by Neil Rowland
“Look, you might as well drink a cup of tea, while you’re waiting,” Liz offers.
“I just came from Angie’s café,” I explain. In fact, after that double espresso, my eyes are like flying saucers.
“How would you like a slice of cake?”
I bang my rib cage. “Bad for the old pump.”
“Then can I get you something else?”
“I wouldn’t turn down a nice cold beer.”
Elizabeth heads over to her gigantic refrigerator without comment and extracts a chilled beer for me. One of her husband’s, Frank’s, chilled beers. She twists off the cap without hesitation, plucks out a fancy glass and pushes the whole arrangement over.
“Careful, it’s lively.” She claims a high stool next to mine at the breakfast bar. She’s transforming the interior of her house into a Hollywood film set. Archie Leach would be perfectly at ease here. She poses on the high stool like a sexy college kid.
I pour the beer carefully; keeping tabs on the tremble; and then sip. “This isn’t too bad at all, Elizabeth.”
“At last you found something in common with him.”
“Tastes good,” I admit.
“So how is Angela today? What’s she getting up to?”
“You need me to tell you?” I goad.
“She lives with you, doesn’t she?”
“Doesn’t she pop around to catch up?” I wonder.
“I haven’t seen her in weeks,” Liz admits.
So how is Angela? “Thriving. You know what the girl’s like. She leads an amazingly busy and sociable life.” I can see every sign that Liz’s new life is demonstrably busy and full.
“You saw her earlier? Did you say?”
“Just to check out that she’s all right,” I say. I’m enjoying the icy fizzle of beer on my lips.
“So does she manage to get to work on time, lately?”
I put a little spin into the beer bottle. “Most times, she does.”
“What about her love life? Does she have another boyfriend?”
“Could be. Not sure.”
“Better if she doesn’t have her head turned. I’d rather she was focussed and independent,” she argues.
“I don’t expect any introduction soon,” I assure her.
“You suspect she’s going out with another boy then?” she surmises.
“Technically she’s already classified as a ‘mature student’,” I lament.
“She was never like this as a little girl,” Liz recalls, wistfully. Like what?
“Come on, Liz, ease up on the girl, she’s just finding her feet.” She didn’t want to stay in Kansas. Would she grow homesick?
“You’re far too soft and easy going with her. She’s completely wild, or so it looks to me.”
“Well, I can’t always work as private detective.”
“Oh yes, that would suit you, wouldn’t it. Playing Philip Marlowe,” she tells me.
“Angela just has a complicated existence right now. But she isn’t the only one,” I add.
“What’s complicated about working at a café?” she wants to know.
“It’s surprising.”
“We were too busy studying, to take jobs.”
“That isn’t all we were up to,” I have to remind her.
“But we managed to study... and there were too many books to read, too many new movies and ideas to discuss.”
“Angie reads a lot of books. I found her last night. I believe she goes to the cinema.”
“Not towards her exams,” Liz reminds me. “That is different to doing those things for pleasure. But they need to be done.”
“Yes. I take your point. Though she has to make some money, to help pay for university studies. She was working hard in the café today. Working the cash register. Looking responsible and grown up.”
My former partner doesn’t look convinced. “There’s no sign of her getting back to study. Is that the kind of future we want for her?”
First I take another gulp of Frank’s well-brewed beer, then I put my foot into my mouth. “What do you do? In that cake shop? If you don’t wait on people?” I gag.
There’s enough flame in her eyes to roast several sacks of nuts.
“I offer employment to people. I have four shops around the city, with expansion plans for other cities. Why should I both to explain the difference to you?”
It was true, Frank put up the initial capital, but after that she expanded due to her own hard work and acumen.
“Forgive me,” I say. Unfortunately she doesn’t sell any humble pie. You can’t easily get the better of Liz, try as hard as you like.
“Angela’s an intelligent girl, in her own way. Why don’t we help her to become a success?”
“There’s no reason why not, Lizzie,” I agree.
“Don’t call me Lizzie,” she tells me.
“What’s the problem? Hook up with Angie some time.”
At University people called Lizzie ‘Witchy’.
“You have more chance to talk to her these days,” she admits.
“I’m trying my hardest. She’s been an elusive character, to be honest with you. I know because I lie awake some nights worrying about her.” I instantly regretted this discouraging insight.
She looks at me with more sympathy. She has beautiful eyes, sharpened by her intelligence. They have a mesmerising mineral complexity. “Angela’s well on the way to becoming a drop out.”
“She doesn’t know what she wants from life yet. She’s a student of experience,” I argue. “She wants to get some experience outside of student circles.”
“She’s never been inside student circles.” Elizabeth’s jungle eyes swirl and harden. “Unless you count compulsory education.”
“She has research to conduct on the real world.”
“That’s ridiculous, Noah. Research? She has little experience of what you call the real world. When is she going to submit her paper?”
“In the end you decided to drop out of academia... and it never held you back.”
This argument doesn’t impress her, for reasons I have yet to explain. “If you allow the girl too much liberty, well, she’ll be working in that café for the rest of her life.”
“Nonsense, the girl just has to find herself first.”
“I’m appalled to hear you spout that twaddle,” she retorts.
“What do you mean?” I object.
“If she doesn’t get herself directed soon, she will miss out entirely.”
“No point going anywhere or doing anything,” I say, “if you don’t understand yourself first.”
“That’s just the kind of liberal nonsense I expect to hear from you.”
“You can’t change me,” I vow.
“I wouldn’t want to change you for the world, Noah.”
We glare at one another, propped uncomfortably close on her tall stools. This is how I watch my memories of her, unending and silent, drowned in the lonely darkness.
I manage to swallow down the insult and she prises away her powerful eyes. But at least I have a chance to relax again.
She’s justified in some of her concerns about Angie. There’s more than a lick of pain and confusion for me too, in the struggle with our daughter.
Angie’s whole existence is tangled up in her parents’ history. This is because Lizzie got pregnant while she was studying at university. I agreed that she should have an abortion, given the circumstances. Instead Elizabeth decided to have the child and to marry me. Despite the problems involved, we were ecstatically happy and the future seemed to slot into place. The outside world hadn’t caught up with our way of thinking, but we didn’t calculate parental and societal attitudes. Not for nine months.
I
t’s agony to understand that Liz and I are irreconcilable. She’s a determined woman and she knows her own mind. Obviously I have a lot of admiration for those qualities, even though she can be as tough as tough. Why did she drop me in the middle of our life journey, half way across the ocean?
Although I know she has a few ideas about me too.
“I suffered another heart incident,” I confess.
“Another?” She’s clearly shocked. “What does that signify?”
I’m still more comfortable discussing my life and death adventures with her. We’ve known each other since school days; although we didn’t undress each other until we reached university. She didn’t allow me to touch her until I proved myself smart enough in a seminar, or had made my first significant political protest. That’s how we used to impress a girl. These days they go out and shoot all their classmates.
Unlike your record and book collection, you can’t take back a store of shared memories: all the parties, the gigs, the festivals and holidays. She and I were married in our final year at university and she gave birth to Angie while I was taking my finals. We had no reason to post Angie off to be second marked.
We’re not marching on the same side any more. Even in your personal life you’re either a unilateral disarmer or not. I’m not exactly in a position of strength. If I can’t share my terrible secrets with her..? But I have to be more discrete with my medical files. I can’t throw myself on Elizabeth’s charity any longer. They say that a diamond lasts forever, but not under a sledgehammer.
“What exactly did the consultant mean? A complication?” she enquires.
“He didn’t offer the exact details,” I say. How could I explain the freak component in the aorta artery? My heart’s under siege but I have to keep up some defences. They’d already reserved a cloud for me, but I had to keep a reality check.
“The hospital is liable if they messed up your operation,” Liz reminds me.
“I can’t claim to be the expert,” I reply. I’m backtracking already, because I know the one technical detail that counts.
“You must be devastated by this setback,” she argues.
“I’m trying to carry on with my life, as per normal,” I claim.
“So you are in decent shape? Mentally, I mean?”
“Let’s just say, I’m trying to stay in one piece.”
“Right, Noah, so you have to change your life style.”
“How come?”
“Have you looked at your diet recently? You don’t eat properly these days.”
I absorb the suggestion. “There are plenty of nuts and berries in my diet, I can assure you. The demands of my new life situation aren’t helping,” I blab.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she wonders, shifting her bottom.
“You know, the people who are close to us, the people who are no longer so close to us.”
“Shouldn’t you be getting over that episode, at least?”
“Pulling us in one direction, and then in another direction...”
“Isn’t that your own affair or, should I say, your affairs?”
“How can we be saved, unless we choose to cut them out of life altogether?”
“Sometimes it is necessary,” she told me.
“How civilised that is. How comforting to reach an agreement,” I comment.
“You don’t want to be left behind, do you Noah?”
“I suppose that we need other people... otherwise we wouldn’t bother, would we?”
“Change is hard to accept,” she says. I heard the deliberate echoes.
“Do we lose interest in someone, or is it really our own self that we become disillusioned with?” I consider.
“Either way we have to adjust,” she argues.
“Or we go back to square one,” I suggest.
“We have difficult decisions to make.”
“While we still have enough time and money,” I remark.
“Why certainly Noah, because what would be the point? What would be the purpose of change and self-discovery otherwise?”
We gaze into the barrel of another futile argument; as if trying to break the private images that had already been shattered.
“Is there something very wrong with your heart, Noah?”
The change of tack catches me by surprise, with one set of thoughts adjusting to another like cross-cutting waves.
“How’s that? Very wrong with my heart?”
“That’s right. What do you know?”
She waits expectantly from the stool, with her gorgeous eyes wide, her long legs, so intimate and familiar to me, gently crossed. Even if I survive I have been cut out forever.
“This is something I’ll just have to live with,” I argue.
“Can’t they make good their mistake?”
“I told you already.”
“You must be worried out of your wits,” she concludes.
“I shan’t go out to celebrate,” I admit.
She stares as if she can’t believe the man she sees or imagines I will vanish in a moment. “What’s happened? You can’t tell me or you don’t want to?” She drops any hint of expression from her face.
“What I mean to say is... that the specialist explained... that one of my heart valves is wrecked.”
Her eyes flicker over me and she gently shakes her head.
“It’s quite serious, to be honest with you,” I say. As she had driven me to the heart hospital that day a little honesty was not out of place.
“Is it life threatening?” she wondered.
“To me, it is,” I reply.
She puts hands on her hips and leans back on the stool, just not to quite imperil herself. “Aren’t you devastated?”
“I’m worried.”
“What’s to be done about this, Noah?”
“I’ve taken up yoga,” I tell her.
“Yoga? Is that enough?”
“Not really.”
“Yoga’s never been one of your interests,” she says.
“Not when you find yourself single again...and you’re just shy of forty nine... as I am.”
I want to forget all my troubles by tying myself up in even more knots.
“I’m surprised you can find the time... even if you’re able to relax enough to begin to...”
“You shouldn’t under-estimate the gentler arts. Not until you try them yourself,” I retort.
“No, well, if you think that may help. You’re not joking, are you?”
“Would I pull your leg, Liz?”
“You look so much better than you did,” she informs me.
“I’d turned into a skeleton, before I went in for the op, hadn’t I?”
“I don’t know why they pump people full of drugs these days. We have powerful natural alternatives,” she says. “But you shouldn’t disregard medical advice entirely. That isn’t what I am saying.”
The specialist more or less told me to go jump in a lake. If you listen hard, you can almost hear a splash. My ex’s words were appreciated, yet it was difficult to hear the concern in her voice, without picking up an underlying emotion. We’re way past love Elizabeth and I. Love looks like a dot in the Pacific Ocean from this vantage point. She prefers to remember our married life as a nightmare. This kind of sympathy is hardly worth feeling. It’s only a tormented sketch of the original painting.
“Did you have another heart attack?” She doesn’t give up the investigation. The marbled green orbs hypnotise me.
“No, no, it wasn’t another heart attack. There’s an artificial valve inserted into the artery. Inserted when I had the bypass. This moved about inside me, apparently, and that caused me pain.” I was too close to the truth here. I didn’t like it.
“
I understand. Oh, yes, I see.”
She gazed at me along her cute nose, still bumped and freckled after all these years. It got broken when she was ten years old, on a Guides’ trip to the New Forest.
“Do you? Do you really see?” I returned.
She ran straight into a low lying branch at full tilt. Before I came along.
Her intense eyes began without emotion, then tightened focus. “So what is the hospital intending to do about your valve?”
No doubt I stare mysteriously back. “They can’t do anything about the valve.”
“What do we have a health service for?” she wonders.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
By this stage everything is being processed by the left side of my brain.
“Can’t you get another opinion?”
“Why should I need another opinion, Liz? Do you think this is election time?”
“Can’t they offer you another operation?”
“Only to further reduce my weight,” I observe.
“You’re telling me that the doctors can’t put this mistake right?”
“The body isn’t a collection of nuts and bolts,” I argue. That’s precisely what my body has become; like one of those put-it-together-yourself vintage sports car kits.
“The surgeon had better do something about this,” she warns.
She’ll have her finger back on my pulse soon.
I gulp back the final inches of Frank’s speciality beer.
“The specialist promised to write to me again.” I make the guy sound like Boswell. “I’ll get regular check-ups. Hospital appointments as required. Learn how to take better care of myself.” Take care of my effects would be more accurate.
“My god.”
“I know.”
She observes me with some anguish. “This is disturbing. We noticed such a huge improvement. You really had your puff back, didn’t you.”
“What can I say? C’est la vie,” I tell her.
Previous rancour falls away from her eyes. If I’d said something good then I didn’t object.
Timothy Sheer bounces downstairs to join us. He’s prepared for the big kick off in his Bristol City shirt. “Hiya, Dad!” Thick glowing copper hair like his mother’s, how it used to be, clashing a bit with the red colour of the football strip.