“I should think so,” Adam grins, leaning up on one elbow and stroking her cheek. “I put a lot of effort into that.”
“I’m serious, I feel…I don’t know. Things will be okay.”
“I’m always here for you,” Adam says, “you know that, right?”
“Of course I do,” she says, grabbing his hand and squeezing it.
“That conference did you good,” he says, “you should go every year.” It takes every ounce of willpower for him not to add, “Where were you really, Louise? Talk to me, let me in.”
“Maybe I will,” Louise replies, and Adam’s heart somersaults, like it’s hit an unexpected speed bump in the road and momentarily stopped dead in its tracks. He waits for something else, for an elaboration that doesn’t come.
“I love you,” he says eventually.
“You too,” she says, pulling the sheets back over her and turning her back on him.
Interlude
When I was a kid, I used to think death would be like some kind of holding space, like the blinding white-red light you see when you close your eyes against the summer sun. Now I’m worried there will be nothing. What if when I finally hit the rocks and water the neurons in my brain stop firing and there’s nothing beyond? No darkness, no light, no lost loved ones to greet me. Nothing? Where’s the comfort in that?
If I tell you I’m scared, don’t believe me. I’ll admit the initial shock was terrifying, but now? It actually feels quite peaceful. If you have ever done a parachute jump, you’ll know what I mean. Getting out of the plane is the heart-stopping moment but once you’ve jumped, a weird calm descends. When you’re in free-fall, there’s nothing else to do but enjoy the ride. Of course, this time I didn’t jump. And I haven’t got a parachute.
It’s odd how quickly calm took hold – one minute I was standing on the edge, grasping for clarity, realising there was a chance for us after all and the next I was falling, heart thumping, lungs aching, eyes streaming. It can’t have been more than a second before my brain locked down and accepted everything, started savouring every last moment of the flight: the air, needle-sharp, salty and fresh; the rocks below, mountains with teeth, worn down and sharp from the sea’s buffeting; the waves, gnarled, frothing monsters, hungry for me. My screams are alien, like they’re coming from somewhere else, appealing against someone else’s death.
A lot can happen in an instant. If you don’t believe me, ask your dreaming mind. Maybe an instant can be an eternity in the right circumstances. Perhaps this is what people talk about when they say life flashes before their eyes when they’re about to die. Maybe I’m locked forever in that last millisecond before death because time seems endless and my brain is firing a million memories at me, not all of them good. But I suppose if they were, I wouldn’t be in this situation.
It wasn’t planned, you see, none of this was planned. I needed to get out, to get away, to run screaming from reality, lungs blazing. Guess I got my wish. Reality recedes. Lungs blaze.
Maybe I knew death was coming. Maybe I’ve been waiting for it, like it’s been woven into the fabric of my being for years. Maybe I’ve heard the murmur, felt the vibration ever since Tom died. But I held on to the illusion, the belief that I was allowed life, that I could have something of my own, that I deserved something. But eventually, reality floods back in, filling my lungs so fully that I can no longer speak, like waves of salt water, choking me. Maybe it had to happen this way but I still thought in the midst of all our pain, we could find a new spark, a new direction, a way out of this. I couldn’t forgive you, you couldn’t forgive yourself. But there was nothing to forgive. If only we’d talked to each other we’d have known that. But we ran away from each other and now I can’t ever come back.
I am my own narrator. Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impressions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.
I am my mother, my father, my brother. I am the plastic toy I buried in the sand when I was five, I am our first and only cat Lily, I am the green and white swirled lino in my gran’s kitchen, I am a runny-yolked egg pierced with a fork, I am my over made-up, white-faced primary-school teacher Mrs Jones, I’m the shop assistant who wore too much lipstick, I am Mr Rynne the 70s throwback music teacher with sideburns who told me I was pitch perfect, I am my mediocre GCSE results, I am words spoken, thoughts thought, I am the cut on my left palm from the potato peeler, I am the woman I comforted because she was crying on the steps outside the pub, I am the commuting man I saw yesterday with the infectious smile, I am the dreams I’ll never fulfil, I am cold, I am a painted whirlwind, escaping reality. That word again. Reality.
Every atom that makes up our body was forged in some distant star. That’s madness isn’t it? And here’s another fact to blow your mind: so far humans have only identified 4% of the universe. That’s it, 4%. This covers all the matter we know of: humans, beetles, dogs, dirt, wood, plastic, your fingernails, the Earth, the planets, the Sun, the solar system, galaxies, the elements, comets, meteors, space dust, pot noodles, stars, everything.
What about everything else – the whopping other 96% of the universe? That’s Dark Energy and Dark Matter, apparently. Nobody knows what either is, though. We can’t prove they’re real – they just have to be real in order to make everything else make sense. That’s an awful lot of ignorance by anyone’s standards – not the sturdiest platform to build reality on, if you ask me. But then nobody is asking me. Why would they, I’m plummeting to my death.
Funny. Or not funny. Have you noticed how we say that? We say something is funny when we really mean it’s disturbing or uncomfortable. We know so little. At this stage of my life – or should I say death – I don’t know if that’s comforting or not.
It’s weird how long a second or two can stretch out inside your own mind. Millions of thoughts, all attacking me at once, creating an endless moment, like a dream where days pass but you’ve only been asleep for a moment. Is that my fate? Will I hover here above the rocks, locked in a timeless mind explosion for all eternity?
I am soon to be past tense. ‘I am’ becoming ‘I was’. What used to seem important seems altogether trivial now. And tomorrow? Double ‘r’ one ‘m’ – flashes of grey plastic tables and small wooden chairs. Spelling tests? There is no tomorrow. Not for me, not now. A word-association game, you mustn’t pause, you mustn’t hesitate otherwise you get a bash on the head like this, or like this.
I shouldn’t have come here. Shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t – all so distinct from each other, not even related, really. Related. Reality. There’s no connection there, right? No reason for the similarity in those words?
There was a documentary about Prince Philip on the other week. Is he the most misunderstood man in the British Monarchy? In other news, by 2020, over two million people a year will be killed in road accidents. How do they know? Most victims are pedestrians, cyclists and the users of public transport, apparently. Again, how do they know how these future people are going to die? Seems like a ridiculous study to me. Apparently, treating their injuries is going to be a huge drain on poor countries. Should human life always come down to money? That’s not right, surely?
Human life, so complicated and difficult – yet everyone paints a mask on and tries to pretend it’s not. Underneath their smiles, beneath their public ‘I’m all right’ grins, most people’s lips are all chewed and cracked and bloody. Mine certainly were, towards the end anyway. Maybe ever since Tom died, if I think about it. I lived a borrowed life. I stole things, a marriage, a family. Maybe I never deserved love or happiness. But that’s not true, I know it’s not true. My kids
still love me.
Loved me. Soon to be past tense.
Part Three: Interested Others
“She doesn’t watch him all the time. She’s not weird.”
Chapter Thirteen
Her café is called Louise, not Louise’s café, not café at all: just Louise. Standing behind the counter, coffee pot in hand, it’s not hard to see why. The café is her. It’s how she fills her days, how she concentrates her efforts. She spends all day, every day in Louise. She’s there early in the morning to take the bread delivery. She’s there last thing at night scrubbing tables and cleaning out fridges. Louise takes her mind off things. It stops her thinking about her life and her marriage. The café is her lifeblood, her validation, something she’s got right.
By the time she got home after her ‘conference’, she’d actually been excited to see Adam. The kids had been overjoyed to see her, both running into her arms screaming “Mummy” and in that moment she’d realised there was no better feeling in the world. Her family. At home, the kids had run into the living room, demanding some telly before dinner and Adam had stood in the hall, smiling, clean shaven, slim and handsome and she’d run into his arms and they’d held each other close, tightly, and she’d known, she’d known that things would be okay, that they could sort things out. He’d prepared a meal for her, Thai, and they’d sat by candlelight and eaten and polished off a bottle of wine and chatted and laughed. And it was like old times and then, oh God then, the sex, they had sex and she’s missed sex with him; when he’s on form, Adam is superb, better than youthful waiters or married delivery men or the students or the electricians who pummel her like she’s a blow-up doll or a hollowed-out melon or something. It was a perfect evening in soft focus. A Vaseline-smeared lens of an evening.
The next morning, she’d got up and done her bit with the kids before coming to the café to catch up with Bella and see how things had been while she was away. Everything felt like it was going to be okay.
“Take the day off, Bella,” she’d said, smiling. “I can handle it, doesn’t look too busy today.” And she’d whistled and hummed to herself and served and smiled and wiped and…she felt contented in a way she hadn’t for ages.
And then, later that day, everything changed again, in an instant.
“Put the TV on,” a man had said, rushing into the café from the street, his blue overalls unbuttoned, revealing a greasy white t-shirt beneath. “I just heard on the radio.”
“Heard what?” Louise had asked, but he’d ignored her and waved his hand at the television screen. Intrigued, she’d clicked it on. As the news sank in, Louise dropped her coffee pot. Nobody understood what they were seeing. Nobody understood the enormity of it. A young guy froze coming out of the café toilet, eyes locked onto the TV screen in the corner. The builder who’d ordered coffee simply stared, rubbing his hand over his beer belly and muttering “fuck me” over and over. At the back of the room, a teenage girl sat at a table with a Coke and an unread magazine in front of her.
“What…?” she’d mouthed, her eyes not wavering from the TV screen.
The café was still, like a screen on pause, juddering, waiting for action. Orange plastic chairs sat silently around collapsible grey tables. Steaming coffee breathed mist from white china. Faces reflected the silver amber lights dancing from the TV screen.
“What’s happened?” Louise had whispered to nobody in particular. Then other noises had infiltrated the room: ripples of ‘Oh my Gods’ from the TV, a newsreader speaking in staccato, repeating himself, slightly stunned as if he was talking about something that couldn’t have happened.
“Jesus fuck.” A woman’s voice this time, from inside the café.
And then, as if from another place: “You’re spilling it.” His voice was gentle. He leant over the counter and stood up the coffee pot Louise had dropped on its side.
“Oh,” was all Louise could manage, “thanks.”
“No worries,” he replied, touching her arm gently and turning his attention back to the TV. But Louise wasn’t looking at the television anymore. She wasn’t looking at the coffee as it dripped off the side of the counter to create a pool on the tiled floor. She was looking at the man in the blue overalls and white t-shirt.
“I’m Jarvis, by the way,” he said, flicking her a smile.
“I’m Louise Gaddis,” she replied, grey cheeks turning pink. The briefest second followed where nothing happened at all. Then mayhem sprang from the TV screen and Louise’s moment was lost, swallowed by an event with infinitely more importance than anything her life could produce.
That night, she and Adam had sex again, the best they’d had in years, better even than the night she’d got home from the ‘conference’. Except this time, someone else was filling her mind as her toes curled. Jarvis. From that moment, she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him. She can barely think about anything else anymore: Jarvis with the smile, Jarvis who lightly brushed her arm as he spoke. Jarvis, Jarvis, Jarvis.
* * *
Take today. It’s quieter than normal for this time on a Thursday, so Louise has nothing to do other than stare languidly at the door. She has nothing to distract her from the fact that she knows Jarvis is working on the woman from the bakery’s car this afternoon – she overheard him talking to his accountant when he bought his coffee this morning.
“I’ve got an emergency this morning, Harry, woman from the bakery down the road. Her Metro won’t start.”
“We need to talk about your year end,” the accountant replied, rubbing his sweating forehead with a napkin and smiling half-heartedly at Louise.
“This afternoon,” Jarvis said, grabbing his coffee and winking at Louise before turning his back and leaving the café.
“I’ll have a number one, please. With an extra sausage and fried egg,” the accountant muttered to Louise, shaking his head in disapproval. If she could, Louise would close up and go to Jarvis’s garage but she knows that’s not feasible. Besides, she doesn’t want to seem obsessed. Watching him all day wouldn’t be normal, she has to keep things in perspective. She knows she’s the only woman for him, she knows it’s only a matter of time before they are together.
Preparing a coffee for herself, Louise imagines Jarvis grabbing Sandra and pushing her passionately up against the side of her grubby Metro, ripping her shirt open, unable to contain his passion for her big, bouncing bosoms any longer. Unconsciously, she cups one of her own breasts with her free hand, weighing it up as if to judge it against Sandra’s. Pull yourself together, Louise. It’s you he wants.
She is sure he feels the same. It’s like a thousand events in both their lives have resulted in their meeting and now their worlds have collided and converged into one, instantaneous, finger-flicking moment that neither one of them can deny.
* * *
She started watching him shortly after she met him. Not stalking him, she’s not weird or anything. But he’s living in the flat above the garage opposite the café and she can see so much. And he never seems to draw his curtains. Not fully anyway. He doesn’t eat badly for a man living alone: some ready meals, but just as much fresh veg and fish (she’s ‘bumped’ into him in the supermarket). He likes beans on toast (he eats it on his lap on his leather sofa in front of the TV), a few takeaways – fish and chips occasionally, a curry most Fridays. Despite this, he’s still quite thin, but he does a lot of running.
She doesn’t watch him all the time. She’s not weird. She’s not obsessed or anything.
When Jarvis is at home, he often wears just a t-shirt and his boxer shorts. He scratches his balls absently while he watches TV. She thinks he draws the curtains when he masturbates, like he knows someone might be watching through the window. This morning, before opening the café, she crept upstairs and hid behind the curtain of her store room, filled with broken chairs, tables and old china cups and saucers. She could see him pulling on his jeans through the crack in his curtains. She wishes she could see into his bathroom, as she’s sure he
must have just had a shower. She can’t see the kitchen, either, that must be at the back of his flat. It doesn’t matter. He never eats in there, he always eats on his lap in the living room. His kitchen is probably not big enough for a table.
Some days, she feels she’s been watching him a little too often. But he’s so friendly, so…demonstrative. She’s sure he’s feeling the same as her, she’s certain of it. He comes into the café most days and he’s always chatting to her, asking about her life.
She does feel bad that she’s started watching him. She didn’t mean to do it, it happened by accident. She was putting a broken chair into the storage room upstairs and happened to glance out of the window at his garage opposite. And there he was, in the first-floor window, pouring himself a beer and sitting back into his sofa. Without his top on. Her heart had nearly jumped out of her chest. This first time, she stayed looking at him a little longer than she should have done, hidden behind her curtain, peeking as her chest threatened to burst open with excitement.
But that was only the start. Once she’d started, she didn’t know how to stop. She began working that bit later, so she could see him up there after he’d closed the garage. Then she started going in early, to see what she could see of his morning routine.
Maybe he wants me to see him? Maybe he knows I’m watching him?
Some thoughts can’t be un-thought. Of course that was it. How could he not know? He likes it. He likes that she watches him. He gets off on it as much as she does. As soon as Louise had let this reasoning in, she’d opened the floodgates. Whenever the guilt or doubt crept in, she’d remind herself that this is his flirtation as much as hers. Why would he be so interested in her otherwise, why would they feel so connected?
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