In My Heart There's An Image
Created | Updated Jan 18, 2009
In My Heart, There's An Image
Tis winter again and last week the snow set in. I miss you most in winter. You used to love the snow.
I trudged to the newsagent's this morning. You remember old Mr Stone, don't you? He hasn't changed a bit since you were here. A little greyer maybe, bit more cynical; if that's possible. And still resisting the lure of the property developers. They must have offered him fortunes by now. Old Jack Stone is an object lesson in obduracy.
I was wrapped up and cosy in that famous sheepskin you bought me in seventy nine. There's a rip just under the left shoulder and it's picked up a few more oil stains since you saw it last, but hey, you know me and my reluctance to let go of the familiar. Slipping along the tree lined street with my breath billowing out ahead of me like Puffing Billy, collar turned up and icicles forming where the droplets had landed when I threw some water over my face to clear the sleep before I left the house.
You remember how the trees are here? Of course you do. It was you that used to tell me that they protected the place in winter like some kind of surrealistic scarecrows, arms wide out and dangerous, feet buried in snowdrifts. I stood and watched them for awhile, marvelling again at the way the white covered every twig. And all so bright. So clean. Back home the snow, even if it lies, seems to go dirty grey so fast.
I'm still in the same house. Still sharing it with Doctor Leibniz and those spooky midnight thumpings. Still propping the table level with cardboard wedges. Leibniz looks older too now, going white around the muzzle, of course it's over fourteen of his years since you went back home.
You know, on the day that you left it felt like the only word I could spell was broken. There was this great gaping hole in my soul that was bleaker than aching, and I rearranged the books on the bookshelf because there was nothing else to do. First I started with Plato on the top shelf left hand side and put them in order through to Derrida. Philosophers by date order. Did the same with Romantic novelists on the second shelf. Poets next. By the third re-arranging I was more sophisticated. I grouped them by mindset. Spinoza, Samuel Pepys and Milton all together. Foucault, Douglas Coupland and Roger McGough. I'm sure you can work it out.
The things we do to ease pain, he?
Thing is Miriam, I've tried to write to you several times, but there was too much self pity in what I was saying.
Or too much vindictiveness.
Or just too many words.
It's been hard to learn to live with the silence. And Leibniz never said much. So I've had to learn to work through what happened, and why, all by myself. Before I could trust myself to contact you. Even now I'm not sure that writing this is wise. Perhaps I'll never send it to you...
It's so stark walking through your front door and seeing the vacuum cleaner propped up and lonely against the wall. Having your bleary eyes dazzled by the sight of a freshly sterilised house. All traces of your lover expunged.
No longer a home.
It's almost as if someone changed all the doors in the street, and so it's somebody else's house that your key unlocks. And you're standing in a hallway you never knew. For a few moments I just stood helpless; then I started scouring the walls for familiar smudges. For anything I could tell myself you had left for me.
I fell apart.
Not in any new or original way, you understand. I was already too deeply into what ruined us to be able to add any new expression of self destruction to my repertoire. No, it was more that I lost my sense of where the exit sign might be. Up until then I had always known that I could pull out of the dive before I hit the bottom. I knew that I could save us. After all I was some kind of super hero. I was Dermot Magee, youngest ever Regional Director. But after you left I started turning up at the office at six thirty every morning, and working through until ten o'clock at night. I was afraid to go home. Afraid of the microwave meals and the solitary glasses of wine. Afraid of the television chatter and the dust on the mantel. Afraid of the reproach in Leibniz' big brown eyes.
Being made redundant brought me up short. What does a workaholic do when there's no work? That was another one of those days when you step out in the morning from a world you know, and by the time you're letting yourself back through the door at night the certainty's all evaporated, like the chemicals on one of those Petrie dishes we used to use in school. Mind you, I know the story of the great event would make you smile...
'Morning Pete, sorry to keep you waiting.'
That's how the execution started.
I'm sure I told you about Nigel. International Director. Tall guy; balding; ex Army. Dayglo braces and matching socks. Brusque; spoke in clipped sentences.
Probably 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 domestic. Terrible business. Still life goes on.'
'You're only a year late, you idiot!'
'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 Calgary office. Board decision. Want to wrap up by month end. Calgary'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 realising that I'm still numb from your leaving, 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!
That was last winter, and for three months the highlight of my day was the newspaper run down to Jack Stone's. I used to shoot the breeze with him for an hour or two every morning. We talked philosophy and music. He told me all about the property developers wanting to buy his stand. About the megabucks they were offering even then. But his father had owned that shop before him, and Jack reckons there are some things money can't replace. Like I say, he's obdurate. It was Jack who introduced me to the editor of the local paper and sold me as some hot shot music reviewer. That's what I do now, you see. I get some great free CDs.
It's certainly not how I would have chosen to get here, but life's so much more real for me now. I feel like events stripped me of all those shiny trappings that finally hid me from you and my whole life has shrunken into something I can take responsibility for again. Something I can recognise as being mine, and not the product of some script that I stumbled into. It's like we told ourselves it would be, back when we started. Except, of course, that you're not here; you're not sharing it with me.
In my heart there's an image. It goes back to seventy nine. Just after you bought me the famous sheepskin coat. Just before Micky got butchered on the Oldpark Road and we decided to leave Belfast and come to Canada. It was that day the snow covered Cavehill and we got up at six and went to make the first tracks in its yielding softness before going to work. You remember that when we got back to the car it wouldn't start and we had to trudge the whole way in the snow to the bus stop at the Castle Gates on the Antrim Road? In my heart there's an image from then.
You're red cheeked and breathless from the climbing. I'm acting nonchalant and pretending I'm fit. Lungs burning up from the cold. Halfway up Cavehill you turned to me. 'You know I love you Dermot Magee, don't you?' You whispered, before pushing your snowy mitten round to the back of my neck and pulling me towards you and kissing me like there'd be no tomorrow.
It's memories like that that I can't let go of.
I met a woman last week, Miriam. And for a moment I felt that I could reach her. I was sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by the bustle of waitresses serving midday cappuccinos and corn chip garnished triple deckers whilst at the next table an obviously 'grand American couple' were complaining about the service.
'You have to tell them, Chucky. You have to make them unnerstand!' I swear, his missus really said it!
She was sitting at the next table to me, dark haired and understated, and I noticed her struggling to hold in her laughter and, for a moment, I thought it might be just like it was with you and me. The sharing of a secret joke: the way it created a connection.
Of course I have no idea what she's called; or if she has a lover. I don't know how she likes her tea at bedtime; or her fornication in the morning. I'm not sure that I know the colour of her eyes.
It's a small thing on which to base an infrastructure of hope, and after all I've been through, I know that hope can be a heartless taunter anyway. So I'm not reading too much into the equation.
But I do know that inside me it might perhaps be springtime.
