A Habit of Dying (7 page)

I think of ways out of this and every way seems as painful as going on. Suppose at the last moment, she dissolved and wept and said how much she loved me really, and how it would all be different and let’s try again, suppose that happened and I’d already said I was leaving her. And if I was leaving her, where would I be leaving for? There are no friends I could suddenly announce myself on. And to plan it all beforehand, without telling her would be my betrayal not hers, I would be the deserter when all along it [was] she who left me. No, I have always been here, she is the one who left slowly and agonisingly over the years. Why couldn’t she talk to me or accept my love that I so wanted to share when that tiny scrap of a person, that dead, dead baby
lay for a few hours in his Perspex crib, for all the world peacefully asleep as any other baby on the ward except that he wasn’t breathing.

9th entry

Across to H and J for a meal tonight. They were their normal selves, perhaps a little more tension in the air than usual. All explained when after the cheesecake J said they had something to tell us. I thought they were having a baby, people always seem to find that a very hard thing to tell us. A few of our friends have told me quietly when I have been on my own, as if it only S who would find the news brought back dismal memories. But not so tonight, instead H and J are to split. Needing their separate lives and space to live them in. Quite astonishing how little we know of what happens in other people’s private lives. or how little I know. They seemed to have the perfect solution to their infidelities, ignore them. And we were the first to be told, we who are so ‘good together’, we who have known them for such a long time and who are so ‘close’ to them. Close? Listening to H’s detailed stories of humping in the capitals of the world is not ‘close’. Embracing J when we meet and planting a playful kiss on her cheek is not close. Do they have any idea what close means? Can people be close when the closeness is entirely one sided? Did they love each other in the same way? Did they love entirely by their own definition of what that was, unconcerned about the other’s notions or feelings on the matter?

S was completely unmoved by the news and she has known them longer than I have. I might have appeared unmoved also but I felt convulsed. I wanted to know how they had even approached the subject. Did they just one day wake up and say ok that’s over, lets move on. They apparently plan to split when H finds somewhere to live. No emotion, no tears, so casual it was painful.

Which has left me more angry confused and inadequate than ever. S did not even mention it as we walked the few streets back home. And was she surprised? No not really it happens to a lot of people these days she told me almost disinterested. Is that how she would be, calm and matter of fact, so we’re splitting, so what? It seems that I am the one who is completely out of step with the world, if I was like the world then I could be as casual, I would count love for so little. But there is the bind, I don’t and I can’t. I do not begin to understand how she can be so cool. Not cool, tepid more like. Ice or flame
would be easier, I could cope with that. But tepid, so you don’t know if your hand is in the water or not, is impossible.

10th entry

All is confusion. I want the world to stop and let me catch up, instead it swirls about me teasing with opportunities and maybe’s and if ’s and then as I reach for the idea it dissolves and laughs at me for thinking that I could grasp it at all. Does she laugh at me I wonder, do they exchange little jokes in the staff room about their husbands or is the indifference total and utter, beyond the slightest emotion? Would they want their partners at home when they got back from school? I have had a silent plan forming somewhere in my head that I could work more from home, increase the amount of time that we share the same space, increase the opportunities for meeting, seeing, even touching. How this was to happen I have no idea, but until tonight it seemed like an idea, like a step, a movement that could offer something in the bleak log jam. For a tentative floating of the notion I could not have chosen a worse moment, but of course I chose it just so that she would not be put in a corner and have to respond. A more careful plan was needed but I seized on an instant, so no surprise it was wrong. H and J continue their bizarre cohabitation and as still a couple, they visit as a couple. H spoke of working from home a few days a week when he finds his new flat. It was the moment that my silent plan found voice and I suggested that I might do likewise. J was in like a flash, saying how it was a good job he hadn’t tried that on before now as she wouldn’t want him at home in her private time and didn’t S agree. I could not even look at her as she said how much she agreed, certainly couldn’t have that, how would she get anything done. That was her time, her own private time, those few hours between our different returns from the work day. I want to tell them, to scream at them, that they are selfish bitches uncaring, unthinking, blinkered cows. I don’t, I scream in my head while H says how he wouldn’t want to interrupt anything, get in the way of anyone’s fun. If I had a gun I could shoot each of them right there.

Now that she read it through properly for the first time, Lydia found herself slightly stunned. She had focused largely on the accurate copying of the words for many hours, sometimes spending several minutes on a single phrase, now their flow and meaning
came to the fore. Fact or fiction, this was a man struggling with his life, maybe struggling for his life. That idea, a man, a male, wrestling with emotion and feeling, came as a surprise. It was so long since Lydia had come anywhere near to such strength of feeling herself, she had to make a conscious step to reach into her memory. There on the page was some of the same pain, but more intense than the passage of time now rendered her own. The shock, revelation almost, was that it was a man’s voice crying out. She wanted to reject it as being fiction and fiction written by a woman.

Lydia’s own marriage had ground to a halt after nearly ten years. Michael had lost interest in every part of it until, as the cliché has it, Lydia had been traded in for a younger model. The end had been relatively swift, more depressing than acrimonious. She was cast as the wronged party, he the infidel. They had settled with a clean break, probably to her financial disadvantage. Without children to complicate the arrangements, she had been keen to cut the knot with a single stroke, where he might have wanted to stay in contact. Now she could look back objectively, as she thought, at a time which may have been her life, but might just as easily have been someone else’s. Had she ever thought that he might have felt any pangs, any anguish? He had always been big, bluff, uncomplicated Michael, not too troubled by the deeper things in life. Suddenly, and to her shame for the first time, she contemplated the idea that she could have played a part in driving him away. Had she ever had such passion, been as consumed by him as the anonymous author was by his ‘S’? Maybe it had simply faded away, dulled by the everyday routine of marriage. At this distance she found that she could not remember.

Lydia slept badly, her normal peaceful night disturbed by unseen demons relentlessly hunting her down through twisting mazes, past the mindless stares of a cast of characters from ten and twenty years previously.

11
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entry

S sent me a Valentine’s card yesterday, just as she always does. She always signs it ‘love ????’ which I once knew meant love from guess who. For years it has meant simply ‘love?’. I send her one also, which I don’t sign at all and never had. This exchange of cards defies all reason. Today they sit on the bookshelf between the photo of her mother and father and a souvenir ivory elephant she brought back from Thailand a thousand years ago. Is it not peculiarly perverse to kill an elephant to carve [an] image of the dead animal from its remains? Not so perverse as the two mute valentine cards which will sit there for a week and then be put in the bin. They will sit and stare at me for that week in silent rebuke. And they have their matching partners at Christmas and on birthdays, except that they are signed and signed ‘with love’. I want to not do cards any more, I want to not keep up the niceties and the pretences, I want to stop it all for ever and ever. I want her to go away, and I want her to stay, I want it to be possible. But that is the horror of it now, it remains just that, possible. Better impossible than eternally possible, and never realised.

Our neighbours had a grand shouting match this morning, not loud enough to hear the words but enough to feel the anger. Enough to hear the silence when it was finished with a slammed door. How I wish I could have that row, provoke that reaction, engage that emotion. Not that we have never rowed because we have. Precisely three times. And now that I come to think about it, to write about it, to define it and consign it, maybe we have not. She has not shouted at me once. But we did row on our first holiday together after we were married when she took some [ ] at something that I know not
what and did not speak to me for a day until I refused to go further until she told me what was wrong. And we did row a year later when the same thing happened for a week with just monosyllabic grunts instead of speaking. That time she took herself away to some spot until she came back and said she was sorry and that she would try again, whatever that meant. For a couple of weeks she was sweetness and light, but it all seemed such an effort and I was just holding back waiting for the spell to be broken, until it was. Maybe five years ago one night when I drank a little too much, defences lowered I complained of feeling as if I were dead and wanting a life again, and she with a little drink inside her too, wept a little and said how she knows it has not been very good but she would try harder and she was scared to lose me. There was a difference for a few weeks before the indifference seeped back. I think I tried to respond but I was too wary, suspicious, untrusting of this artificial attention. Now a bloody good row seems like a good thing to have, a thunderstorm to clear the cloying air. I can hardly bear to look at her any more, she just looks away.

12
^th
entry

I went to the centre again today to see if I could make an appointment with the woman who listened. I didn’t even remember her name and couldn’t say why I needed to see her. Then I needed to go to the office but could not work out the best route to take. There are two obvious ways, each really as good as the other, but I needed to take the best one and I could not decide. I know the best one from here, but not from the health centre. So I sat in the car unable to move until rudely prompted by the person waiting to get out of the car park. Panicking, I drove home, to where I knew I could choose the correct route. I think this is the start of madness. It may be beginning of the end of madness or it may be too late for anything. Tonight I have waited a long time after she has gone to her bed to write this. First I got this book out and two pens set beside it. One works well but I don’t like it. The other works less well and blobs ink from time to time but it sits well in the hand and is comfortable. Now I have waited, deliberately letting myself think about which pen I should use. I am testing whether or not I can make a simple decision, one of no consequence whatsoever. There is ink now on the page under the very tip of the pen that writes this but it is from neither. I have become transfixed by the choice and put it off by choosing neither and hunting
until I found a biro that neither works well nor is comfortable in the hand. I know that the pens still sit here beside me, each unused, each with its virtues, each its faults. The third way is the worst of both pens. I look at them and think that I may never use either again. I see that this is strange behaviour, but I cannot control it only observe that it is odd. Even the observation of it is odd and I can see that too.

13
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entry

She is asleep and has been for more than an hour. I have not slept at all, I have been waiting for her to give me an answer to the question. By chance, certainly not by design we got into the same bed at the same moment. After a few minutes of darkness and silence as if in a trance, someone who might have been me, said that they wanted to make love and had wanted to for ages. Then in a slow-motion parody of conversation someone also said that they loved the other. And someone else replied that they loved the other. And then me, probably me, asked what did love mean? And yes, there are many kinds of love but what kind is yours. And I listened for an answer as she [breathed] slower and deeper and [snuffled] in a way that she only ever does when she is asleep and I waited and listened again until there was no possible [mistake] that she had gone away into whatever she dreams of and there was still no answer.

But I do have an answer. It is the kind of love that cannot see how important it is to give an answer. It is the kind of love that does not see love coming the other way. It is the kind of love that cares not a jot for the other, that can’t smell the burning flesh. It is a [destructive selfish loveless] love that wears the clothes of love over the [torso] of a corpse. It mocks the word and the feeling, laughs at sentiment and anguish. When did it slither in and make its rotten home in that other love that once was there, I can’t see through the fog. I need an [antiseptic aerosol] spray to clean it away and wipe it clean again.

14
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entry

It doesn’t count if you have to ask for it. Love doesn’t count as love if you have to ask if you are loved, even if the answer is yes. I do not want a love that is there when [demanded] but absent otherwise. I want her love and everything that goes with it completely unasked, completely voluntary and more than [volunteering] she must want to give it. I dream of making love in
a million places in a million ways and I dream that she would have those dreams too. Not because I dream them, but because she dreams them, not because I have a [fantasy], because she does. My fantasies can only come true if she shares it without knowing that I have it. It is a cruel fantasy to have, it can never ever be made real. I am [marooned] on an island from which there is no escape, never a hope of escape, and I cannot even wave at the [passing ships]. I must hide from them and wait for them to check my island for lost souls because they want to, because they see the island and think that there could be someone there in need of [rescue]. And while I wait my mind becomes fuller and fuller of every thought [imaginable] until it is unable to cope with volume, the [complexity] of every tiny nuance of every particle of thought and races madly away in a [vortex] of [ ]. And amazingly there is a tiny cold [unblinking] point in the centre which sees all this chaos of thought and [synapses] sparking. And the tiny cold centre does nothing, can do nothing to stop it relentlessly churning in my head.