First Love Read online

  Anyway. All of this came back to me, then subsided. The fascination with old things rediscovered (like opening those boxes) soon wears off. Christine told me that when her father died (that’s my grandfather) she ran all the way from the hospital back to their house. Miles and miles, in the winter, and without a coat.

  6

  Can the future be a white expanse? Can you run in, heart pounding?

  I find I’ve never given much thought to the future. Beyond that sense of getting away. Derelictions, you see, left and right. Yet here I am.

  —

  Edwyn and I had to face each other when we got married, and hold both hands. After the registrar, we repeated, ‘I promise to love you and care for you for as long as we both shall live.’ Potent words. It felt incredible to say them, to hear them.

  —

  His hands ache now, all day, but especially in the morning. I used to rub them with oil first thing: a carrier oil and a ‘relaxing’ oil, mixed up by my finger in a medicine cup. ‘It smells nice,’ he’d say, his poor staunch mitts on the towel I put over the duvet. But it didn’t help, not really. His condition is a scold, I’m learning. Edwyn’s wary of door handles, these days. A tight tap. A heavy kettle. He gets put down so spitefully, should he forget himself. A DIY jag—‘Got to keep things shipshape!’ he says—will leave him moaning, his wrists swollen; he rides his bike and a hip joint burns, so for days he can’t settle, can’t walk, can only hobble and hiss.

  ‘It feels like someone’s going at me with a welding torch,’ he says, giving me a meaningful look.

  Sleep is difficult, too. Whisky helps him drop off. Which is fine, until he starts snoring. In the past I might have tried to roll him over, or given him a nudge, but that doesn’t seem fair anymore. Instead I tend to get up, lie on the settee, roam the flat. Recently, abroad in the bathroom one morning, I saw one of the foxes heading home, along the garden wall. It was the dog fox; head down, and his full tail pointing down. Would he see me? He sometimes did. I knelt down and willed it, but he just dropped into the woodland, disappeared.

  Their den is under the lime tree. We saw it this last spring, when the local Residents’ Association spent a cold Saturday morning clearing up that little strip of embankment, bagging up cans and crisp bags, dragging rusted garden furniture free of the ivy’s jealous grip. Edwyn, intrepid as ever, a boy again, worked his way to the back of our house first, and from there called me over, to look at the low arch of the foxhole. I scrambled to join him. ‘Can you smell?’ he said. I nodded. ‘And look,’ he whispered, and he pointed to a spot by the tree that we’d both seen Fox occupy. Here, amid the tangle, was a perfect oval of clear, smooth earth.

  ‘That’s where he sits when he needs a break,’ I said.

  Edwyn nodded seriously.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Chap’s got to have a break. Working so hard.’

  II

  1

  Without a shift, Margaret used to spend Friday evenings with her sketchpad; lying on the settee, her long legs steepled. Conveying her character, which was thoughtful and sincere, her pale eyebrows were often drawn into a frown, looking up from her work.

  I see her like that. Or maybe in her kitchen, peering mildly at her tea. Or arriving at the Pev on a rainy night: wet ragdoll, wet raincoat, wet apricot-coloured hair, poking in her purse for some jukebox change.

  She was in when I got back from seeing my mother, that day at the cinema, and she looked up just as I’ve described, transferring her attention to the grousing figure in the doorway with unwarranted grace.

  ‘Do you still want to go and buy a tree?’ I said.

  ‘Mmm…’

  I dropped my bags on my bed and then gave my hair a brush in the hallway, while Margaret put her papers away and got on her boots and coat. She’d been letting me her box room for six months by then. I’d told myself it was a stopgap, but the truth was I didn’t know how I’d ever afford to move. I didn’t think about it, that was my scheme. Or else—I think I just hoped something would happen (why shouldn’t it?). Margaret was away so often with her various jobs, I didn’t feel too much under her feet. She said it was fine by her if I stayed on.

  Pale clouds drifted over the city. Down below: wet streetlight. In Albert Square, the tree man stood in the shallows of his grove, banging his gloved hands. We moved through the spiky corridors, tried to assess the trussed-up specimens. A smallish spruce was indicated. Shoulder height. Could we lift this one? We both could, and in headlong stints we carried it home; hugging it and hoisting it, hobbling blindly forward.

  Later there were nestling fairy lights, the dull glittering of Margaret’s old Russian baubles, movingly fashioned after vegetables. My initiative, and a typically poor one, was tangerines stuck with cloves. These quickly ceded to rot (you were supposed to dry them out first), and within a week I was delivering them to the bin. Still—they looked nice that night, turning slowly on their threads.

  Our phones were on the table with our drinks. It was about nine o’clock. I remember standing up to see who was singing, or making some kind of a lusty row, out by Napoleon’s, was it? And then turning back to find my phone’s message light flashing. This, as it turned out, was the ‘something’ happening. I read the name and felt my scalp prickle, my cheeks flush. An old circuit completed.

  —

  I worked in a bar while I was at university. Margaret was there too, briefly: it was where we met. And Michael Whelan—whose message I was now sitting down to read—was somebody who played there one night, in what, 2001?

  Oldham Street was an outfall back then. Fuliginous nooks yielded uncertain streams of piss, on that first block of money shops, bookies, bus-stop drunks. My shift started at seven, but I’d often walk up there early, passing the smokers shivering outside the Methodist Hall, and their shadow selves, the ruined gurners who hugged the walls by the pubs, cowering in, sneering at, this new element of not-pub. Our place was handsome, in its way, with its tall windows and old theatre curtains. Posters listed WHAT’S ON in a white-on-black label-maker font: just local bands most nights, their bussed-in crowd. American musicians were unusual in that they might tip you, refusing their change with a wounded wince, a raised palm. Sometimes they’d slide over the little piles of coins they said they wouldn’t take home, again turning tactfully away as you slid them into the jar. Michael did that, I think, drinking after his set. And then at the end of the night, though we’d barely talked, he said,

  ‘I wish I could continue talking with you.’

  That sullen attention. It did not waver. And the next day, too, crouching over me, whispering, with no less forcing interest.

  —

  He was twenty-eight then. I was twenty. What followed was strange. An attachment? A conviction? I make no case for it, either way. Or only this case: that it was based on nothing and fed on nothing. For the next three years we saw each other for a few days a year, that was all. Wet English winters. Black rooms above pubs. On stage, his screaming was jaw-wide. And then, afterwards, there were the strange fights he’d get into, as—he said it himself—he loved to be obnoxious. Michael was my height—short—with tightly curled brown hair, a widow’s peak. He tossed his head around girlishly as he incited these set-tos, but then never looked like he was enjoying them once they got started. Rather he looked dull, resentful. His eyes in shadow; dark slots.

  We used to drink a lot, together. I’d often be drunk when we met. From fear, I think.

  I remember: rain like a gel on the old grey stone.

  Michael saying,

  ‘You know, I like it when you’re like this? But they don’t know you.’

  Or in a nightclub, taking my hand, to sympathetically slur:

  ‘I mean, I’ve already been married, so I have to be like super-careful who I pick next?’

  Finally I started a fight, with him. We were in Derby. We argued in an eighties theme bar, then out on the street, then at a taxi rank. On it went, like promenade theatre. The year after that, he d
idn’t call me. I knew he was in England, then Manchester. How frightening that felt. The whole city bristling with his presence (I felt), the noisy streets huzzahing his happy lack of interest in me (I felt). The years went by like that. Five years: far longer than we’d known each other.

  Edwyn likes to say that ‘When people are done with each other, they’re done with each other.’ ‘People are a lot less interested in each other than you seem to think,’ he says. I believe him now, or rather, I agree with him, but while it’s hard to dispute the first proposition, its inverse does also hold. And in this case there clearly was something that I couldn’t let go. Something I insisted on, for all that it crowded out.

  And then came that message at Margaret’s. Michael Whelan ‘reaching out,’ as he put it. ‘Seeing if this is still you.’

  He wrote a little bit about what he was up to. He was living in Montana now. A town called Whitefish. ‘You should look it up,’ he wrote, ‘it’s “quaint.” ’ He even asked if I’d mind—‘mind terribly’—sending him a copy of my new book. ‘As a holiday gift for an old sweetheart?’

  How strange. My mind fogged. I fell asleep quickly that night.

  The next morning, too, was strange. I kept smiling helplessly, in spasms, as I walked down Oxford Road. And later, heading home, I saw a girl I knew coming towards me on her bike; just a slice of face between scarf and hat, and I raised my hand to wave to her in a way that I wouldn’t have done, ordinarily.

  It wasn’t that I imagined myself the only one being ‘reached out’ to, incidentally. There was a vacancy, that’s what I had to assume, and I knew him: he’d want to feel he was being fair. It didn’t matter. Not to me. I replied that night, and tried to match his tone.

  —

  In March, Michael sent a birthday message. ‘Sorry it’s a little belated,’ he said, ‘lost track of time there!!!’ I wrote: ‘That’s all right. Thank you. Surprised you remembered! x’

  His answer to that came back like a slap.

  That felt a little sparse, coming from you—has my sporadic esponsiveness agitated you?? Hope all is well in your world!!? If it’s not, lemme know. Can’t promise to help, but perhaps console?? Xomikey

  Agitated? I thought. Console?

  A phone call was my idea. At first Michael said he’d call me. But then, his phone was too shitty, he wrote, and he couldn’t work his phone card? Would I mind terribly?

  That was an odd conversation, full of silences I didn’t care to break. Instead I held the charged little lozenge to my ear, and looked out of the window. Sackville Street at two a.m. Black and glittering.

  Michael was touring again, he’d told me, in Salt Lake City that night.

  ‘Let me just step outside,’ he said, a few minutes in—to me, or to someone in the room with him.

  I heard a fire door opening, then the droning wind, five thousand miles away.

  ‘You sound cold,’ I said. (I could hear the cold tightening his jaw.)

  ‘Ya, I guess I should have put my coat on? But I’m so lazy.’

  I had a can of vodka cranberry open, still wet from the fridge in Spar, and I pulled on that and shivered; walked around the dark flat.

  The next afternoon Michael wrote to me.

  Hey,

  Ha ha, you were right my consolation skills were way off! I’m pretty terrible on the phone, which I do recognize is a problem in trying to be in touch with someone on another continent. Also, I DO understand your feelings concerning our relationship. I might explain to you, I am not dating anyone now but I’m also not looking/wanting to date anyone. Maybe not EVER?? Which, hey—might be similar to your feelings on the subject.

  I did want to be in touch with you again because time has passed, and sure, we had a pretty awful time a few years back, but I don’t believe either of us truly meant to treat each other in those ways. It was passion!! Too much of it.

  But now, reaching out to you, I’m really only looking to be in touch to reconnect after all this time apart. I like the idea of being friends, which is all we can really be in our current situations anyway, right?

  I hope hearing from me is a positive in your day, not another barb!! You maintain, in my memory, the most intense, confusing and frustrating experiences in my life. I mean that as sweet! And funny!!

  Xomikey

  People we’ve loved, or tried to: how to characterize the forms they assume? Michael sounded like a teenage girl, here, I thought—the queenish self-regard, the untroubled belief in his ability to coax, to blandish. That said, he didn’t seem insincere, so I tried to be honest, too. I wasn’t looking to ‘date’ him, I said. And yes, I imagined I had been quite a frustrating proposition. But there it was.

  A month later he wrote again, to tell me he was playing a show in London soon. ‘Too bad we’re not coming to Manchester!!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, too bad,’ I might have written. But I didn’t do that.

  —

  At the back of the Scala people held their jackets over their arms. Drinks slopped. I left during Michael’s last song, shuffling out to catch an empty bar. I took a flimsy cup of vodka to the ladies,’ brushed my hair out, redid it. At half past nine I walked down to the foyer. I stood and looked straight ahead while I waited. And then as we said hello, and after we’d OK’d a hug, as we were talking about what to do, where to go, I felt my eyes darting over Michael’s face.

  He suggested we stay and watch the next band. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘OK. And not talk?’ That was off-putting, wasn’t it? Why so jealous? So grasping, immediately? Because I knew the whole thing was hopeless? Because after all I did have a crazed and gleaming notion that it wasn’t? It frightens me, to remember this. What had happened to me? What had I decided I had a right to?

  Behind the bar, a muted TV screen showed the stage. Here was a singer, in white leggings and a white polo-neck, walking slowly, like a ghost in a play. Behind her a man in a black fencing outfit stood up at his drumkit. I asked if Michael knew them, were they friends? But I wasn’t interested, barely listened to what he said, instead I hustled us to a pub I knew, with heedless dash, and again felt thwarted, put down, when we got there and Michael said he didn’t want to get drunk. Instead he ordered a beer.

  ‘I don’t understand these. Do you want to help me out? What is that? A two pounds?’

  He laid the coins out in his hand, looked at me.

  —

  Conversation was difficult. Unnatural-feeling. The attention I was paying felt like an awful kind of attention, but I didn’t know how to dilute it. Michael kept needing me to repeat what I’d said, too. Sometimes because I was speaking too fast…He asked me about work, and then I asked him. He asked me what I’d been reading, and the question felt bottomlessly sad, I don’t know why. I didn’t tell him I’d lost my flat. I nodded when he said, ‘Same place?’

  His hand rested on the foot of his glass. My purse was on the table, too, ready for another round.

  ‘So I should, um, tell you that I got engaged last year,’ he said.

  ‘OK. Goodness. Congratulations.’

  ‘But, um…Six weeks before we were due to get married I told her that I couldn’t—that I wouldn’t—marry her.’

  ‘OK.’

  (It sounded like he’d prepared what he was saying, I remember, down to each gulping pause.)

  ‘Why did you ask her?’ I said.

  ‘Oh. Um, just wanting to do right for her, I guess.’

  ‘Right…’ I said. ‘Well…Just a sec. Sorry. Excuse me.’ I stood up, edged out of the booth, heading first to the ladies’ and then to the bar. What was bothering me? Making me panic? The familiarity was confounding. Michael, there in front of me. Each expression of helpless submission or bored compliance. This was him. How he passed. And living like that, of course, you would now and then end up with fiancées which had to be shaken off.

  I knew more about that break-up than I let on, I should say. Guilelessly, his ex had been keeping a blog about it. Margaret and I found it after he first got
in touch. A ‘diary of her healing,’ she called it. I read it with burning cheeks at first, but that wore off. So I knew how Michael had announced, one morning, ‘You know what? I do not want to marry you.’ ‘You are the girl that never came true!’ he said, pressed for a reason. And I knew about the weekend before he moved out, when she followed him around the supermarket, begging him to reconsider. She should be grateful, he told her, that this was happening while she was still young. Still attractive enough to get someone else.

  Later, scavenging, as you do, in wreckage like that, she wrote that she actually really admired the way he lived his life, citing as an example of his no-compromise attitude his turning off of the car radio one afternoon. She thought she just had to put up with bad music, but he said, ‘You know what? I do not have to listen to this.’ She said she’d learned from this, how she should follow her heart and demand the best for herself. She hadn’t been doing this (she saw now) with him, turning instead to booze, pills, pot and carbs (‘Cheese Bix, I’m talking to you!’) to fill the emptiness when he was away on tour.

  That figure echoed in our row, too.

  ‘You know what? I do not have to be here.’

  And in a story he once told me about his first summer job, at a pancake house. He decided he wanted the position, charmed the manager, then walked out on his first shift.

  ‘You know what? I don’t need this.’

  What was this? This more-than-indignation, this self-assertion always feeling like an allegation, too. Except no one was making him do anything. Were they?

  And about our argument. Too much passion, had he said? Us treating ‘each other’ badly? My memory was of me in great distress, behaving horribly: drunk and vicious, unrelenting, and of him scurrying away. I couldn’t blame him, and that’s what I’d lived with. Shame. Consequences. I believed—I believe, strongly—in both of those things. To what end, I wondered, did he think I’d want to buy in to his fiction? To a rewrite from Mr Reaching Out, Mr Reconnect? Some people will assume that we’re all up for a flattering fantasy. I didn’t like him, when I thought of that. So what was any of this for?