Life After Joe

by Harper Fox

  The Parfitts were there, as well as Nicky. Both brothers were still quite well bruised up, and I only smiled modestly when Lou whistled in admiration. Wayne settled for dirty looks and a stomach-churning snog—not that I could really complain about public displays of affection—with poor Nicky, who looked as if he hadn’t been let out from under the bed in a week.

  Aaron’s place at the bar was occupied by a scared-looking middle-aged businessman. I told myself I didn’t mind. That I certainly hadn’t expected to find him there, or anywhere else in the club’s booming shadows, and I wasn’t looking around for him. I concentrated on the lost art of having a few drinks without getting arseholed and grabbing the first half-willing prick that came near me. I could do it. “Riverside” came on, and my mouth dried out a bit, but this was the radio edit, its lyrics censored down to—well, just riverside. The world was a less interesting place than I’d given it credit for, that was all.

  I told myself I could cope, and I did, pretty well, all that weekend and through a decent slice of the next week. I was almost back into a routine. My concentration wasn’t good enough for the reading and studying that might get me through my foundation-year exams, but I didn’t miss any more shifts. There was life after Joe. There had to be, hadn’t there? I just wished that instead of my constantly having to muster every scrap of my strength in order to feel normal, it would happen of its own accord. I didn’t want happy. Normal would have done. Still, on the whole I did a good job of faking it, until the doorbell rang at eight o’clock on Thursday, and Marnie was there on the doorstep.

  The problem with Marnie was that you couldn’t dislike her—not even when you’d been dumped for her. She was sweet, self-contained, very intelligent in a quiet way. She was also a nurse. That was how Joe had met her. Joe and Marnie, doctor and nurse, love’s young dream. If she was aware of the stereotype, she bowed her head to it. To me, she’d never been anything other than courteous. Unapologetic, God knew, but why should she apologise? Winning Joe was no more her fault than losing him had been mine. On the few occasions when we’d met, we’d been scrupulously polite to each other, and this was the same. I asked her to sit down; made us both a cup of tea. She told me Joe was sorry not to have come round himself, but they’d both thought this might be better coming from her. Sitting back on the sofa, I wrapped my fingers firmly round the mug I’d found too hot to touch a second before, and I waited for it. News of a baby? That actually wouldn’t have upset me. Joe loved kids, and knowing he was getting one might have lessened my sense of our breakup’s utter futility and emptiness.

  No. She’d had her shifts cut back. So had he. Times were tight for everyone, weren’t they, and really I must be finding this big flat a lot to heat and manage. It might work out best for everyone if it went on the market.

  I put the mug down. My fingers were scarlet from tip to palm. I told her, quite steadily, I thought, that not only had I scraped together the mortgage payments to keep the place for the last half year, but I’d never asked Joe for a penny to help out and never would. He didn’t have to worry. Nor did she. And then Marnie, who beneath her quiet sweetness was incredibly determined, put her cards on the table and said Joe wanted his share in the value. And soon.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. Bricks and mortar, right? Not Joe’s problem if I had dedicated the last few months to preserving some kind of mausoleum of our life together. Grocery cupboards still full of his favourite soups, wardrobes with the clothes he had left behind neatly hung up and ready for use. His toothbrush still in its holder beside mine. That one was pathetic actually. Watching Marnie, who was very sympathetically watching me, I made a mental note to bin the brush.

  There was nothing I could do. Even if I’d wanted to put up a fight, the flat was jointly owned, and I couldn’t afford to buy Joe out. Marnie finished her tea. We talked about small things—the cold, how close it was to Christmas. Perhaps she thought about enquiring into my festive plans, but she was either too kind or didn’t have the nerve. As I saw her to the door, she said that if I would just let the odd viewer in, she would deal with the sale. I wouldn’t have anything to worry about.

  Bricks and mortar. It shouldn’t have mattered, and yet, when she was gone, a kind of dull panic seized me. If Joe had been the heart of my life, this flat, these rooms, had been its bones, an enduring skeleton. Structure and shelter in the mess. Christ, it was like he’d died, and she’d come round and told me I couldn’t tend his grave.

  That reflection did it. Self-disgust tore through me. I grabbed a coat and walked out. What was I going to do, sit around all night in the bones? The fucking graveyard? I shoved my hands in my pockets and headed off, up the beautiful street Joe and I had chosen to make home, way beyond the budget we’d discussed, but such a far cry from Shieldwell and the council wastelands that it had made both of us think we had made it. That we were safe. I went past the row of expensive little shops, keeping my eyes front and down. All right, maybe Marnie had a point, and I would be better off living somewhere I could look at the local baker’s without a hundred memories of weekend mornings, of taking turns to run out and get breakfast before leaping back into bed. Beyond the shops and the even nicer sweep of Georgian houses—not just tempting but prohibitive, and probably just as well—the Exhibition Park stretched out beneath its bleak, leafless trees. That was full of memories too, but I’d have to walk long miles around here to find a place that wasn’t. Striding blindly over the grass, I smiled bitterly. For a couple of nights recently I’d been the exhibition around here. I didn’t just do pubs and clubs. There were usually a couple of lads to be found hanging round beneath the bridges or lounging around the steps of the bandstand.

  Must be too cold for them. If they had been on duty, it wouldn’t have made a difference—I was past even that grim comfort now, I told myself, hoping Marnie’s cloud might have a lining of dignified misery. That would have been a nice change…I made it through the park intact and onto the long straight road that led past the university’s medical school. Obviously even slowing down at that point would have been masochistic, and I kept walking, up past the digs we’d shared with Lou—roaring with music as I passed by, as if in loving memory of us—and the student pub on the corner. Beyond that was the edge of civilisation. Well, no—just a break in it. I loved a lot of things about the city, and not least of them was this vast green interruption. The town moor, as if a great wasteland of heath was and should be an integral part of human settlements. A breathing space, a pair of lungs. Common land protected by ancient common law. Cows grazed there. In summer, kids came to fly kites. Civilisation picked up again afterwards, roads and houses encroaching, but no builder or developer ever touched the moor. I loved it. Joe loved it. God, if I’d set out with the intent of finding the place that would hurt me most to look at again, I couldn’t have done better. Picnics, early-morning shared runs, cautious, passionate sex in the sunny hollow we’d both calculated was just about screened from unwary kiddies and grandmas…

  A different world on a winter night. A banshee wind was slicing down from the north. The only people out there looking for sex would be those whom society had freaked out and stonewalled into not being able to get it anywhere else. That wasn’t me. I was beginning to calm down, the knifing gale knocking even the will to be properly miserable out of me. All right. Enough was enough—I would go home. It might not be mine any longer, but it contained things I should be grateful to have the use of on a night like this—warmth, food, a bed…I turned around. It was marginally shorter to retrace my steps than carry on down the Great North Road. Sensible choice. I think I knew at that moment what a blade-edge I was on; that I was going to start being sensible or jump the rails entirely, and there wasn’t much in between.

  A man was waiting behind me. He was about ten yards off, leaning on one of the trees that bounded the moor. Probably he had been concealed there when I went past: he had that look about him. And apparently I had my own look about me. He saw that I saw him, and he didn’
t step back.

  He was nothing like Aaron. About twenty years older, for a start, and dressed one shade off tramp. He was dark, that was all. Or I thought he was—everything was dark, and getting darker, as I left the path and followed him through a gap in the fence and onto the moor. He was big and bulky. Serving him—sucking him or letting him have me, whatever it turned out to be—would be a struggle. Maybe I would die of it this time. Choke or tear apart. It was so bloody strange, I reflected, stumbling into the bushes. In all my time with Joe, apart from our occasional three-ways, I’d never even thought about touching anyone else. And now I couldn’t stop.

  He turned and grabbed me by the shoulders. I took my next breath with my face rammed tight against the frost-rimed trunk of a tree. Okay. That answered my question about how this encounter might play out. The transactions were usually simple enough, God knew. Considering the stink of him now he was up close, I supposed I was lucky he hadn’t opted for anything that would bring my mouth and nose too close to the business end. He started tearing at the front of my jeans, and I snarled at him and shoved his hands away, doing it for myself. Wanted to be able to walk away from this with a zip that still fastened, didn’t I? His breath began to explode against my ear. He was already humping me, groaning. He dragged my pants down, and I felt the shove of his dick, clammy and cold…

  I didn’t want it. Way, way too late to be reaching that conclusion, but I still stupidly expected to be listened to when I said no. I said it several times, accompanying the last with a violent twist to be away, and he grabbed my hair, banged my brow off the tree trunk and told me, in a guttural rasp, that he had a knife.

  I didn’t believe it. I hung on to the trunk, waiting for my head to clear enough for me to try again. I wasn’t even sure why my body and mind had clamped shut at this point: they’d gaped wide enough to smellier, bigger and less courteous punters than this one. All I could see, through pulsating red flowers, was Aaron’s face. Aaron, according me the respect I hadn’t earned. The kindness my whole soul craved…Probably I would never see him again, so my sudden conviction that I did not want to be touched by anyone else on the planet—Jesus, not even Joe—was inconvenient, to say the least. “No,” I repeated, and a thin cold line pressed into my jugular.

  Not quite a rape. Maybe my struggles had excited him, or maybe hopeless premature ejaculation was one of his reasons for being out there in the first place. He pushed and pushed, while I stood with gritted teeth and tight-shut eyes, then shot his load between my buttocks, spattering across the small of my back. He made a whooshing sound, as if his last breath were leaving him along with his come, and I seized my moment: drove an elbow back into his gut and tore loose.

  His knife was the edge of an empty tin, crushed and folded almost into two. It clattered to the ground as I shoved him away and stumbled out of his reach. I needn’t have worried: his interest in me was as spent as his limp dick. I watched, trembling and gasping, while he shoved it back into his trousers, zipped up and lumbered unhurriedly off towards the road.

  I ran. There wasn’t any point, and I wondered, flying blindly across the orange-black moor, what was worse—being chased down by yobs or left to my escape with no one at either end to care if I made it. I just couldn’t slow down. If I ran hard enough, the awful, sick sobbing noises I was making could just have been shortness of breath. This was quite a good shortcut, diagonally out through the dark. I reached the Great North Road in no time and plunged across six lanes of traffic unscathed. No brakes squealed, no horns blared. Maybe I had become invisible to drivers too, insubstantial enough that cars could pass through me. By the time I reached home, I had forgotten all about Marnie’s plans for the property: it was just a door which I could slam shut behind me, a set of stairs I could pelt up, so well-known to me I didn’t need to switch a light on. It was a source of hot water and soap, and I stood under the shower until even the big Victorian tank gave up and started to run cold around me. It was a bathroom cabinet which contained the last of the supply of sleeping pills I’d been prescribed back in June, about a fortnight after Joe had taken my hand, sat me down on the rug by the hearth and told me that, much as he loved me, this just wasn’t what he wanted anymore.

  ***

  Cloth hit my face. I put up a hand that did not feel like my own and made my fingers curl around the fabric. Okay. The next step was the eyelids. I levered those open one at a time. Why had my body turned into a machine whose separate parts each required conscious operation? When had I lost the autopilot?

  I pulled the clumsy hand back to look at what it held. A shirt…There was light in the room, but not daylight. I blinked and saw that there was also a man stamping impatiently back and forth between the bed and the wardrobe. I opened my mechanical mouth, got the tongue dryly working. “Lou…What the fuck?”

  “What the fuck is right, you fucking divvy.” Something else hit me. Trousers this time. Oh, all right. I understood. A long time back, in very dark days, Joe had given Lou a key to the flat. I remembered that conversation actually; it had suddenly risen up from the fugues and blanks of that first week. Joe, on his way down the stairs for the last time with his last rucksack. Where had I been? Sitting on the top step, if I remembered rightly. Clutching the banister as a viable alternative to running after him, prostrating myself and clinging to his ankles. “I’m giving Lou a key, Matt. Don’t do anything stupid. If he doesn’t see you around, I’ve told him to let himself in.”

  Plainly I had done something stupid. The alarm clock by the bed said half past nine. Professor McAllister’s lecture on disease control had been due to start on the hour. It was an important one: nonattendance would be frowned upon. It was very good of Lou to miss the first part to come and rescue me.

  I didn’t think McAllister was gonna like these clothes. I sat up, making each vertebra do what it should, and had a look at them. My green silk shirt. Nothing flashy—more a moss colour—but it fit me skintight. My expensive black jeans. I was scheduled to A&E after the lecture. I cleared my throat of what felt like powdered-glass cobwebs. “Ta, Lou, but…I don’t want to get blood and puke on these.”

  “Christ. Not another one of those nights…”

  I frowned. My hair was in my eyes. It felt matted, as if I’d gone straight from the shower to bed without towelling it off or running a comb through. Night? Now I gave it consideration, at this hour even on a late-December morning there should have been some daylight beyond the drawn curtains. Lou was ferreting about beneath the bench where Joe and I kept our shoes. He emerged with a pair of my nice Italian Allegras. I never wore those to work either. For a moment, I thought he was going to chuck those at me too, but then he sighed and came wearily round the foot of the bed to crouch beside me. “Matt,” he said, gesturing towards me with the shoes. “I know…I know all the shit you’ve been through. But you have got to stop making such heavy weather. I can’t keep up.”

  That seemed fair enough. I didn’t recall ever asking him to try, but I knew he’d assumed the duty with good intentions. “Okay,” I said, taking the shoes, setting them in a businesslike pair on the floor. Ready for anything, once I’d found some underpants. “Sorry. I’m guessing you’re not here to wake me up for work.”

  “Work? You’re fucking kidding me. If I had to come round here every time you missed a shift, I’d never be there myself…” He paused, brow furrowing in concern. “Matthew. It’s half nine at night, you dozy git. Friday night. My brother’s birthday if you recall him inviting you, same way he has every year since we were both about four years old. Get dressed.”

  I sprang out of bed. My legs instantly buckled, but I made a good save, grabbing the bedside table before I could go down. My hand closed round a plastic pill bottle, and memory returned, one big flash. The good young intern I had once been knew you could down a hell of a lot of sleepers without killing yourself, and I had taken—well, a hell of a lot. I’d just wanted to sleep, hadn’t I? Not even that—just not to be sentient for a while. I’d sat on the
edge of the bed, a half-full bottle of milk in my hand. That must have rolled out of sight somewhere, or Lou would have been on it, just as he would this near-empty pill vial if I hadn’t knocked it label-down behind the alarm clock. Milk. Right. Whatever I’d been doing, I’d wanted the dose to stay down. I’d taken the hell of a lot you could without killing yourself, and then I’d grabbed a handful more.

  Fuck. I palmed the bottle, hauled myself upright and staggered into the bathroom before Lou could see the state of me. I leaned my palms on the sink and stared into the mirror without recognition.

  ***

  Lou’s brother’s party wasn’t too hard to endure. Some things in life were constant, and one of these was that every year, James would invite the same group of people to the same small pizza restaurant off the Bigg Market. It was nice. Joe and I had always enjoyed it. James was rather the star of Lou’s family, being straight and in the possession of legitimate children. But their parents, if set in their ways, were good people. Growing up, I’d spent at least as much time in their kitchen and back garden as I had my own. Joe—unforgiven even though he’d finally seen the heterosexual light—had not been invited, and Mam and Dad McNally kept bestowing compassionate looks upon me from over the table.