Heartlines

by Susannah McFarlane

  Susannah

  Okay fine don’t know what to say but thought it better to say this than nothing.

  Robin

  You are cross. We can talk about it later, I love you.

  Susannah

  Not cross – but it wouldn’t be too terrible to show your heart would it?

  Robin

  Now I’m cross. I’m sick of these accusations and judgments just because I don’t respond exactly the way she might like me to respond – I feel controlled, bullied.

  I guess we treat one another the way we would like to be treated. If I feel hurt, I like reasonable explanations to allay my concerns. I’m more comforted by them than by emotional there, theres. I had better call her. I’ve had enough of texting.

  Susannah

  Robin calls. I take the call in the garden and leave a slightly concerned Oskar watching the tennis (the tennis seems to be the soundtrack to our arguments these days). Things start off okay but soon go pear-shaped again. I try to explain. I acknowledge I was being needy, I apologise, but could she see what I was saying? It seems not. Robin is being very logical (not at all what I need at the moment – it just plays cold and hard to me) and then, as I begin to react emotionally, she starts to get frustrated and her voice rises in anger. Her voice is harsh and mean and I hit a wall. I feel overwhelmed and upset and I hang up on her. I stomp back inside.

  ‘Fuck this! I do not need this!’ I shout as I slam my phone down on the kitchen bench.

  Oskar has now moved from slightly concerned to alarmed. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. We argued …’

  ‘Again?’ asks Oskar.

  ‘Yes, again,’ I confess. ‘But this time Robin lost her temper and got really angry. It was awful, she was mean, so I just hung up.’

  Oskar doesn’t say anything.

  ‘Fuck this!’ I repeat. ‘I do not need this. She doesn’t need this! Perhaps this is just too hard. Maybe we’re done and it’s over!’

  Where has this come from? Suddenly it all seems much bigger than one argument, one phone call. Suddenly it feels like the fight you have when you are breaking up with someone. Is that what is happening?

  Oskar suggests – sensibly as it’s now nearly 1am – that we go to bed, and I agree. Then Robin sends a text.

  ‘Just leave it,’ suggests Oskar.

  ‘I can’t,’ I reply.

  ‘You can,’ he says.

  Now I feel myself getting angry with poor Oskar but instead I crumble a little.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I just can’t.’

  I open the text.

  We are both upset now and we both seem to feel unheard and misunderstood. I shouldn’t get angry. I apologise for that, I do really love you but I feel you won’t believe me unless I show it exactly the way you choose to show it.

  Susannah

  Aaaaaaarrrggghhh! Apology and then the power kick. This is not going to stop. Part of me, a really big part of me, doesn’t want to reply. I want to cry. I want to follow Oskar’s advice and go bed. I want to wake up in the morning and see if I can do this any more. But another, smaller but maybe braver part of me decides to hang in there. I send Robin a text.

  I don’t think that’s fair – but am up for trying to talk through it one more time if you are.

  Robin calls back and we begin to talk again. And then, both of us, seemingly learning little from the last call, take our positions again: me appealing for a little affection, her for some common sense. And then her voice starts to harden and rise again. She has lost patience and I have just lost it. It’s all too much. I break. I burst into tears. I know it’s childish but I don’t care, I am simply done in.

  ‘Okay, okay, just please don’t be angry with me, Robin.’ I plead. And then I burst into tears again. It’s all too much.

  Robin

  Oh dear, this is awful. I feel stricken by her tears. I guess I haven’t fully grasped, and taken into account enough, the reality of the little baby Susannah I am dealing with. I was trying to talk adult-to-adult when it was completely inappropriate. I suppose I should have just dropped it and given her what she needed. Oh well! Another mistake to try to correct and recover from.

  Susannah

  Robin’s voice softens and we somehow nurse the conversation to a vaguely reconciled end. I go to bed tear-stained and exhausted. Oskar stirs and puts his arm around me.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he mumbles.

  ‘Not really,’ I answer.

  ‘Is this really worth it?’ he asks.

  I don’t answer because I don’t know. I thought I did but I don’t anymore. Maybe Robin and I have just broken up.

  Crossed wires

  Susannah

  When I wake up the next morning. I’m not angry anymore. I just feel sad and I start churning the argument of the night before over in my mind. I end up writing another poem. I write this and text it to Robin:

  I feel like we drove a bulldozer over our hearts and I’m sorry for my part in that. Hope we can heal the bruises …

  You lost your temper

  And I lost the plot

  And we broke it

  A single x undoes us

  Too strong, too fragile

  Too much with too little

  Cry amongst the pieces

  Sifting heart debris

  Fear both fix and flee

  But the heart’s battle song of open

  Holds you to the path but with no map to find

  Where X should mark our spot

  Robin

  What a sad and beautiful poem! She really is brilliant. But fragile. I think sometimes I am fooled by her natural ebullience into thinking she is more robust than she really is.

  I send Susannah a text:

  Darling I am so sorry. Please forgive me for crushing your heart. I love you. We are not broken, just badly bruised. We will find our special X. Meanwhile, please accept these tokens – xxxxxxxxxxxxx

  The next day, Susannah comes over and we sit together with the cryptic crossword. Once again, it does its job. Where words have got us into trouble, here words help us out again: gloriously external, neutral words, carrying no emotional burdens; just the companionable pleasure of solving problems that don’t actually matter. Frustrations and misunderstandings have all but run us aground but there is, after all, an X marking the spot to guide us to a calm, safe cove of respite. Crossed wires – cross words – CROSSWORD!

  Susannah

  But some things do matter and I wonder if we can heal the bruises. We seem better able to inflict new ones on each other at the moment and each argument chips away at my confidence and my energy.

  And then, to add injury to insult, I find out I need to have shoulder surgery. That will mean hospital, a week to recover from the surgery and then at least three weeks with no driving. That alone is going to cause a lot of disruption to family life but also, I realise with panic as I come out of the surgeon’s rooms, it will mean no driving to Robin’s house. Would she come to me on the other side of town? Would she drive over? Might she even come and help look after me in that first week? I move from feeling panic to feeling quite taken with the idea: Robin seems to value acts of service as a way of expressing love – perhaps asking her to look after me is a better way for her than me banging on about leaving an ‘x’ on text messages all the time.

  I ring Robin and tell her about the surgery. She is very sympathetic but when I mention the no driving and the idea that she might come to my house she pauses.

  Robin

  My first reaction to Susannah’s suggestion that I drive to her house in Brighton for the next month is slight panic: I can’t, I don’t know how to get there, what will it involve?

  This tends to be my initial reflex any time I don’t know what exactly I may be committing myself to. I think ‘No’ – and then very often think ‘Actually, yes, I probably can’, a very short time later. Like the phone call with Maddy to arrange my first meeting with Susannah: ‘No, I
can’t possibly do this Tuesday; it’s too short notice … okay, we’ll make it Tuesday.’ Or when Susannah first suggested my staying overnight at Longleaf – maybe even for more than one night – ‘Oh, I’m not sure, and if I do come, definitely not for more than one night.’ I stayed four nights.

  I have to weigh things up first.

  Susannah

  ‘It’s quite a long way to drive,’ she offers.

  ‘Well, not really,’ I reply, taken aback and thinking I drive to her place every week and it’s about half the journey she makes to her church. It’s a shot to the heart, but I press on. ‘Maybe you could stay over, then?’

  More pauses, more dodging and weaving. We agree to wait and see. She is clearly not enthusiastic and I am gutted.

  Robin

  I get off the phone and get out the Melways. Just holding this trusted old friend in my hands and feeling its weight and solidity anchors me with its promise of clarity and order. The basic first step of locating Susannah’s street in the index at the back calms me further. None of your iPhones and GPS systems for this tortoise!

  Already Brighton is a possibility – nay, even a potentially exciting prospect – I will be able to go to Susannah!

  Susannah

  I have hit a wall with Robin. Indeed, I feel like we are both bashing our heads against a brick wall, lots of brick walls, all the time. Maybe Robin is tired of it and that’s why she’s hesitant about coming to see me. Maybe she wants a break and this is her way out?

  With not much in between, I go from being hurt to angry. I decide I am going to get in first: I don’t think I can take Robin rejecting me. Perhaps I should step out, really out this time.

  We just don’t get each other – we barely speak the same language. She feels I am bullying her into being someone she isn’t and I feel she just doesn’t want to give me what I (both inner child and adult) need and what I so easily think she could.

  We both seem tired of trying and tired of getting it, each other, wrong all the time. Yes, there’s absolutely a connection, primal and strong, but it’s perhaps not enough to take us the distance. We don’t seem able to convert it into a real-life relationship.

  Perhaps it is time to unhook? Something has to give. Or do we just give up?

  X

  SALVAGE

  Searching for stillness

  Susannah

  Following the last phone call with Robin I am, once again, all at sea and at a loss to know what to do with my relationship with her. I desperately need to get a grip on something, ideally me. So, once again I hit the meditation cushion.

  More often than not a good thought – albeit one I’m not supposed to be having – comes to me on the cushion, and so it is now. There I am trying to focus on my breath as thoughts tumble across in front of it. I replay the arguments with Robin, I wonder what I am going to cook for dinner, I plot a plan to simply withdraw from Robin, I wonder how people manage to meditate for hours and, every now and then, I notice that I am breathing. And then, with crystal clarity, a better thought comes to me. I realise that these thoughts to cut and run from Robin are not me formulating a proper response – they are a reaction fuelled in no small part by my little friend, my inner child. I see for the first time that my urge to run away, my hurt-and-hide routine, is little me protecting big me but also punishing Robin – it is a sulk but it is also a test. Would she come looking for me or would she reject me? Again.

  This is a reasonable fear, given her form, but it is a childish reaction and I need a grown-up response. So, what is that response going to be? Am I really going to cut and run? Am I going to call Robin and tell her that it is all too hard, that it isn’t working? I can tell her that and go back to my life – which actually had been great.

  Finishing with Robin would give me certainty but it wouldn’t give me peace. And, anyway, who am I kidding? I have been acting like I have a choice in this. Yet now, as I sit not meditating on my meditation cushion, I see, quite clearly, that I don’t.

  Because I realise that every time I think that it’s all too much, another thing, more felt than thought, stops me. This woman – for all the differences between us and the misunderstandings we have – gets me. While there is a whole lot of stuff about me that she doesn’t know yet, she fundamentally sees me and she can, when she wants to, make me feel unbeatable.

  Just like – and it’s only ever happened once before – Mum did. And that is the simple reality. I wasn’t looking for another mother but now I have one anyway. It just is. That’s a really special thing; amazing actually – lightning doesn’t often strike twice, so you don’t give it up easily. It’s worth fighting for, even if you are fighting yourself.

  I come across the quote from the Buddhist monk Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, ‘The only true elegance is vulnerability’ in a meditation book. This gets my attention, because I seem to be the pin-up girl for vulnerability – except for one critical difference: I have been seeing it as a bad thing. I saw it as putting myself out there – ‘there’ being a lonely, cold place where people might not come to find you, but this same place, the quote seems to say, is the only place you have a shot at genuine happiness. And then I pick up the Brené Brown book again and she is on about the same vulnerability thing: humans are wired for connection, belonging and love, but we need the courage to ‘tell our own hearts’. That connection is everything but it isn’t always easy.

  You can say that again.

  So, I have my light-bulb moment: I am never going to break from Robin. Even if she drives me nutty I am going to stay. I’m going to stop hiding when hurt, and I will stay out there in the open where she can see me. For better or worse, we are stuck with each other. It is no longer about if we have a relationship, it’s just about how.

  So, I ring Robin and ask if I can come over. I need to sort out this thing about her not being able to drive to Brighton.

  Robin

  Susannah comes to my house. We do our usual thing of getting our cups of tea and sitting out in the garden, but this morning Susannah is clearly upset about something. Finally it comes out that she is really hurt because she feels I don’t care about her shoulder – or her, for that matter – because I just can’t be bothered driving to Brighton to look after her.

  I am mortified that she feels this, but I see now how she could quite easily have got that impression. I hasten to reassure her that that was never the case. I try to explain that sometimes when I am asked to do something I have an initial fear of incapability, but that it generally doesn’t last long and I nearly always end up doing the thing. I tell her I want to come to her house and help her. I hug her and I tell her I love her. And it is true.

  Susannah

  I even get a hug. This honest vulnerability thing has a lot going for it. And then, of course, we do the cryptic crossword and everything feels better. But I do wonder if Robin can come out and be more open with her feelings as well: it has all felt a bit one-sided on the raw-emotion front.

  I think I might have a cunning plan for that.

  Eyes wide open

  Susannah

  I’m off to Robin’s house for lunch and I am taking over a DVD of old family movies. I’m hoping that watching footage of me as a baby and toddler will provoke an emotional response from her. This is my biggest gun: if a curly-headed, fat-faced toddler doesn’t get her, I don’t think anything will.

  Robin

  Watching the old home movies seems a great idea, so we set ourselves up with cups of tea (hers always fresh mint; mine, your good old classic tannin variety) and settle cosily on the couch to enjoy the movies.

  There is no soundtrack and the photographic quality is not always of the highest standard, but the general effect is that of a sun-bleached, idyllic world of childhood. The first scenes are in Susannah’s grandparents’ house in Toorak, with beautiful, extensive gardens made for exploration and adventure, and later shots showcase the family exploits on the tennis court and in the swimming pool. Everything is full of activity an
d fun – bikes, bats and balls, miniature-train rides. Everyone, especially Susannah’s mum and dad, looks so invested, so happy.

  There is Susannah as a toddler, probably about eighteen months, looking rather like a wind-up doll – golden curls, chubby legs, yellow frock – trying out her new walking skills, her mother following close behind, ready to rescue should it be necessary.

  Suddenly, I am surprised by the feelings triggered within me: jealousy, resentment and a sense of ownership. She’s not yours, she’s mine. I have never thought or felt this before.

  Such a dear little thing, eager and energetic – scrabbling up stairs, galloping at speed on the rocking horse, scudding along on an animal trolley of some kind, brandishing a toy gun.

  Then watching her at about age five, I am struck by how much she resembled her sister Anna at the same age, not only physically but in personality, with a certain bumptious, I-am-great quality. (In fact, I can hardly believe it when the video shows her, at about nine, walking along making the ‘V for Victory’ sign with both hands, exactly as Anna used to do, accompanying the gesture with verbal brilliance of wit ‘Thank, thank you, Fans and Air-conditioners!’)

  Despite this apparent healthy self-confidence, I can still see in the small Susannah that tentative quality that I had picked up in the later professional photo of her I had seen on the Net.

  Then, quite suddenly, reality hits me.

  It seems the veil that has been over my eyes and heart is suddenly removed and I see and feel, for the first time, the enormity of what I have done.

  I gave away my best thing, my most precious treasure.

  I have not always found it easy to give away, lose or break material objects that I have been attached to, but I had given away a baby, my baby!

  This is the stuff of nightmares, those awful dreams where you belatedly realise that, in a moment of neglect, you have forgotten your child – left them on the train or at the shops. As the panic rises, you wake to the glorious relief that it is not true.