The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  He looked at her, narrowing his eyes. Sometimes she wondered if he had the power to read her thoughts because he seemed to have a knack of knowing what she was thinking. ‘I mean you have to stop doing this to yourself. If these things,’ he nodded in the direction of the TV, ‘if they bother you, then why not stop reading the papers and watching the news?’

  ‘You mean pretend none of this is happening?’

  ‘I mean why worry about all those things you can’t change. I understand where it’s coming from – no one can blame you for seeing the worst in everything – but it’s not helping, is it? Just try it, Mel, for me and you,’ he said.

  She stared at his face, couldn’t understand why she hadn’t seen it before. He had reached his limit, eyes lightless, begging. And because she loved him and couldn’t bear to experience loss all over again, and because her worst fear was to be alone, she smiled and squeezed his hand and said, ‘OK, I’ll try.’

  Life is about forward momentum. This is never more obvious than when you are stuck and can’t move on. You walk into the room just as everyone else is leaving. You are listening to the conversation but you’re not part of it. You have people’s sympathy for a while, weeks, months, but it’s progress they want to see. You are stuck in a groove, an endless tortuous loop, and it’s boring for everyone else on their forward trajectories. So sure, take your time to mope around, lick your wounds, cry when you need to, but after that, learn how to survive.

  You are a survivor. No more ladybirds. Your time is over. Slam.

  This was what Sam was telling her.

  The news had to go. It nearly killed her for the first few weeks. She needed to pin her dark mood on something, give it a reason for being, and without the horror stories she only had her own story. She switched to lifestyle shows, bought women’s magazines to amuse herself, and she saw that the survivor stories were everywhere.

  My boyfriend told me I was worthless but look at me now, under a photo of a woman dripping in bling outside a mansion.

  I was sacked from my job as a waitress but now I’m a millionaire businesswoman.

  Chronic asthma nearly killed me but last year I climbed Everest.

  The overcoming was everywhere.

  In turn she ditched the lifestyle shows and the magazines because they made her feel worse about herself. But on the nights when Sam worked late, which was pretty much every night, she still had acres of time. She needed distraction, constant, endless distraction. Keep busy, don’t stop. Her birthday came around and her mother presented her with Delia’s How to Cook. Not her first attempt at domestication by any means; there had been frequent missions over the years, all without result. So the book was more of a long-standing joke. ‘I won’t cancel the restaurant reservation just yet,’ her mum had laughed.

  This time was different.

  She applied herself to Delia and found that not only could she boil an egg, she could also make caramel, cook a joint of beef and make the gravy too. Once she had mastered these basics, she graduated to other chefs: Nigel Slater, Thomasina Miers, Marcus Wareing. She bought a different book every week. She thought Ottolenghi was a dream because each recipe demanded at least ten ingredients, most of which she had never heard of, and sourcing them took more time than the cooking.

  They had never eaten so well.

  This created another problem. She had never been thin, but the endless cooking and tasting had grown her waistline beyond what she considered reasonable. She enlisted the help of a personal trainer recommended by a friend of Sam’s.

  With Erin by her side she went out running. They took a route along the riverside and through the town, where the shops sold women’s raincoats and polka-dot wellies and kitchen utensils in pastel pales: pink colanders and blue jugs. There was a time when she would have laughed at the tweeness of it all, the lack of edge, and worried that by association she was losing hers. But now she just ran without thinking. After the first few weeks, when she’d fight the urge to stop and catch her breath every five minutes, she found her legs were able to carry her along their route with ease, and when Erin suggested they turn back it was Melody who said just five more minutes. Now she had started she didn’t want to stop.

  She even, after months of excuses, accepted an invitation to drink coffee with Siobhan (whose husband worked with Sam and who had therefore decided they should be new best friends). Or rather she invited her over to the house, along with her friends. They arrived in a jam of buggies, toddlers waddling around sticky-fingering the walls. It was all fine. She could do it. Even the conversation, which was centred on the consistency of poo and what their offspring would and could not eat – ‘he laughs in the face of broccoli’ – was bearable. And when the women turned to Melody to ask her what she would do, because obviously they hadn’t noticed that she did not actually have a child of her own, she said, ‘I’d sell them on eBay.’ Cue outraged laughter. They thought she was hilarious.

  And maybe she was. Skittering through life unburdened, so light she swore she was flying. Who was to say she couldn’t be a survivor, looking forward, never behind?

  It’s already late when Lottie and Patrick leave, Lottie with an optimistic, ‘Hope to see you again.’ Melody likes her; it looks like Patrick does too, but she’s learnt that counts for nothing. If she wanted to be deep about it, she’d say he’s searching for something he can’t find, but she’s got enough deep going on tonight as it is.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ Sam says, his arm around her, kissing her head.

  Upstairs she brushes her teeth in the en suite and watches in the mirror as he undresses, flinging his clothes on to the chair next to their bed. He starts his nightly ritual of stretching, arms out to his sides and then above his head. His movements are precise, practised, like an athlete.

  Did he see it too? He must have, he was sitting right in front of the television, but he hasn’t even thrown a look her way. Are you OK? Do you want to talk? Maybe she imagined it. No. She would go along with this theory were it not for Lottie. She can distinctly recall Lottie mentioning it. Perhaps she has done such a good job at hiding it for the last four years that it’s been completely wiped from their history.

  Once Sam has completed his stretches he peels back the covers and flicks through his phone. Is he tweeting? What can he be saying? Just done five star jumps and a hamstring stretch, now getting into bed. Is that more than a hundred and forty characters?

  Perhaps he’s waiting for her to raise the subject. She has the urge to. The words are massing in her throat. She’d like to dislodge them but she doesn’t want to be accused of going back over old ground. At times it’s difficult to remember what is considered a healthy topic of conversation and what is deemed to be destructive.

  She gargles with mouthwash, spits it out and goes into the bedroom.

  ‘Lottie seems nice,’ he says.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she says.

  ‘You didn’t like her?’ He rolls on to his side and plays with her hair. ‘She reminded me of someone,’ he laughs and kisses her neck.

  ‘Stop it. She was lovely.’

  ‘What is it then?

  Tears spring up in her eyes. She shakes her head.

  ‘Oh Mel,’ he says, sitting up to look at her. ‘Really?’

  She blinks in acknowledgement.

  ‘I thought you had missed it.’

  ‘It was right there in front of me, how could I have missed it?’

  ‘Darling, it could be anything. It could be a dog walker who had a heart attack and keeled over. You just don’t know, so why bother getting all worked up about it? Come on, don’t be silly.’

  She’s crying now, can’t stop herself. Oh God, she doesn’t want to cry in front of him. Sam hasn’t seen her weep since the day of the ladybirds. That’s not to say she doesn’t cry at all, because she does. There is very little in life that she hasn’t shed a tear over once in a while. A burnt cake (although this is a rare occurrence these days), the way her hair kicks out on one side no matter how
much she tries to blow-dry it flat, the way she can never find a pair of trousers to fit her because she is only five foot one. She cries when the sky is so black she can’t imagine seeing the sun again. She cries when it’s brilliant blue because it makes her feel that she should be doing something to make the most of it but she has no idea what that thing might be. She cries when Sam calls to say he’s working late again because of an emergency (it’s always an emergency).

  ‘Come on, Mel.’ He cups her face with one hand and wipes her tears with the other. ‘It’ll be nothing, I promise you.’

  He’s right. She is being silly. She can see the glimmer of fear in his eyes too: don’t take us back there. That’s why he doesn’t go near the subject. It’s a black hole that will suck them right down into its heart.

  She remembers what it was like, the feeling that her head was populated by ants. The combined torture of always wanting to run and yet never being able to move. Delving into her mind to dissect her memories, convinced that there must be something, a clue that she had missed that would bring everything into focus.

  But she could never find it.

  It was Sam who told her: ‘If you can’t make sense of your memories, you have to stop trying.’

  Once, she read an interview with the climber Aron Ralston, who was trapped down a canyon after a boulder fell on his arm. In order to get out and save himself he had to cut it off. That was how she felt. She could move on but only if she left part of herself behind.

  What was it he had said? The moment when he severed the last tendon was the most beautiful, euphoric moment of his life.

  It was at this point the parallels between their stories ended.

  Melody had to lose her old self to survive but there are days when she would dearly like her back.

  ‘We’ve got everything to look forward to, the wedding’s only a few months away,’ she hears Sam say. He’s still trying to steer her back from the edge.

  She lays her head on his chest. It’s the part of his body she loves the most, the heat and smell of it.

  ‘Sorry …’ she goes to say but he puts a finger to her lips.

  ‘You don’t have to explain, Mel. I get it. You’ve been amazing, really, you’ve coped with it all so well. The baby too.’

  The baby. She’d even hidden those tears from him.

  She has to come back from the edge, can’t go there again.

  She kisses him, bites his lips. She wanted to talk to him; now she wants him to stop. She needs to run as far away from it as possible.

  ‘Would you like me to take your mind off it?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she says, attempting to make her voice sound light.

  His hand moves down under the covers, runs from her hip bone through the dip in her stomach and downwards. She closes her eyes and conjures a scene, transporting herself back there.

  They steal time for each other, Melody and Sam. They rob minutes and hours from work and lie to feed their addiction. It’s never enough. She has the sense that the hours they share together are simultaneously slowed down and speeded up. They can fill them with so much – talk, sex, eating, drinking, just being close to each other – and yet when it’s time to leave she feels she’s only just arrived.

  Usually, though not always, it’s the same hotel, equidistant from her place of work and his. They enter through a small reception with a different extravagant display of flowers every time they come: dahlias, lilies, ornamental cabbages. To get to their preferred room, which is nearly always free, they take the lift up two floors, turn left along the corridor through another set of doors, then follow the hallway to the end. She likes this ritual for the sense of building anticipation, but also because of the distance it puts between them and the world outside. It’s the entrance to their parallel universe, where they can be excused anything.

  At first these encounters would end with her saying tearfully, ‘We can’t do this again, we mustn’t,’ but they’ve dropped the act now. Any attempt at delusion seems cheap next to what they have. Which is what exactly? Neither of them has said. If they tried to put it into words, they might talk about falling hard, about having no choice: ‘I can’t help myself,’ as if there is some force greater than themselves at work, and they are powerless to stop it. They might say that when they are together no one else exists, that they need each other in the same way their bodies need oxygen. Of course they believe this to be true, but it is convenient to couch it in such notions. It allows them to abdicate responsibility for their actions. It also sounds better than admitting they book a hotel by the hour to have a lunchtime fuck.

  At the door they kiss. They always do this. It’s a tease, an opener. They are on the threshold of consuming each other again. He’s still kissing her as he puts the key card in the door and pushes it open. Pushes her inside.

  He’s so tight against her the heat makes her indistinct, like she is melting into him and doesn’t care about anything else. Nothing else matters.

  He moves down to kiss her neck and she feels the pressure of his mouth on her skin. She didn’t know she had so many nerve endings, millions of them concentrated in that one spot, the way he makes them sing. With a single finger he traces the line down her spine.

  She can’t stop this, even if she wanted to. And she doesn’t want him to stop.

  She commits it all to memory to sustain her when he’s not here.

  Her eyes are closed to provide a canvas on which to play the memory. It’s always the hotel room, a younger Sam, a different Melody, the fantasy of anticipation, of wanting him. Who would have known that years later, those lunchtime fucks would still be sustaining her.

  ‘Good night,’ Sam says. ‘Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch,’ he laughs.

  ‘Good night,’ she says.

  She waits until she hears his deep, rhythmic breaths before she reaches over to her bedside cabinet and finds a little yellow pill which she takes to obliterate the day.

  Wednesday is a typical day for Melody. The calendar shows that her personal trainer Erin, a gangly Australian with a big smile and a mouth packed with white teeth, will arrive at 11.30 a.m., which gives her ample time to track her imminent deliveries. There is a colour-coded chopping board set designed to reduce food contamination arriving by DHL today. Although when she checks she notes that this has not even left the depot for dispatch. On the other hand, the new set of pure Egyptian supersoft bath towels in charcoal is due to be delivered around two o’clock, when Erin will be leaving. Perfect timing, she thinks.

  ‘It’s bewtiful out there,’ Erin says with her Aussie lilt when she arrives.

  Melody sticks her head around the door and feels the touch of warm air on her face. The sky glares at her. Even though it’s mid September, it still feels like summer.

  ‘Shall we stick to the garden today?’ Erin suggests. At more than an acre, it’s big enough to accommodate her interval training. She agrees. They start by running around the perimeter to warm up. They chat, or rather Erin does most of the talking to give Mel her twice-weekly update on her boyfriend, or ‘the actor’ as he is known between them with a nod to irony. In all the time she has known Erin, his only screen appearance has been as an extra on Holby City.

  Today Erin has big news. He has a part in a BBC daytime drama, filmed it months ago but it airs this afternoon. Melody has never seen the actor but has collected a detailed picture of him from Erin’s descriptions; dark, handsome, louche.

  ‘It’s on at one thirty; we could watch it when we finish.’

  ‘Deal.’ She would be happy to have Erin stay all day, all week if she offered.

  They come to a halt. Melody knows the drill: lunges, squats, star jumps, then she rolls her body on her hips clockwise and anticlockwise. She is loose, ready to go, like a dog itching to get out of the traps.

  ‘All set?’ Erin asks. She holds the stopwatch out in front of her. Melody nods.

  ‘Go.’

  It’s the high-intensity interval trainin
g Melody likes best. She finds comfort in the repetition. Thirty seconds running nearly full out, then a break of sixty, then again for sixty seconds followed by a break of one minute twenty. She loses herself in the exertion of these short bursts of speed, enjoys the sensation her burning lungs give her. She pushes through it, clearing the yellow pill fog in her head. When she first started training, the lactic acid would build in her legs and drag her down. After five minutes she was unable to move let alone run. Now she barely feels it. She imagines each sprint pushing oxygen-rich blood through her body, her muscles programmed to use it more efficiently, her stride longer, more confident. Erin has taken to calling her ‘the machine’ because she doesn’t want to stop. Ever. It’s the only time she is sure she’s alive, aware of the forward momentum.

  After the running, the sit-ups. Erin holds her legs and Melody springs up and up again, stomach muscles engaging. She never dreamt she could have a body like this, the muscle definition, the six-pack. When Erin tells her she is finished, she lies back on the grass, looks up to the sky, closes her eyes and listens out for her reward: the sound of her pumping heart, the reassurance of it.

  Over lunch of carrot and lentil soup, Erin starts talking about a half marathon she thinks Melody should do.

  ‘You’re ready for it, honestly, it seems like a waste to do all this training and not compete.’

  ‘There’d be too many people around.’

  ‘But it would give you a new challenge.’ Even Erin wants to see progress. Don’t stop moving. Melody thinks of the Great South Run she did with her dad when she was a teenager, the crowds; you couldn’t run for tripping over people. The collective march of feet and people waving and screaming, ‘On yer go,’ at the roadside.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She sees Erin look at her, searching for the thing she can’t understand.

  At 1.30 they turn the TV on for Doctors. The actor, Erin explains, is playing a cancer patient who is refusing treatment and drinking weird concoctions from a quack instead. They settle down with a cup of herbal tea. ‘His first appearance is three minutes in,’ Erin tells her. Doctors is not the kind of TV Melody watches so she’s not familiar with the storylines. There’s a shot of the waiting room, assembled patients, and Erin shouts so loudly Melody almost spills her tea: ‘That’s him.’