How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  She hated this bitterness, that sometimes it was the only way to stave off despair. She tried looking out of the window.

  The sky beneath them was dappled with soft clumps of cloud. They looked close enough to reach out to; far, far below lay the sea. It was a standard aeroplane view; familiar yet incomprehensible, this being above the clouds, encased in a heaving mass of metal. This was one of the things that she and Adam had shared: a childish excitement at the wonder of it, a gleeful enjoyment of the paraphernalia of flight. She remembered how acutely, how strangely they had felt it on their way back from New York, a guilty relief after the nervousness of days spent waiting for normal traffic to resume, with the images of those planes and those towers on a loop in the very air that they breathed. When they had at last found themselves in the boarding lounge at JFK, oppressed by the tense jaws and jiggling knees of their fellow travellers, Adam had put his arm around Eva.

  ‘Are you feeling nervous?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, statistically …’

  ‘I know. But still.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  They had all filed on to the plane like a funeral procession, the boarding bridge tight around them, had settled meekly into their seats. Hers was by a window, and Eva had looked out on to the damp, grey, solid world outside, unable not to wonder whether this was to be her final, fiery journey. Then the take-off, the tension of waiting to see whether they would suddenly tilt into an unnatural turn, whether anyone would stab an air hostess in the jugular – and, once they were up and away from the city, the feeling of exhilaration, of having dodged death once more. With what excitement and relief they had explored their onboard entertainment options and greeted the arrival of their first meal tray! They had tugged the covers off their aluminium platters in perfect unison, compared with interest Adam’s chicken tikka to Eva’s baked salmon, while several tons of metal and gasoline hurled them through the air, so precariously safe. Ryanair was more honest than your BAs, your Virgin Atlantics: there was no glitz here to distract you from the creaking and heaving, the superhuman effort that was necessary to save you a few hours’ travel time.

  No, this plastic mode of transport was not doing her journey justice – and yet, perhaps it was. Why kid yourself with illusions of elegance – a high-altitude glass of champagne, a seat you could actually relax in – when all you were was human wreckage, of love deprived, returning to the home you had never set eyes upon?

  IT IS STARTING to acquire the patina of familiarity: a certain clunking of the wheels around this bend, the houses along the railtracks which she can pick out from each other now, the seat she prefers to occupy if she can: facing forwards, of course, on the right, just back from the window, but this is better than the next seat down, which is next to a tiny end of window not big enough to look through properly. There is a window problem, as far as the design of this train is concerned. Who would have thought life would become so suburban so quickly?

  A short, sharp uphill walk which is never as bad as you anticipate it’s going to be, and then she’s home – home. She feels the now familiar proprietorial thrill as she steps through the front door: these wooden floors, this charming fireplace – there’s no denying it’s a nice flat they’ve got themselves here. Why then this faint feeling of dismay that tinges her homecoming?

  She goes straight into the bedroom, puts her bag on the floor, and surveys her kingdom. The bed is pristinely made, ironed covers, proudly solid. It is a good bed. An expensive bed. She notices that, in the far corner of the room, her mother’s samizdat is hanging, newly framed. Bugger. She’s been saying for the past two weeks that she’ll go and buy a frame for it, and now Adam’s gone ahead and done it for her. Eva feels the righteous anger of the slovenly, who would get around to doing the dishes eventually, if only they were given the time. She moves closer and inspects the frame: at least Adam, who is not to be trusted in matters aesthetic, has had the wisdom to go to John Lewis, and it is tasteful if not particularly exciting. Now she resents herself for getting annoyed with him, feels a surge of tenderness towards this man, her husband, but a boy still, really, who takes such good care.

  She looks at the words inside the frame, streaky ink on rough grey paper, the edges damaged by water, calling for freedom, democracy. Her mother’s pseudonym in block letters at the bottom of the page: ‘LUTHER’, in reference to the ninety-five theses hammered to a church door in rebellion against Catholic tyranny. A long, noble history of resistance to oppression.

  Adam is clattering and sizzling in the kitchen, while Eva sits down on the bed and stares out of the window at the knobbles on the tree outside. She is worried about this interview next week. It’s flattering, of course, but being asked to dress down the prime minister feels like punching above her weight, and reawakens her sense of being an emperor in new clothes, her success owed only to flukes and bluster. She is no Luther, that much she knows. She doesn’t have her mother’s toughness, her courage, her moral integrity. Eva is soft, having grown up in more pampered circumstances, is weak, having never been tried.

  She doesn’t have the clout to take on Tony Blair, and she wishes she could be alone to think about it, but she lives with Adam now, and she wonders when married people find time for privacy, for making sure they are still who they think they are.

  Adam pops his head round the door.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  She smiles.

  ‘Yes. Sorry, I’ll come through and give you a hand in a minute. I was just catching my breath.’

  He comes over to her and kisses her fully, tenderly on the lips.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m perfectly happy out there. Take your time.’

  Perhaps this is the time you get for yourself, stolen moments in an adjacent room, with the sound of the other present but removed, a reassuring disturbance. Perhaps this is the exiguous space her inner world will have to inhabit from now on, the price to pay for having a pair of arms around you every night. And yet she loves him. Does Adam have these thoughts? Is he enjoying his brief solitude in the kitchen now, savouring his stolen moment of contemplation before she walks in to break it?

  For the sake of something to do, she bends forward and starts to remove a shoe. But no. Midway, she realizes this is no time for practical, quotidian gestures: this is her time for self-reflection. She reclines back on the bed, one leg still crossed over the other, laces dangling, and looks up at the ceiling, at the desultory lightbulb that hangs in the middle of it. She really must pick up that lampshade. But for now, she must think about Iraq.

  She was there several months ago, in the buzz and heat of the green zone, and the trip was made surreal by the fact that they were in the middle of completing the purchase of the flat, so that her time was divided between face-to-face interviews with obfuscating American officers and satellite phone conversations with Adam and her bank manager. Talking to Adam in particular had unsettled and calmed her all at once: being transported to a cosy nook of middle-class London, when all around her were distant explosions and adrenalin-crazed journalists. At times, she had felt as though she were losing herself, who she was, her mortgage and stylish wardrobe and BFI membership in London seeming impossible in this world of dust and ammunition. At times, Adam’s voice on the end of the crackly line had felt like the only thing that connected her to her supposedly normal life.

  She needs to use this trip to get under Blair’s skin, find an anecdote that will unsettle his smarmy rhetoric.

  A tinkling crash from the kitchen and a muffled string of expletives chase away whatever brainwave she may possibly have been about to have. She allows herself a moment of petulant exasperation at Adam, even though she knows it is unfair since it is hardly his fault that she isn’t feeling very inspired this evening. Then she finishes removing her shoes – the pull of the laces, the tug off her heels are such strangely comforting movements – and goes through to the kitchen.
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  ‘Don’t come in, you haven’t got shoes on!’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  She stands in the doorway, watching her husband gingerly picking tiny pieces of ceramic up off the floor, cradling them in his palm. A pan of Bolognese sauce is spluttering vigorously on the hob behind him. He turns from his crouching position and looks up at Eva with the expression of a guilt-ridden dog.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘What is it you’ve broken?’

  Eva takes a cautious, tiptoeing step into the kitchen – and then she sees: a small, curved piece of incredibly fine porcelain, a delicate pattern of intertwined violets.

  ‘Oh, Adam.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’

  Eva picks up the fragment and sits down at the dining table, staring at it blankly.

  A louder-than-usual hiss from the Bolognese makes Adam twist up and round, lithe as a cat. He gives it a frantic stir, then returns to picking through the wreckage.

  ‘We might be able to stick it back together …’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Look, it’s smashed to smithereens.’

  The venom in her voice makes Adam flinch.

  ‘I’m sorry, I – I don’t know how it happened, I was emptying the dishwasher and I must have put it down too close to the edge of the sideboard or something and … I’m really sorry.’

  She follows the line of a twisting violet, and thinks of how she never really liked the pattern, too floral for her taste, but nevertheless, aside from the samizdat, this was the only thing she had, the only family belonging her mother was able to take with her when she fled East Germany, and an afterthought at that, a tea cup hastily slipped into a pocket in the rush of escape.

  She imagines – has often imagined – her mother huddling into a thick coat in the dead of night, taking one last glance around the family home she will never see again, and suddenly thinking I must take something with me, some keepsake, something tangible into which I can pour my past. Her eyes roving around the room and alighting on the tea set, and, of course, what would make more sense than to take one cup from this complete set to treasure with the knowledge that identical ones are sitting on a shelf back home, to leave this shelf to display the incompleteness of her absence?

  And this incongruously fragile thing somehow survived the perilous journey, this precious heirloom that was then handed down to her, Eva, the only object connecting her back to her grandparents, and now this oaf has gone and broken it by being his usual clumsy self. The frustration, the anger, well up in her eyes, and soon to her own surprise she is sobbing loudly, like an aggrieved toddler.

  Adam, who has been guiltily stirring the spaghetti sauce, comes over to her, tries to take her in his arms, but she shrugs him off sharply.

  ‘Why – why couldn’t you be more careful?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eve. I really am.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘It was all I had left.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I’ll try to stick it back together again. It might be possible.’

  ‘It won’t be, Adam – look at it.’

  The edge of the piece is thin as a razor blade. She could crush it into dust, this sole remaining possession of her lost family.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Adam stands by her awkwardly, head hung in shame, not daring to touch her. Eva sniffs, the tears running down her cheeks silently now, as silent as her dead grandparents, as silent as her mother when her painful history is evoked.

  ‘I’ll clear the rest up.’

  She picks up the other fragments with care, marvelling at their fragility, then fetches the dustpan and brush to sweep up the remains too small to be worth saving. Adam, after hesitating for a while, has returned to the Bolognese, which after all will not be stopped from burning just because there is some kind of crisis going on. Her fury at him has descended to mere irritation now, and is secondary anyway to the sadness of having lost a precious object, the symbol of so many memories.

  She disposes of the debris in the bin, setting aside only the biggest shards, which perhaps something can be done with, while Adam busies himself over the linguine. Once she has finished cleaning up, she stands by him, watching the water boil.

  He kisses her on the cheek, tentatively.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘Sit down, it’s almost done.’

  She walks over to the dining table, takes a seat by the fireplace, looking out on to the garden and the kitchen. Autumn has set in, and the evenings are getting darker now, but it is still light enough outside to see how the leaves on the big hazelnut tree are losing the intensity of their green, how the roses have faded. She spots some movement in the grass, and sits up straighter.

  ‘Adam!’

  In a corner of the garden, a fox is rummaging around in what is left of the barbecue they had at the weekend. He is quite big, and his fur is full and glossy – he is a healthy, suburban fox, a different breed from the mangy creatures she used to come across going back to her place in Brick Lane. Eva wonders if living here will have the same sleekening effect on her. Adam, who was in the middle of bringing their food over, tiptoes cautiously for the rest of the journey, sets the steaming plates down on the table, and stands by her, his arm on her shoulder. The fox must have sensed his movement, because it looks up at them and stares for a while with its yellow, pensive eyes. Then with cool, unhurried movements, it picks up the remains of a lamb chop and trots off across the garden, its bushy tail bouncing along comically behind it. Adam laughs gleefully. Eva smiles sadly, ruffles his hair, and meets Adam’s eyes again for the first time that evening. He is sad too.

  ‘I know I’ve broken something that can’t be repaired. But I’ll try and make it better – somehow.’

  ‘It’s all right, Ad – it’s only a thing. It just makes me sad, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come on, let’s have some dinner.’

  It smells rich and delicious – Adam is rightfully proud of his family recipe for spaghetti Bolognese. She feels a surge of love for her husband, who is so sorry for what he has done, who knows why it has upset her so much. She feels the warmth of this kitchen, of this food, of this evening they will spend doing something unexciting and domestic, of this haven they have made their home. She thinks, as she smiles at this man proudly wrapping a slop of pasta around his fork, that really love is a strange and wonderful thing.

  EVERYTHING WAS WRITTEN in German, everywhere. Easyjet boasted about its billige Flüge, free copies of the Berliner Zeitung were dotted every few metres along the corridor, you picked up your Gepäck from here, followed that sign to the Autovermietung from Hertz. Eva inhaled, drank in, caressed the words with her eyes. They felt so – familiar. In other airports she had landed in, she was always overwhelmed at first by the opacity of whatever foreign language or script had taken over the familiar logos and predictable signs. But here, it was as though they resonated with a part of her that had been lying dormant for years. The words unlocked meanings with the immediacy of a mother tongue, and yet engulfed her in their otherness. She felt this other Eva inside of her, this German Eva, stirring, filling out, awakened by these words like a cactus flowering after a few drops of rainfall in the desert; she felt she could be allowed to grow vigorous, occupy all the space in this body which was, after all, hers as well.

  Perhaps it wasn’t even a bad idea: to this German Eva, the loss of Adam might feel more remote, less acutely a part of her. His death, and their whole relationship, had happened in another language: even though Adam had, from time to time, tried to get Eva to speak German with him, Eva had always refused. Back then, she had been worried that they might find he spoke the language better than she did. She realized now, as she felt the letters and sounds around her nestle comfortably into her understanding, that this was a ridiculous fear. But perhaps there had been something else in there as we
ll. Perhaps she had felt that she needed to keep some part of her away from him – had she foreseen, perhaps, that losing him would destroy her so completely that she needed to keep one half of herself out of reach?

  She waited at the Kofferlaufband for her Gepäck to arrive. The suitcases trundled by, each one bearing its tiny, hidden world, and she felt the ground go soft underneath her when she read, on the name tag of one of them, the words: ‘LENA BACHMANN’. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart started pounding, and she turned, absurdly, to check whether there was a mysterious woman standing next to her, ready to extend a leather-gloved hand and grab the case. There was none, though, just a weary-looking teenager, and anyway when Eva looked at the label again, the letters had resolved themselves into a different name altogether, Lena Bachmann disappearing into thin air, a mere trick of her mind. Eva saw her own case moving towards her, focused on that: getting into position and taking hold of it, its handle cool and hard beneath her fingers. It swung lightly into the air, a reminder of how few belongings she had brought with her, tugging pleasurably at her arm as it arced around her, its feather weight drawing her into this new place.

  As she turned to leave, the man next to her heaved his suitcase off a little too enthusiastically, and knocked into her.

  ‘Oh! Entschuldigung!’

  ‘Kein Problem, kein Problem.’

  ‘Hab ich Ihnen Weh getan?’

  ‘Nee, wirklich – nix passiert.’

  ‘Na dann. Schönen Tag noch.’

  ‘Gleichfalls.’

  Eva had turned her back on him before she realized she had just had her first conversation in her mother tongue in twenty years – and the guy hadn’t even seemed to notice that she might not be from around here. She tingled with the thrill of it.