Signs of Life

by Anna Raverat

  The hotel room was small. Along one wall was a fitted wardrobe with mirrored sliding doors and you had to squeeze around the end of the bed to get into the bathroom, which had a shower but no bath. The mirrored doors were probably intended to make the room look bigger but since all they reflected was the bed, it seemed as though the room was taken up entirely by this looming bed with its pale pink cover.

  I didn’t want to be with Carl. I didn’t want to touch him. When we walked from the hotel to a Chinese restaurant I left a gap big enough for another person to walk between us but that other person had left me and I didn’t think he was coming back. All my desire had evaporated, and yet I knew that I was going to do it anyway. Sex was the destination our affair had been leading to and now, with Johnny gone, there was no reason not to. Carl showered before bed, and when I showered after him, it felt like a ritual.

  It happened in the middle of the night. Carl said, Look at us, and gestured to the mirrored doors where I saw us, naked, having sex. Here I am with you, said Carl, pausing to savour the moment. I was already self-conscious and now I had to watch. I don’t like remembering this, and although I have successfully forgotten many details of that first time, such as how he initiated it, whether I thought about Johnny, what we said to each other afterwards, how easily I managed to get back to sleep, I am left with this picture of me and Carl having sex in that vast pink bed.

  I didn’t fall in love with Johnny: I jumped. I said I was wary of him when we met because of the other girl he’d been with that summer, and that was true, but I was also wary because he was so good looking, so popular, and because the place was so romantic. I didn’t trust all this and so I held back, watching, waiting, until a few months later when Johnny was staying with me. We’d been to the cinema on a mid-week afternoon. Afterwards we walked through a park and sat on a bench, watching people scurry home as the evening came down. The feeling between us was like warm blue water, very wide and very deep. I suppose that neither one of us wanted to break that feeling because we stayed as it grew dark. I remember Johnny smiling at me: his mouth twitched slightly, as though he was so happy he just kept pouring into that smile and it became so full that it overflowed into these twitches at the corners of his mouth. How good it felt to be the subject of such a smile. The rush of people thinned out. Through the middle of the park was a path with streetlamps spaced at regular intervals. The streetlamps had come on without our noticing. A cyclist rode along the path and there was a rhythm to how the rider moved through the darkness, dipped into the light, moved through the darkness and dipped into the light. Johnny was already in love with me, and I could see that it would be all right to love him too. It was as though I didn’t really have a choice because I knew it was right, but maybe I knew because somewhere inside I’d already chosen. Despite this, I hesitated: I was afraid, but I also knew that if I wanted to meet him there, I had to jump.

  One evening, when they pinned me down, I explained my dilemma to Shirin and Delilah: Johnny is the perfect man for me, but it’s not the perfect time, and therefore how can he be the perfect man? It wasn’t a proper question, but I wanted an answer.

  Delilah said: Johnny is not the perfect man.

  Shirin said: You’re too hooked on perfect.

  Both of them knew, now, about Carl and though they never met him or even saw him, they didn’t think he was the perfect man either. In fact, everything I said about Carl disturbed them. They didn’t like the sound of Carl, they didn’t like the situation I had put myself in and they didn’t like what I was doing to Johnny.

  Shirin said: I’m worried about you, you should stop it with this guy or else what’s going to happen?

  Delilah said: You should tell Johnny. Or stop. But you should probably tell him now anyway, it’s gone that far.

  But it was clear that I wasn’t going to stop and that I wasn’t going to tell. Delilah and Shirin told me later that after this talk they were even more concerned. They didn’t know what else to do so they called in the big guns – they told my sister.

  Something else made the first sex with Carl awful, although it didn’t happen until two days afterwards. Other colleagues were attending the event we were driving to, including three friends of Carl who knew about our affair. We arrived late at the hotel and Carl’s friends had already gone; we wouldn’t see them until the next day. Carl pinned a note to the door of their room. He didn’t fold the note or put it in an envelope, so I read it. At the end, he wrote, ‘P.S. The Good Life.’ When I asked, he said this was just a joke with the lads.

  The next day I had breakfast with these work mates while Carl stayed in bed. One of Carl’s friends alluded to the fact that Carl and I had finally had sex. I was surprised he knew because Carl hadn’t seen his friends since we arrived. It turned out that Carl’s P.S. was code and they all knew what it meant.

  I returned immediately to our room to tackle Carl. I was angry at his laddish trumpeting, angry that he’d speculated and discussed it with them all beforehand, and angry with myself for getting mixed up with this idiot. I told him it was over between us. He cried and begged me to forgive him. I remember him sitting in bed, propped up by lots of pillows like an old lady, his lank hair and red eyes, and wanting to kick him. Hard.

  Ten

  The flat opposite is to be saved after all: the plastic sheeting has been taken down, most of the scaffolding is gone, and the place is swarming with builders. I don’t mind all the noise and activity because they are signs of life and anyway, I am prone to daydreaming and the sudden bangs bring me back with a jolt.

  Every choice involves a loss. By following Carl, I lost Johnny. Or I gave him up. I knew about choices such as which assistant to hire, which car to buy, whether or not to ignore the comments of builders shouted from the scaffolding (not the builders opposite; they are part of the ‘Considerate Builders Scheme’, there’s a sign up that says so) – these were decisions made at the top of the head. What I didn’t acknowledge was that some choices are made at other levels and it can take the conscious mind a while to catch on. Like when I tried to jump from the waterfall: the top of my head was saying I could but my feet had already said no. I don’t know whether my body made the choice or whether the choice was made deep in my mind and my body simply informed me of it.

  After Carl’s ‘Good Life’ note, I didn’t want to travel back with him and I certainly didn’t want to be alone with him. There were three vanloads of people leaving that event in convoy. I made sure Carl was in a different van to me. An hour or so into the journey, Carl’s van – he was driving – made an unscheduled stop. Seeing him pull off at a garage, I felt abandoned, which took me by surprise. Twenty minutes later, someone in my van said: Look, here they are! Carl’s van came up very fast behind us and overtook. I was annoyed; yet more foolish antics, but also slightly relieved that he was back. I was sitting in the front passenger seat and I noticed that up ahead, Carl was dropping one white flower after another from the van window making a trail of flowers on the road that our van gobbled up. This went on for a few minutes. Everyone in the vehicle had something to say about it, but I knew this was his apology – or rather, because I was so pissed off, the beginning of one. On a long straight stretch of dual-carriageway, Carl slowed his van to parallel ours so that he was alongside me, with only a metre of fast moving tarmac between us. Carl held out the last white flower. Take it! Take it! yelled everyone in my van. I rolled my window down and took the flower.

  I didn’t want to let go of my first feelings for him, I wanted to stay inside the crush, and I suppose I didn’t want to deal with my life; the job I had grown bored of, the flat that I couldn’t quite afford and now, with Johnny gone, learning to be on my own. Even before the affair, when Johnny and I were fighting a lot, Carl was where my mind went. The disenchantment with Carl was only a couple of days old. There had been several months of feeding the fantasy and the habit of thinking about Carl and wanting him was still there and, I found, easy enough to resurrect. It’s not lik
e I hadn’t seen the warning signs. I ignored them because I liked what he gave me. I thought I could dabble. It was like the beginning of an addiction, to kryptonite.

  The intensity with which Carl looked at me took me by surprise at first. Once I even looked over my shoulder to see if there was another, more glamorous, woman; I didn’t believe he could mean me, and this wasn’t because I didn’t think I was attractive, but rather that there was a wide gap between the kind of attention Carl paid me and me as I saw myself in my workaday life.

  In a dream, I am at the top of a tall tower with a group of other people. The group leader, who is on the ground, yells up and a young man climbs over the railings at the top of the tower and jumps. He is in the air for a long time. The jump becomes a fall – his body tips forward, his head goes back, his knees bend up behind him – it looks like he is about to start spinning. He manages to right himself just before landing heavily on his feet. His legs buckle beneath him and he staggers away on the hard earth. Now it is my turn. I climb over the railings and I’m in a perfect position to let go, but I am terrified. I don’t have a good handhold or a good foothold. I take off one of my hands to try and get more stable and that makes me even more precarious. I don’t want to do it. The railings are tall and there’s nowhere to put my feet. I struggle back over onto the solid tower.

  I said I remembered Johnny’s twitchy smile as we were sitting in the park but now I realize I could be wrong about that. I couldn’t have seen his smile in the dark, so perhaps he gave me that smile on another occasion. Or maybe the memory of this smile is a composite of all the other times he smiled at me like that, and not attached to any particular time or place, in which case it’s not really a memory but a floating image. I also say I loved Johnny and yet I treated him so badly, while still claiming to love him, that I have to wonder whether I did love him at the point at which I started with Carl or whether my love had disappeared, like street-lamps fading into daylight and switching off without anyone noticing.

  I still have all the letters and cards Johnny sent me, though I’ve never re-read them, and I thought I’d also saved the heart-shaped stone pendant, but it turns out I was wrong. The only other thing I kept was his records, and that was an accident: when he left, he picked up the wrong box and took my records instead of his. We intended to exchange the records but that never happened, and now I still have his long after we lost touch. I never listened to them, partly because I stopped playing records, and partly because they are his. Once I took out the box intending to drop it off at the charity shop and ended up looking through the records. They were like postcards from Johnny’s life, showing where he’d been and what he liked – up-beat African and South American bands, blues, independent labels, classical music I never heard him play. I took most of them to the charity shop in a carrier bag but selected a few to put back into the box and then returned the box to its place in the cupboard. I don’t know why I’m keeping them. I wonder if he still has mine.

  Eleven

  For my birthday, Carl gave me a coffee pot, cup and saucer each decorated with a Man Ray image of a milky-skinned, long-limbed woman. Even though we’d just split up, Johnny sent me a book by an author I liked. Inside the front cover, wrapped in white tissue, were some pressed flowers: a buttercup, a daisy, a sprig of cow parsley and a pink campion. The cow parsley had dropped its tiny white petals leaving a green skeleton and the gold had drained from the buttercup so that it was more like a ghost of a buttercup. I loved the inexpert way Johnny had carried out his sweet idea. I was comforted by his tenderness but mainly his gift made me sad because it showed me what I’d lost, or thrown away.

  On the evening of my birthday, Carl and I sat in my garden drinking cool white wine; it was another hot night in a long line of hot nights. We could hear the clatter from a nearby restaurant and at one point the whole crowd sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Listen, said Carl, they’re singing for you! I smiled, but I remember feeling lonely. Homesick, even though I was at home.

  Carl and I visited a grand country house. We’d been driving on the motorway and needed a break. Carl looked on the map and suggested this detour: there was bound to be a tea room, it wasn’t far and it would make a change from motorway services. As we drove down the gravel road, a sand coloured mansion came into view. You should live somewhere like this, Carl said.

  At the entrance a stout man in a brown uniform refused to let us in because it was closing time. Carl asked if we could whiz round: No. Could we at least get a cup of tea in the cafe? Look in the shop? No. The man got down from his tall stool and drew back the iron bolts holding the huge wooden doors open. He closed one side. Carl stepped over the threshold asking for ten minutes. The man refused politely. There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Carl was standing in a gentle dip in the flagstones and I remember wondering how many centuries of footsteps it takes to wear away stone. The man started to close the second door. Carl came out of the house without complaint but I could see that he was frustrated. The doors were shut against us, the man inside. When I turned to go back to the car, Carl erupted: he shouted and beat the doors with his fist. I watched, feeling entirely separate from this red-faced, spitting creature. His anger spent, he followed me back to the car, rubbing his knuckles. I wanted to take you there, he bleated.

  He went to smoke a cigarette in the tree-lined car park. I watched a blackbird dart from a tall green tree. I could tell by the way Carl drew the smoke into his mouth in hard fast pulls that he was still agitated. The blackbird flew back to her nest. How good to be a bird, or lighter than a bird – a small cloud, or thistledown, borne away on a breeze, no choices to make, no business with others, no obligations other than floating. It was a regal tree, with smooth grey bark, elegant branches reaching up into a clear sky.

  It’s like being in a cloud that never rains,

  The way they rise above the storm, and sleep

  So bird-white in the sky, like day-old

  Infant roses, little unambitious roads,

  Islands not defecting, wanting to be rescued.

  Medbh McGuckian

  The blackbird appeared again. Carl finished his cigarette, and crushed the filter into the gravel with the toe of his boot. I had no interest in him at all. Maybe he sensed this because he wandered away, head down, fists in pockets. I looked for the highest leaf on the tree, a habit of mine since childhood, but the wind was moving the uppermost branches, so I couldn’t find it.

  One night last week, my sister stayed over, unplanned, and after showering the next morning, she went to find some clean underwear to borrow. It was such a bright morning – impossible not to be cheerful about the day ahead and the possibility of a whole summer of days like this. I was making coffee when I heard her scream. I met her dashing, naked, from my room.

  Fucking arseholes!

  What?

  Fucking ARSE-holes!

  What?

  Go and draw the curtains!

  Ah: bonanza for the builders. I went to draw the curtains, as instructed, and in the flat opposite was a window-full of builders, grinning and waving. I couldn’t blame them. I waved back.

  Fucking cunts, she said, with a towel wrapped around her even though she was nowhere near the window now and the curtains were shut anyway.

  Wankers, more like, I said, but she was too pissed off to hear the joke.

  They cheered. And clapped, she said.

  Well, they are on the ‘Considerate Builders Scheme’, I said and then, to placate, added: And anyway, who wouldn’t cheer, seeing you naked? (My sister is very beautiful. We have a system of acknowledging this.)

  Because we worked with groups of young people in isolated locations, it was company policy for all managers to do a wilderness medical training course called ‘Far From Help’. I was away when everyone else did it so I had to catch up. The course was a long, long way away from London but the thought of an overnight train to the north of Scotland and three days and nights alone appealed to me and so did the name of the place:
the Forest of Maibie.

  This happened earlier, when Carl and I were on and then off, on again, off again, on again, and I knew I had to break that cycle, and also that I had to decide what to do about Johnny. I needed to decide whether or not to tell Johnny, and if I did tell him whether I was going to try and stay with him, if he still wanted me, or whether by telling him I would also be breaking up with him. I needed to consider whether the whole affair with Carl was just a painfully long-winded way of breaking up with Johnny.

  The course was in a log cabin down a long track in the middle of the forest, accommodation in adjacent cabins. I remember nothing about the other people on the course and I don’t remember much of what I learnt, though I passed the test, but I do remember the session on the recovery position: me turning inert bodies over and bending limbs into the correct pose, other people turning my inert body over, bending my limbs into the correct pose.

  I went to see Johnny where he was now living. He had a room in a friend’s house in a town an hour away. The house depressed me as soon as I saw it. Actually, the street depressed me first; it was a wide, curved street and so far from anything with any zest to it that the place felt dead. The house was pebble-dashed and the bay window had a mini roof of red tiles. There was nothing to see out of this huge window except other ugly houses. It horrified me, but I see why Johnny might have shored up in such a place, to hide and heal.

  So I have sailed the seas and come . . .

  To B . . .

  a small town fastened to a field in Indiana. Twice there have been twelve hundred people here to answer to the census. The town is outstandingly neat and shady, and always puts its best side to the highway. On one lawn there’s even a wood or plastic iron deer.