by Liam Livings
I left and began the twenty minute walk to the nearest Tube station. A walk I did every day on my way to the photography studio where I was doing unpaid work experience. Chris drove the opposite direction to his estate agents.
Each time, the rain drenching me, the cold freezing my face, even when it was hot like now, fifteen minutes into my journey to the Tube I would ask myself how this had happened. Being twenty minutes from a Tube station in zone 2, North London, was quite a feat. In South London, okay, so that wasn't too hard to do. There were only about thirty stations south of the river, unless you counted rail stations, and I didn't. I'd specifically said to Chris when we were looking for a new place, "It's got to be near a proper Tube station, that's the point of living in London. None of this stupid Overground network crap." And he'd agreed with me. The estate agent had picked us up from the Tube and driven us to the flat. Mistake number one. "Only ten minutes' walk," he'd said. And I'd believed him, like the twat that I was. Let's just replay that for a moment - I'd believed an estate agent who worked with Chris. Yeah, that's what I thought about myself, too. First time I actually did the walk, once we'd moved in, it was too late. That ship had most definitely 'gone sailing' as Lena always put it.
With every footstep, I felt something building up inside me. I didn't even want to go back to the Tube today. I wanted to enjoy the time alone in the flat, time I rarely had, when I could do what I wanted. These Saturday mornings were precious to me, I realised, and so why was I leaving the flat again after being out for lunch already?
Because wherever I looked around the flat, on my own, I managed to wind myself up. That was why.
As I left the shared garden our block of flats stood in, I turned to look at the building: a brick inter-war building four storeys high with a flat roof. I noticed our car still in the car park out the front. Why hadn't Chris taken the car; it was Saturday, wasn't it?
I turned and walked back towards the flat, turning over in my mind the oddness of the car being there today.
I screwed up my fists and turned back, heading back to the Tube station. I took a few more steps, back in my original direction. But the car's presence nagged at me, I needed to know why he hadn't taken it, or I needed to get in it on my own for the first time in a long time.
Fuck it, I'm going back to the flat to check out the car, or something ...
I put on some Robyn music, loudly - Lena said she'd modelled her look on this Swedish electro rock pop artist. Lena's six inch peroxide quiff and every day bondage clothes certainly left you in no doubt as to her inspiration.
I started to tidy the crockery in the kitchen, the Don't Fuck With Me built as Robyn shouted across the flat.
I left the kitchen and surveyed the damage in the living room: bits of Dave's carcass were all over the floor - nuts, bolts, pieces of bent and ripped metal, a fan lay on its side with some of its wings broken.
As I put the pieces of Dave into a plastic bag, I realised how I really felt - like a little bird in a cage with its wings broken. I'd tried to leave but returned, for no real reason, except having to tidy up the place before Chris came home. What was I, some nineteen-fifties housewife, putting on her make-up and doing her hair for her husband's return from a hard day at the office?
I felt the broken fan in my hands. I was a nineties guy; I was in my twenties now. Chris was a seventies man, in his forties. The age gap never used to worry me. It meant I had a boyfriend who had money, way before I ever did. It was great fun, going to expensive restaurants and him paying. He even taught me to drive in his company Mini, with the estate agent's name plastered all over it.
"Why don't you get a normal job?" Chris would ask me as I ended another unpaid work experience placement.
And because I didn't want to say, "Because I can't think of anything worse than doing what you do," I just said, "It's not my dream. It's not who I am."
"Dreams are all good and well, but they don't pay the rent or the council tax, do they? Or pay for food? You need to think more practically, babe."
There it was, that word he was so fond of. Practically.
I wasn't so big on practically. I was more into dreams and hopes, which was why I often didn't bother arguing about the sofa bed or fridge freezer. Because deep down, I knew none of it really mattered; it was just stuff. Stuff you fill your life with when you don't have dreams and hopes, like I did.
Some people were okay getting on without dreams and hopes. Some people find them irritating, not practical, airy fairy, pointless - all words Chris and others had said to me about my dreams. But for me, a dream wasn't about getting a new TV to cover the party wall, or a fridge which filtered and cooled water. For me, dreams were about experiences: swimming with dolphins, helping a parent to take a perfect picture of their child which they'd all look at in years and smile about.
When Chris got out his practically and waved it at me, I normally shrugged. Not one to want an argument, I just preferred to leave it. Recently I'd replied with, "I do bring in some money, and who does your dinners every night when you come home?" Like a fifties housewife.
"I know, babe. But you might have to downscale your 'dreams' a bit." He did the air quotation marks, which afterwards I realised really stung me. It was another dig at my dreams. "You need to be more down to earth with what you want. Can't you just be happy with something where you have enough money to buy some nice clothes and a new TV every few years? That's why I got into this lark. You don't think I woke up one morning and thought, you know what I'd love to do, sell other people's houses. Someone told me about the percentages they make, and I thought I could do with a bit of that. I had my eyes on a new BMW at the time. And the rest, as they say, is history. Don't knock money, babe. It's money that makes the world go round."
"I'll have a think about it." I smiled weakly at him. I'm just not sure I'm ready yet to be that miserable and settle. "I'm sure something'll turn up. Lena got her job after work experience."
"Yeah, only because they were too scared not to give it to her!" He laughed. "The KFC along the road's got a sign out for vacancies. I could drop you off on my way to work. Just see how it goes from there?"
I shrugged. How can he not realise this isn't what I want? I was floating about in the Milky Way and he had me frying chicken on the Holloway Road.
Now, I looked down at my hands, still playing with the broken fan. Fuck, what in the name of fuck am I doing still here? How has it taken me this long to realise how I really feel?
It was the heat of the summer, my inability to be comfortable in my own home, remembering things we'd talked about properly, without Chris there to correct me on my memory. All these had combined to this one feeling that I had to go. I had to leave this place and run.
I grabbed a bag from the washing machine cupboard - even that made me question what I was doing. I had won that argument: it wasn't a washer dryer. Madness, therein lies madness. I shook my head and slammed the door, taking my weekend bag and throwing it on our bed.
Lena's words floated before my eyes: "What does he have, your Chris, a penis which has magic?" I'd just finished complaining to her about an argument we'd had when he'd stormed out the flat, after breaking some plates against the wall in the kitchen. All because I forgot the right cheese to grate on the Spaghetti Bolognese, and had used Cheddar instead. "He must have something for you to stay with him."
I shook away her words and knelt next to the bed, resting my hands next to my bag, unsure what to do.
I stared at our bed. I suppose that had been one advantage of him being a seventies guy to my nineties lad: before coming out he'd been a bit of a serial shagger - of women. He'd really played the field, a new woman or more, every weekend. Once we'd been together a while, he told me how he used to go dogging. Naive me, I thought this was what people did when they took their dogs for a walk. Oh no. How wrong could I have been? My eyes popped and my ears went red with the stories he told about car parks he'd visited when he was my age. Then he'd got married, twice. Two wom
en, one straight after the other. As soon as he'd split up from the first, he'd asked the second woman to marry him - he'd been keeping the second one warm while the first one fizzled. Only the second woman - Sharon, Sandra, something with an 'S' - wasn't too pleased to find out he liked a bit of extracurricular, but this time with men. Chris had quenched his shagging thirst for women and, as he turned thirty in 2000, he'd developed a thirst for a different sort of shagging. The second wife, we'll stick with 'Sandra', she was into tantric sex - you know, hours and hours of it, just hovering next to the point of no return, but not quite going there. She loved it. She couldn't get enough, Chris said. I asked what he got from the men, and he said it was the exact opposite, "A quick knee-trembler and you're done with the blokes."
By the time I met Chris, he'd divorced Sandra and had a serious relationship, this time with a man. And it was that combination which meant when we got together, although he didn't have a magic penis, he might as well have done. The first time we slept together, he kept us going for over an hour and a half. I remember laying there begging him for us to finish, and he kept stroking, teasing and feathering about all over the place.
This was a very different experience from on my own, which never lasted very long, or with the few other guys I'd slept with at that point. It was always quite rough, dirty, quick. I knew where I was with rough, dirty, quick. With Chris, I didn't quite know which way to turn, when it would be over. In bed, he showed me a side of himself I had never thought possible. It was a side of him he never showed to anyone else. He didn't want an open relationship with me - "I've done all that. Got it out of my system" - so I got this side of him all to myself. Which, as someone in my late teens, was very attractive. I soon got used to our afternoon-long bedroom sessions, pausing for bottles of water and checks on chafed areas. Every time he lost his temper, he would very soon afterwards give me that look and take me by the hand into our bedroom, where all anger, broken plates, food thrown out the window, shouting, would be forgotten. Forgotten in a cocoon of our bodies entwined together, in contrast with how twisted our minds had become during the argument beforehand.
Now, I threw some of my things into the bag. In five minutes, I'd scoured the whole flat for everything I gave a shit about and put it in the bag: some clothes, some photos from when we first got together and with my friends, some films I comfort viewed alone on repeat and my photography stuff - camera, tripod, notebooks.
And this was the point I found myself throwing his stuff into a bag and pushing it down the stairs.
Chapter 2
I carried my bag through the living room and noticed the plastic bag containing the remains of Dave. A few lone screws, some liquid and bits of metal remained on the floor.
Shit, there's no going back from that. I dumped my weekend bag by the front door and collected a roll of black bin bags from under the sink. Or the 'domestic products zone', as it was known in this flat. I opened the TV cabinet and swept an armful of Chris's CDs and DVDs into the bag, grabbing some of his ornaments from the living room on my way to the kitchen, throwing them into the bag on my way. I grabbed his carefully organised toiletries from his perfectly arranged shelf in the perfectly organised bathroom and threw them in amongst the media. I threw this bag next to the front door and pulled off another bag from the roll under my arm.
Back in the bathroom, I emptied the rest of his pristine shelves into the bag, returned to our bedroom and bundled his clothes into the bag, before unplugging the radio alarm clock he insisted on keeping despite us both having mobile phones with alarms, and threw that in too.
In the kitchen I grabbed some crockery and cutlery and put it in the bag on top of the other items. I tied up this bag and threw it next to the other one by the front door. Another bag unrolled, I went to the washing machine cupboard and collected the various cleaning and bleaching products, all arranged in alphabetical order within zones of use (bathroom, kitchen, living room, bedroom). This bag was tied and joined the other two.
I was panting now: the air thick with humidity and my heart pumping quickly; I felt it in my chest, and heard the blood in my ears. I scanned the flat and was just about to leave when I got a block of Cheddar cheese from the fridge and put it in my pocket.
I opened the front door and pushed the bags down the stairs, hung my bag over my shoulder, grabbed the car keys and walked down the stairs, pausing at the bottom to put the Cheddar cheese on top of the black bin bags.
I ran to the car, I started it, glanced at my bag on the back seat, containing all I gave a shit about in the world, took a deep breath. Am I this person? Am I going to be this new person, or am I incapable of doing it?
I stared at the kitchen window where I'd stood making dinner for my Bath friends one evening. The same evening Chris had refused to eat what I'd cooked because the pasta was little bow ties, and not little twists. "You know I don't eat the bow ties, babe. What can I have instead?" he'd asked, the guests looking at their plates intensely.
"We don't have any little twists left." I had looked at the bowl of pasta in the middle of the table.
"What about spaghetti, I like spaghetti."
"We don't have any left. I checked. I thought it'd be fine."
And he'd grabbed the car keys, shouted, "It's fine, I'll get it," before slamming the door.
The memory of that night in the bedroom, once my friends had gone, still couldn't wipe their faces from my memory as he slammed the door. No amount of tantric up-all-night-sex could do that.
I sat in the car and imagined myself wearing the KFC uniform, asking someone if I could help them, and knew I couldn't be that person, so instead I must be this person. My right hand shook as it hovered over the key in the ignition. I was just about to turn it to start the car, when I realised what the noise was - the engine was already on. I moved the gear stick and it stuck, the car responded by emitting a grinding noise.
Clutch.
I put my foot on the clutch; it was all coming back to me now. I put it in reverse and after three attempts (once the wrong gear and twice stalling it, each time shouting at myself to calm down, and failing) I pulled out of the car park, my hands trembling on the steering wheel.
I pulled onto the main road, taking deep breaths as I waited at the junction for a gap in traffic. I cowered at the wheel, expecting every movement to result in a shouted order or criticism from my left side. Once he'd taken to marking my driving out of ten at each junction. If I dithered too long before pulling out, he marked me down. If I pulled out too soon in front of a car - still safely I thought - he'd mark me down. Then when we reached our destination he'd give me a detailed breakdown of why he had marked me as he had, and how I should improve next time I drove. When he wasn't marking me out of ten, he was shouting orders at me, "Change lane! Different gear! Don't hold it on the clutch!" After a while there had been no 'next time' and I had just let him always drive.
Now, it was taking me a while to get used to the empty passenger's seat and lack of barked orders.
Once on the road, I noticed my shoulders stopped hunching up by my ears, and I straightened my back. I was following signs for the A406 North Circular Road, but first I had to get past a series of industrial units and a narrow bridge, which felt as if it should be in the countryside gently curving over a stream. Instead, it crossed a river leading to the Thames, just next to a sign that proudly told me I'd just entered the London Borough of Enfield and they asked me to drive carefully.
Enfield? That's not right, I'm going in the wrong direction. I slowed down and at the same time, tried to do a U turn in the road, and after a bit of a skid I found myself jammed against the right wall of the bridge, the front of the car squashed around the immovable bricks.
Enfield.
Shit.
Fuck.
I put the car into reverse, remembering the clutch this time, and tried to back away from the situation. I noticed crowds of cars gathering around the scene as I was blocking the wrong side of the bridge, stopping traffic.
I got out the car to check the damage. It didn't look good. The passengers' side of the front of the car was completely squashed, glass, plastic bits of bumper and metal bits of bodywork were all over the road. The shiny silver grill of the Mini, which had looked like a smile, was now more like a wonky smirk, with part of the smirk broken off and resting on the floor. The broken smirk glinted in the sun and I leant against the brick wall on the bridge, taking in what surrounded me: cars on the other side of the road slowly passed, but on the side I'd crashed, there was now a long tailback. Some people had got out their cars, standing next to theirs or looking at the state of mine. A man was nearby checking out the damage to my car. He was walking towards me and saying some words. I knew this because his lips were moving and his arms were flailing about. He reached into his pocket and brought out a mobile phone, then he was shaking it in front of my face.
"Oi, mate, you alright?" said the man. "Want me to call an ambulance? You look a bit shook up."
I looked at my hands and they were both shaking. My stomach felt tight and crunched into a ball. I felt a sudden burst of sickness and leant against the wall and threw up next to the car.
The man came over and touched my back. I smelt his strong aftershave, and noticed his large arms, covered in dark hair. I glanced back at the van he'd emerged from: white Transit, something about plumbing services written on it.
"Oi, son, you want me to call an ambulance?" the plumber asked, holding my shoulders as he turned to face me.
I looked into his eyes and noticed both his pretty impressive arms and a white T-shirt, stained with the day's plumbing … stuff? I just wanted him to hold me, to feel his strength next to me, for him to tell me it would all be fine, and did I want to join him in the back of the van for a little lie down.
I shook away that inappropriate feeling, sadly realised I wasn't in a gay rom-com and instead managed, "Fine," before spitting a bit of remnant sick on to the ground. "Can you help me get it free?" I pointed to the front of the Mini wedged into the bridge.
