And I know too that you think that running away with me is an easy option and that staying with Tom and making that work is somehow “better”, but I have to tell you, I think you have it the wrong way around. There’s nothing “easy” about turning your life upside down, and nothing courageous about staying in a doomed relationship with someone who can’t or won’t commit.
Come to Paris. Or come to Bogotá. Of course it won’t be easy, but nothing worth having ever was. It will be better though – much better. And if it isn’t, we will change whatever needs changing until it is as good as it can be, I promise. Did anyone else ever make you such a promise?
Madness is hard as we get older – we think that change is impossible, but these things still happen: people do transform their lives in an instant. They do walk out for a packet of cigarettes and never come back. A friend of mine left his wife at sixty-nine and moved in with a mistress. The only hard bit is the first step. The only hard bit is the saying ‘yes’ – the believing. And in the end we crazy people know that even if it’s hard, it’s better than not believing.
We all make mistakes - don’t let this be another one. Let the mistakes stop here. Choose the guy who is crazy enough to still make the promises. Choose me.
Your Ricardo.
I realise that I have stopped breathing and force myself to inhale deeply. I re-read the letter again and then put it gently down on the passenger seat. I feel a little sick. My head feels swollen and puffy. But still there are no tears. I wonder if I haven’t become hard, emotionally dead. For it’s the letter I dreamt my whole life of getting but never had. And yet I can’t put a finger on any discernible emotion. I think, “Poor Ricardo. He chose such a useless piece of … silt.”
Silt – It’s not the right metaphor somehow, but I can’t think of another one.
And then I start the engine, pull the seatbelt on, and squeal my way out of the parking space.
As I lurch off towards the exit ramp, the Holcombe Waller CD bursts back into life, a beautiful acoustic guitar riff at the beginning of my favourite track of the album. But my mind is elsewhere, and I don’t think about the words until his beautifully understated voice starts to drift from the speakers.
I’m all mixed up. I’m free I’m stuck,
I’m free, I’m stuck, I’m a coffee cup.
My eyes start to tear.
I’m yours, I’m not, I’m yours, I’m not,
I’m yours, I’m not.
“Finally!” I think, reaching out and turning the music up. A huge lump forms in my throat, and my vision starts to blur. I can’t see to drive. I pull sharply into a different parking space just before the beginning of the twisting turning exit ramp. I don’t think I can negotiate it until the flood has abated.
Crash in the air, beyond repair;
no stars, no stairs, no cars, no cares;
take me with you.
I pull on the handbrake and turn the sound up full blast and gasp at the fact that such beauty can exist in the world, that a single man can make such a sound, and then stunned by the poignancy of the words, tears start to trickle, then roll, then stream down my face.
I may be mad, I may be sad;
I may have doubts, I may pull out;
I may see through, the things you do;
take me with you, take me with you …
And I sit and bawl as what feels like a lifetime of stress gushes out through my tear ducts.
When the song ends, I turn the sound back down, then off completely, and open the glove compartment in the hope of finding tissues. I pull out a pile of sweet wrappers and paperwork, but find none. I fish in the door-pocket and find a single used tissue, and use it to wipe my face and blow my nose. Then I exhale sharply and pick up the papers on the seat and stuff them back into the glove compartment.
A handwritten letter – for a second I think it is the one from Ricardo – catches my eye, and I pick it up and wipe my eyes and sniff and stare at it.
Dear Tom.
As promised, please find enclosed the cheque. If you have any problems cashing it let me know – it should be fine. As I said on the phone, don’t worry about the deeds – if you can’t trust family then they shouldn’t be family. Do what you want with the flat, rent it, keep it, use it as a holiday home, whatever. If I need the money one day then we’ll talk about what to do with the place then. And good luck with the crazy hilltop project – I hope it works out for you despite everything. Call me next time you’re home in Brighton.
Yours, Claude.
I frown at the letter and at that second my phone starts to ring. I pull it from my pocket; see that it is Tom, and answer.
“Hi Tom,” I say flatly.
“Mark, I tried to phone you, you didn’t answer. The sale is off,” he says, his voice brittle with anguish.
I sigh.
“Can you hear me?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“The sale is off. The notary phoned. She pulled out. I can’t believe it.”
“No,” I say.
“You sound weird,” Tom says.
“Yes,” I say. “I … I think I’m in shock.”
“Me too,” Tom says. “Why would she do that? We were supposed to sign tomorrow. Why would she do that the day before?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Are you still at the airport?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Ricardo … he’s gone. I’m on my way home.”
“Good,” Tom says. “God, I’m so … I can’t get my head around this.”
“No,” I say.
“No,” Tom repeats.
“Tom, I have a letter here … I found it. From your uncle.”
“Yeah?” Tom says.
“Yeah. It came with the cheque.”
“Oh yeah,” Tom says. “That’s nothing.”
“No,” I say.
“It was with the cheque, that’s all,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can see. What does it mean?”
“It hardly matters now,” Tom says. “God I can’t believe it.”
“No,” I say. “It looks like you were keeping your flat though. Is that right?”
“As I say,” Tom says. “It hardly matters now.”
“No,” I say. “I guess not. Only I didn’t know.”
“No,” Tom says. “Anyway, we can talk about that when you get back. God Mark, I’m so … this has really knocked the stuffing out of me. Do you think we could make her a higher offer?”
“No,” I say. “Definitely not.”
“No,” Tom says. “I somehow thought you’d say that.”
“Right,” I say. “Anyway, I’ll see you in a bit.”
“Yeah,” Tom says. “Does she actually have to give us the twenty grand now? Or just our twenty back?”
“Both,” I say. “She has to give us forty.”
“Oh,” Tom says. “Cool. Well, at least there’s that. Actually, I suppose it’s lucky I didn’t sell my flat.”
“Yeah,” I say. “At least there’s that.”
“OK, well, there’s no point paying to discuss it all here if you’re on your way home,” Tom says.
“No,” I say. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
I end the call and then turn the CD back up and listen to Take Me With You again. But like a second cup of tea, it can’t be as good as the first – maybe there just aren’t any more tears left. And so I start the car, reverse out, and swing up the ramp.
As I weave around the one-way system of the airport it strikes me that there’s nothing really to go home to. Tom has revealed another lie: he wasn’t selling his flat at all, but keeping it, borrowing money against it from his uncle. It doesn’t really matter. Other than the dishonesty, it’s in no way truly important. But it is another one. It is another lie. And all we seem to have done lately is lie to each other.
And the gîte is gone. Who would have thought it? All those months planning, waiting, and I have successfully vaporized that dream in a few minutes. Was it me? Was it
my fault? Maybe Chantal did it. More likely it never really existed; more likely it was just a mirage. Either way, without it, what’s left? For Tom will as sure as night follows day return to Brighton. And without fidelity, without a project, without honesty running either way between us, is there anything left at all?
Betting on my relationship with Tom is like living with a leaky washing machine. You live in hope, but you know that, inevitably, one day, you’ll come home and find that it has flooded the place out. Maybe Ricardo was the replacement and I missed it. That strikes me as a cold, calculating thought. But then what’s wrong with wanting a new dream – a more reliable dream? Other than the fact that you know that it too will go wrong eventually. But you don’t let that stop you, do you? You can’t. You have to live in hope. We know that we will die yet we somehow manage to pretend that we won’t. And we do it because it’s the only way to live. The only sensible choice is to believe that happiness is just around the corner, that Mister Right does exist, and that we will all live forever.
I suppose I’m big enough and old enough and wise enough to know that it’s all falsehood. We all die and Mister Right doesn’t exist. If he does he’s bloody elusive. Maybe Ricardo has it right. Maybe wanting to spend your whole life fighting with the same person is all anyone can hope for.
My eyes start to tear again as I sweep around a corner towards the roundabout. As the car turns, Ricardo’s letter slides off the seat beside me and onto the floor. I reach and pick it up, scooping the photo with it.
I notice for the first time that something is written across the bottom. When I get to the roundabout, as I wait for the confused tourists in the Dutch camper van in front to read all the signs and decide which way they want to go, I hold the photo flat against the steering wheel and study it. With a biro that hasn’t quite taken on the glossy surface, Ricardo has added a person in a chair sitting on the beach. And along the bottom, beneath the wooden house, scrawled across the blue sea, he has written, “Q: Why only Mark on the beach?”
I frown and flip it over. On the other side, he has written, “A: Ricardo is in kitchen making breakfast.”
His little drawing strikes me as so beautiful, so naive, so poignant, that tears well up again. A car behind me toots but I ignore it and I flip the photo back over and look at the front again.
As I wave at the driver and pull away I realise that I have gone the wrong way – I have turned back towards terminal two again.
And then, still crying, I also start to smile. And then I break into a broad, Ricardo-style, face-cracking grin.
I press the photo to my chest, and then put it back on the passenger seat.
I say, out loud, “You’re a crazy fucker, you know that right?”
And then I answer myself. “Yes, I know,” I say. “But in a good way.”
Epilogue
Our egos tell us that everything turns around us, that we are the nucleus in the middle of a whole vast structure suspended around, dependant upon us; a structure that can only continue to exist because we do. From this deluded point of view, we deduce, can only deduce, that without our presence, the world will simply implode.
In that we are all bound to each other by invisible forces there is some truth to the delusion. But as in physics, each combination is more or less unstable – each composition has its own limited lifespan after which it will start to decay. Epic implosions change the structure: friendships end, new ones form, but nothing is truly created and nothing truly ceases to be. Things just move around. We each continue doggedly to exist. And just as in nature there is ultimately no good or bad about it, no external judge to decide that this thing is in fact better or worse than that thing. In the end, it’s all just different, the only preference ours.
We atoms are stronger than we think – sometimes it seems that we are virtually indestructible, and the links between us are perhaps more fragile: in the end, they come down to nothing more than choice.
Tom, for his part, folds our life together like a novel at the end of a holiday: he slips it into his suitcase, jumps into his car and, the bonds severed, spins away into oblivion. Well, back to Brighton anyway.
He is gone even before I get back from my “break” in Paris, before I even tell him about Ricardo. By the time I get back to my flat, he has disappeared so completely, that if I didn’t have photos to prove it, I would have trouble believing that he ever existed.
When finally I phone him to stumblingly, grovellingly explain everything, he is surprised not that I am with Ricardo but that I am not with Tony. It seems he knew I was having an affair all along and accepted that fact as inevitable, forgivable, and unremarkable even. In that way I realise I underestimated him: what I interpreted as a lack of belief turned out, in the end, to be simply a different system of belief – as well crafted, solid, and functional as my own. Just different – and incompatible.
As when we leave a job and we wonder how those left behind will ever manage without us, my sad little ego would love to be able to report that Tom spent months rocking in a corner sucking his thumb somewhere, but, happily, I suppose, it would seem that these Earth shattering events barely made a dent in his outlook.
We’re not in touch anymore, but it’s not because we are enemies. It’s simply that, apparently, we have no need for each other. Tom’s life, it transpires, continues exactly as before. He has a new boyfriend; his second this year, and seems – so Jenny tells me – really happy.
I should probably have noticed that Jenny too was already spinning out of orbit, already being pulled inexorably out of my life and back to a previous, more familiar configuration. She was, is, furious with me for lying to her. She says she will probably never forgive me for that, but the fact that she’s still talking to me, or at least, still sending me acerbic little emails punctuated with exclamation marks telling me that Sarah has started school (very posh, very Surrey!) and that her mother is currently fruitarian (imagine!) and that she’s seeing a (pig ugly but hugely wealthy!) city stockbroker (with a humungous dick!) makes me think that she someday probably will. Apparently there is still some force holding us in orbit – albeit a distant orbit.
The breeze is hot and humid. The temperature is already in the high twenties and the sun isn’t even over the cloud-line yet. I dig my toes into the sand, deep enough to find the cool seawater, and as every morning I sit and stare out at the horizon, and think about distant lands over the ocean, and think about my own distant lives, because they do feel like entirely separate lives. They too feel like novels I have folded into my own suitcase.
As every morning, I think about Nice and Tom, and then Sarah and Jenny and Rodney or Roderick or whatever his name is back in Surrey, and then onto Hugo and Steve and all of the lovers from my own past and all of the lives lived and the adventures yet to come, because, amazingly, it never seems to stop.
The sun is peeping above the clouds now and I will be called in soon.
Things have changed a lot since that February morning of course. Somewhere along the way, Ricardo ceased to be a saint and became a real person, a real person with real faults: he’s obsessively tidy and irritatingly dogmatic that everyone else should be the same (which clearly, for me, is always going to be problematic); when he first gets home from work he’s grumpy and irritable, so I have to steer clear of him for the first hour every evening; he won’t tell his mother he’s gay (in fact he still won’t admit that he’s gay – a constant source of spicy debate) so I visit Bogotá’s single gay bookstore every time he visits her – my own personal protest. When he’s ill – a thankfully rare occurrence – he’s unbearably dramatic. I assume that this is a doctor thing, but I still struggle to remember that he didn’t die when he had the migraine, and so, by deduction, he’ll probably survive the bout of ‘killer’ flu as well. Worst of all, his technique of shouting every mispronounced word back at me makes him the worst Spanish teacher imaginable.
I’m still not quite sure what I did that February morning, still not quite sure i
f I stayed true to form or suddenly grew up. Was running away to join Ricardo in reality simply Mark making the same mistake all over again – dumping the old for new, one more time? Or was this one different? Maybe Ricardo was always the one for me and I thankfully saw that fact just in time. It feels that way. It feels right. Once the new course was set, it didn’t feel like a mistake, not once. It all felt wonderful and shiny and new and exciting. But then didn’t it always? Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I need to learn to live with that.
The sun has risen a little further. I need my sunglasses now, which means that it’s time for breakfast. I glance back towards the house. Paloma, who with the help of a massive dose of tranquilisers survived the transatlantic flight, but who I fear, may be too old to ever make it back again, is standing on the decking watching me. She’s seen more boyfriends come and go than she’s had birthdays: my constant companion, my witness. She sees me looking at her now and meows plaintively at me to return. She likes Ricardo, though that may just be because he feeds her tuna. And I think she prefers the beach house to the flat, though with a cat, it’s hard to know. As she stubbornly refuses to ever put a paw on the apparently terrifying sand, this is, it seems, as far as her experience of Colombia will ever go.
Paloma meows again and then Ricardo appears beside her. He gives her a stroke, and then waves at me and shouts, “Mark! Desayuno!” – “Breakfast!”
Ricardo says that human happiness is difficult because we are built like cats – preprogrammed for survival to notice only that which may be dangerous, only that which may threaten us. So just as a cat in a garden won’t see the sunshine or the grass, just as a cat will only notice the rustling in the bushes or the bird of prey overhead (or the imagined dangers lurking in the sand) we ourselves only notice the imperfections of our own lives, the faults of those around us, the things which might one day spoil things if we don’t, like cats, kill them first or run away quickly. He believes that the route to happiness is simply to look around and make yourself notice everything that is just fine, to force yourself to overcome the basic human instinct to spot only the negatives. It certainly seems to work for him. I look at Ricardo and Paloma and the house and do that now.
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