by Louise Kean
We lay next to each other for a while, not saying anything, and then I got up and pulled on my top and jeans, over my naked body. Dale snatched up his shirt and trousers and did the same. I sat down heavily on the bed next to him, and he took out his cigarettes, lit one, passed it to me, and lit one for himself. We sat staring ahead, and I reached around smiling, and took his hand, to let him know it was alright.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ I asked him.
‘I’m going down to the hospital. You?’
‘Finish packing, I suppose.’ I sighed hard, took back my hand, and massaged my neck. I could feel the tension.
‘When do you go?’ he asked, watching me.
‘Saturday,’ I replied.
He nodded his head, as if he agreed that I should.
He got up to leave, and I watched him move to the door. I got up as he twisted the door knob, and took a couple of steps forward towards him. He turned and smiled at me.
‘Have a good flight,’ he said, and laughed a short sharp laugh, at the weight in the air, at this strange way to say goodbye.
‘I’ll try,’ I said, and smiled back, raising my eyes to heaven, at us both, at our stupidity, and our misguided beliefs that we would make ourselves feel better, or lose ourselves in something so quick, and so small.
‘Take my number, well, my parents’ number,’ I said suddenly. ‘In case you’re ever in London, and need a place to stay.’
I grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled the number down quickly. He took it from me, and stuffed it straight into his pocket without looking at it.
‘I’ll see you,’ he said, turned and spun out of the door, and I watched it close behind him. I heard him walking quickly away, his footsteps suddenly stop, then turn, and I could hear him walking back towards the door, and I prayed inside myself that he wouldn’t open it. Somehow he sensed my prayer. I heard him stop, and then the footsteps make their way back down the corridor.
I had allowed it to happen, convincing myself that I was making Dale feel better. I thought I was helping him, like some Mother Teresa figure on heat. I realized in the seconds after he walked away that was not what I had done at all. I had simply helped myself. The phone rang, and I picked it up, not saying anything, numb.
‘Nicola, are you there?’ Charlie said.
Who Cares?
It takes me half an hour to get the fire going, but I don’t give up piling on log after log, and far too many firelighters. I leave Charlie undisturbed – he hasn’t come out of his room since the policemen left, and I imagine he’s sleeping. By the time I have had a shower, moisturized, plucked my eyebrows, taken time on random stupid tiny things that require all my concentration but no thought, I am relatively relaxed. I pour myself a large glass of red wine from the drinks cabinet, sit myself down on the sofa in a huge sweatshirt I got free from work, clean jeans, and damp hair, and I feel ready to face anything. I smoke a cigarette smoothly, and sit back and think. I need to have a proper talk with Charlie, I think he is crying out for attention, crying out to talk, he just doesn’t know how. For the thirtieth time since Phil rang, I mentally acknowledge that Dale has called, but in the same way as I have done for the last hour, I push it to the back of my mind. Charlie is my first, my only real concern. Dale is from a different world, Dale won’t even recognize me now.
I dig around by the phone and find all the takeaway leaflets that have been collected and kept in an orderly manner by Charlie’s parents. I find an Indian one and phone in our order. It’s the same meal we always have, I don’t need to ask Charlie what he wants. I potter about, turning lamps on, straightening cushions and throws on the sofa, tidying books on the table in the corner, putting paper down on the coffee table, getting cutlery, pouring myself another glass of wine. The temperature has dropped, there’s a chill in the air, and I snuggle inside my sweatshirt, and close the back door. The sky is black. I look at my watch – it is nine o’clock. I see clouds creeping in from the wings, hanging over the cottage.
Somebody rings the doorbell, and I take my purse to the door, and accept two white plastic bags holding our evening meal.
I take the boxes out of the bag, put the naan bread on a plate, turn the stereo on, turn the volume down to low, press play on the Fleetwood Mac CD, one of Charlie’s dad’s, and move to Charlie’s door. I knock quietly, and wait for an answer.
‘Come in,’ he almost whispers.
Charlie is sitting in bed, naked from the waist up. He has obviously been asleep – his eyes are a little red, and his hair sticks out in strange clumps on his head.
‘Char, I’ve got us an Indian. Do you fancy a chat?’
Charlie just nods, and climbs out of bed in his boxers.
‘I’ll just put some clothes on,’ he points to himself, and smiles at me.
‘Absolutely – do you want a glass of wine?’
He looks up at me, debating it in his head.
‘Sure, thanks.’
I close the door and move back towards the table. I remember some candles in a drawer in the kitchen, probably for power cuts. I take all three, place them in the empty candlesticks above the fire, and light each one. I turn off a lamp in the corner, leaving only one other by the sofa shining softly.
Charlie walks out of the bedroom. He stares at the scene in front of him for a moment, pulling down his sweatshirt distractedly.
‘Come on, Charlie, it will get cold,’ I say quietly.
He sits down on the sofa, and I pass him his wine, which he takes with a serious look, and then his plate, which he accepts with a smile.
‘This looks great, Nix, thank you,’ he whispers. I flinch as I see a tear appear in the corner of his eye – he can’t cry yet; we haven’t even started. But it disappears almost immediately, and he takes a tiny sip of his wine. For a while we eat in silence, looking at the candles, listening to the music, feeling the summer evening’s chill, wondering how, in the midst of all our emotional turmoil and madness, we have found ourselves sitting in a parody of a romantic evening. I wonder how something that looks so calm, and promises so much romance, can actually be such a façade. I thought that if I made it look right, it would be right. But not a word has been said, and we both know that when it is, when one of us begins, and really talks, this calm room will be filled with all the madness again. Even if we whisper. You can’t stop what’s outside your door from coming in, you can’t just shrug it off with your coat.
Eventually we find ourselves small talking, about the food and the wine, but it bores us both, there are bigger things to be said. Charlie, with a newfound frankness, begins.
‘I’m alright, you know. Today, throwing that food in the village, I knew what I was doing. I just wanted people to … stop, to … look at me for a minute. A half-naked man in their midst, hurling fish and loaves, I wanted to wake them up. I wanted to, to break them out of their shopping, and their working, and everything! I wanted to affect them, make them think I was mad, shock them into doing something different. I launched a terrorist attack on their apathy. I just wanted them to … care … about something, for a minute.’ Charlie stops talking, deflated, looking down at his plate.
‘Charlie, the thing is, your world isn’t theirs,’ I say.
‘If you are feeling detached, or alone, it doesn’t mean they are too. You are in a peculiar world, we both are. We work and play in a city that sits its homeless at ten-metre intervals on our way to our overpaid jobs, and we’re numb to it – we’ve seen it all before. If I sat and thought about it, it would break my heart. But, Charlie, we don’t, not because we don’t have time, but because we don’t have the inclination. We don’t care. In a way we don’t dare – how could we function?’
‘It shouldn’t be like that,’ Charlie speaks through his anger.
‘Why, Charlie, because you’ve only just realized it? All of a sudden you are ready to confront and condemn every social problem we have, you’re going to clean the streets and clear the loneliness, because you’ve had some sort of pe
rsonal … epiphany? People have been doing it for years, Charlie. There are more worthwhile people than us, thank Christ, and they’ve been trying to make us care for years. You can’t go in to work every day with tears in your eyes, you can’t spend all your time at the soup kitchen, or in the counselling centre, and have the life that you lead, the drinks, and the fun, and the car, and all the accessories of your life. And you can’t see all the problems either. Those are just the ones that stand out. Everybody in London is kind of lonely, anybody in such a big city is – it’s a choice you make, when you decide to live in a place that grand, that busy, when you accept that the people that pass you in the street may never pass you again. You can’t have that, and a social conscience as well.’
I stop and take a breath, another gulp of wine. I am a little embarrassed that Charlie will think I am on my soap box, but when I get going, I find it hard to stop myself, I feel like I am an oracle. Of course it’s only an hour later, when I’ve calmed down, when my passion for my subject has abated, that I remember every thought I’ve had has been had before. I remember that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, just another taxi driver spouting on about politics, another bloke in the snug declaring the perfect England formation, another office gossip on the moral high-ground. It’s always then, when I feel like a stereotype, that I feel like a fool, for while I am making my speech, in the middle of my monologue, I forget myself, and believe utterly in whatever comes out of my mouth. I can talk the big issues to death. It’s my issues I can’t voice.
‘I want to go away then,’ Charlie says.
‘I can’t live there any more.’
‘Where do you want to go?’ I ask, sincerely.
‘Somewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere people know me. I could live here – more people know me in this village than in town anyway.’
‘You could, you could live here,’ I say, and decide for a shot at the bigger issue.
‘But, Charlie, why all of a sudden do you feel like nobody cares about you? Why now? You’ve always loved London, it’s always suited you up until now, what’s changed?’
Charlie shrugs quickly, turns his nose up, and looks down at his plate.
‘So it’s nothing then, no reason,’ I say. Charlie shrugs again.
‘Charlie, that girl, the girl being attacked – did you see more than you are telling me?’
‘What? What do you mean? I told you everything I saw. It was horrible.’ He looks up at me, pleading with me to believe him. I do believe him, but for the first time, something nasty clicks in the back of my head, some horrible thought that swims back with my memories, and song lyrics, and useless trivia, some terrible little question not yet ready to surface, that’s just burst its shell. It nags a little, but then disappears. But it leaves a slight uneasiness in my head, in the air between me and Charlie, that I might not know everything he has to tell. It hadn’t occurred to me before that he might have kept something from me.
‘I don’t know!’ he suddenly says, louder, more forceful than before.
‘I don’t know what I want to do, but I don’t want to stay there – I don’t want to heal the fucking world, but I don’t want to be cold, I don’t want to be cut off from everybody. I want to … feel something. It’s just too easy, not to care. I get swept along, I got swept along.’ We finished our food long ago, half-empty plates on the table in front of us, both sinking into the sofa and the wine. Charlie reaches over and fills up both of our glasses finishing the second bottle of wine.
‘Charlie, you just, have to make more of an effort. It doesn’t have to be something dramatic. You just have to go after something that will make you happy. And if you know it’s not what you’ve got, then, well you need to clear out the deadwood.’ I half smile at him, knowing full well I mean me.
‘You’re drinking a lot, by the way, for a man who has given up booze.’
‘I know.’ He smiles and looks down at his freshly filled glass.
‘It’s okay, Charlie, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.’
‘We’ve had trouble, haven’t we?’
‘Yes, but I think we’ve actually done quite well, considering what’s been in our heads.’ I look down at the wine in my glass.
‘I think it was that summer. I think it was that early. We should have just let it go. But I didn’t.’ Charlie is still smiling at me while he talks, but my whole body has gone tense.
‘Nix, don’t you think it was that summer, after America, it was back then that it started going wrong?’ He is still smiling at me, like we can talk about anything now, but I carry on staring at my wine, gripping the stalk of my glass harder and harder, digging my nails into my hand.
‘Nix?!’ He nudges me on the knee, almost laughing, wallowing in this new found honesty, wanting to say everything now. I look up and glare at him. He pulls back, like I’ve slapped him.
‘What?’ he asks. ‘I need to talk about it. I know we were too young, but …’
‘Charlie, stop it, I’m not going to talk about that,’ I say fiercely. All my good intentions have come to nothing.
‘Nix, you have to,’ Charlie says quietly. ‘I’m not the only fucked-up one in this room, you know. I’m not the only one with issues, it’s just that mine … well, they’ve come to a head! Nix, you can talk to me about it. Surely by now, enough time has passed …’
‘That is never going to happen, Charlie, enough time is never going to pass. You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like. Try, try and imagine it – how can you?!’ I shout at him. But he just looks at me evenly. I slam my wine down, and get up to leave, but he lurches forward, and grabs my arm, pulling me back down.
‘No, Nix, not this time. You’ll never talk about it, you never say how you felt afterwards. What was I supposed to think? You were almost relieved, for Christ’s sake, you wouldn’t discuss it. How was I supposed to know? I just thought you were relieved, to have got it out of the way.’
‘“It”? “It”, Charlie, was a baby, and you thought I was relieved?! Are you fucking stupid? I didn’t want to be pregnant, but I was never … relieved. You know, I’ve never told my mother – can you even imagine what that’s like, or how she’d look at me if she knew? It didn’t happen to you, Charlie, it happened to me!’ I am crying now, tears streaming down my face.
‘No, you’re wrong. We both went through it; don’t say it didn’t mean anything to me, because it did! I know how hard it must have been, but you never spoke to me about it, you wouldn’t tell me. I tried, but when a person pushes you away, well, what was I supposed to do?’
‘You could have left,’ I say, slumping back into the sofa.
‘I know,’ Charlie says, evenly.
We sit in silence for a while, smoking cigarettes, drinking more wine. Charlie opens another bottle.
‘It was a strange summer,’ he says. ‘It was too early for us to have to go through something like that; we were both too worried about making it work, at home, away from America. I was so scared that we’d get home and you’d just see some little semi-detached house in Oxford, and think I was … different from what you thought I was. I thought you’d see my mates, and find me … ordinary.’
We lapse into silence again.
‘How did we last this long?’ I ask suddenly.
‘We didn’t really. You did, and I did. We was for America. We’ve had a six-year relationship, but we’ve both been single for five years. That’s what happens when you get two good-looking cowards together!’ Charlie leans his head on my shoulder, and nudges me in the ribs.
‘Ouch! Who are you calling good-looking?’ I laugh back.
‘We should have talked more, we should have talked like this,’ I say. ‘Charlie, do you realize that this is the best conversation we’ve had in about four years?’ I laugh. I know it’s my fault, but Charlie tries to make me feel better.
‘I know, I know. I’ve never really had that much to say, though, have I?’
‘In all honesty, it was never your person
ality I was interested in, and once you lost your looks, well, it was all downhill …’ We are both giggling now, slumped back on the sofa next to each other, a glass of wine each, feet up on the coffee table.
‘It won’t be like this when we get back to London, you know that, don’t you?’ I say, quietly.
‘It could be,’ Charlie says, under his breath.
‘Charlie, in two months’ time, we’ll be back where we started.’ I pull myself up to face him.
‘You’ll be going out with the boys, drinking yourself silly most nights, sleeping with anything in a skirt.’ Charlie looks up at me quickly, as if somehow I wouldn’t know about the others.
‘Charlie, come on, I’m not stupid, and I’m no angel either, but obviously nothing on your scale.’ He raises his eyes to heaven.
‘No, come on, I’m serious, you don’t talk to me like this usually.’