I can’t sleep.
Well me neither Anya.
It struck me then why it is that the English phrase – to drive home – means to make someone understand.
In the middle of the night I could no longer bear it and insisted that we leave without saying goodbye. We would check into a hotel before tomorrow’s flight. I could not spend another second in that place without imploding.
Luke was half asleep at first and I had to shake him. We whispered furiously for a while. But when he realised I’d already packed up our shared suitcase, taken it out into the hall and was not coming back into the apartment, he evidently decided that staying without me would be even worse for him in the morning than this cloak-and-dagger disappearance overnight.
Back down in the lift, back into the car – parked on a steep incline – where Luke sat at the wheel for a minute with his eyes closed as if summoning strength, then to the only hotel I could, in that moment, think of, the big yellow Holiday Inn.
I locked the chain on our bedroom door. The bed was hard and low. Flyers for a 24-hour casino called NEW ERA and various strip clubs were fanned across the coffee table. Maybe it was the sight of these that made me think of tugging at Luke’s waistband – to make it up to him, or to separate in his mind who I was now from the child I turned into with my family.
Immediately afterward he fell asleep and I got up and stood for a long time at the window.
As a child I would stay up watching the fires. Silhouettes of buildings, indistinguishable from the night except where they glowed. Their black geometry slowly folding. In the morning familiar places would look foreign, as if I’d never seen them.
*
I woke to three powder shafts of sunlight on my cheek. A line of moth holes in the heavy curtain shone white-hot like bullet holes. Leaving Luke to sleep I left the bed and tweezed two hairs from my jaw, crouching in front of the mirror.
The lights in the windowless bathroom went out midway through my shower and the hot water ran cold. In the pitch-dark I groped my way, dripping, to unlock the door.
Downstairs, the receptionist explained that the whole area had the same problem. Maybe workmen had cut through something – they were excavating under the roads all round the hotel. They had a generator but it was not, at this present time, working. One American woman who came to the desk behind me was outraged that she could not take the elevator up to her room. Was she supposed to walk up nine floors? My home had been on the tenth, I wanted to tell her.
Luke gave me the silent treatment all the way to the airport. When I asked what was wrong he said: Nothing, but there will be if you keep asking me, so I stopped asking.
Our Austrian Airlines flight from Sarajevo Airport stopped in Vienna for an hour. Luke was miles ahead of me and I went through what turned out to be the wrong exit – for passport check not connecting flights. Luke had my boarding pass, so I had to go all the way through security again and back to the gate where he seemed to be in an even worse mood, headphones clamped over his ears.
Boarding again for the final leg, dusk shimmered over the runway and I remembered that first evening in Sanary. With a sharp intake of breath as if I was being submerged in ice, I realised I’d left the ring with Hana.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I’d done this time. It made me feel like my mother.
The cabin filled with the strains of Mozart. Conveniently, since we were ignoring each other, Luke was seated several rows ahead. I guess because he hadn’t known how much time he could take off so soon after our summer holiday, he’d booked his own return some time after he’d done mine. That was the reason – but I kept looking up and between the seats to where I could see the curve of his ear, waiting for him to turn.
Poised on the runway, I looked over the tarmac. At the green lights glittering their messages across it in the dark.
After we collected the bags, and the train pulled into Liverpool Street, he finally took my hand.
The chokehold loosened. My words came out in a rush. I asked him again if he still loved me. Again he took his time to respond.
There was a lot of tension, he said finally. And I’m not used to that.
ASYLUM ROAD
10
It felt like returning to reality. London, but without a diamond flashing in my peripheral vision all the time.
Luke went straight to his office while I went with the bag to the flat. Entering, closing the door behind me, everything slipped back into place. I knew then I would never go back.
Luxuries I’d stopped noticing now seemed lit from within. The pressure in the shower seemed stronger. I stood under its cascade until I forgot where I was. The bathroom blurred and my breathing became shallow. I stopped the water and pressed my face into a heavy towel, its detergent smell, until I felt strong enough to tackle the blocked sink.
The various things I’d puked up had become one thick, primordial tar, but as the putrid remains began to glug away, I felt energised. A certainty came over me that order had been restored.
I couldn’t bring myself to think about the ring yet. Instead I opened my laptop, emailed the lost property counter at Split. When the reply came that still nothing had been found, the feeling I’d had of something being stuck in my airways every time I remembered the lost items now dissipated.
That my confused thinking might ever amount to a significant original contribution to knowledge had seemed implausible from the start. It now struck me as ridiculous that I would have to have these same unoriginal thoughts all over again. To eke out the same niche and then defend it felt like the most futile thing I could imagine. Reproducing all those lost words (concomitant, coterminous, coeval) that no one would ever read and which could serve no real purpose to anyone.
University institutions had provided me with shelter and a certain amount of liberty, a veneer of cosmopolitanism, but I had not made many friends. By then I only spent time with Christopher, and sometimes his friends, or Luke and his. The two groups could not have been more different and they never mixed. I called the latter posh but Luke insisted they were middle class. Anyway, the correct word for truly posh people was grand, he said, and actually grand people were often broke.
Initially these posh friends of his acted interested in getting to know me. They made me feel welcome, if not at home. But five years on they rarely asked more than polite questions. How was your summer? How’s the PhD? I realised they had only been starting conversations with me as a reflex of confidence, according to a code of behaviour they all knew. It didn’t mean they were truly interested, just that they could speak to strangers with ease. In such an incestuous group they might pounce on one as a novelty – a random or a fringe person as they were known – but I was no longer new.
I’d made temporary alliances with some of them. New girlfriends mainly. This was how I’d made most of my friends – uniting with outsiders via a shared sense of exclusion. It could feel heady at first but that quickly turned to bitterness if they managed to assimilate.
I sent two emails with the same two words as the subject, ignoring the two warnings: this body has no text.
QUITTING PHD
I waited for two responses.
But you’re so close, Luke protested. It’d be perverse.
Minutes later Christopher’s:
Sunk cost fallacy. Where the fuck have you been? How was BiH?
I replied to Christopher’s, explaining about my phone, the lost book, the desire to be free of it, and Luke’s insistence I carry on. He said Luke’s reservation would probably be that he thought I was looking to become even more dependent. You should tell him you’ll get a job, he wrote. A full-time one, not more transcribing.
I tried to think of what else I could pretend to do while Luke went out to work.
Usually when he left the house I would listen for a few moments, imagining I might hear his key turn in the lock, footsteps bounding back up the stairs. Then I’d gaze at my phone’s darkness, waiting for communicatio
n from someone. Once I was sure Luke was not coming back, I went round neutralising the absence. Closing things he’d left open or turning things off he’d left on. Replacing lids. Hanging up the wet towel, lowering the seat, picking up waste material.
The routine continued: check face, check chin, pluck renegade hairs – digging when they weren’t ready, wiping blood from the blade. Brush teeth, wash hair, make tea, sift mail. Another flyer warning us we lived in a hard water area. Sort laundry, fill French press, find something broken, add to list, panic as the washing machine reached its frenzy.
If I didn’t have a wash to do, the silence could grow deafening, waiting for him to make contact. Until he did, it felt as if I was very far from life and the outside world. If he didn’t, my refuge could become imprisonment. To escape I’d close my eyes and see if I could imagine the future. Perhaps that’s what my mother meant when she said the women in our family had foresight. Two more thoughts usually occurred to me then.
No one can give me what I need.
I need to need less.
I made quieter, smaller movements. Tried to take up less space. I once listened to an eight-hour YouTube video called Ambient Iso Binaural Beats and watched the sky pass beyond the window, imagining myself no longer encircled by negative thoughts. Still the unrelenting sensitivity as if my skin had peeled right off.
It was better if I wasn’t already in the flat when he came back to it. Like a good exile, I began spending all my time in cafes. I felt better too this way, returning to the flat on a more equal footing. Like a dog that had taken itself for a walk.
Christopher called it limerence, the magical beginning I wanted back. When each hair I found after he used the shower, usually coiled in the grout between tiles, I gathered like relics of a saint. When I talked about him as my boyfriend and my heart had raced.
Luke had insisted we call his flat ours. In practice, both of us tended toward the evasive but definite article the. He had teased me, in the beginning, over how I couldn’t bring myself to actually use things I owned, preferring to keep them for a future date. I used so little toothpaste, he said, it was unlikely my teeth were ever clean. I watched the smart meter he’d installed which told me how much energy I consumed each day I was alone there. It would go up dramatically in the morning if I had a shower or boiled an egg, and I would think that it was pointless to eat eggs. The benefit was essentially cancelled out by the energy and expense of cooking them. I started to buy food that could be eaten raw.
Still, it was hard to express my happiness then. There was no room. I remember it like floating in warm water. A weightless, all-over miracle, my body held by something that also ran through my fingers. I liked hearing the sounds he made getting ready for work. The shower turning on then its softening which told me his body was beneath it. The electric shaver, the kettle, cup down, the steam hiss of the iron. All meant progress underway, without me having to make any. I rarely had anywhere to be at that hour. And then, exactly twelve hours later, I’d assume positions suggestive of domestic bliss for the moment his key turned in the lock. Not bent over my notebook on the sofa but hanging washing, arranging a salad, or emerging from a bath to print my body against his shirt. Inhaling the smell of exertion, his fug of productivity.
Somehow I had imagined this state would be made permanent by the decision to get married.
Luke arrived back just before midnight. I was in bed, not wishing to give the impression I’d been waiting. Over the course of the day my optimism had begun to falter. I’d started to feel uneasy again. I’d gone for several walks, trying to rid myself of a burning sensation. Not hot but cold, deep in my chest, like smoking a menthol cigarette. Shrinking, twisting blue, crushing in on itself. It grew painful as I heard him unlock the door in the hall and climb the stairs. I’d draped a drying sheet over the banister – a white flag of surrender.
When he came in he sat on the bed, began to untie his laces without greeting. I waited as long as I could bear the silence.
Are you OK?
A longer silence. I began to vibrate in the dark. He got into bed and sat with his back against the wall.
Luke?
I’m trying to relax.
OK.
A longer silence still, in which I turned to face the other way, then turned to face him again, the coldness spreading out now from my chest into my veins.
Luke?
These pregnant silences drove me mad at first and then I tended to panic as if I was being strangled.
I don’t know what to say, he said at last, staring at the wall.
I realised I was panting and tried to take smaller breaths than I felt I needed.
It’s not working, he said then, in an unfamiliar voice.
What isn’t?
I tried to swallow but my tongue felt swollen, blocking up my throat. By now my whole body shook, as if something inside – a whole other person – threatened to break out of it.
Well, I said brightly, aren’t we going to talk about this?
I was determined not to behave in a way that was hysterical or backed him into a corner. That, as Luke had taught me, is when even docile animals lash out. It was better to sit with the uncertainty than provoke a reaction I didn’t want.
It’s late, he said with a shrug of resignation. Talk tomorrow. I need to sleep.
Yes, I said, as if this had been what I’d suggested, better to talk about things in daylight.
I lay awake all night again, listening to him sleep, but must’ve dozed sometime after five because I woke up to find him gone. Immediately the adrenaline returned. Then I heard him on the landing.
Where are you going? It’s Saturday.
Work.
The word landed on me in the empty bed like something insignificant dropped from a height. Then a zip closed decisively and he returned, giving me a conciliatory pat. I said nothing, moved my chin a centimetre, offering him my mouth.
I haven’t brushed my teeth.
I persisted and he submitted to the kiss, which made it worse.
You can’t work here?
I left my charger at the office.
OK, well then, I’ll see you later?
Maybe you should stay at Christopher’s tonight.
OK . . . that’s a good idea . . . right then, I’ll do that.
He picked up his running headphones. I hid my face in the pillow, arm at a strange angle, unable to breathe until the front door had shut behind him.
I spent the whole day with the sensation that the floor beneath me was giving way. Nothing I came into contact with felt solid. Nothing could hold me. From the bedroom window I saw that a neighbour’s roof had been removed and was now covered with plastic sheeting that moved like a lung in the wind. I watched it for a while, breathing in and out in sync. As one magpie sailed past the window I shut my eyes. When I opened them I saw it had been joined by what I assumed was its mate and felt this to be a good omen. Then I saw it was in fact cannibalising a pigeon and I reached out and struck the window.
Luke emailed in the afternoon just as the light was fading.
I think it’s best if you stay at Christopher’s for a couple of days.
I lay on the carpet until its weave was printed on my skin, trying to get rid of the falling feeling, interrogating the phrase he’d used. Couple of days. Couple. I often used that word interchangeably with few and several. Did Luke’s couple strictly mean just two?
I could not think of any responses so I didn’t send one. I’d communicate with potent silence the way he always did, saying only what was absolutely necessary and factual.
I emailed Christopher instead who said he would order an Uber for me. Twenty minutes later I got in with a bag – mostly the same things I’d taken to my parents’. The luggage tag from Split still attached. I kept my eyes out the window but the driver seemed anxious to make conversation, presumably not because he had much interest in his passenger but so he would get a good rating. He tried to catch my eye in the mirror. A cherry a
ir freshener swayed beneath it.
Going on holiday? he said.
Yes.
The shop window below Christopher’s place was daubed with the words FINAL DAYS.
It’s a break, I said after he’d held my body for a long time, very tightly.
He’d taken the afternoon off work to sit in this alternate reality beside me. I wanted to express gratitude but could barely speak. I let myself be brought onto the sofa.
Do you want to take your coat off?
No.
Can I get you tea? Alcohol?
I shook my head.
I have a work phone you can borrow while you’re here, he said, if you need.
I nodded, trying not to let his kindness undo me, and he nodded too, and then we watched nature documentaries. He didn’t even comment on how relentlessly I traced my nail along my jaw.
Do you need anything? he asked when the third episode began automatically, I’m making dal.
I shook my head.
Would you rather listen to a podcast? What’s that one you’re –
I shook my head again, more firmly.
I woke up in the morning to find the sofa under me was moving. The place next door was a building site, I remembered. Someone must be tugging at the foundations.
Luke suggested we meet three days later, during his lunch hour, near his work. I told Christopher he had suggested a walk. I sensed his mother behind this idea, assuming being in public might stop a scene from taking place. Or so her son could not be trapped by me then held hostage.
On my way I passed a headline printed on a board: EXPERTS WARN AGAINST OPTIMISM.
His office was down a side street near the Heron Tower, shared with a few other green-investment-type companies. I was early, so I waited outside that building, rather than loiter directly outside his. The lobby was taken up by a vast aquarium which I knew Luke hated.
Asylum Road Page 12