First Love

by Gwendoline Riley

  —

  In the morning, he didn’t get up when his alarm went off. Instead he just kept sighing loudly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer, just turned his head slightly away. Was he going to just lie there?

  ‘Are you not talking to me?’ I said.

  After a while he said,

  ‘Nongsematter.’

  ‘Is it your angiogram? That’s today, isn’t it?’

  Again, after a long while, after I’d asked him again, he deigned to shrug.

  ‘OK,’ I said, and I turned over, reached for my phone to look at my emails.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know what?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s that.’

  ‘Right.’

  I didn’t ask for details. I didn’t say sorry, as I used to, whether I felt I’d done anything wrong or not. He never apologized. If I pressed him to, after he’d called me a name, for instance, or broken something, it only ever made things worse.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he’d say. ‘I’m sorry I’m old and I’m sorry I’m ill. I know it’s terribly inconvenient. I know it makes your life shit.’

  A day later, after a night’s sleep, he resumed hostilities with redoubled force—if I apologized. So now I just curled up with my phone and waited for him to get up and go to work. Only he didn’t get up. I tried again to talk to him, but how desultory it sounded, I knew it did.

  ‘I don’t think you need to be too frightened, do you?’ I said. ‘You’ve been exercising, eating well. You look good. This must be the healthiest you’ve ever been.’

  I reached for his hand and held it. He still didn’t look at me.

  ‘Do you see? Perhaps you don’t…’ he said.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘You say “healthy.” Fine. I’m not healthy. Oh, no.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘What I might explain to you,’ he said, still looking away, ‘is that I died when I had my heart attack. OK? When I was sitting there, waiting, I knew I was going to die, and I did die, and that’s that. Now there is this lizardy part of me that does want to live, but it is just that, that’s what’s clinging on. Do you see? When you say you want your old nice Edwyn back, well, me too, but he’s not here, do you understand? He never was here. What you met, or saw, or thought you saw, didn’t exist and doesn’t exist. Perhaps you can’t understand. Why should you be able to? The fear I felt. I know what’s coming now. And all there is is this…prehistoric, this disgusting…will—to live, to cling on! Even though my body aches from head to foot.’

  ‘Look. I still think you’re nice. You’re still my nice Edwyn. And as I understood it, your last results were really encouraging. You’ve got the heart of a thirty-year-old…And a thirty-five-year-old.’

  I tried to catch his eye to smile at him.

  ‘So you’re doing well. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say. Please don’t be scared.’

  His face darkened. He darted a look at me, and then resumed his staring at the ceiling. He pulled his hand away, started squeezing his fists, working his lips. His mouth was pleating and pursing. Again I reached to rub his hand, which was squeezing the other hand repeatingly. But he snatched it away and started scratching his cheek now, and kept scratching it.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I’m not well!’

  Now he was scratching more rapidly. The scratching kept getting faster and more insistent, until with a breaking-free twist and a bolting jerk he was out of bed, and standing in the middle of the room, punching himself in the face. Then he rushed into the hallway, where there was a sudden cry and then a thump, followed by silence.

  I went out there, and found him lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, and grinning, sort of, only with his mouth open. Like a baby in a cot. Next he started making an airy whining sound. I knelt down next to him, and smoothed out the wave of the pushed-up rug.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘Oh dear! I must have fallen over!’

  ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘Don’t know! Must have fallen over!’

  He got up slowly. He came back into the bedroom slowly, taking each step with a shaky wonder, like he’d just stepped off a rollercoaster, or like he was a bleary old actress, making her way dazedly to the chat-show sofa. He sat down on the bed and I sat down next to him.

  ‘What are you doing? You’re frightening me.’

  ‘What? Oh, no! I don’t want to frighten you! Don’t want to frighten my pusskins!’

  Here he frowned terribly, and then he hugged me. He was hugging me hard but his hands were floppy and his expression looked cretinous and he was pursing his lips to kiss me. He kissed me all over my neck, as a child might a pet, or a favourite bear or doll: keeping an iron grip, and with ‘kissy’ noises: mu-mu-mu. At last I couldn’t stand it and pulled away, and leant back away from him.

  ‘Stop it. Why are you doing this? Are you in there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m frightened! What’s happening? Edwyn? I’m worried you’ve got a brain tumour, or who knows what. Punching yourself.’

  ‘Oh. Have I?’ Now he took his floppy hands and started softly paddling at his scalp. ‘Yes, I have got a brain tumour! See, you can feel it!’ He nodded his head forward and tried to take my hand, to place on his head.

  ‘Have you got any brain tumours? I bet you have! Let me feel. Let me feel! I bet you have!’

  ‘Edwyn,’ I said.

  Finally I did manage to hold him still. Using all of my strength. He breathed into my shoulder.

  —

  My father died of the same thing that Edwyn had suffered. A myocardial infarction. One of the symptoms, described by people who’ve lived through it, is terrible fear, overwhelming anxiety. Was I really going to blame someone for being frightened?

  —

  In the nights after this latest upset, I tried, again, to think of a way forward. I could start again. If the sale of my father’s house ever went through. I didn’t want to. I thought of my mother, on the move. The energy for each flight, as for all of her lashing out, surely generated by the cowering cringe she lived in. Was I like that? Would I be? I’d hardly been unprone to impulsive moves. Dashes. Surges. The impetus seemed different, but perhaps it amounted to a similar insufficiency.

  My father’s sprees were both a reaction to and the cause of his confinement. It was his debts which meant he couldn’t move from that house, even when the stairs got to be a daily torture. Was I too stupid—I couldn’t be—to take a lesson from that? Could I trust myself? Not to make my life a lair.

  Too often that wretchedness came into me. A torpor. A trance. I was in debt, once. Not for much—two hundred pounds or so—but once the third parties were involved, I soon learned what I was. And any idea that I could do something about it was lost. It’s hard to account for now—this wilfulness—but I felt I just had to abide. Suffer through the vellications.

  Those two years in Margaret’s spare room, too: drinking all the time, my face growing strange to me.

  6

  How do I know what’s coming? I always do know. Something around the eyes. Most recently, after a nice, peaceful month, when I told Edwyn I wasn’t going to be in one Wednesday. There was that familiar little pause before he responded.

  ‘Well, please don’t get horribly drunk,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to the pictures.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m just asking, I’m just requesting, that you not get drunk. I’m not in the mood to clean up after you.’

  ‘Clean up what?’

  ‘I don’t want to clean up your sick,’ he said, thrusting his head forward, towards me.

  Dinner was finished. There was just a dot of wine in his glass, and now he reached for the bottle to top up.

  ‘Don’t be nasty.’

  ‘I’m not being nasty. It was just a requ
est.’

  ‘It is nasty. You’re so sharp.’

  ‘Well, that’s how I talk, honey. I won’t be done down for that. Just because I speak the King’s English. Just because I didn’t grow up in a slum in the North.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I just don’t want you to vomit all over the flat. Do you not think that’s a reasonable request?’

  ‘No. It’s not a risk. You talk to me as if it’s something I do all the time.’

  ‘No, you don’t do it all the time. If you did do it all the time, you wouldn’t be living here, I can assure you.’

  ‘I did it once, nearly two years ago. Once.’

  ‘I know you don’t do it regularly, I never said you did.’

  ‘So you are being unfair.’

  ‘No. I never said you’d done it again. I just don’t want you to do it again.’

  ‘There’s no reason for you to think I might, though! It’s not logical!’

  ‘Well, it’s not illogical, either. It’s just fear. You gave me the fear. OK? I’ve never lived with anybody else whose vomit I had to clean up in every room. I still can’t quite believe I am living with someone whose vomit I had to clean up in every room. Do you think that’s normal?’

  ‘Of course not. But nor was it normal what you did. I thought you were going to kill me.’

  Edwyn shrugged, smirked, looked out of the window for a moment, with his chin up, his eyes narrowed.

  ‘That’s how you react to that, is it?’ I said.

  He turned back to me, still smirking.

  ‘A lot of our hatred for one another comes from that night, doesn’t it?’ he said, staring at me. I didn’t answer at first. I was doing what I used to do, I found, just sort of—drifting off, inside. It was hard to counter that.

  ‘Do we hate each other?’ I said, at last. ‘I thought we loved each other. Last I heard.’

  ‘Oh, you do. You hate me. You hate me with a warm hatred.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want. I got drunk. It happens to everybody. I’m sure when you were thirty-three or whatever I was…’

  ‘No. I can hold my drink.’

  ‘OK, but I’m sure there were times when you drank too much.’

  ‘Of course there were, but I could hold it.’

  ‘Were you holding it when you kicked down various doors? When you had the police called on you by your girlfriend? When you punched in that phone box? When you frightened your mother?’

  He sighed.

  ‘I was just angry. I didn’t vomit all over people’s houses and beds.’

  ‘Great. OK.’

  Now he stood, went into the kitchen. He came back with his whisky glass, half-filled that and sat down again.

  ‘Christ, I’m sick of all this hatred and rancour. I’ve never had this in my life before. You had it all the time, you’re used to it.’

  ‘Have I? Go on.’

  Here he spoke wearily, airily.

  ‘Your father. You hated him, he was cruel to you, that’s the only relationship you understand. A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back. So that’s what you’re recreating here. I am not your father. You don’t have to go on being vicious. If you do go on being vicious, you’re out. I don’t want anything more to do with you. I’m not well and I can’t take it. I won’t spend my declining years fighting. If I do, there are things much more worth fighting for…’

  ‘I didn’t start a fight.’

  ‘You don’t have to see things like that. You don’t have to see me as your father and this hateful man getting at you all the time. I’m just making perfectly ordinary, perfectly reasonable, perfectly ordinary human requests, why do you take it as such a threat to you, an attack on your “self-respect”? It isn’t. It’s just a human being asking the other human being who shares their fucking roof and bed to just, you know, remember that he exists, which I think a lot of the time you don’t.’

  ‘Of course I remember. And I didn’t mention self-respect, where’s that from?’

  ‘I don’t know what I am to you, but I don’t exist. I’m not going to just put up with that, you know. With just being obliterated.’

  ‘I’m not trying to do that.’

  ‘To myself, now, I’m just this kind of fearful skivvy. I skivvy around and just go in fear of what you’re going to get up to next.’

  ‘That isn’t a reaction to anything I do. “Get up to”—what does that mean?’

  ‘Because you’re so vicious to me. You’re so sharp and defensive.’

  ‘I’m not, Edwyn.’

  Now he spoke through his teeth:

  ‘You are, Neve.’

  ‘No. I’m warm, attentive, mild. Rigorously so, in fact. Is that the problem? And I keep out of your way. You can’t talk to me as if I’m someone who comes home and is sick here all the time, when I’m not. That’s me being obliterated.’

  ‘I was asking for reassurance. I’m not your father. He’s the one who belittled you, all right? That’s what I’m saying, I don’t exist, you don’t hear what I say, what you hear is your father.’

  ‘All I did was tell you I was going to have a night out, let off steam.’

  ‘The argument isn’t about that. The argument is about your bizarre insistence that I’m attacking you just because I was asking for reassurance that you wouldn’t come home and be sick everywhere. You read constantly, don’t you? Has none of this ever made you consider, or allow, or admit, that people can represent something other than an opponent to you? That people can operate from motives other than wanting to harm you or laugh at you or belittle you?’

  ‘Unless you’re looking to hurt me, you know you don’t need to ask for reassurance about my being sick. As I’ve said.’

  ‘Well, the last time you “let off steam” that’s what happened.’

  By now my voice was very thin. Every word a moaning struggle. My body was clenched. Energy, will, draining away. But I couldn’t give in.

  ‘No, it’s not. I’ve had plenty of nights out. I was happy that night. I just drank too much.’

  ‘And forgot that I existed. And that this was where you were living, where you wanted to live, where you had said, you, that you wanted to live.’

  ‘I had too much to drink, once.’

  ‘Yes. And then I didn’t exist. This just happened to be a convenient place for you to be sick in.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Again. But this is what you think life is for, is it? This is what you think my life, my time, my energy, my goodwill is for? Conversations like this. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Have you got any money at the moment, Neve?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Just an idea, that’s all.’

  ‘Right. I was waiting for that. Yes, I’ve got money. And more coming, of course. So. Go on.’

  ‘Because your view of our living together, basically, is that I provide the circumstances in which you can be left alone to get on with your work, isn’t it? And that’s that. That’s all right because that’s the basis on which I took up with you. But I do expect just a minimum of acknowledgement of my existence from that. I know that you had faceless, nameless sources of that kind of support, grants, bene- fits, but I am not that. I’ve got a name and a face and a being. An existence of my own…’

  ‘I have been working, and I may have been a bit absent…’

  ‘Absence is fine. I wish you were more absent, all of the time.’

  ‘Great. Shall we get a divorce, Edwyn?’

  ‘I’d like you to need less attention from me.’

  ‘I don’t need attention, you do. I pay attention to you all the time, trying to head this sort of nonsense off.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t like that. I don’t need it or want it.’

  ‘OK. So what do you want? No attention.’

  ‘Attention as in, kiss me, love me, tell me you love me, pusskins—that I can live without. What I can’t live without is somebody that I live with acknowledging that I’m here, that I hav
e fears and hopes and worries of my own.’

  ‘Of course I acknowledge that. I made a decision a while ago to stop asking you about yourself. It seemed like a habit. I didn’t think it was bringing us closer. Do you want me to be disingenuous? These last few weeks I have been quieter because I’m trying to finish some work.’

  ‘All I was asking for was a little automatic, tiny bit of reassurance, acknowledgement, recognition. I was worried about something. All you had to say was, Oh, for God’s sake, don’t worry, honey, it’s fine, I’ll be fine. But no.’

  ‘If I’d said that, you just would have doubled down.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. That’s all I was hoping for. Just a human reaction. What I get from you is your reaction to your father.’

  ‘You know nothing about how he spoke to me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I know that he put you down.’

  ‘You don’t. You’ve never asked. He frightened me, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he existed, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And the fact is that’s all you respond to in me. You think that I’m putting you down. It’s the only time I get a response. Otherwise, it’s just pure demand, it’s, Love me, tell me you love me.’

  ‘I don’t say that. I say, “I love you.” That’s what I say. And I do love you.’

  ‘No. No, you only say that in order to be told it back. You know that. You know very well. And if you don’t know that, then, you know, you need to go back to your therapist and she’ll tell you that, if she isn’t completely thick. You don’t love me. You want to feel acknowledged and loved yourself.’

  ‘So why are we married? Why can’t we get divorced?’

  ‘Well, I married you because I thought you wanted to be around me, and I thought you needed to be taken care of…I thought you needed to be supported and helped in life a bit, and that I could do that, I could offer that. I put it to you in just those terms, if you remember.’

  Again. Did I? I suppose I did. So. Take that in.

  ‘Not for love, then?’ I said.

  ‘Love as in?’

  ‘I don’t know. Chemistry. Attraction. Intimacy. Understanding.’