chapter one
Created | Updated Aug 9, 2007
Today there is no place in me more quiet, more peaceful than the place where you carved your name. After everything, it provides a haven in the rushing roar of waketime thought, that crowded metropolis where the minutiae of the irrelevant jostles for space with the occasional moment of epiphany or the half remembered chord sequence of some song I wrote before my soul was sharded.
Because, you see, in every way your love and your acceptance shaped me. And who I am even now cannot be separated from the man you found in me. Ours was a love that touched our core we said. A thousand kisses deep.
And yet the day when I, shrunken and yearning, bent to say goodbye I could find no words with which to leave a message. I was forty five years old. I was alone. And I could never speak to you again.
“Your coffee sir. And your cherry scone”
I’d been walking, some months later, along Royal Avenue looking for a coffee shop, the sunburst sky all dappled with longing and the feel of a fresh morning on my face. Inside Rankin’s Café on Fountain Street people were eating gigantic scones and drinking over priced coffee and chatting with smiles on their faces. And I sat there and read the newspaper sports pages and speculated on the outcome of the last test match of the series and wondered how I might join their human race.
Unemployed. I rolled the word around my mouth like some powdery multi-benefit shake in the mouth of a weight watcher. And then checked over my shoulder to be sure, knowing that the straps of the burden of failure were still in place though the only thing I could see on my torso was my shirt. It still astonishes me how I allowed the pursuit of success to become a monkey on my back. But that’s how work gets to some of us. Drives, dominates and rewards us. And then abandons us like road kill at the edge of some corporate ditch.
Dead. I tried that one next. Something inside my head began to pound and for a moment I had trouble with my breathing. I was having a panic attack and I knew that my face had flushed red and that my clenched fists were white at the knuckle. But the conversation murmur around me continued unabated and nobody in the coffee shop seemed to notice. I have often wondered since why my strange demeanour never attracted more attention. But then I realise that all of us live in our bubbles really and only some kind of perceived red alert makes us peer out. And the rest of humanity exists, if not ignored, at least unseen.
“Is this seat taken?”
I resented her interruption. Her uninvited invasion of my self absorption. So I ignored her.
I was getting used to wearing jeans and a t-shirt in midweek, though I habitually wore black – still the clothes of mourning maybe. Or perhaps I was not yet ready to be noticed. I wear black now too, but these days it’s more of a fashion statement. For an experimental couple of months I wore waistcoats, pastel jackets, patterned shirts and even leather trousers. Like some kind of walking rainbow. Liberating as it was, I soon realised that it wasn’t really me and that maybe I’d have to get noticed some other way.
I doodled with a pen I had bought earlier in WH Smith’s, covering the large taupe and brown napkin with words that were swimming round my soul and drawing beards and glasses on the sporting icons pictured in the newspaper. Childish, I know. Eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversations provided my inspiration and soon the napkin groaned with the weight of random snippets of human angst and trivia that elbowed each other for prominence on its creased surface. Occasionally I reached beyond the thoughts of others and emptied some of my own internal landscape onto the collage. But going there was still a dangerous journey and so mostly I kept those words at arms length.
The loss of my high flying job in finance was beginning to sink into the numbness you left behind in me. With it had gone my fat pay cheque, expense account, Mercedes coupe and automatic entry ticket into all the best sporting events and the choice seats at gigs. Why even the day before the bombshell I had been offered freebies to the “Gig of the Year” at the Waterfront Hall. I’d taken them. Why, I have no idea - I wasn’t going to go. But now I felt stripped. Like Colombo without a raincoat. Or Bond without a tux. But the loss of you was a much more physical hurting. I wore it like the barbs on the flesh of a supplicant. And there was a darkness clouding round me that I knew was unhealthy. But I had no idea how to save myself.
“Is this seat taken?”
I didn’t look up from my doodles. Just grunted something accommodating and minded my own business. She didn’t give up so easy.
“Beautiful day isn’t it?”
So I had to acknowledge her, and glancing upwards met her tentative smile with one of those I’m-one-of-life’s-victims looks that seemed to be all I could muster back then.
“Yes, maybe the summer isn’t over yet”
I sure knew how to make a girl feel welcome.
At that moment the travelling coffee refill reached our table and I said yes. It was an impulse thing - maybe I just wanted value for money, or maybe my day was too empty and sitting here doodling somehow made me feel less of a vacant space in the bustle that is midweek centre-of-town Belfast. Or maybe there was something in her eyes that broke into my self imposed emotional exile and hinted at what was to follow. I really don’t know. But I smiled, a little less grudgingly this time, and tried a mildly less clichéd line.
“You have to get your money’s worth somehow I suppose”
She smiled. Not in an obviously uncomfortable way, but a warm genuine smile. The kind I hadn’t seen much of over the previous months. The kind that something inside me wanted to see again. More than she could possibly know.
She looked about thirty five, but how can you tell these days? She might have been fifty. Not classically beautiful in any sense. But there was an infectious vivacity in her green eyes and her auburn hair hung in an uncontrollable tangle around her slightly asymmetrical face. She was still smiling. I think she found my social awkwardness funny. But then when a man’s lost his job and his wife within a two month period I imagine he’s rarely found at his best.
There was a silence for awhile. Not exactly companionable, but then again not awkward either. Just silence. Her slicing her scone into bite sized chunks and me drawing a beard on Tony Blair. Me wondering if I wanted to speak. Her gazing idly out the window at the passers by enjoying the early autumn sunshine.
There comes a moment when you’re sharing a table. Sharing a meal time. Even if it’s only a snack in an overpriced coffee shop. Me, I think it’s a religious thing – meals are almost sacramental, and the ambiance of a shared table with fallen crumbs and half full coffee cups backdropped by the chatter of relaxing 11am shoppers lends itself to the development of a kind of intimacy. Even with strangers. Your eyes meet conspiratorially over the rim of your cappuccinos, you share a smile at the antics of the child at table 11, you grimace together when the waitress drops her tray across the room, and before you know it the body language is inclusive and the words start to tumble out.
“It’s hectic shopping for everything you need on a Wednesday morning”
“I always think it must be hard being a waitress when the place is full like this”
Of course there isn’t always confluence in the conversation. And the opening gambits collided somewhere over the sugar bowl that sat between us on the table. But it was a start and the laughter this time was spontaneous.
“Let’s try one at a time will we? I’m Rebecca, out for a day’s shopping. Its my niece’s wedding in a month or two and I’m sorting my wardrobe early”
“Hi Rebecca. I’m Peter. Peter Williams. Until recently Regional Director of your local Chester Hawkes International Financial Services empire. Now getting used to being a layabout”
I managed a wry smile.
Though she wasn’t fooled for an instant Rebecca came to meet me on the ground I’d chosen.
“Well it’s good for you tycoons to see how the other half lives.”
Rebecca was petite. Must have been all of five feet three. Slim, boyish build with that long auburn tangle hiding half her face. Green eyes peering through to the outside world. Dressed in khaki combats and one of those cream FCUK t-shirts. And wearing a ring on the third finger of her left hand. As was I. Still.
“Not sure I ever was a tycoon Rebecca. And I’m certainly not one now. If anything I’m quite the opposite. But you don’t want to know about my troubles. Where’s the wedding?”
And so we chatted idly about nieces and weddings, trouser suits and making sure you had all the right accessories and for awhile I imagined myself back in that old familiar world where days drift serenely into one another and the nights are unpunctuated by the staring at blackened ceilings and the choking of tears running back down your nasal passage and filling up your throat. Until we ran out of small talk.
“I see you’re married Peter. If it’s not too intrusive a question, how is your wife handling the changing work situation?”
“She doesn’t know.”
I said it without blinking. Though my throat constricted a little and I’m sure I stumbled over “She”.
“Is that wise?”
She walked into it like a stalked wildcat approaching a tethered goat.
I fired the shot.
“She doesn’t know Rebecca because she died six weeks before I was made redundant. Cancer. She was thirty nine”
Died. Redundant. Cancer. My very own Holy Trinity of disaster. The end of every journey. Captured in a seven second sound byte.
The colour flamed in Rebecca’s cheeks and for a moment her eyes looked wounded. Betrayed. Then her inherent graciousness took over.
“Oh Peter, I’m so sorry. It must be so hard for you”
I scarcely heard her. Or felt her fingers brush across my wrist. My eyes were looking past her now and seeing only ghosts and shadows. My head was hearing conversations that had been revolving round and round in there for weeks. I had retreated to the world that only you and I knew. Though you would never know it again. I’m sure I said goodbye to her when she left. But I can’t remember. Though I do know that later I went home.
Or to what used to be home. To what used to be familiar. Though by now it was you with the passing of each new day becoming more distant and me with only the memory of your smell on my pillow.
I didn’t see her again.
But I did get her message.
To Peter Williams. Tycoon. You never said goodbye. Email [email protected] with apology. Pronto.
Just like that. How she ever got Paul Rankin to put that sign in his window I do not know. And to persuade him to keep it there until I found it six weeks later was more amazing still. But manage it she did. And of course having seen it I had to follow it up.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
25th October 2002 11.35pm
Subject: Rude tycoon
Hi Rebecca
Many apologies for my appalling behaviour in Rankin’s Café. My only excuse is that I have had moments recently where my mind has just drifted away from the present and has been swallowed up in memories that have been bigger than anything I ever lived. More powerful than any moment I ever experienced. I haven’t even been back at Rankin’s to doodle over coffee. Forgive me? Can I buy you lunch?
Peter
The reply took a week to reach me. By the time it came I’d forgotten I’d mailed her. The week had passed like the weeks before it with my mood darkening like the autumn evenings. I had grown even more morose as my sense of loss and failure swirled about me. Your birthday was the worst. October 13th drowned in red wine and early Leonard Cohen and when I finally fell asleep on the sofa I had hit the replay button for Songs of Love and Hate eleven times. Last Year’s Man just broke me open.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
1st November 2002 10.47pm
Subject: Re Rude Tycoon
Peter
Apologies accepted. I’ve been there myself and I know all those places where the mind can go. Won’t do lunch… my husband says I’m much too vulnerable to woebegone men with angst riddled smiles and that I need to keep out of danger…but if you want to talk to me by email, maybe I can share something that might help.
R
Short, but amusing. And to the point. Leaving the door open for contact, but closed for transference. Though containing a natural goodbye if I chose to ignore the enigmatic last phrase. I wasn’t sure how I’d respond. If I’d respond. For awhile it just hung there as I prolonged my self pity. Sitting in the house where you discovered the lumps. Watching my redundancy payment dwindle.
And then as the year wore thin and the nights grew longer I began to feel dwarfed by the company of ghosts. And though the pain in my soul was still a tangible presence and my sense of self was still a jumble of incomplete fragmented achings I decided to make a cry for help. And so a few weeks later I took the plunge and wrote back.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
15th November 2002 1.42am
Subject: Vulnerable
Hi, remember me?
Well it would be wrong of me to take advantage of my woebegone charm! So no lunch.
What can you share that might help me? And why would you want to bother?
Sorry for the delay in replying, but I needed time to fully indulge my self pity – it’s always been a principle of mine to fully explore the bottom before seeking help and trying to rise.
How’s life with you? Was the wedding fun?
Peter (tycoon)
You know, you never heard that I’d been made redundant. Or how. Not that there’s much to tell. I came back to the office three weeks after your funeral – compassionate leave they’d called it, though later I noticed that the time was factored into the calculation of how much I was paid to get lost. Anyway, three days back and I was called over to Swindon. There’d been a Senior Management conference in my absence, big discussions around some compliance issue that was raising its head in the Bahrain office. I supposed they were going to fill me in on that.
“Morning Pete, sorry to keep you waiting”
I told you about Nigel. International Director. Tall guy. Balding. Ex Army. Dayglo braces. Matching socks. Brusque. Spoke in clipped sentences.
Not the guy to correct on the use of diminutive. Though in my head I said it.
It’s Peter you pillock. Not Pete. Peter. Though out loud I said
“Don’t worry. Did emails. No Problem”
Now I was at the clipped sentence thing too. Like some kind of transference.
“Sorry about your wife. Terrible business. Still life goes on”
Though in my case life was going to stop. As far as he was concerned anyway.
“You heard about the Bahrain cock up? Huge compliance nightmare. You don’t need to know the details. Two reasons. First - you weren’t involved. Second - we’re closing the Belfast office. Board decision. Want to wrap up by month end. Belfast’s too small a market. Not scaleable. Sadly I’m up to my eyes with Bahrain. Sam will go through the paperwork”
And I’m sitting there still numb from your dying with nothing in my head but confusion as he swivels his chair away from the conference table and Sam motions me to go outside. To leave the great leader’s presence. We take it like a man at Chester Hawkes.
The rest is mundane. Sam softening the blow. Me nodding in apparent understanding. Me sympathising with how hard a job he has, being the conduit to such human misery. Him telling me it’s nothing personal. Us making sure the shut down project would come in on time.
I remember going for the early flight home. Well what was there to hang around for? Sitting in Heathrow interminably waiting through the delays knowing there was no-one to rush home for either. No-one there to share the hurt with. No-one to massage my bruised ego and tell me they loved me anyway. Told you I was immersed in self pity!
In the midst of death we are in life.
By the time Rebecca’s reply arrived it was nearly Christmas. And I had begun to look for jobs. Cautiously. Well, three months’ pay eked out from July to December isn’t bad. Though my credit cards had taken quite a hit. And I didn’t really want to eat into our savings. For some peculiar reason it felt disloyal to consider doing that. The mind plays funny tricks on us sometimes.
I’d gone to one or two interviews. The usual Financial Services things, Halifax, Northern Bank, Law Society – all those. Though there weren’t many posts going for Regional Directors. So I was taking my time. Reviewing my options. I could easily have scored a position in sales in any of those organisations (or indeed in any one of about twenty more dotted around the city) but something in me held back. I wanted to be sure. Or maybe I had lost my bottle. There was a fragility in me that I’d never experienced before and I was wary of the corporate experience. And anyway, I was still very, very tired.
I was just back from the second Law Society interview. The one where you dance round the package issue, neither side wanting to commit but each hoping that the broad hints they throw out land on hearing ears. My tie felt uncomfortable round my neck after the months of casual freedom and the weight of my winter top coat whilst diverting the mid December cold had reminded me of just how much I had dreaded this kind of conformity back when I was a young student. How I had sworn never to join the rat race. Back when you met me Twila, all hairy and uncoordinated and welded to my guitar.
Anyway, I shed the suit and tie, shrugged into jeans and one of those black polo necks you used to say made me look like a stick of roll on deodorant (well, I might be folically challenged but the house was chilly) and fired up the laptop. You always used to get loads of emails. Amazon, Victoria’s Secret, Holiday Bargains. I noticed the other day that you still do.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
13th December 2002 10.37pm
Subject: Wedded Bliss
Hey Peter
Sorry I took so long to reply. It’s been hectic. The wedding was gorgeous. My outfit looked great. Niece (or to be more accurate, my husband’s niece) is now enjoying wedded bliss. Which is a bit more than I am today!! :( But enough of that.
Why would I want to tell you my story and see if it helps you? Not sure really, maybe because I feel guilty for putting my foot in it so badly re your wife, or maybe because I felt we hit it off when we chatted that day. Anyway, that’s all I have to offer. My story. But don’t have time to tell it now. It’s a madhouse here. Have a great Xmas etc.
In haste
Rx
PS Indulging self pity is a bad thing. It gets fat & takes over your life.
I smiled at that one. She has a great turn of phrase.
And so I faced down my first Christmas without you Twila. I visited your mother and took my Dad down to Lavery’s on Christmas Eve – him for his annual sherry and me for a glass or two of red. I took Carole’s children climbing Cavehill on Christmas morning before tumbling into Jack’s Espace and heading to their place for lunch. And felt the old familiar lurching in my soul as I listened to their laughter as they chased me back down the driveway and into the house. And late on Christmas Night, back alone with the TV off and Will Oldham singing I see a darkness I took your photograph down from the wall and held you in my arms.
Because, you see, in every way your love and your acceptance shaped me. And who I am even now cannot be separated from the man you found in me. Ours was a love that touched our core we said. A thousand kisses deep.
And yet the day when I, shrunken and yearning, bent to say goodbye I could find no words with which to leave a message. I was forty five years old. I was alone. And I could never speak to you again.
“Your coffee sir. And your cherry scone”
I’d been walking, some months later, along Royal Avenue looking for a coffee shop, the sunburst sky all dappled with longing and the feel of a fresh morning on my face. Inside Rankin’s Café on Fountain Street people were eating gigantic scones and drinking over priced coffee and chatting with smiles on their faces. And I sat there and read the newspaper sports pages and speculated on the outcome of the last test match of the series and wondered how I might join their human race.
Unemployed. I rolled the word around my mouth like some powdery multi-benefit shake in the mouth of a weight watcher. And then checked over my shoulder to be sure, knowing that the straps of the burden of failure were still in place though the only thing I could see on my torso was my shirt. It still astonishes me how I allowed the pursuit of success to become a monkey on my back. But that’s how work gets to some of us. Drives, dominates and rewards us. And then abandons us like road kill at the edge of some corporate ditch.
Dead. I tried that one next. Something inside my head began to pound and for a moment I had trouble with my breathing. I was having a panic attack and I knew that my face had flushed red and that my clenched fists were white at the knuckle. But the conversation murmur around me continued unabated and nobody in the coffee shop seemed to notice. I have often wondered since why my strange demeanour never attracted more attention. But then I realise that all of us live in our bubbles really and only some kind of perceived red alert makes us peer out. And the rest of humanity exists, if not ignored, at least unseen.
“Is this seat taken?”
I resented her interruption. Her uninvited invasion of my self absorption. So I ignored her.
I was getting used to wearing jeans and a t-shirt in midweek, though I habitually wore black – still the clothes of mourning maybe. Or perhaps I was not yet ready to be noticed. I wear black now too, but these days it’s more of a fashion statement. For an experimental couple of months I wore waistcoats, pastel jackets, patterned shirts and even leather trousers. Like some kind of walking rainbow. Liberating as it was, I soon realised that it wasn’t really me and that maybe I’d have to get noticed some other way.
I doodled with a pen I had bought earlier in WH Smith’s, covering the large taupe and brown napkin with words that were swimming round my soul and drawing beards and glasses on the sporting icons pictured in the newspaper. Childish, I know. Eavesdropping on other peoples’ conversations provided my inspiration and soon the napkin groaned with the weight of random snippets of human angst and trivia that elbowed each other for prominence on its creased surface. Occasionally I reached beyond the thoughts of others and emptied some of my own internal landscape onto the collage. But going there was still a dangerous journey and so mostly I kept those words at arms length.
The loss of my high flying job in finance was beginning to sink into the numbness you left behind in me. With it had gone my fat pay cheque, expense account, Mercedes coupe and automatic entry ticket into all the best sporting events and the choice seats at gigs. Why even the day before the bombshell I had been offered freebies to the “Gig of the Year” at the Waterfront Hall. I’d taken them. Why, I have no idea - I wasn’t going to go. But now I felt stripped. Like Colombo without a raincoat. Or Bond without a tux. But the loss of you was a much more physical hurting. I wore it like the barbs on the flesh of a supplicant. And there was a darkness clouding round me that I knew was unhealthy. But I had no idea how to save myself.
“Is this seat taken?”
I didn’t look up from my doodles. Just grunted something accommodating and minded my own business. She didn’t give up so easy.
“Beautiful day isn’t it?”
So I had to acknowledge her, and glancing upwards met her tentative smile with one of those I’m-one-of-life’s-victims looks that seemed to be all I could muster back then.
“Yes, maybe the summer isn’t over yet”
I sure knew how to make a girl feel welcome.
At that moment the travelling coffee refill reached our table and I said yes. It was an impulse thing - maybe I just wanted value for money, or maybe my day was too empty and sitting here doodling somehow made me feel less of a vacant space in the bustle that is midweek centre-of-town Belfast. Or maybe there was something in her eyes that broke into my self imposed emotional exile and hinted at what was to follow. I really don’t know. But I smiled, a little less grudgingly this time, and tried a mildly less clichéd line.
“You have to get your money’s worth somehow I suppose”
She smiled. Not in an obviously uncomfortable way, but a warm genuine smile. The kind I hadn’t seen much of over the previous months. The kind that something inside me wanted to see again. More than she could possibly know.
She looked about thirty five, but how can you tell these days? She might have been fifty. Not classically beautiful in any sense. But there was an infectious vivacity in her green eyes and her auburn hair hung in an uncontrollable tangle around her slightly asymmetrical face. She was still smiling. I think she found my social awkwardness funny. But then when a man’s lost his job and his wife within a two month period I imagine he’s rarely found at his best.
There was a silence for awhile. Not exactly companionable, but then again not awkward either. Just silence. Her slicing her scone into bite sized chunks and me drawing a beard on Tony Blair. Me wondering if I wanted to speak. Her gazing idly out the window at the passers by enjoying the early autumn sunshine.
There comes a moment when you’re sharing a table. Sharing a meal time. Even if it’s only a snack in an overpriced coffee shop. Me, I think it’s a religious thing – meals are almost sacramental, and the ambiance of a shared table with fallen crumbs and half full coffee cups backdropped by the chatter of relaxing 11am shoppers lends itself to the development of a kind of intimacy. Even with strangers. Your eyes meet conspiratorially over the rim of your cappuccinos, you share a smile at the antics of the child at table 11, you grimace together when the waitress drops her tray across the room, and before you know it the body language is inclusive and the words start to tumble out.
“It’s hectic shopping for everything you need on a Wednesday morning”
“I always think it must be hard being a waitress when the place is full like this”
Of course there isn’t always confluence in the conversation. And the opening gambits collided somewhere over the sugar bowl that sat between us on the table. But it was a start and the laughter this time was spontaneous.
“Let’s try one at a time will we? I’m Rebecca, out for a day’s shopping. Its my niece’s wedding in a month or two and I’m sorting my wardrobe early”
“Hi Rebecca. I’m Peter. Peter Williams. Until recently Regional Director of your local Chester Hawkes International Financial Services empire. Now getting used to being a layabout”
I managed a wry smile.
Though she wasn’t fooled for an instant Rebecca came to meet me on the ground I’d chosen.
“Well it’s good for you tycoons to see how the other half lives.”
Rebecca was petite. Must have been all of five feet three. Slim, boyish build with that long auburn tangle hiding half her face. Green eyes peering through to the outside world. Dressed in khaki combats and one of those cream FCUK t-shirts. And wearing a ring on the third finger of her left hand. As was I. Still.
“Not sure I ever was a tycoon Rebecca. And I’m certainly not one now. If anything I’m quite the opposite. But you don’t want to know about my troubles. Where’s the wedding?”
And so we chatted idly about nieces and weddings, trouser suits and making sure you had all the right accessories and for awhile I imagined myself back in that old familiar world where days drift serenely into one another and the nights are unpunctuated by the staring at blackened ceilings and the choking of tears running back down your nasal passage and filling up your throat. Until we ran out of small talk.
“I see you’re married Peter. If it’s not too intrusive a question, how is your wife handling the changing work situation?”
“She doesn’t know.”
I said it without blinking. Though my throat constricted a little and I’m sure I stumbled over “She”.
“Is that wise?”
She walked into it like a stalked wildcat approaching a tethered goat.
I fired the shot.
“She doesn’t know Rebecca because she died six weeks before I was made redundant. Cancer. She was thirty nine”
Died. Redundant. Cancer. My very own Holy Trinity of disaster. The end of every journey. Captured in a seven second sound byte.
The colour flamed in Rebecca’s cheeks and for a moment her eyes looked wounded. Betrayed. Then her inherent graciousness took over.
“Oh Peter, I’m so sorry. It must be so hard for you”
I scarcely heard her. Or felt her fingers brush across my wrist. My eyes were looking past her now and seeing only ghosts and shadows. My head was hearing conversations that had been revolving round and round in there for weeks. I had retreated to the world that only you and I knew. Though you would never know it again. I’m sure I said goodbye to her when she left. But I can’t remember. Though I do know that later I went home.
Or to what used to be home. To what used to be familiar. Though by now it was you with the passing of each new day becoming more distant and me with only the memory of your smell on my pillow.
I didn’t see her again.
But I did get her message.
To Peter Williams. Tycoon. You never said goodbye. Email [email protected] with apology. Pronto.
Just like that. How she ever got Paul Rankin to put that sign in his window I do not know. And to persuade him to keep it there until I found it six weeks later was more amazing still. But manage it she did. And of course having seen it I had to follow it up.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
25th October 2002 11.35pm
Subject: Rude tycoon
Hi Rebecca
Many apologies for my appalling behaviour in Rankin’s Café. My only excuse is that I have had moments recently where my mind has just drifted away from the present and has been swallowed up in memories that have been bigger than anything I ever lived. More powerful than any moment I ever experienced. I haven’t even been back at Rankin’s to doodle over coffee. Forgive me? Can I buy you lunch?
Peter
The reply took a week to reach me. By the time it came I’d forgotten I’d mailed her. The week had passed like the weeks before it with my mood darkening like the autumn evenings. I had grown even more morose as my sense of loss and failure swirled about me. Your birthday was the worst. October 13th drowned in red wine and early Leonard Cohen and when I finally fell asleep on the sofa I had hit the replay button for Songs of Love and Hate eleven times. Last Year’s Man just broke me open.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
1st November 2002 10.47pm
Subject: Re Rude Tycoon
Peter
Apologies accepted. I’ve been there myself and I know all those places where the mind can go. Won’t do lunch… my husband says I’m much too vulnerable to woebegone men with angst riddled smiles and that I need to keep out of danger…but if you want to talk to me by email, maybe I can share something that might help.
R
Short, but amusing. And to the point. Leaving the door open for contact, but closed for transference. Though containing a natural goodbye if I chose to ignore the enigmatic last phrase. I wasn’t sure how I’d respond. If I’d respond. For awhile it just hung there as I prolonged my self pity. Sitting in the house where you discovered the lumps. Watching my redundancy payment dwindle.
And then as the year wore thin and the nights grew longer I began to feel dwarfed by the company of ghosts. And though the pain in my soul was still a tangible presence and my sense of self was still a jumble of incomplete fragmented achings I decided to make a cry for help. And so a few weeks later I took the plunge and wrote back.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
15th November 2002 1.42am
Subject: Vulnerable
Hi, remember me?
Well it would be wrong of me to take advantage of my woebegone charm! So no lunch.
What can you share that might help me? And why would you want to bother?
Sorry for the delay in replying, but I needed time to fully indulge my self pity – it’s always been a principle of mine to fully explore the bottom before seeking help and trying to rise.
How’s life with you? Was the wedding fun?
Peter (tycoon)
You know, you never heard that I’d been made redundant. Or how. Not that there’s much to tell. I came back to the office three weeks after your funeral – compassionate leave they’d called it, though later I noticed that the time was factored into the calculation of how much I was paid to get lost. Anyway, three days back and I was called over to Swindon. There’d been a Senior Management conference in my absence, big discussions around some compliance issue that was raising its head in the Bahrain office. I supposed they were going to fill me in on that.
“Morning Pete, sorry to keep you waiting”
I told you about Nigel. International Director. Tall guy. Balding. Ex Army. Dayglo braces. Matching socks. Brusque. Spoke in clipped sentences.
Not the guy to correct on the use of diminutive. Though in my head I said it.
It’s Peter you pillock. Not Pete. Peter. Though out loud I said
“Don’t worry. Did emails. No Problem”
Now I was at the clipped sentence thing too. Like some kind of transference.
“Sorry about your wife. Terrible business. Still life goes on”
Though in my case life was going to stop. As far as he was concerned anyway.
“You heard about the Bahrain cock up? Huge compliance nightmare. You don’t need to know the details. Two reasons. First - you weren’t involved. Second - we’re closing the Belfast office. Board decision. Want to wrap up by month end. Belfast’s too small a market. Not scaleable. Sadly I’m up to my eyes with Bahrain. Sam will go through the paperwork”
And I’m sitting there still numb from your dying with nothing in my head but confusion as he swivels his chair away from the conference table and Sam motions me to go outside. To leave the great leader’s presence. We take it like a man at Chester Hawkes.
The rest is mundane. Sam softening the blow. Me nodding in apparent understanding. Me sympathising with how hard a job he has, being the conduit to such human misery. Him telling me it’s nothing personal. Us making sure the shut down project would come in on time.
I remember going for the early flight home. Well what was there to hang around for? Sitting in Heathrow interminably waiting through the delays knowing there was no-one to rush home for either. No-one there to share the hurt with. No-one to massage my bruised ego and tell me they loved me anyway. Told you I was immersed in self pity!
In the midst of death we are in life.
By the time Rebecca’s reply arrived it was nearly Christmas. And I had begun to look for jobs. Cautiously. Well, three months’ pay eked out from July to December isn’t bad. Though my credit cards had taken quite a hit. And I didn’t really want to eat into our savings. For some peculiar reason it felt disloyal to consider doing that. The mind plays funny tricks on us sometimes.
I’d gone to one or two interviews. The usual Financial Services things, Halifax, Northern Bank, Law Society – all those. Though there weren’t many posts going for Regional Directors. So I was taking my time. Reviewing my options. I could easily have scored a position in sales in any of those organisations (or indeed in any one of about twenty more dotted around the city) but something in me held back. I wanted to be sure. Or maybe I had lost my bottle. There was a fragility in me that I’d never experienced before and I was wary of the corporate experience. And anyway, I was still very, very tired.
I was just back from the second Law Society interview. The one where you dance round the package issue, neither side wanting to commit but each hoping that the broad hints they throw out land on hearing ears. My tie felt uncomfortable round my neck after the months of casual freedom and the weight of my winter top coat whilst diverting the mid December cold had reminded me of just how much I had dreaded this kind of conformity back when I was a young student. How I had sworn never to join the rat race. Back when you met me Twila, all hairy and uncoordinated and welded to my guitar.
Anyway, I shed the suit and tie, shrugged into jeans and one of those black polo necks you used to say made me look like a stick of roll on deodorant (well, I might be folically challenged but the house was chilly) and fired up the laptop. You always used to get loads of emails. Amazon, Victoria’s Secret, Holiday Bargains. I noticed the other day that you still do.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
13th December 2002 10.37pm
Subject: Wedded Bliss
Hey Peter
Sorry I took so long to reply. It’s been hectic. The wedding was gorgeous. My outfit looked great. Niece (or to be more accurate, my husband’s niece) is now enjoying wedded bliss. Which is a bit more than I am today!! :( But enough of that.
Why would I want to tell you my story and see if it helps you? Not sure really, maybe because I feel guilty for putting my foot in it so badly re your wife, or maybe because I felt we hit it off when we chatted that day. Anyway, that’s all I have to offer. My story. But don’t have time to tell it now. It’s a madhouse here. Have a great Xmas etc.
In haste
Rx
PS Indulging self pity is a bad thing. It gets fat & takes over your life.
I smiled at that one. She has a great turn of phrase.
And so I faced down my first Christmas without you Twila. I visited your mother and took my Dad down to Lavery’s on Christmas Eve – him for his annual sherry and me for a glass or two of red. I took Carole’s children climbing Cavehill on Christmas morning before tumbling into Jack’s Espace and heading to their place for lunch. And felt the old familiar lurching in my soul as I listened to their laughter as they chased me back down the driveway and into the house. And late on Christmas Night, back alone with the TV off and Will Oldham singing I see a darkness I took your photograph down from the wall and held you in my arms.
