The Pretence

by Linus Peters

  Ian, who had been born and raised in Abroath, eventually turned to Jill, a look of utter disgust on his face. “Time to leave,” he said.

  “Oh yes. The baby sitter,” she explained.

  “No, no. This lot. I can’t bear listening to the nancy nations of Europe, those with so little history or cultural heritage, squabbling over their usual inane trivialities.”

  With more good-natured exchanges, they left, and immediately Clara’s new boyfriend - I can’t remember his name - took hold of her hand and began to play with it, and soon they followed. Andy left rather abruptly, saying we had to meet up again soon, that one of us must give the other a call, though we both knew we didn’t have the slightest intention of doing so.

  Then it was just the three of us: Luca, Charlie and me. Digging out the serious stuff, the single malt, getting drunk and slightly embarrassing. Charlie telling us that he loved his wife and mistress in exactly the same quantities, or perhaps not at all, and what did it matter anyway, when you consider that ‘a stiff todger has no conscience’.

  It seemed to be a convoluted reference to something that was much on his mind but he was unable to actually voice, and as always, Luca could never understand the dilemma. For him everything was ‘all life’, and as he often did when Charlie blundered clumsily around, he groaned and threw his hands in the air in utter resignation.

  “Charlie!” he cried

  “Oh, stop your bloody gesticulating!” Charlie shouted. “Cut your arms off, you wouldn’t be able to say a word.”

  “Well, what are saying?”

  “Nothing!”

  There was a pause, Charlie refusing to add anymore, and us feeling perplexed that we couldn’t unravel anything from his usual torturous reserve. However then, partly to deflect us, but also as if it had always been the main theme of the evening, he turned to me and muttered. “New York, eh?”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Amsterdam,” I insisted.

  He nodded his head and grunted, as if we were now equal, that we’d both done our fair share of open heart bleeding that evening. “Any more booze?” he asked.

  I went to the kitchen, found an old bottle of duty free someone had given me, and was about to return to the sitting room, when I remembered Frances’s letters in the drawer. For some reason I took them out and leafed through them ... Amsterdam! She’s in Amsterdam, you fools! Phrases, lines, words fluttered by me: ‘so special ... too perfect ... how I wish I had received them.’

  A few moments later I returned to the sitting room with a smile on my face, hiding my secret to my heart like the glow of buried treasure.

  “What are you smiling about?” Charlie asked, by now becoming almost unintelligible. “Been having a wank or something?”

  A little later he began to lose it altogether and I had to steer him down the stairs to the street and wait for a cab. “Where you going, Charlie?” I asked, thinking he might be too slurred for the somewhat reluctant driver to understand.

  “Oh, one or the other,” he said. “Makes no difference. Can’t get it up for either of the bitches.” And with that he got in the cab and it pulled away.

  When I got back upstairs, Luca wasn’t in the sitting room. I waited, thinking he was in the bathroom, then heard the creak of someone shifting their weight on one of the kitchen chairs.

  I’d left Frances’s letters on the table, and as I walked in, I was greeted by him openly sitting there reading them. I couldn’t believe it. I was about to say something, to get angry with him, when he looked up, the expression on his face instantly stilling me.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Luca stared at me for a long time, his mouth slightly open. “Simon, how do you know these are from Frances?”

  For a moment I didn’t answer. I could hardly believe what he was saying. “They are!” I eventually cried. “You said!”

  “I didn’t know they were written on a computer.”

  “She’s learnt. She had to learn. I told you, this new job.”

  He paused for a moment, again looking at the letters, shaking his head and frowning. “Are you sure?”

  I wanted to say ‘yes’, that I was sure, a hundred per cent positive. It was Frances, it had to be Frances, but something wouldn’t let me. Instead I slowly lowered myself down opposite him, staring into his face, as if I was a child about to be told that something I’d always believed in wasn’t true, that my world was about to be shattered.

  “Who else could it be?” I asked.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Deep down I think I’d always known. It was just having Luca confront me with it. It wasn’t Frances writing those letters. Of course it wasn’t. How could I, even for one instant, have believed it was. How could I have thought that by some billion to one chance I’d just happened to have invented an address where she lived? I mean, the mind plays some strange tricks when it longs, but surely, there should’ve been at least one lucid moment, one brief lull in the twisting of my self-deception, when I saw what would’ve been obvious to anyone. That whoever was writing to me, it wasn’t Frances.

  The second I took the idea into my head, the letters read so differently, I couldn’t believe they were the same ones. Frances never wrote letters like this. They were far too formal, too structured. She wrote more like she was talking to you, with a stream of conversation that she could barely be bothered to punctuate. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find our humour, to play our games; it hadn’t been ‘us’ who’d been searching.

  For some time Luca and I sat there, reading and rereading letter after letter, searching for other clues. The remark about theatre she made the second time she wrote: ‘I’m sure you’d love it’. I’d taken it for irony, that she was referring to my well-known aversion to live theatre, now I realised it was genuine. I’d been so ready to believe that anything that didn’t quite ring true was because of inevitable changes, the passing of time, even the use of a computer. ‘Just living in another country makes you communicate a little differently’. Jesus, what a fool I’d been!

  “But who’d do something like this?” I cried.

  “Well, you never know, it might still be Frances,” Luca replied, though not with any great conviction.

  “Course it isn’t! I can’t believe I ever thought it was.”

  He shrugged, as if there was still a chance, though both of us knew there wasn’t.

  “Just a game! A stupid fucking game!” I cursed. Luca sat there in silence, staring at the letters, obviously a little intimidated by how upset I was. “Who on earth would do that?”

  He sighed and made this odd little face, as if the possibilities were endless but he’d rather not go into them.

  “What?” I asked.

  “On the Internet ... People often pretend to be who they’re not. Young girls pretend to be older. Old men pretend to be younger. Some even pretend to be girls themselves.”

  I can’t tell you how badly that made me feel. My mind went back over all the letters I’d sent, all the things I’d said to ‘Frances’, and I wanted to throw up. Jesus! No wonder whoever it was had urged me on to say more, to pour out greater feelings, more intimate memories. They’d been having a whale of a time. I felt almost as if I’d been violated. As if someone had broken into my mind and trashed the whole damn place.

  I started imagining all sorts of stuff. Kids giggling at me, showing my letters to school-friends, reading them out on the bus. Some old pervert wanking over explicit details of my and Frances’s sex life. No wonder they hadn’t wanted me to pay them a visit. No wonder they’d got so worried at the possibility of me making a surprise call.

  Eventually, just as dawn was beginning to break, Luca decided he’d done all he could, and left. I knew exactly what his final words would be. If the positions had been reversed, mine would have been the same.

  “It might still be her,” he said, from the bottom of the stairs. “You never know.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to reply, just shook my head, and
after helplessly pausing there for a few moments, he made his way to the front door of the building and let himself out.

  I’d been dreading that moment. That click as the door closed, as his footsteps faded away. Finally I was alone, I was unprotected, and the real tragedy of this situation was about to hit me. I’d lost her again. I’d lost Frances. And though she might be innocent of the fact, though she might be thousands of miles away and hadn’t given me a thought in months, again she’d disappeared from my life.

  I just collapsed across the kitchen table, like some twisted carving of pale wood, my face buried in my hands.

  I guess that’s the thing about hope. The fact that we need it so, that it sustains us, means it can break us too. It’s not the bars of the window that destroy you, but the patches of sky in-between. For a while I’d actually thought I had a chance of getting back with Frances - of at least something between us, some measure of a future - now it was gone, and I felt utterly and completely vanquished. God, what a fool I’d been! What a stupid, sad, self-deluding fool.

  I grabbed hold of the letters on the table before me, screwed them up as tightly as I could, and threw them to the floor. Bastard! How could anyone do that to another person? How? To goad me on like that, to drag out all my pain, to pretend to bathe it and bandage it and give me hope, just so as to give them some kind of warped thrill. What sort of person are we talking about here?

  And suddenly I felt so damn angry, so bloody violent, I thought I’d go out to the airport, catch the first flight to Amsterdam, and go and see them. Whoever it was. Beat the fuck out of them if it made me feel better. Yet I was so drunk, so weary, so beaten, in the end I just went to the bedroom, collapsed on the bed and passed out.

  I didn’t know another thing until Charlie called me a little after two the following afternoon.

  “Simon?”

  “Mm?”

  “You sound bloody awful?”

  “Yes, I er .. I don’t feel too good.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Could be ... flu, maybe.”

  “Not the demon booze?” he said, jokingly rather than accusingly.

  “No, no ... I didn’t have that much.”

  “Mm. Bloody I-ti’s ‘working at home’, too,” he commented. All of us knowing, yet never actually saying, what that meant. Charlie paused for a moment and I wondered if he was pissed off after all.

  “Erm ... I er, didn’t disgrace myself too much, did I?”

  “No. Course not.”

  “Oh, good ... Funny what genies pop out of the emptying bottles sometimes.”

  “Mm,” I mumbled, too tired to really care what he was talking about.

  “Yes, well, you take it easy,” he said, sounding, if anything, rather more contrite than considerate. “No need to hurry back.”

  “Oh. Right. Thanks, Charlie.”

  I muttered something about having to get the Audi I was supposed to be testing back from him, and he told me not to worry, that if the worst came to the worst he’d do the write-up for me, and despite the fact that I knew Charlie had a writing style so dense it could be used as secret code, I thanked him and fumbled the phone back into place.

  But I couldn’t get back to sleep. Last night was flooding back in upon me like some recidivistic tidal wave. I wouldn’t go to Amsterdam and lecture some blithely callous teenager about how one day they’d learn the meaning of the word pain, and I hope they’d think about me when they did. Nor to punch out some squinting sad-faced old wanker with cum encrusted on his half-inch thick spectacles. What would that do for me? I’d just write, tell them they were sick, that I’d known it hadn’t been Frances all along and had just been having a bit of fun at their expense. Turn the tables. Salvage a little pride. Though I knew it would take a great deal more than that to make me feel any better.

  I slowly dragged myself to my feet, my left temple throbbing and pulsing as the drill inside my head did its best to burst its way out, stumbling through to the bathroom.

  But I never got there. Of course I didn’t. I mean, how stupid can you be. Always when you least expect it, right? For there, lying on the front mat, was yet another letter from Amsterdam.

  Dear Simon,

  I thought about you a lot today.

  Well, I guess I think about you every day, but

  today it was as if you were actually with me, that we

  ‘took each step together’. I find myself wondering

  what you’d say about things, sometimes even asking

  you - ‘What do you think, Simon? Should that be

  allowed? Is it a good idea? Do you like me in this?’

  I don’t know. Perhaps it sounds a little crazy to you?

  We are just rehearsing for another show. It starts

  on the third of next month, so as you can guess, I’m

  very busy. This time I have a very small part.

  Only a couple of lines but it still makes me feel

  very nervous. I don’t think I’m a natural born

  performer somehow.

  Simon, do you remember saying how you always

  loved me in black? I was just wondering, which

  dress did you like the best? Describe it to me

  properly (not like a typical man), but details

  about the length, the cut, the neck and everything.

  Just so I know exactly which one you’re talking about

  and if I still have it. Maybe I’ll wear it one night in

  your honour.

  Anyway, I’m sorry, but this has to be a little shorter

  than usual. I’ve only just got home from rehearsal

  and it’s gone twelve already. I’m so tired.

  I miss you, Simon. I know it might sound a little

  crazy, but I’d do anything to be holding you now.

  All my love,

  Frances

  What the hell was I to think? I mean, even then it went through my head that maybe I was wrong, maybe it was Frances after all? Yet now that I’d taken that moment to stop and think, to adopt a more rational state of mind, I knew there was no way. Yet the thing was, if it wasn’t Frances, if it wasn’t my ex-partner writing to me this way, then why did whoever it was seem so damn ... nice? So sincere! So loving!

  I hated them. I still hadn’t entirely given up the idea of going over there and beating whoever it was to pulp. This was so cruel. Yet when I read the letters, it was hard to see them as the product of a sick mind. More of a sad one. I mean, maybe the cruelty wasn’t all one way here? Maybe in some way this thing was hurting them as much as it was me?

  And what was this business about the dress? What were they going to do? Go out and buy something as close as they could to my favourite dress of Frances’s? What for? Just so they could wear it sometimes? Pretend they were her? I mean, how far was this going to go?

  For the rest of the day I tried to conjure up some kind of reply but I just didn’t know what to say. I was angry about what they’d done to me, that they’d given me back Frances and then taken her away again, but so unsure of how to go about approaching such an unknown quantity. Maybe I should suggest they needed psychiatric help? I mean, they do surely? Asking about favourite dresses. What’s going to be next? A request for a photo? An appointment with a cosmetic surgeon?

  I did get round to writing ‘Dear Frances’ at one point, crossed it out and replaced it with ‘Dear Whoever You Are?’, but for the life of me, didn’t know where to go from there. I phoned Luca but he wasn’t in. I wanted to read the letter to him, ask him what he thought, what I should do? I wanted conviction. Or confirmation. This person was insane, weren’t they? They had some kind of weird psychological problem that needed extensive therapy? That’s what I wanted him to say, that’s what I needed to hear.

  But if that was the case, if it was that straight-forward, then why couldn’t I bring myself to write the letter? Why couldn’t I shove reality, like some bleeding lump of cold meat, right into their face?

  I got
up to make myself yet another cup of coffee, taking the opportunity to read the letter through once more: ‘... today you were actually with me. We took each step together ..... I’d do anything to be holding you now ...’

  Yes, I know. I know. And so do you. That was the reason why. Because whoever it was, as crazy as they might be, if they were just playing a game, then they played it incredibly well. I slumped back down in my chair. Who the hell was this? What did they get out of it? And perhaps more to the point, why was I so reluctant to bring this whole bizarre episode to an end?

  It took me almost two weeks, and a fairly constant degree of worry, before I finally wrote again. However, when I did, it became something of a close call which one of us was most in need of psychiatric help.

  Dear Frances,

  Sorry I haven’t written for a while.

  Just like you I’ve been very busy, but you have been

  in my thoughts .

  You really set me wondering, asking which dress of

  yours I like the most. I guess it’s the long black one

  you used to wear to ‘smart’ parties, all soft and slinky,

  with the high front and very low scooping back.

  Though to be honest, I almost like you as much just

  in black jeans and a polo neck. Hey, why don’t I just

  say it? I like you in everything.

  Frances, this is a really difficult thing to put into words,

  but in this period that we’ve regained contact, it’s

  almost seemed as if I’ve got to get to know you

  all over again. Lately I’ve begun to realise how much

  that means to me. I mean, I’ve talked about ‘before’,