The Delusionist

by Rachel Mathias

  “I don’t want anything to get in the way. Especially….” She paused for effect, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head down in the manner of a school mistress peering over her glasses. “Especially…. Not men.” She looked at me, head slightly wobbling, then at Maddie, who was furiously trying to change the music which had taken on a rather sombre tone, then accepted the water and drank two sips before setting it back down on the table, precariously balanced half on and half off a coaster. I reached out to adjust it and half-heard Caro’s last words before she heaved herself up and let herself be swept into a slow dance with James. I think she said “No more silly misunderstandings, girls.”

  Harry was waiting online for me and when I read his last message the phone buzzed in response.

  “Hey babe, how you doing?” His voice was slightly slurred. I took comfort in the presumption that since I could hear that, I must be stone cold sober myself.

  “I’m so happy. It’s all been amazing. I have had such a great evening, such a great weekend. I am so lucky. I don’t deserve this really.” I was almost tearful. I get like that when I’m overwhelmed, feeling the love…

  “What do you mean, you don’t deserve it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t always been the best person I could have been. Caro, she’s the one with the birthday, brought it up just now, about me and Maddie having had a bit of a misunderstanding in the past, and I just felt so undeserving suddenly. You make a mistake, and people forgive you, and that’s just, well, I’m too lucky.”

  I was ranting. The drink was talking, but Harry didn’t seem to notice, and didn’t want to know about the thing with Maddie, which was a relief.

  “I’m missing you baby. Only met you once, but feels like we’ve been together a long time.”

  “I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Where have you been tonight?”

  “What do you mean? Nowhere.” His tone was abrupt.

  “Just – did you go out, or whatever?” I felt chastised. And now I felt nosey, jealous, over-inquisitive. Drunkenness gave way to sobriety in an instant. I felt the adrenaline rush through my body.

  “No baby, I’ve been working.”

  “How’s it going? The work?” I was stumbling now, reaching for safer ground.

  “Oh, same old. All good.”

  “On target?”

  “Yes, so far, I think.”

  “You’re up late.”

  “I’m always up late baby, I told you, remember? I do online share dealing, so it’s the markets. Got to stay up late to keep it all rolling.”

  “Ah. You’re a wheeler dealer. I almost forgot.” Had he told me that? Had he told me about his motorbike accident? I felt as if I was constantly playing catch-up, a forgetful granny being reminded that grandpa was dead and that the corner shop had closed forty years ago.

  “Sorry.” I added. Trying to iron out the rumpled conversation with pacifying words was becoming a habit of mine. But my heartbeat had subsided. I needed to be less jumpy.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you baby.”

  “Me too.”

  It was a relief to hang up this time. My performance on the phone had been shaky at best. The reviews would be damning. I put it down to nerves but resolved to keep live chat to a minimum and stick to texting if I wasn’t going to make myself look like a paranoid idiot.

  After a messy brunch on Sunday, Caro and James were waved off by the full cohort, and we trudged back indoors to repair the general devastation, wrap leftovers in cellophane and divide up the remains of the cake between us. Jess and Jason were last to leave in the afternoon, along with Maya, who had been planning on staying an extra night but didn’t fancy playing gooseberry or being murdered in her bed by a psychopath, which was understandable. There was a sombre mood on the drive as we hugged goodbye. They were worried about leaving me alone in a manor house with a strange man I’d met for twenty minutes. I thought that was the most exciting thing imaginable. A WhatsApp check-in group was created. I promised to provide regular updates.

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Maya climbed out of the car and pulled out her phone. “It’s what I do with my kids. Well, it's what they do, and basically the only way I communicate with them.”

  She opened up Snapchat, an app I had downloaded out of curiosity but had rarely used, and showed me how to use a map feature I didn’t know even existed.

  “Because I have enabled it on my phone as well, we can always see where each other is.” She opened up the app on her own phone and zoomed in on two miniature versions of us, snuggling together in the middle of a map of Dorset.

  “Well that’s going to be really useful – knowing which county I’m in,” I said.

  “Oh it goes much more specific than that.” She zoomed in further, and there we were, just off Main Street, with the Larder Café just half a mile down the road. I nodded in reluctant admiration. Then Maddie appeared on the same map, a cute blonde avatar with worryingly purple eyelids. “Ta daa,” she said.

  I zoomed out, and saw Sadie in London, last seen an hour ago at school. I could get used to this, I thought.

  “Sadie will have enabled it too. You can’t see just anyone, you can’t even see your own friends, unless they allow it.” Maya was on a roll here, the new technology consultant, the bridge between middle aged parents and their unwieldy offspring.

  “Okay, you got me. That is genius.” We said our goodbyes with renewed confidence, and I felt extra safe, a little too safe perhaps, knowing they would be able to follow my every move.

  “Just don’t go into ghost mode,” she called out of the window.

  I could imagine what that was.

  And the next person I saw that day was Harry.

  PART 2

  Chapter 7

  Flamingo

  I have a tendency, despite my acute awareness of it, to take control of situations. I deliberately never use the phrase “control freak” because it is overused and has exclusively negative connotations. In my experience, most of us who wear that label have simply lost their ability to trust. We have somehow learnt that leaving things to others to organize just won’t do, and I’m thinking mainly about women who have had children and done the bulk of the childcare, on top of their job and organising what remains of their social life. The moment they hand little Felix over to Daddy he will without a shadow of a doubt run into the road, wet his pants and shoot the neighbours’ cat. Therefore, we have no choice but to be in charge, of everything, at all times. Then we complain we are too exhausted for anything fun and you can pretty much go straight to divorce. Do not pass go, and don’t collect £200, just times it by 100 and hand it over to the lawyer.

  True to type, I was keen to take some control over the afternoon with Harry before it even started. I had had the marvellous idea of collecting him from the station and driving him blindfold to Monkey World, whereupon we would have the kind of perfect day Lou Reed sang about. I watched him walking down the platform and relished those moments before he saw me. I took in his stature, his ruddy features, the languor of his gait, and allowed myself to imagine being held tight in an embrace that had been so many agonising weeks coming.

  He spotted me in the car park just as he was crossing the footbridge, silhouetted against the sun and gave me a wave. I was leaning against the car, one foot up behind me against the door, looking like some sort of flamingo, holding my phone in sweaty hands. Phones are like mummies and daddies. Holding our phone, we are holding their hand– it makes us safe, keeps us in touch with the ones who pull the strings, wear the trousers, call the shots. I wondered whether I should run up to him and leap into his arms or wait for him to saunter over to me at his leisure, then I settled for something in between and met him half way, in the middle of the car park where we took centre stage for all to see. Swinging his rucksack over his shoulder, he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. There was a split second when I felt a strange urge to apologise, make an excuse, sympathise with his hot and lengthy journey, but he cut
me off by suggesting we go to the pub.

  Last orders on a Sunday were at 2pm. Alcohol would oil the wheels of this unconventional encounter. I looked at him and knew I would be safe. Monkey world was shelved and never mentioned. I texted the check-in group while he went to the loo to say it was all fine, and the relief of letting go of the reins flooded through me.

  “Cheers baby.” He was back before I’d even pressed send. Reaching over my shoulder, he lifted the Guinness to his lips and gulped thirstily.

  “Texting already?”

  I turned the phone over. “No, that can wait. You were quick!”

  “Cheers,” he said again.

  “Thanks for coming down,” I said.

  “The pleasure is all mine. How are you feeling?” He sat down opposite me at the picnic table.

  “I’m okay. I’m more than okay. How was the journey?”

  “Long, hot, but I got some work done. It’s all good.” He took another swig. “God, that’s good. I’m a bit hungover.”

  “Hungover? I thought….”

  “I don’t think you can talk, can you? I’ve seen the videos, remember…”

  I did remember sending him the three-man version of Oops Upside Your Head, with barely audible soundtrack. He had a point.

  “What did you drink?” I asked him.

  “Oh, some wine, and a friend came round, and then we had some lemon vodka, at least I think it was lemon.”

  “Oh, so happy hair of the dog then.” We clinked glasses.

  And of course I was actually wondering which friend? And why he hadn’t mentioned it last night on the phone. But you don’t ask, in case you look jealous, and we had vowed that we would never be jealous, like Craig had been.

  I talked about me, then he talked about him. I was confused about the chronology, and made him tell me again where he’d lived and when, how the partners and children fitted into his roaming life. How he had split up with them, how his relationships were now with the exes, with the kids. He padded out the gaps in my knowledge of him so I could tell it back to him almost perfectly. I felt like a spy in training, adopting a new identity, practising a false narrative to deliver to my captors in case of discovery and torture. He stopped at the last break-up, leaving ten years of occasional dating to my imagination. I inferred that no woman had made the grade or made enough of an impression to warrant talking about. I wasn’t curious enough to ask about previous lovers, and was grateful that we slipped the thorny subject of sex with other partners into sanitised packages of heavily censored information.

  “What do you want to do?” I checked the time on my phone. At two thirty, the night was very young, in fact several hours off yet.

  “How about we go back to the house, I dump my stuff and get changed and we go for a walk?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I was letting him take the lead. It was a new feeling, and a good one.

  “We can take a bottle of wine, go and sit in a field somewhere.”

  I was happy to let it play out. The sun had suddenly come out of hiding to beam down its celestial approval, for the first time in two days.

  My phone rang as we drove up to the front door, and I took the call while letting Harry in. He motioned for permission to explore, and I stepped into the garden to talk. It was Adam, asking about various things to do with the kids, telling me our fifteen-year-old son had come back drunk on gin from a party the night before. Adam said he just wanted to let me know so that I could reinforce the no-boozing message on my return. Either that, or he was instinctively calling me to check I was okay.

  He has always had a bit of a sixth sense about me being with other men. He has had his own non-stop stream of post-divorce girlfriends, but I always felt the tension between us when it came to any new partner of mine. It sparked a sense of shame and guilt in me, which I knew of course to be my own, not his responsibility. We are in charge of our emotional reactions to others, I am told by every single book I read on the subject. If I explored my guilt I would probably find it rooted in fear, fear I’d done the wrong thing, that I’d hurt him, should have tried harder, when the reality of it was we had squeezed every drop out of our marriage until there was nothing left, dragged it from therapy room sofa to the lawyer’s boardroom table, only to have it confirmed by decree that it was long dead, and that this was nobody’s fault.

  I turned back to the house, to find Harry emerging from the front door holding a glass of white wine. I hung up the phone and must have looked slightly too long at his glass because he said

  “What’s the matter babe? Is it the wine?”

  He knew.

  “Yes.” I just said it, hesitantly, but I said it. “Yes, it’s the wine.”

  “I’m not Craig, baby.”

  “I know you’re not.” I lied.

  At that moment, he was everything I couldn’t bear about Craig. Until that moment, I had done my best to brush aside my instinct that his drinking went beyond the limits of the “socially acceptable”. One Monday afternoon he had rung me from a bar, after a meeting with a client, and by the end of our conversation, he seemed to be most of the way through a bottle of wine. His voice had begun to slur, but I was too busy taking it all in. The words, I’m falling for you babe, whether slurred or not, produced a ripple of delicious excitement through my body. The fact was that the more he drank, the more he was in love with me, which is all I wanted, or so I thought.

  “Let’s go for a walk then.”

  Aside from the correlation between alcohol and declarations of love, I was trying to normalise the parts of Harry that unsettled me, because I wanted to believe him. If he was real, then I was wonderful, and he was filling a gaping hole in my self-esteem that needed that assurance. I was playing out a familiar pattern, dancing around waiting for his approval. He probably spotted me a mile off.

  The best way to normalise someone else’s drinking is to drink with them. Two alcoholics together can easily rationalise the activity for each other to the point that they become reliant on each other facilitating it. I packed a rucksack with a bottle of wine and two glasses and a bag of Doritos and put on my trainers and sunglasses. Harry was tying his shoelaces meticulously. I watched him for a second, puzzled that someone could take such pains to get each loop exactly the right size, double knotting it over the top for extra security. He caught my eye.

  “You alright, babe?” That was to become the chorus in the soundtrack to our relationship, but had already changed its tone from a carefree “orrright?” to something more concerned, more laden with meaning I couldn’t quite capture.

  If you go for a walk with someone you don’t know, in a place you don’t know, it’s a chance to find things out about each other, not just in conversation, but in the way someone walks, where they want to get to, the landmarks they point out, the route they take. It’s a micro- life journey. Harry and I didn’t take any paths at any point. It was a wild and random walk. After a few minutes, we came to a gate into the next field that said “Private Property, KEEP OUT”. I know I had been down a path two days earlier with a sign saying “danger of death” but that was a public footpath, and the military must have to follow public safety rules for insurance purposes, so the danger was in all likelihood minimal. But to me, Keep Out means Keep Out. Makes me think of Peter Rabbit and Mr McGregor. Harry just laughed and looked at me with incomprehension.

  “You’re so funny. What are you scared of?”

  “I don’t know. Being shot?”

  “You won’t get shot. People do this all the time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look, it’s a field of sheep. Now if we came piling in with a pack of mad dogs that would be another matter, but we’re not doing any harm, we’re just walking through. How bad can it be?”

  I agreed to do it, because it was the only way forward anyway, and the hills beyond looked too enticing. As we neared the other side, he gave me a squeeze.

  “You see? It wasn’t so bad was it?”

  I shook
my head and smiled. I felt small, scared, naïve, but exhilarated.

  “Shall we aim for that tree over there?”

  I followed his pointing finger. A lonely oak stood in a fallow field, strangely out of place, stark against the horizon. I looked to the right where a path led up a hill to an invisible other world. I wanted to see what other world it was.

  “Can’t we go a bit further up?”

  He didn’t take much persuading. He knew his own mind but was easy about having his plans adjusted. We weren’t disappointed. The higher we climbed, the more of this other world, this middle earth, revealed itself. Like the sun suddenly emerging, this was another Truman Show set thrown together at the last minute to meet our change of plan. I could imagine the directors putting the last prop in place just as we rounded the corner. It looked brand new. Strange structures, of different shapes and sizes, colours and materials, were scattered about the grass. Cuboids, cubes, indefinable forms, made of wood, stones, grass, like a sparse futuristic graveyard. Across the summit of the hill, three giant tombs, each topped with a haystack, like double ended sunbeds, stood squarely against the sky.

  “Horse jumps.” This was like the shout out round in the quiz. Sally would have loved it here. I stopped to take photos with my phone and noticed my battery was dying.

  We made our way towards the biggest one, climbed on top and settled ourselves at each end, head against haystack, legs stretched out towards each other, not touching. Harry poured the wine and handed me a glass. It was only four thirty. I felt a warmth around me that was more than the heat of the sun.

  “I knew you’d ask me to come down.”

  “Did you? I didn’t,” I lied again.

  “Honestly? I think you knew you’d ask, and you knew I’d say yes.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  We talked about who we were, what we wanted, described our fantasy homes, a sprawling farmhouse overlooking the sunflower fields of the Dordogne (me), an Italian olive plantation with all profits going to the local villagers (him). We went back over our initial conversations, each remembering something the other had forgotten, raking over the detail to find the moment where we had moved on, become closer, made this inevitable, the moment when he knew he was falling for me, and when he realised that we were meant to be together.