Dating : Why I Went, Now I’m Back

Walking up the front path, I remember clearly why I left. The box hedges, so trimmed and present in their perfection. My life, too: well-kept house, well-kept body, well-kept life. Everything so manicured, so gently but firmly shaped, the well-meaning or occasionally daring burst away from conformity quickly and ruthlessly hacked or filed away to bland stupor. I remember so very clearly the day I walked down those stairs, out that door. A day so clear, so bright, so full of possible joy that I simply let myself be led. Down the garden path and far away. Not a moment of intent. Just willed into being by the sky, the sun, the sound of the late morning traffic as it charted its way north, south, east, west, every direction I wanted to be.

Even as I walked, I knew that every step was madness and yet the exigency led me on. I could not have resisted for a second, and knowing this freed me from the conventional worries. No purse, no money, no coat, no cares. I was already gone, only my body was following. Hunger, thirst, desire were all one and nothing and I just knew that if I kept moving, my hunger would be filled, my thirst slaked and my body filled. Just keep moving, away, away.

The path, greyed stone stained dark and rust, mocks me after all these years, twenty and more. So you think you can come back? My fear was, is justified. How can the past have a hold on the future when so much separates us? I was me then, I am me now, only more so. With age comes wisdom, and bravado too. I never was one to bet on the variables. But I think, even now, that to stay would have been sheer folly, the rich man’s kind and I know for sure that I have, even now, only the most rudimentary tools in the great theatre of marital warfare. In the end, I just kept walking, moving on, moving on. Never once did I look back. Until I did.

Now only metres lie between me and the past, me and the future. I am in the moment, I know I am here but I would give a large part of my soul to be anywhere else at all.

When he came looking for me last June, I could tell he was shocked to see the squalor I had so readily embraced. How could the desire for self be stronger than the walls of possession that he so readily offered? I could see him doing the equations: brown rice versus dinner at La Caprice, my brown dirndl flapping madly in the winds of our madness while he clutched firmly but with no small measure of desperation at his Barbour trench coat. I saw him glance at my ring finger and felt his breath settle as he saw the ring still in place. If he hadn’t been so obvious, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed but even now I feel the seeping rage of grief as I remember him grasping at symbols instead of reaching for me. Plus ça change…

I was seventeen when I married him with the blessing of just about every person known to me. His friends spent the evening gloating and imagining me naked, my family and his spent theirs gloating over the sensible merger of two of their most suitable assets. He behaved impeccably at every turn, I simply obeyed. I walked, turned, smiled and nodded on command. Drinks found their way to my trembling hands, I drank. I do not recall saying yes, I do, I will. All I knew is all I know now: life would always be thus, me two steps behind, nobly vague and always appropriate whilst my bones bleached me slowly but surely into death.

It seemed for a long while as if life was one great choreographed dream and I a bit player, the shadow in the back, a presence unworthy of notice. It was only the greater tragedies that intruded: the babies lost, a womb so fixed with fear that not even the hardiest sperm could serve in its harshly infertile landlay. The sudden and violent death of the adolescent son of the gardener, there one minute, a youth so vibrantly filled with hope that he seemed lit from within, and then in the space of a bullet, noting more than a splash of riotous colour on the walls of the pool house. Genocide and mass murders, dreadful car crashes or lunatics with switchblades — none of these touched me but the greater things came without fail, regular as the tides. A fatality, or many. Every few months or so without fail, I would be dashed to the ground, smote with the tenebrous realisation that nothing could ever be good again.

How could I not think it was me? Us, the toxic mixture of a life spoiled. How could I stay? How could I not have gone?

And here I am again, making my way back with an outward show of confidence and less oxygen in my lungs than is required to breathe. I know that in fewer seconds than it takes to make a life, I will raise my hand and knock, once, twice, firmly as is my right, and ask to be let in. I am not totally unexpected; he must have been waiting for me for years. I will knock, he will open and we will start a conversation we never really began two decades ago. I am ambivalent but resolute. I have nothing to lose. All I can do is hold on. It’s only the breathing that is difficult but then, here, it always has been. I hope and pray the words come easily.

When he opens the door it’s as if the gods have chosen to play a careless, mean-spitited joke. His face is frozen, a ravaged glacier of repressed emotion. His sour sweat and blood-stained eyes cause me to step back and yet my heart leaps forward, compassion to the fore. The mother instinct to heal all wounds rises to bind even this gash, the wound that is and was me and mine.

We stand quietly as the lead ballast of the years drags us down. He is inches away and I could be at the edge of a crevice, peering down. I do not recognise the mania that so clearly rules and ruses the Cartesian blandness that was home to him. He hesitates, offers a hand, withdraws and settles for a soft sigh that could be disillusionment or acceptance. I follow him into the dark shanks of the house, step though careless piles of detritus that is the chronological archaeology of a life misused. The place smells of cats, their putrid ammonia a call to reveille or at least to the late Indian summer that makes the world beyond sing.

He putters, for all the world an ancient member of a long forgotten tribe. It is hard to imagine that once we lived a life, if not together, then not entirely apart. My mind recalls his youthful skin, the milky pallor playing sky to the coarse black hairs of his boyish chest. Now he stands concave, bowed by lack of will and indecision. He offers me Scotch, I accept without comment although it has been more than a lifetime since the bitter taste of alcohol has haunted my palate. I pose the glass on a small table I do not recognise, a table that has surely played out other scenes of love and abuse. He lights a small cigarillo, its fetid odour strangely coherent with the dank rancidity of the house.

We sit in silence and slowly the darkness rolls over us, providing a comfort I had not been competent to imagine. We were the last members of a cavalry long since departed; our duty to hold out holds us upright and yet only the slightest breeze would send us — and the silence that entombs us — crashing to the ground. Hours later, or perhaps minutes, and a bell chimes an indiscriminate message that conveys the passing of time. Is it time to eat, to sleep? Does this house rob us of all anima, so that we exist only in some perverted parallel universe where only the blackest of bodily functions are admitted? He stirs restlessly in his chair and I, fearing drowning, rise up to speak. The words I have turned so long in my head leave my mouth with a violence that astounds me. It is my voice, it is me. As I speak, I can feel the impact of each syllable as it attains it’s target, bulls-eye, direct.

I say it out loud and although I know it will kill me surely as the cancer that has wound its sinuous death dance through every bone and organ of his defeated body, I say it true. I say it all. And then, more gently, I say the last thing I have come to say.

“Will you let me nurse you to the end, here?”

He nods, just once, and strangely I am free.