by Fred Crawley
“You know what I’m talking about,” Gwen said.
He opened his mouth to protest, but he didn’t. “Sorry,” he said.
They fell back into silence. Nathan sipped his drink. Gwen sipped hers. He was more worried about what she thought of him now than he had when they’d first begun dating. It was a delicate line to walk between showing her that he could handle just being friends and letting her know that it would take just one word from her for him to marry her and spend the rest of their lives together.
The thought that he wouldn’t be spending the rest of his life with her was depressing on a scale he could hardly stand. He hoped that Dr. Springer appreciated how lucky he was and then he hoped that he got hit by a bus.
“How’s your brother?” Nathan asked, more for something to say than because he actually cared. He was desperate to show Gwen that they could be friends and part of that was avoiding too many awkward silences. He wanted to show her that he was still fun to be around.
“He’s fine,” she said.
Usually, she would have spoken for ages about her family but she didn’t. Nathan worried that he had upset her with his comment about Marcus, but he wasn’t about to apologise for it. “Are you okay?” he said.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were blue and wide. She looked as if she might start crying. Her left hand was on the table and it wasn’t very long ago that seeing her like this he would have taken it and tried to offer her comfort. But that was a boyfriend and girlfriend thing and definitely not the sort of thing that two ex’s trying to be friends should do.
For a brief moment, Nathan considered how Dr. Romero would be proud of him for realising the distinction. Then he reached out and took her hand anyway and she didn’t flinch or try to pull away. “What is it Gwen?” he said.
She shook her head and now there were tears in her eyes. “It’s nothing, I’m just being silly.”
He held her hand more firmly but didn’t repeat his question. They had lived together for more than a year and been intimate for twice as long before that. He knew Gwen like he’d never known anyone else. She would tell him when she was ready.
“His girlfriend’s pregnant,” Gwen said.
“Who?” Nathan said while he was thinking, please let it be Marcus, please let him be cheating on her. It was a terrible thing to hope, but he couldn’t stop himself. He wondered how many steps back in his recovery it put him.
“Who do you think?” Gwen sniffed. “Amanda, Lewis’ girlfriend.”
“Oh,” Nathan said. He tried not to feel disappointed. Gwen’s hand twitched in his and he moved away before she could comment on the situation and make it awkward. His hand felt empty without hers in it. He watched her wipe her eyes. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“It’s great,” Gwen said. “I’m very happy for them.”
Nathan stared towards the dance floor where three boys who looked like students were clumsily dancing. It wasn’t much past nine o’clock, but they were already stumbling drunk.
He tried to understand Gwen’s reaction to what she had told him, but he didn’t. People having babies was supposed to be a good thing, wasn’t it? He was sure that people had parties and things to celebrate it. So why wasn’t Gwen happy? It was at times like this that he was forced to accept that he really did need Dr. Romero’s help still. The world was a confusing place because people didn’t just say what they meant and he couldn’t read their minds.
“How’s work?” Nathan said. He was getting near the end of his drink, but Gwen had hardly touched hers. She was still wearing her coat and he had the feeling that she might get up and walk out at any moment.
“Do you want to go outside?” she said.
“What for?” Nathan said.
She still had her handbag on her lap as well. She reached into it and pulled out the corner of a blue cigarette packet.
“You’re smoking again?”
She nodded and didn’t say that it had been a difficult time for her, but he knew it was what she thought. She’d used the crash and whatever was going on with her brother as an excuse. He tried not to feel annoyed with her about that and found that it was easy, that he was glad of the excuse as well.
They carried their drinks down the stairs, past the pool tables and out the back door. The smoking area was lit with fairy lights that hung from three of the four walls. There were some tables but it was cold, verging on frosty, and only the most committed smokers had set up permanent camp out there. Most of them were standing as close to the heat lamps as they could get or as close to the doors as they could get away with.
Gwen offered him the packet and he took a cigarette, wondering how long it had been since he’d last smoked. Two years maybe. It felt like no time at all as he lit it and inhaled the smoke. He felt immediately better for it.
“How’s Julia getting on?” Nathan said. She was the teacher who had been brought in to teach his year fives after the crash, a favoured supply teacher at Thornhill that he had worked with before.
“Good,” Gwen said. She blew smoke upwards and it vanished into the burning red element of the lamp. “The kids miss you, though.”
He nodded. He missed them as well but the chances of him ever being allowed to teach again were so small you would need an electron microscope to see them. No school was going to risk employing someone who’d had a mental breakdown as spectacular as his. At the moment, he wasn’t even allowed to stop by and say hello.
They smoked and Gwen finished her drink. She went inside and bought them another. They stood outside and smoked and for a while it felt like old times. Like it had been when they’d first started dating and had both been smokers. The noise of the other people isolated them and Nathan wished more than anything that it wouldn’t be totally inappropriate to lean over and kiss her. She was giving him all the signals that she wanted him to do so.
Halfway through the second drink she was laughing and touching his arm. He had to remind himself that this was because she was comfortable with him and that was a good thing. If he tried to kiss her now, it would ruin everything and she might never agree to come out for a drink with again. It was confusing.
He tried to enjoy being in the presence of her while he could because even he knew that their relationship was in a kind of limbo that couldn’t last forever. Soon they would either have to get back together or fall apart forever, the current situation could never last.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” Nathan said.
Gwen finished the last of her drink and put the empty glass down on one of the tables. He had finished his long enough ago that one of the bar staff had already collected it. She took her phone out of her bag and looked at the time. “I can’t,” she said.
“What time is it?” Nathan said.
“Gone eleven,” she said. “I need to get home.”
“Early start tomorrow?” Nathan said. When they had been living together and both teachers they would have been in bed by now. If they were still together there was nowhere else, he would rather be than in bed next to her.
Gwen shook her head. “Marcus is coming over.”
“Tonight?” Nathan said. He hoped that he managed to keep the disappointment from her but, while he was unable to read her mind, she had frequently appeared to be able to read his.
“He works shifts,” Gwen said. The happiness that he had seen rising in her face over the last few hours had vanished. He wondered if it was the thought of seeing Marcus that had done it and hoped that it was.
“I’ll walk you to your bus stop,” he said.
They left the bar together. Gwen was stumbling slightly and after a few metres she reached out and grabbed his arm. She lit another cigarette and handed it to him. They walked through quiet streets towards the station without saying a word. When her bus stop came into view, she leaned her head against his shoulder and seemed to say, without any words, that she was sorry for what she had done to him and that she wished that things could have been differen
t.
CHAPTER 5
THE ICE HAD SETTLED BEFORE HE MADE IT home, but Nathan hardly noticed. The lack of food, the alcohol and being with Gwen had left him in a happy state of confusion. Thoughts flew around in his head too quickly for him to grasp and examine and after a while he stopped trying. In one night, he had held her hand and she’d kissed him. It had just been a peck on the cheek but still, that was something to treasure. He wondered if she would tell Dr. Marcus Springer about it.
He stood at the top of the stoop in front of the bright red door and fumbled for his keys. He could see lights on through the frosted glass semi-circle at the top of the door and heard voices that might have been a television or actual people. Unlocking the door, he went inside. The warmth hit him immediately.
Nathan closed the door behind him and walked down the long narrow corridor. The first door he passed was open slightly and he could hear two people talking about a football game they had watched earlier. The words were lost on Nathan as he continued along, past the stairs and into the kitchen.
It smelled of half a dozen different meals and looked like someone had set a bomb off. Cups and plates and pans and plastic containers were piled up next to the sink and in it. There were no lights on. Nathan felt the happy mood that he had carried all the way home start to falter. He didn’t understand how anyone could leave a mess like this.
He opened a cupboard to get out a glass, but there weren’t any there. There weren’t even any cups that he could use as a glass. He crouched down and opened the cupboard beneath, but there wasn’t anything he could use there either. He reached into his pocket to see if he had any loose change.
If he’d known he was going to come home to a mess like this, he would have stopped at the shop and bought himself a drink. But he should have known; this was hardly the first time the people he lived with had done this. If he went into the communal living room, he would probably have found every cup and glass that they owned half full on the coffee table or the floor.
He took out three coins, but they were all copper. He had five pence to his name. The nearest cash machine was back in town and the corner shop wouldn’t take card. He considered leaning over the sink and scooping handfuls of water into his mouth, but there was still the matter of dinner: he had a shelf in the fridge full of food but nothing to cook it in or eat it with. When he had lived with Gwen nothing like this would have happened: they had a strict understanding about who did what around the house.
There was a clock above the fireplace. It was quarter to twelve. Nathan considered going into the living room and telling whoever was in there to wash up their stuff, but he wasn’t so crazy as to think he would actually do it. It was more likely that he would just give up and go to bed, hungry and thirsty and praying that someone would wash up before he woke in the morning. He’d done it before, but then he’d woken up to the same mess and ended up having to wash up everything before he could even make breakfast.
Nathan sighed and tried to hold onto the happiness that he had felt earlier. He rolled up his sleeves and walked to the sink. It was full of half soaked pans covered in something brown and crusty. It seemed impossible to believe that six people could make so much mess. He emptied the sink and had to use the kitchen table to pile up the overflow. He rinsed out the plastic washing up bowl and told himself that he was only going to wash a cup, a plate and some cutlery so that he could eat something.
Twenty minutes later he turned around at the sound of his name. A tall, thin girl, who he hadn’t seen before, was standing at the door to the living room. She was dressed in loose fitting dungarees with a black t-shirt beneath. She looked as if she’d just woken up.
“Hi,” Nathan said and then turned back to the washing up. Just a few things for himself had turned into: ‘might as well wash up until the water needs changing’, which had turned into: ‘there’s no point leaving it half done’.
“I’m Libby,” the girl said. Judging by the closeness of her voice she had crossed the room and was standing behind him now.
“Nathan,” he said without turning back to face her.
“I know,” she said.
“You’re new?” he said. He put a half-rusted frying pan on the draining board and wondered why she wasn’t offering to dry up for him. It would have been the polite thing to do.
“Just moved in today. Didn’t they tell you?”
Nathan shook his head. They hadn’t told him anything.
“Why are you doing the washing up?” Libby said. She was standing close enough to him that he could feel the heat from her breath and smell the bitter spirit that she had been drinking. She put her arms around him and he wasn’t sure what was going on.
“What are you doing?” Nathan said.
“Helping you,” Libby said.
Nathan looked down and saw her bare arms. Her skin was china white, but jagged red lines ran beneath the surface. Scars that had healed and then been opened again repeating the dance of self-harm again and again. For a moment, he couldn’t think of anything other than to wonder what they had put her away for in the end. The self-harm had obviously been happening for a long time, what had been the final straw that had gotten her committed?
“It’s fine,” Nathan said. He stepped away from her and she made no effort to stop him. “There’s nothing to do really. I just-- I wanted to get a bowl clean for breakfast.”
“Where are you going?” Libby said. She stood at the sink and looked at him with big sad eyes. Two broken people had no business being together, it suddenly seemed insane that he was living in a house full of them.
Nathan grabbed hold of the door frame. His head swam as reality fell apart and rebuilt itself around him. For a moment, nothing was real but the possibility existed that everything was. Potential energy coursed through him and he closed his eyes.
“Are you okay?” Libby said.
Nathan opened his eyes and found out that he had fallen and was now leaning against the door. He was surprised that Libby was still there, that the half-way house full of crazy people was real. He had been sure it was all in his head.
He pushed himself to his feet. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired. It’s been a long day.”
Libby smiled at him, but he could see that she was unsettled by his behaviour. He turned away and walked back along the hallway to the stairs and then up to his bedroom.
There was a single bed beneath a slim window, a bedside table, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers. Most of it was empty because he no longer owned very much.
Nathan closed the door behind him and sat on the bed. It squeaked and he felt the old springs digging into him. He sat for a moment staring at the door. It was all so familiar, but it had been before. Familiarity was no guarantee of reality and vice-versa. He needed to remember what was real, but sometimes he didn’t even know if he could trust his memory.
He lay down on the bed and reached under the pillow. His fingers brushed against the wool cuff and for a moment it was enough to enjoy the sensation. Then he pulled out the black jumper and held it against his face. He could still smell her on it. When he closed his eyes, it was as if she was there with him.
CHAPTER 6
THE WAITING ROOM HAD BEEN CLEANED RECENTLY. NATHAN could smell the disinfectant and see cloth marks on the brightly coloured chairs either side of him. He was sitting on a lime green stool with a white stool in front of him, a blue one to his left and an orange chair to his right. The tiny old man was sitting on the opposite side of the room, but the rank smell of his sweat was overpowering.
Nathan watched the man while doing his best not to make eye contact. He didn’t mind talking to people while waiting to see Dr. Romero because they were short conversations usually interrupted by the doctor’s secretary before they could get properly started. If he made eye contact with the little man, however, he was afraid he would take it as an invitation to come closer. Nathan didn’t want to find out what the stink was like up close and personal.
The wall
behind Nathan was white with an enlarged section of the Underground printed on it. The lines looked like something vaguely medical, but he recognised the District Line and the Circle Line and even some of the stations. The rest of the walls were pale grey. There was a single door in and out, it was currently half open and Nathan could just about hear the tinny music coming from a radio down the hall.
“Are you here for Dr. Romero?”
Nathan looked up. “Yes,” he said.
“Me too,” the smelly man said.
Nathan held his breath and waited for him to stand up and walk across the room. He didn’t move and after a few moments Nathan began to relax.
“My name’s Chester,” he said.
“Nathan.”
“Have you been coming to see Dr. Romero for long?” Chester said.
Nathan didn’t reply. There was an unspoken rule about engaging people in waiting rooms, or so he thought, you weren’t supposed to talk about the thing you were all waiting for. He wondered if Chester was really there.
“I’ve been coming to him for the last ten years,” Chester said. The fact that Nathan hadn’t answered his question didn’t seem to concern him. “Since I was about your age I would guess.”
Nathan looked more closely at smelly Chester Freight. He thought that he looked more than ten years older than him but probably not much more. He still had all of his hair even if it was thin and plastered to his forehead with grease. He wore thick glasses that made his eyes appear to pop out of his head. He had a checkered shirt and a red tie.
“Do you know the office he was in before this one was terrible,” Chester said. “In the winter it got so cold that the water pipes froze and Dr. Romero had to boil water in a kettle if he wanted something to drink.”
It wasn’t just the smell, Nathan realised. There was something deeply unsettling about Chester; something that seemed to transcend all of his senses. Or maybe it was a combination of them all. He realised that he didn’t want to speak to him.
