Do you understand? I can’t say this. This is too hard to say.’
She covered her face and then she looked at me again and she was going to cry.
‘Carly. All of it is for us.’
‘No. Half of it is for you.’
She was crying and that made me cry. I got up and grabbed her and held her. ‘You dumb fuck. What is this? What are you talking about? You can’t buy me-not-loving-you.’
‘We haven’t been good,’ said Carly, into my shoulder. ‘You and me. We haven’t been good in a long time and we know that. I got out.’ She squeezed me hard.
I was crying so hard.
She said, ‘These past weeks have been amazing, Myeong. It reminded me what we used to be like. Who we were then.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I got out.’
‘It can – be like this – all the time,’ I lied.
Hard to speak. Crying too hard.
‘No. Can’t.’
‘Forget I said anything – okay? Go back to – before I said whatever I – said.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Go back.’
‘It’s nothing you said. There’s nothing you could have said.’
‘Carly – I – will get – a good – normal – job.’
We stayed up all night. I fought hard to keep her, even just for a little longer. And a couple times I nearly did.
§
Okay.
The next morning I took the stairs like ten at a time.
Our stairwell has always been filled with dusty, locked-up bikes, like some super-evolved form of cobweb. My calf scratched against a pedal and made it spin.
In the vestibule I checked in my purse for my keys. Deeper in the building, in a spree of shadows in a doorway, two old guys stood chatting. One I kind of recognised, a neighbour. ‘You haven’t fallen out?’ he was saying to the other old guy, in a brazen we-all-have-our-own-lives-and-our-own-dramas kind of way.
‘That’s not it,’ said the other old guy. ‘I told her that I would boil the kettle to wash and shave.’
‘But she thinks of you as her guest, not her nephew,’ said my neighbour.
‘She is a lady of that dispensation,’ said the other.
I was crackling with energy. Maybe that’s what the expression ‘in shock’ really means.
My nameless neighbour caught my eye and smiled, a smile in a tiny spotlight cut by the chickenwire-repaired frosted glass. I smiled back.
‘She doesn’t want me,’ added the other, shrugging a cope of shadows, ‘to see the house in that state.’ He started to turn his head toward me.
Outside it was sunny but crisp. I wanted to sprint to the mouth of the cul-de-sac. Too much coffee.
There was a sudden spring shower that splashed on my glasses and stopped.
A low-frequency ‘chunk’ sounded by my hip. I tilted my face, and the chequered green and yellow in the corner of my eye crystallised into an ambulance-car, parked a bit wonky. A sturdy paramedic with a shaved head and the crispest ever shirt strode up the cul-de-sac toward me, holding his car-key in one hand and his roll and coffee in the other.
His eyes were averted and he wore that troubled, amused expression so common in the shimmering world nowadays – like I was his Trainee Barista, taking forever to clean a foam spillage from his tray.
I swang myself around and skipped as we passed. I smelled bacon and I bet he smelled Jean Patou and Colgate and no shower.
A triplet of swallows shot across the mouth of the cul-de-sac.
On the bus shelter a hundred feet away, the rolling display aligned a small, precise figure in a bikini with the droplet of finished rain that was slipping down my glasses all spiky with sunshine.
As I walked by the park the ‘Buggy Bootcamp’ fitness mommies were thundering down the path by the tennis courts. A batch of newborn babies, trussed up tight in their prams, all boggled their eyes as they came round the bend. Their cheeks flapped back.
I took off my glasses and wiped them.
It was kind of cheesy but it was kind of beautiful. The whole idea of getting out when the market was high.
Breaking up when you’re at your happiest.
I can’t really expect anyone else to understand. It’s one of those weird coupley things you can’t explain to other people.
Bye Carly.
Also by Jo Lindsay Walton
Invocation (Critical Documents 2013)
jolindsaywalton.blogspot.com
@jolwalton
Afterword
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Marta and the Demons Page 9