Ellie's Return

Copyright© 2013 Bronagh Pierce

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author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
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One

The airport was crowded that morning, but it mattered less now
that she was on the return leg of her journey. Ellie Russell’s anticipation was
behind her now, no longer fresh and vibrant and full of possibilities but a
lesson learned, a first step towards changing her mental attitude to one of
quiet acceptance of at least one thing that may never be, rather than what of
might have been.
 
People will tell
you to demand what you want of life, not to accept second best, not to give up
on your dreams. Nobody had needed to tell Ellie that, she was not one to accept
less than she wanted from life, at least not where she could control the
outcome, but other people can disappoint you.
 
In demanding less of themselves they are resigned
to the fact that only other people get to live their dreams. You suffer for
that because you wanted to love and respect them but if they won’t do their
best for themselves, if they won’t believe in themselves, how can they do that
for you?

Ellie was trying to clear her mind of that negativity, and
she needed to do it quickly. When she had fled three years ago she did it
because she needed to move on, and she had done all she could to set things
straight with Tom but if he would not speak to her it was like losing the love
of her life and her best friend all at once, and there was nothing else to keep
her there. He had disappointed her again now. She tried to console herself that
their two year relationship followed by three years of angst and regret would
at least be easier to deal with than having a five year relationship that had
gone inexplicably sour and which would have caused her a great deal or torment
and sorrow that she would have to start dealing with now, whereas actually she
was now way ahead of the game. She still had the disappointment of love lost
and a sense of betrayal from a man who was not all he had seemed, but it was
weakness more than anything that he had betrayed her with, so her overwhelming
feeling was one of disappointment rather than one of betrayal, and her adjustment
to that had begun long before. She may never come to terms with it though, so
she needed to move on, change her environment and try to put the disappointment
behind her rather than let it infiltrate her soul lest she too, should someday
stop short of what she could be.

Ellie had been staring into the distance while she thought
about this, and was playing with her hair, twirling a short blonde lock around
one finger as she stared into the distance. As she came to she saw that a man
was staring at her, and had insinuated himself into her line of sight so that
she would see him when she stopped daydreaming. He was giving one of those
smarmy knowing looks that she so detested, and she felt instantly repulsed by
it. That was a shame because if she had seen him first she would have been
impressed. She guessed he was early to mid thirties, probably a couple of years
older than her, and he had thick short hair, not too trendy and try hard, and a
bit of stubble, which suited him. His body was athletic and toned and he
dressed to its full advantage so she knew he was confident in a way, but that
smarmy know-all grin just made her want to kick him in the teeth. She wished
she could be more casual about attraction and play by the rules of it instead
of analysing those rules, but she was what she was, and she thought again with
regret about how she missed the one person who ever really seemed to understand
what that meant.

She couldn’t really blame the smarmy man. She was wearing a
push up bra, a white low cut shirt, and tight jeans, her standard travelling
outfit in other words. She knew it would have been a bit of a torment to
Claudia to dress like that this morning and stand before her and then hug her
as she left but that was rather the point of this outfit, she might not need
anything from anybody when she was travelling, but anything she did need she
could get pretty much anyone to do for her because when she looked like this
everyone, male or female, seemed to want to help. For all that, she also knew
that she might get attention she did not want it so much right now. She stood
up to her full height and stretched, and as she did so she glanced quickly up
and saw the man’s eyes widen as he took in her full height and perfect
proportions. She reached down to her large bag and just as quickly he registered
disappointment as she stood up straight again and covered herself in a baggy
unflattering fleece. He sloped off, message received loud and clear; but thanks
for caring, she thought. It was good to have an ego boost as long as she didn’t
need to hear the tedious chat up line that went with it.

She felt brightened by that. The feeling of sadness was
coming and going, even if she knew that it only went when she forgot it and
inevitably came back moments later. The airport, as vast as it was, felt
oppressive, and she kept checking the departure boards from her vantage point,
looking closely and then having to look a moment later because she had failed
to take in the information or had forgotten it already.

She looked forward to getting back and seeing Venice. She
hoped to see it once more with the wonder of a tourist. It was too beautiful to
ever take for granted, but in the three years since she had settled there she
had got used to some aspects of it. She thought of that stage of acceptance
simply as another step in her relationship with the place, the way that one
starts to accept a person or a place or a thing as part of one’s own life, at
least for a time. We don’t think about endings when something is beginning,
because if we do we cannot properly begin them at all, but somehow we still
know that most things are temporary.
 
Venice had always been temporary, she knew that well enough, and she had
left it to go back and fix things with Tom because she had not known that he
was temporary too. She felt the rush of loneliness, the sense that this was wrong;
that it was too soon to picture a future without him because in all the time
she had to prepare for that, in those three years without him it was not
something she had ever really accepted at all. For now she would think of being
alone, she would deal with that first. Small steps, as Tom always used to tell
her.

She thought she had seen Tom in the distance, just a flash of
him going by, but she had thought that a dozen times this morning and it was a
different person every time and never who she wanted it to be. How silly to
think it would be him, how silly to want it to be. His parting shot had been
one of his increasingly cryptic messages, so far from the straightforwardness
she had first loved about him. Once he had given inspiration and demanded respect,
it was something irresistible and inevitable about him, but now the no nonsense
Tom was gone, faded out into a colourless gloom that no longer gave or demanded
anything.
 
Ellie needed to think
about something else, since even the greatly reduced Tom was better than an
exaggeration of most men she met. She still could not stand before him even now
without being drawn almost magnetically into his world, and even the
frightening gloom that was his daily demeanour now was filled with a romantic
charm that she found difficult to resist, knowing that their assignations of
old revealed more instinctive knowledge of each others bodies than either of
them could ever expect from another person, and she wondered even now if that
amalgamation of body and soul would have been enough to keep them together when
everything else had faded. It was the one thing she did not want to find out,
so she had walked away, and even now as she sat in the airport lounge she
struggled not to imagine his weight on her or her own ecstasy
as
she rose to meet his entry into her.

She needed to think of something else. Mara would be waiting
for her at the old apartment, and she would have to explain what had happened
because their communications had been short and obtuse, and Ellie had told her
again and again that she would let her know when she saw her what had been
going on. She had characterised events as complicated when she knew that only
her feelings were really fitting of that description, and because of that she
had been unable to detach herself from events because she was hoping that given
some time to herself, events would eventually filter down and she would know
finally what she thought. Time was a great healer, everybody said so, but the
downside was that it took time and she needed relief now, so distance would
have to do until time had the opportunity to do its part. In a world where
Ellie was increasingly sure that nobody ever listened to anybody else and where
you can go close to mad with everybody only wanting to listen to themselves,
Ellie also had mixed feelings about the fact that the one person who knew how
to really listen, insisted on doing so with such utter commitment that the only
thing she never heard was when Ellie said she did not want to talk about
something. It was not that Mara was not to be trusted, she was a good and true
friend and Ellie had always been grateful to have her in her life, but sometimes
she really did not want to talk about something until she had understood it for
herself, and all she knew right now about her and Tom was that it had no right
to be over, so she did not know what she would say when Mara asked her.

Two

Where to begin though? It was only three days that she had
been away but now everything seemed so final. She had wished that Mara were
there to talk to face to face. Claudia had been good to her and taken her in
when she did not have to do that. She had tried to strike the right balance
between being there for Ellie and having nothing to do with Ellie’s problems or
the people who had caused them. Ellie’s visit had been a strain on Claudia
because of the ghosts she bought with her, the memory of Lola and the world she
had tried to leave behind her, but also the feelings she had once had for Ellie
which Ellie knew she had once naively taken full advantage of for her own
gratification. If this haunted Ellie she saw it clear as day in Claudia’s face,
in her movements, her responses and her body language, but she hoped now that
some good had come of this weekend even if she was not to see her again.

Now she saw that there was delays all up the departure board,
and her own flight was delayed by at least two hours. She didn’t want a coffee,
it was too early in the day for a glass of wine, and she had not bothered with
a book. She could never read when travelling, when she did not read she was
bored and when she did there were too many distractions, but today there was no
way she could read, there was too much on her mind and she didn’t need to lock
it all in any more she needed to let it all out, because there were still one
or two things that didn’t really make any sense. She tried to imagine that she
was already with Mara, and they were sat comfortably at home, and she had at
last the distance she needed and could think it all through. What would Mara
ask her first? This was like an interview, why did she need to think about what
Mara would ask first? She reasoned that Mara would ask the right questions, she
always did, and through that Ellie had learnt to always answer them because of
what she might discover about herself. Mara was a gifted listener, a practised
listener. She could always hear what you said, and if she listened very
carefully, she could hear what you needed to say too, but first she needed to
know what had happened when Ellie had first arrived home. Or maybe it went
further back than that, maybe she needed to tell her why she had left when she
did, because Mara had been away for a few days and the departure had been
unexpected, so there was all that to tell too. She had left a note saying that
she was going back to England after all, and she did not know if she would be
back and Mara could let her room if she needed to but she had left her cases in
the utility room and just taken her hand luggage, and she was so sorry but she
was sure Mara would understand. Mara understood everything, somehow, and if she
didn’t understand it right off, she made it her job to understand rather than
say she could not or would not. She was older than Ellie, maybe not that much
older, but she seemed to know things that other people didn’t know. Ellie
thought maybe that was why she was so great at listening, or maybe it was
because she was so good at listening that she knew things, but either way she
seemed to have it together and she never talked about herself, as though she
already knew all that and it was old news, but that everything about other
people fascinated her and if you listened to her, listening to you, you might
just learn something too.

 
It wasn’t the
journey then, because that was just a tedious journey and the only difference
between the trip out and the return was that she had come into one airport with
hope and left via another airport without it, but the story began before that.
Not three or five years, she would come to that in due course, but maybe this
journey had begun a couple of weeks before she had left, when she had found
that there was a hole in her soul where Tom used to be, and she had ignored it
and hoped it would heal over but it had not. It was the break up with Alfonse
that had caused her to realise again how she had missed Tom.