Listening for Voices
DURING THE night I woke with a particular line from your letter. Something, which when I remembered reading it, made me irritated and frustrated that I couldn’t reply to you straight away, and then in an instant it was gone. I scrambled out of bed to get the pieces of paper from the bin, to put the untruths back together. I found the line and I was right; you had written it. I was still hurt that you’d decided: “Now isn’t the time to talk.” We had always talked.
We sat in parks and open spaces talking for hours - in lunch breaks, after work and on days stolen from our routines. We made space for each other around meetings and visits, in between boring staff training and fifteen-minute tea breaks. You’d turn up outside my work place on your bike with a rose in your back pocket or a dog eared cartoon card. I accepted your gifts and invitations to tea. I felt wooed, chased, sought after. At the beginning you always said: “From the moment I met you, your smile hasn’t left me” and my heart would dissolve into sugary liquid. Our lives fitted together - a jigsaw puzzle satisfyingly done, a mystery solved.
As we grew closer, we looked hungrily for open spaces, as if rooms were too contained for us. The circle of trees in Green Park and the pathways in Hyde Park were favourite talking places. We’d sit on the grass sowing the seeds of early love. When we did venture indoors, we met in steamy cafés and sat among builders and tradesmen and old age pensioners smoking fiercely. You ate soft eggs and chips with beans, sometimes mushrooms to compensate for the lack of healthy food on your plate. I ate baked potatoes with beans or cheese, and I stole your chips every now and again momentarily forgetting a preoccupation with my thighs. I wanted to take you to posh French patisseries where the waitresses wore long aprons and served frothy cappuccinos, petits fours and mille feuilles.
We walked within spaces, along tired London pavements, weedy canal pathways, and on misty Sunday mornings we’d walk home from sweaty walled clubs, where we’d only looked at each other all night, and I’d watched you move chaotically but beautifully to Studio One tunes, and we’d held each other so close I still felt your hand prints on my back and on my thighs, your hot breath on my neck, the next day.
We often walked back from the shops or the market to my flat; exhausted, we’d fall asleep in the afternoon or watch unbelievable American films about children on the run to find their real families, or about nannies who married their rich employers. Sometimes we’d make love for hours - sleepy love that made my legs tired or love so new and dangerous it made me think of edges of cliffs, or the time I’d taken the cable car in Barcelona high above the city only to realise that my fear of heights was real.
We’d wake to discover it was time for bed and we hadn’t eaten. I’d make you cheese on toast or pasta with basil and tomato and you’d fall asleep immediately afterwards and sometimes I sat up next to you watching TV, your locks spread out like a fan over the bed sheets. I’d watch your eyes flicker, jealous of your dreams.
You slept pillow-less, supine, bare shouldered, the blankets covering the rest of your bareness - your beauty. I curled up next to you, my lips brushing your skin, our shades of brown like colours on a fabric wheel. I wanted to kiss you between your breasts or climb on top of you, into you. I imagined fighting through your muscles, telling your cells of my love for you, kissing your heart tenderly, watching each beat pump the life force, that vitality I loved, through your body.
On Monday mornings when you left for work, I’d find remnants of you, half-finished cups of tea and toast or small post-it notes with messages scribbled like “hello gorgeous” or “hi sexy” or “smile” stuck inside my lap top, on cereal boxes, on the bathroom mirror. They made me catch my breath.
We lived together for a while but fell into a see-saw of wanting and not saying, or saying too much and then hurting each other for not delivering. I loved you and wanted to please you, but wanted to please everyone else, too, so I became a ball of sickness. It was early winter, golden and amber leaves still on the ground, sodden and wet from the October rain. The nights were dark and silent. People rushed home to watch soap families, pretend lives on TV whilst reality fell into disrepair around them. At the same time my life became filled with ultimatums and accusations. I was so used to measuring the success of our relationship against what you wanted that the position of blame was easy for me to accept. You said you could take no more of my disloyalty and would leave me to sort myself out. I would join you only when I was healed, whole. I felt broken, an anchor wedged at the bottom of the sea, small fish swimming in and out of my metal arms and legs.
It seemed you were packing for months. You arrived home periodically with boxes and tape and eventually when your new place was ready you packed slowly and methodically for two days. I stayed out of your way, moving around you, pretending to be interested in books I’d forgotten I had.
On the day you left I came home from work to find empty spaces on the book shelves, pockets of dust and popped bubble wrap scattered in the corridor. “I didn’t have time to sweep,” you said. The flat felt used and disrespected. I thought of you in your new place, surrounded by boxes and the new furniture I helped you choose. My flat, a desert in comparison, reminded me of when I moved in, a new homeowner, but the emptiness at the time felt fresh. I had filled it with my mountain of books, two cheap unsteady book shelves, a sensible dark blue sofa-bed and a double divan bed, because I loved the height off the floor.
As I tidied the flat, I found objects you’d left in your hurry to depart: an unopened bank statement, a birthday card I’d given you, a silver earring you’d lost the year before. I followed this trail of objects as I attempted to return my belongings to some sort of order. You had taken the bed, so I slept on the sofa-bed in the living room. Over the next few months my flat became a bedsit. I hated the bedroom and only went there in the mornings to dress and iron my clothes. I found a picture of Michaelangelo’s Pieta I’d bought when I was on the Art Survey course and pinned it on the wall. I spent hours staring at it, or meditating in the corpse pose, listening out for a voice to say everything is okay, but nothing came. The silence made me calm, calmer than I was during the day when I walked around thinking of death and how it would come, how to get to the end of the street without collapsing, dying.
At night I couldn’t sleep, so I watched comedies for hours without laughing, then cried at wars, bombings and missing children, and sometimes when I was gripped with fear I’d call you. You’d try to calm me, suggest deep breathing and proper sitting positions, but I sensed an irritation in your voice, a longing for me to be normal, to disentangle myself from my problematic life. I imagined my funeral, people crying, wondering why I’d gone. My family in black, my friends looking sullen-eyed and surprised. Grief settled like a veil around me. For a year I walked around with it gripping my shoulders, shifting in and out of my heart until I admitted it was there and it decided to leave me.
I thought my soul so damaged by the loss of you that I would never enjoy walking again. I sat listening to couples’ conversations in coffee shops, their mundane topics reminded me of ours. Sometimes we’d pick a topic and spend several minutes talking about, say, walking. How we walked down the street together, who annoyed whom by their pace, whether to hold hands and where it was safe to do so. Which friends or family members annoyed us by the way they walked. We’d estimate together how long it took us to get to a certain point and which one of us would get there first. I began to retrace journeys we’d made: the time in Paris we thought we could walk to the 16th Arrondissement from Bastille as long as we kept going north, stopping finally, tired and hungry and, after an over-priced Chinese meal, almost out of money on the first day of our holiday. Now I walked in circles, never reaching a point.
One weekend in Oxford, with friends, we walked to the Bridge of Sighs from Headington, then round the Bodleian Library and across to Christ Church College, round to the river and back to Headington, engaging them in our occupation. In the main Dining Room at Christ Church, pictures of old Oxonians lined the walls. Someone asked me who John Wesley was and I suddenly couldn’t remember who he was and why he was famous and what he’d done. I managed a small explanation, my sentence trailing off into thin air and the space in between our breath was filled with a sigh. We passed the door where Robert Peel’s name was written in large letters, and my mouth opened in explanation but closed again; I knew too little about Peel and Catholics, and left it unsaid.
That night I dreamt of John Wesley preaching on a street corner. A woman with a child listened intently, pulling her shawl round her baby, the street wet with rain, her dress sweeping the dirt on the ground. In the dream I could remember who he was and exactly why he was famous. He whispered in my ear, God speaks the truth and everything will be okay, and I woke drenched in sweat, mumbling some forgotten words which I tried all day to remember.
I travelled back to London thinking that all that talking we did still left me unheard. And the memory of us sitting on the grass in some park somewhere in London felt surreal and vague as if it had not happened. A beautiful woman looked me up and down on the bus; I held her gaze until it left my face and her deep brown eyes lowered back to her book. I turned towards the window, closed my eyes and imagined us laying next to each other in a white room, her sleeping and her hair spread over the bed sheet, she supine, bare-shouldered, me breathing in her scent and climbing on top of her, planting a kiss between her breasts as I enter her body fighting through the muscles, veins and cells. I reach her heart and watch it pump, pump, pump.
Page(s) 33-35
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