by Joanna Walsh
Break.up
JOANNA WALSH’S work has appeared in Granta, Narrative, The Stinging Fly and Guernica, amongst others. Her first collection, Fractals, was published by 3:AM Press in 2013, and her non-fiction work Hotel was published internationally by Bloomsbury in 2015. This was followed by Vertigo, published by And Other Stories in 2016 and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her digitally groundbreaking novella, Seed, widely praised for its innovation, was released in 2017, and her latest collection of stories, Words from the World’s End, is out now. She was awarded the 2017 Arts Foundation Fellowship in Literature for the manuscript of Break.up.
Break.up
Joanna Walsh
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Tuskar Rock Press,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
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Copyright © 2018 Joanna Walsh
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 417 5
For the conversations, for Natasha, for Katherine, for Rachel, for Susan, for Harriet, for Chris, and most of all for Lauren.
Break up
1) To cease to exist as a unified whole
2) To end a romance
Webster’s Dictionary
1 London/Leaving
All love stories begin with the letter I.
So where am I? I’m here in the bathroom at Eurostar Departures, St Pancras Station, London. I’m looking into the long bank of mirrors above the basins, making myself up. Not that I usually wear makeup, that’s not me. I made myself up each time we met, it’s true, though I was never quite sure whether it was to make me look better or to make sure you knew I wanted to look better for you. But I’ll do it again today, just a little: mascara, lipstick, though I’m not going to see you, or anyone else I know.
Today makeup strings together a face that what? – mourning? – what should I call it? (there’s no word for feeling the end of love) – has pulled in such different directions that to see myself in the mirror – still – is a surprise. The light in the bathroom is grey-ish and orange-ish, and I look OK. A glance to the side: even compared to the other women I look OK, their faces always older under the fluorescent strips, disappointed, disappointing, no longer the heroines of their own stories, or of anyone else’s. And I’m one of them. It’s a miracle it’s not written on our foreheads in black felt tip. Mirror? Window? I’m transparent with love (or is it grief?). No need to spell it out: surely everyone can see right through me.
But the women come and go without a second glance. That’s to be expected: people are ruthless in their non-arrival, you can’t rely on them. You, for instance, are not here now, and you-not-being-here accompanies me wherever I go. You are not here when I get out of bed, when I drink my coffee. You are not here when I clean my teeth. You are not here when I am here, now, standing in front of the mirrors in the Eurostar bathrooms. You are here when I read my email and, although even there you have been not-here for some time, when I scroll down, here you are again, each time I look. I can open your emails, I can shut them again, as if I just got them. Their envelopes never become ragged with re-reading. I could move them – into Trash, for instance – if I liked. And if I did, I could take them out again, not even dirty. But I don’t. I like to see their outsides, here and now. They move me. Still.
I look OK in the mirror, although there’s something wrong with the glass that I can’t work out. I know it’s there, but when I turn to the mirror there’s no hole, no gap, however hard I look. In my jacket, with my handsome travel bag, I look almost together. And I am here, clearly, because there’s a here for me to be in. Because I’m standing looking in the mirror in the Eurostar bathroom – a place where I usually am not – there must be a me to be here. I occupy some space, so here is where I am. Here.
But soon I’ll be leaving.
How did I get here?
Before dawn I took a bus to the Eurostar terminal.
London began like rain, ‘Harrow Fencing’ at its borders. I leant against a cold window to photograph an empty sky through a triple screen: eye, camera, pane. At my photo’s baseline, a few unlit street-lights to show perspective, orientation, to give a clue to where I am. I thought I might send it to you. Even if I’m leaving, I want you to know I’m here, still. I look down at the picture my phone has saved for me. Between the two lamp posts, a smudge of red: a light: one star awake. I didn’t see that when I took the picture. It’s good to notice something I didn’t the first time, something going on nevertheless. It is hope. It means I will take more pictures. It is a beginning.
I don’t know why I’m beginning here, when it’s all over – or am I still in the middle? It’s difficult to tell, but I will write down what happened because it’s barely a story yet. And I am not a storyteller. But if I put it into words, it might begin to become one. I met you first for five minutes, in a bar, a friend of a – not even a friend – an acquaintance. I noticed – what? – a buzz, something in the air: attraction, aggression? A week later you wrote to me. I wrote back. In a few months we exchanged over a thousand emails, which turned into days spent on g-chat, 3am texts I still wake for, though they don’t come any more. How close can you get?
We never slept together.
We were together In Real Life for hardly more days than a working week, and never the same place twice. I spent time in between places: on trains, on buses, in hotel rooms, on international flights. We met in city centres, nowhere else to go. We always met alone. We never met each other’s friends. Where did it all happen? In airports, in stations, in anonymous coffee shops – not really ‘in’ anywhere. Outside then: on park benches, on street corners. Most of all online, which can be something you’re ‘in’ like a net or a web, or something you’re ‘out in’, virtually limitless, a (Cyber) space. We met wherever there was WiFi, which is almost everywhere nowadays so that, when you left, there was never a space from which you could be erased, tidied over. There was never a place where you weren’t, a place from which you could properly be missed.
I’m not in a hurry but I jaywalk the lights to the tube station. That’s how you do things in a city, set yourself to its pace. Different cities have different settings. London is fast and red. Bricks and mortar: it will always be harsh. London’s a nineteenth-century city. It seems older but mostly it’s not. Its patterns look immemorial but already they’re tired, already tiring, and the city’s still having changes of heart, not new-built but repurposed: flats become home offices; cafés are for working at; warehouses for living in. You would have thought there was enough money to have made the city over by now, but it’s still making the same mistakes, autopsied building sites, the evidence of neglect, abuse, ill health, the wrong decisions, plain bad luck. Outside the tube where there was once white stucco, today a dirt-brown interior exposed like a bomb site, the inside turned out. One day London will shine from top to toe, its own theme park. It will not any more decay. I’ll like the place then. As it is, one part falls as another part rises.
The form of the city changes faster than the human heart. Charles Baudelaire, The Swan
I am still inside. I am in love. I love you, still. But I’m out of place everywhere. No places feel like places any more. They all fe
el like somewhere I have to get out of.
I don’t like places.
I don’t like being in the world
I want a world of other people’s places, places I haven’t had a hand in.
I am leaving the places I know to find some new places.
It’s not entirely true that I won’t know these new places: does anyone know nothing of anything, now that nowhere is more than a click away? The plan of the metro, photographs of the mosque at dusk, the market at noon, even of the city’s cats and dogs, its bar listings, reviews of its restaurants, the phone numbers of its karate clubs: you can know more about a city by googling than by being there.
I board the tube. This is one of the lines I travelled with you. This could even be the same carriage, a clone of all the carriages on all the other trains on this branch. But because the carriage won’t stay in one place, it can’t move me like the corner of the street where we last met. I’ve passed and passed that place. I might be passing under it right now, but I’m never quite sure which street. Does it matter that I tie love to place? Or is it neither here nor there?
The tube train unpicks the stops, one by one, some of them places we were together, a straight line with no branches. I stare at the route map but there are no complications between the dots, no diversions, no breaks in the line. The real distances are nothing like as regular as they’re drawn, or so they say, and gaps between the stations are not so evenly distributed. We spent most of our time together when things were well on their way to over. I might have missed something along the line, but I still don’t understand how we stopped before we got to the end.
Mind the gap.
Between each station there’s a gap of time which is also a gap of space, and each stop moves me further away from the last time we travelled together, even if it was in this very carriage. How long is it since I saw you? How long is a piece of string? Even if this is the carriage, the months since we stood here must be looped around it, the spooling spew of an old cassette tape that needs winding back tight if it’s to keep time with space. I thought place was my problem, but perhaps it’s time, and this slack length of time – this spare time I don’t know what to do with, hardly want to own up to – is what longing is. I’m always trying to shift the pain further down the line, for it to have happened already, or for it to be about to happen in the future, somewhere, somewhen else, please not now. If I travelled this route backwards would the train reverse, could time somehow rewind? If I rode all day, back and forth, could I wear out the magnetic tape, overwrite you, score out the line?
I have travelled this route a few times since it was over and I’m no longer sure this is possible. Longing doesn’t fade like an old tape recording: it moves in patches, hitting hardest where time and place coincide.
I’m unhappy only by moments, by jerks and surges, sporadically, even if such spasms are close together.
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Let me explain.
Love is not a cassette tape.
Love’s not analog, it’s digital.
Love is movement. Though it may not be self-precipitated, it is precipitate.
Love is falling.
A certain length of time ago, I fell in love with you. (In love: blank words. A fait accompli.)
Fell. In. From what height? To what depth? A logical question. Length again.
Love, definition-less, is also measureless. That is as it should be.
There is no depth in digital.
So am I still falling? I can’t tell.
The minutes fall away, nothing I can do. On the up-escalator at St Pancras they’re bowling down the opposite staircase. I could run back and try to catch them but I’d end up flat on my face, pratfallen. That’s OK: inconclusion, ignorance – right now they suit me down to the ground. Besides, one part of my mind is always getting away from another. From the top of the stairs, a glimpse of the clock on the front of the newly restored station and, timewise, I seem to be doing OK. We’re a nation that likes to keep time, when it can: the city’s symbol’s a clock, and its toll on the news at ten, the tell for the whole country. As for me, I’m always on time, which means I’m usually a little early. That’s fine. I’ve never minded a wait, so long as it’s not too long.
Time was so long. You said I took things too fast. It didn’t seem fast to me. ‘I am digital,’ I said, ‘not analog. On or off, zeroes and ones.’ I’m not sure you understood. I’ll try again. ‘Between my word and my action falls no shadow.’ Or hardly any. I meant to say, there is no sweep of the second hand between what I say and what I do. I meant to say, I don’t say things I don’t mean, though I admit I might sometimes have a problem with timing. You said, ‘You are an odd mixture of something and recklessness.’ I don’t remember what that ‘something’ was, indecision maybe, but I’m not indecisive, once I’ve had time to think. I look before I leap, even before I decide I’m going to leap, and when I decide, I do it right away, or I’m already doing it. The moment seemed to be right. But then there was a gap. As I felt you draw away, I said, ‘I like you: why waste that?’
You said to me, ‘I wasted my time with you.’
I said to you, ‘I didn’t.’
I’m still trying to work out what you meant. Did you mean like the time between the stops, the time spent waiting at bus stations, in airports? As a child I was taught to count only the time spent at destinations, never weighing the moments in between: hours spent on motorways at dawn, queuing for ferries in a mist of petrol, on long tours of housing estates – backwaters of the domestic – searching for a new address. Are we nearly there yet? Although, at the time, it was impossible to say, I think I was happiest in these wastes of time; it was the wastes, not the destinations, that I remember.
How long is happiness anyway? I don’t wear a watch. I use my phone (who doesn’t now?). We had such a short time together, I thought we’d just started. I’d imagined our happiness would increase, only realising afterwards, that was it. Perhaps I should rephrase: how short is failure? Not that I had ‘success’ in mind. It’s not like I’d wanted what we had to last forever, just a little longer than it did, then just a little longer than that: just long enough for it to merit a name. Why did I need so much to give it a name, that name?
We never named our connection to each other – it wasn’t friendly, was barely even erotic – but nor was it denied. To deny something, it has to exist somewhere, even as an idea. Instead we made a not-thing, a gap in something, no words to give it borders, endings. It was impossible to know what kind of thing it wasn’t. Not that the name would have helped: love’s a word for so much that it isn’t really a name for anything. It’s the word at the end of the line. You can’t argue with it: no cleverness will unseat it. I say it’s love. You say it’s not. End of story.
But I’ve been daydreaming. If I want to be on time, I should get a move on. Here I am, already, at border control. I’ve passed the enormously ugly bronze couple that stands on the station – as large, as wordless, and as terrifyingly hideous as love can be. I’ve placed my passport against a small glass square, which is enough to prove who I am. I’ve crossed a border, I’ve checked in.
• • •
I like stations. I like places designed to be left. Everything here is transparent: they’ve let you see its workings right down to the bones: the rails it runs you out on. The iron roof showcases its skeleton as decoration – there’s no sleight of hand, you can see what holds it together – and, a long, long way below, a concourse of shops, the enclosed smell of alcohol and hot food at the wrong time of day.
I’m right on time, which means I have some time to spare. I walk to the stationer’s, passing a man by the bar. Did I look at him? Did he look back? It’s nothing I could put into words. Whatever’s between us turns like a revolving door: plate glass. Is there anybody there, or is it just my reflection? To travel is constantly to begin a love story.
I dawdle along the stationer’s shelves looking for a book that
might help me, but I can’t find any. So many love stories: pink covers for the ones that end in marriage, black for those that end in death. I don’t have time to hang around to see either of them out.
A love story comes only after the end of love, whether it ends one way, or the other, and, until the story’s told, love is a secret, not because it’s illicit, but because it’s so difficult to tell what it is. Having this nothing to tell becomes indistinguishable from the need to have someone to tell it to. Love stories are a confessional whispered to a third party, not the lover, because once you agree it’s love, something about it is over. It was different online where we were alone together. Ignoring invitations to ‘favourite’, ‘like’, ‘friend’, our love letters were outtakes, asides to the fourth wall, because that’s what instant message is: an echo chamber for thoughts not said out loud, performed to an audience of one, both lover and confidante. What could be more intimate, what could be closer? A line from you could keep me going for a whole week while I held it, secret, inside me.
In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
They say love is blind, but so are words. A love letter must have a reader as well as a writer, and it must be the right reader: a love letter received unexpectedly reads as the ramblings of a crazy person. But a love letter can only be written when the reader isn’t there. Writing is distance.
How is it between you and me? I love you, and you are away. Marcus Aurelius, Letters
A love letter turns words, the only proof of love, into something solid: a piece of paper, a number of bytes. Is this a love letter I’m writing now? I’m not sure. That depends who I think I’m writing to, and why. A love letter is designed to provoke love, but how? If I write about sex it’s a sex act, provocative, but there is no pornography of love, no way to conjure a sound, an image that both represents and seeds the feeling: could it be all in the words? Venn-diagrammed with sex, but not so bodied, love has to be be ‘like’ something – like what? A red red rose? A butterfly? Metaphor rehydrates feeling, curls it open like Japanese paper flowers in water. What hovers in those words is alive and not-alive, like the terrible creature that unfurls itself in Chinese lotus-flower tea, but too much metaphor and the story flattens, slips sideways, disperses itself across the words that are its stand-ins until only the insect, the bouquet, remains. Every time I write love down it has a change of heart. Art and life are very different, yes. Writing makes love artful.
