life still pulsing through the streets around me, and I started looking through Sam’s eyes at the days I passed through, seeing things anew.
We hardly talk at all about our different darknesses, our histories. We’ve picked up little secrets here and there. I know the brushes he uses for shaving were his Dad’s, and he knows that I have a picture of Joe and Lizzy and me on the wall above my bed, but neither of us ever explains what mementoes like those mean to us. The past is an island receding behind us, and neither of us wants to spend our time looking back. It fell to us both, when we’d come through our trouble, to decide whether we wanted to live our lives as a continual farewell to what was passing, or face into the voyage and the future and snatch what was happening now. We’ve both tried to choose the latter, walking
through the streets of Bristol together, drinking coffee in the cafés, drinking lager in the pubs. The place is really too busy for Sam, who’s even worse around towns than I am. Bristol’s hemmed in wherever you look, by cliffs, by roads, by flyovers, the river, and Sam will grab at any excuse to get out beyond it all, into real country, into the steep gorges of the surrounding hills, as often as he can.
‘D’you wanna get on a train and go somewhere?’ he likes to say.
‘Where?’
‘I dunno. I don’t mind. Cheltenham. Bradford on Avon. We can go somewhere lame. We can go wherever you want. I just feel a great need to be speeding along at eighty miles an hour somewhere this afternoon.’
He’s a dreamer. That’s all right by me. I like sitting around and dreaming with him. We can share time in silence for longer than anyone I’ve known before. It’s enough for the two of us simply to drink in the light falling over woodland, to walk alone together till we’re out of breath and reeling, to try and recognise birds by their songs, a game Sam is quite good at which I can’t play at all. He lived more of a country childhood than I did. He’s tried to teach me, but I find it hard to get the knack. ‘What’s that one?’ he’ll ask me when we hear a call, and the gleam on him makes me happy as he falls over his feet, walking backwards so he can look at me, quizzing me.
‘Easy. That’s a collared dove.’
‘Ding! What do we have for her, Johnny? And who’s that?’
‘That’s a magpie.’
‘Ding ding! And that?’
‘I don’t know that one.’
‘Seriously?’
‘No. Is it really easy?’
‘Female blackbird, innit. That’s dead easy. Nul points.’
There’s no need, among the richness of our games and our time, to talk about the past. I don’t know how close that means we really are, that we keep so much of our two lives secret. But it feels safer that way, not to risk too much of ourselves.
He makes things easier for me. Life isn’t as empty as it used to be; time isn’t as difficult to fill. There’s less room in my head for the dark to flood into, and that seems to mean the wounds begin to heal. Or at least the waters start closing over everything that’s happened, as I leave those memories ever further behind me, too far now for that life to hurt me as it did in the first few years. I’ve started sleeping through whole nights. I wake up in the same position I fell asleep in, and smile, because I thought that might never happen again, I’d become so used to my restlessness. Now I find I can go out, have a drink, enjoy an evening.
But still, there is a limit to the closeness I can find with Sam, no matter how much of a good thing he is for me. Very early in the territory we shared, we reached a precipice within us both that neither dared look beyond. There’ll be evenings when Sam will come round and find me sat in my kitchen staring out of the window at the sun going down, mute and distant.
‘You OK?’ He fumbles for the right way to reach me. The language we have for making sure someone else is all right always strikes me as being so thin, so inadequate. There should be ways for Sam to come in and say to me: I know the things you’re carrying, I know the paths you’re travelling down, I know I can’t do very much to help you, but if there was anything at all, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Perhaps someone else would know how to say that. Perhaps all the silence around me is only spun from the threads of Sam’s shyness, and someone else would have broken through. I don’t know.
‘Yeah, I’m OK.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘I’m OK.’
Sam will turn on the kettle. ‘I’ll make us tea.’ I know in little touches like that what kind of family he comes from, the Englishness of him. No subject too big that it can’t be avoided with a cup of tea, a chat about the football. All real speech can happen through the secrecy of those intermediaries, and the steam rising from a cup of tea is the mast all hopes are hoisted on.
And Sam is still a student, going through the mill of undergraduate life in Bristol, and sometimes, because of that, he forgets about me, and that puts another distance between us. There are nights when we arrange to meet, and he doesn’t turn up. At first I’m angry, and then I feel afraid, convinced something has happened that’s stopped him from coming. Then I call him, hating him because those calls remind me that no matter how much I try to keep to myself, I’ve ended up needing him. I call him time and again, convinced he’s hurt somewhere, desperate to hear his voice no matter how angry it makes me when he finally picks up the phone and I can tell from the noise in the background that he’s in the pub with his friends and not thinking of me. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m out. Shit, were we supposed to meet?’
‘Yes, but don’t come round now.’
‘I’m so sorry. I can come now.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Please can I come over?’
Then I either give in, and he comes round half-cut, too tongue-tied to apologise properly, or otherwise I manage to keep him away, and then I feel more alone than I would have done if there had been no one to forget about me at all.
Dating a student means putting up with a lot of that kind of bullshit. I can’t believe how easily all the things that preoccupy him bore me half to tears. It’s strange how quickly I’ve left all of student life behind me. Just a few years ago, Sam’s preoccupations used to be my life as well, the endless cyclical fallings-out with people you didn’t actually care for anyway, the essay crises, the parties, the hangovers, the tears. Now I’ve come out the other side of all that, it seems so unimportant and so small to look back on, watching another person wading through the same distractions.
Sometimes he does all right at being strong when I need him, and sometimes he can’t offer me much at all. It isn’t really his fault. His ambition or his insecurity or the troubles in his own head get in the way of his noticing there’s never really a day when I’m all right. There’s never a time when I don’t need his help. He doesn’t always see that. When he does, he’s kind. Or that’s what I tell myself, when I wonder how good he is for me, and try to convince myself we’re good together. In the last year, I’ve done so much that would have been impossible without him. I need to remember that, and be thankful.
We don’t get to choose many of the tensions that form us. We’re not in control of the lives we’re born into; we’re not really in charge of our dreams. And perhaps we only have so much choice about the person we choose to form the other half of our life, perhaps there are forces beyond us that affect that as well. All the same, sometimes it feels like choosing, to be with someone, and I do feel as if I’ve chosen Sam, for however long, the next little while, as long as we’re good for each other. Perhaps not for ever but for now. And I really want to have made the right decision, so I try to convince myself of the goodness in him. In the fog of the world you find someone and cling to them. Once you’ve chosen, so much of your life will be made up of that other person, attempting to deserve them, interesting them, showing them what you really meant, if only you had the words to say it. They can shape everything you do.
Sometimes I wish we hadn’t missed so much of each other’s lives, Sam and I, and there wasn’t so much to explain away between us, so much life that never seems possible to put into words. I wish we could have gathered each other up and away from the fire of it all a little earlier, and saved each other from some of the loneliness we’ve lived with over the years, neck-deep and drowning. But the world is as it is, and we all have to live with the damage that’s been done to us. We have our walks through the quiet of the woods on the outskirts of Bristol, steep public paths, dappled light on our faces, and we hold them close, we cherish them. We have that moment of recognition shared in the room above the call centre, when Sam decided to take my hand, lead me out of the noise of the big room into a silence where we could stop for a moment and look at each other.
I suspected Sam wouldn’t come today. He didn’t want to risk himself
amongst a garden full of strangers, another person’s relatives, an afternoon of questions about how we met. He didn’t feel brave enough for that. I know that’s why he bailed. It’s enough to make me wonder whether I should just forget him. It seems selfish to me, that he could let himself be overcome by his fear, and not realise how exposed, how alone I’m feeling. I’d been hoping we could rely on each other today, lean on each other to make each other stronger, two trees entwining in the storm passing over. I wanted to be able to rely on him. But he thought of himself, not me. And now I’ll have to face the day alone. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle it. It’s so casually and unthinkingly cruel of him. He’s shown me that I am still on my own. No one is going to help me be brave when I see Mum again. I’ll have to find that courage for myself.
I come back into the house to find Laura busy in the kitchen, windows fogged from the boiling of potatoes. The smell of food is easing through the rooms all the way to the front door like heat through a radiator. Plates of salmon have been brought from the larder and placed bright and gleaming on the big table in the main room, their dead eyes open to the ceiling, their flesh sliced open to the air, staring back forever into the very last moment of their living, the river they had been leaping from, the hook that had snagged them, the net they had drowned in.
‘Busy in here,’ I say as I come in.
‘It’ll be busy in here all day.’ Laura doesn’t turn round to look at me, carrying on the dance of her hands with the knife she’s holding instead, her body coiled over in furious conversation with the chopping board before her. ‘I hope you won’t mind lending a bit of a hand today, will you, my love?’
‘Of course not. What can I do?’ It’s all so Sisyphean. All this work, every year, just so it can be finished and packed away, then got out once more and gone through again a year later. We all age and the work never changes. All the knives worn down little by little but the dance they were put through endlessly repeating.
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