The Pretence Read online

  Dear Frances,

  Do you know what pain is? I do. Pain is when the person who made your life complete smashes it into so many pieces you know there is no chance of you ever being able to rebuild it again. That try as hard as you might, there will always be cracks, there will always be weaknesses, that suddenly rupture and out bursts blood and innards and again you cry out in pain and fall to the floor.

  Have you any idea how many times a day I curse you? Not only, as I thought, in my unhappy moments, but also in my happy ones, too. I curse you for those occasions when I’m laughing and suddenly think of you. When a flicker of sadness wings past me like a bullet, and that laughter feels pointless because I didn’t share it with you.

  How long is this going to go on? Why can’t you tell me where you are? You were everything to me. You know that. I breathed your breath, absorbed your sweat, wore your mind. Why must we lose it all? It doesn’t make any sense.

  Please, for the love of God, tell me where you are.

  Simon

  Would you believe me if I told you it’s over three years since I last saw her. Three fucking years! She took me higher, and left me lower, than any person has a right to do. I was obliterated. Like one of those animals you see run-over on the road, so crushed you can’t even be sure what it was. Night after night I walked endless chains of tear-cracked street light, oblivious of my surroundings, of how far I’d come, even of those who stared uncomfortably at the passing weeping stranger. I was in shock. Unable to believe that someone I loved so much could do that to me. So much pain, and not a blow had been struck.

  Take a human being right to the raw edge, it doesn’t do to expect originality. I committed every cliché you can think of. Getting senselessly drunk so often my toilet didn’t know my face from my ass, pounding at unwanted bodies as if I was searching for something they might keep deep up inside them, and even falling to the inevitable thoughts of suicide. Frequently. I mean, life is all about optimism, right? Hope. That’s how we sustain ourselves, upon the frequently flawed foundation that things will always get better. But I knew they couldn’t. Not without Frances.

  She was twenty eight. Well, I mean, I guess she is thirty three. But I seem to have this habit of freezing people at the point I first meet them, and there they will always remain. The instant I saw her, I was in love. Sorry, but it’s true. In fact, do you want to know something? Even before I saw her, I was in love.

  I was at this party, some young friends of Luca, standing in a dark and crowded room trying to scream a brief moment of communication through some unremitting techno at a girl I couldn’t make up my mind about and telling the whinging bastard inside my head who kept going on about ‘Isn’t thirty four too old for all this crap, and be honest, are you really enjoying it?’ to fuck off, when this group of late-comers arrived.

  They did so in that way that late-comers at parties often do; like you’ve got a disease and they’re not sure if they want to catch it. Huddling together, moving as a team, four or five of them, men and women. Yet somehow I knew. Somewhere a rusty old antenna began to twitch. I straightened a couple of inches up the door-frame I was slouched against, trying hard not to be too obvious, peering over the shoulder of the girl I was talking to.

  It was almost as if they were minding her, locking her away, trying to save us both from our mutual fate. I caught a quick glimpse - bare shoulders, glossy brown skin, a flurry of black shiny hair - then finally, like curtains parting, everyone stepped aside and I had my first proper look at Frances.

  People always try to tell you that love will come along when you least expect it. ‘Relax! It’ll happen! Give it time!’ These are exactly the same ones that when a bird shits on you say it’s lucky. Basically they’re just trying to make you feel better about a crappy situation. Listen to me, if you ever catch even a distant glimpse of that thing, the palest shadow on the furthest horizon, lock your eyes on it, hold them there, slowly make your advance, and never, not for one moment, look away.

  As soon as I saw Frances, standing there all serene, as if her whole worth was in the sense of how much she denied the interest she was creating. The moment my sight verified what my other senses had told me the instant she’d walked in through the door - maybe even entered the building - I neither blinked, nor looked away again, for two whole years.

  “Do you know how much I love you?”

  “On a sliding scale?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Would it be larger than Ben Nevis?”

  “A mere pebble.”

  “Oh. What about Everest?”

  “Hillock.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Can’t even see it from where I am. There are clouds in between.”

  “Ah. We’re talking something very big? Very high?”

  “Look, there goes Columbia.”

  “The space craft?”

  “Somewhere down there.”

  “You’ll need oxygen.”

  “I do feel a bit light-headed.”

  We could do that forever. Just lie somewhere - on a crumpled pyre of Sunday newspapers, in long summer grass that measured time by ripples, a beach that ticked to the rhythm of waves and the polishing of pebbles - and endlessly flirt with, and tease, each other with our own personal brand of stupid schmoozing.

  “What shall we do?” she asked, rolling over to face me, repeatedly hitting her pillow till she’d finally plumped it up high enough to look me directly in the eye.

  I gazed at her for a moment, paying my usual unspoken homage. Everything about her was big and brown and honest: the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and that fringe that, no matter how recently she’d had her hair straightened, was still inclined to go frizzy at the mere mention of rain, sleep or making love. She wasn’t expecting an answer from me and we both knew it. Maybe on the fifth, or even the tenth occasion, one of us would make a suggestion and the other would stand up and wordlessly comply, but not yet. Love’s rituals must be observed

  “You have a scar,” I told her, drawing a finger across her left eyebrow.

  “You may receive one,” she informed me.

  “Why?”

  “Every Sunday you tell me I have a scar.”

  “It’s your one imperfection that makes you perfect. A flaw as a mean, a method, to measure you by.”

  She laughed in that way that a lot of black people seem to do. Like she really wanted to, like it had been bubbling away inside her for some time and she’d just been waiting for an excuse to release it. “Full of shit,” she commented.

  “In that case, if that’s your attitude, I shall just have to measure you the old-fashioned way,” I said, leaping out of bed.

  She shouted after me but I took no notice, plunging through the flat naked, everything slapping from thigh to thigh, going to the toolbox under the sink and finding the tape-measure.

  Frances measured - maybe still measures - five feet seven and a half from her hard-skinned dusty feet, along the undulating length of her warm and perfumed body, to her huge mane of shiny black hair. Her legs are 31 inches long, her arms 26, her waist 25, and the circumference of her left breast is 19 inches, whilst the circumference of her right one is slightly more. The opening of her vagina, which I also intended to measure, alas, I cannot tell you, for as is the way of these things, a certain amount of fumbling around in that area resulted in us making love.

  I suppose like most couples when the spell’s still new and vital, rebounding back and forth, lighting up those lights and clanging those bells, we seemed to make love an awful lot of the time. Starting, finishing, and breathlessly punctuating our days with it. Sometimes even waking in the middle of the night and still finding ourselves going all Itchy and Scratchy. As if, though our bodies might be tired, our libidos knew
a good fucking thing when they saw it, and weren’t about to stop for a moment. We were like Siamese twins, rubbing and writhing at the join, forever rocking on Venus.

  When the letters started exactly, I don’t know. If I’d realised how important they were going to be, what damage they would do to my life, I would’ve paid more attention. I guess we always left notes. Jokes under the pillow, in the pockets of each other’s coats, that sort of thing. Once she wrote, ‘Be kind to your lily-white ass, it is your finest feature,’ several sheets into my toilet roll, only for a friend of mine to come round and use it.

  It was more me than her. If ever we were apart, I would write almost every day. Like when she was staying with friends in Paris and I sent her a letter that made her laugh so much she actually pissed the bed and had to strip it down and wash and dry everything with a hair-dryer before they got back from work.

  Of course, I know what you’re thinking: who writes letters these days? Surely everyone uses e-mail? But I just find it a too impersonal medium for expressing feelings. A letter is drawn, pictures that make up words, words that make up pictures. What’s an e-mail comprised of? Millions of anonymous little dots, each one exactly the same as the other, that get squeezed into a cable and reformulated at the other end like mince-meat into a hamburger.

  Mind you, that isn’t the only reason why I never use it. I am currently one of the world’s leading authorities in the field of technophobia, and back then, Frances was my number two. I mean, please, do carry on – with your mobiles and megapixels, your headlong dash into a digital world – and yes, I do know it’s a whole new world, but we’re going to wait here for a while. Where you can still perfume your correspondence, leave a lock of hair, maybe even the stain of a tear.

  Anyway, whatever, I’ve always written her letters. It was an intrinsic part of our relationship. The only difference being, after she left me, the nature of them, the need, drastically changed.

  The first few weeks they were pretty well what you might expect: an endless catalogue of pain, begging her to come back and save me, repeating myself over and over, barely making any sense. I guess I was just searching for the lock, the key, the machinery, that might somehow time-travel us back to where we once had been.

  Dear Frances,

  Please find enclosed some of the photos we took when we were in Scotland. Do you remember? That evening at Glen Coe? The way we hugged each other tighter and tighter in an effort to squeeze the dying sun back up into the sky? What about the old lady in the shop at Aviemore? The one who said she’d never seen two people so much in love. What did you tell her? ‘I love him because he brings out the most loveable parts of me’.

  Please, give me the chance to do that again. I promise you, you won’t regret it. You were so happy then. Have you been so happy since? Be honest with yourself. Don’t let pride stand in your way. Nothing is irreversible, believe me. Maybe this period apart might even work in our favour? Maybe we’d appreciate each other even more? Our happiness that much greater. Can you imagine that?

  I will love you forever - I have no other choice.

  Simon

  You don’t have to tell me. Utterly, wet-pantedly pathetic. I mean, Jesus, the lies you tell yourself. The theories you swallow in an attempt to ease your pain. As if emotion strips away everything - intelligence, common sense, perception - and leaves only your dolt of a bloody heart beating away like some specimen in a jar.

  You see it so clearly in others, but never in yourself. They didn’t want to leave you, of course they didn’t, they were just confused, going through a difficult period, influenced by someone they shouldn’t have been. As if you’re some kind of insane conspiracy theorist, searching for a plot, a reason, why someone should suddenly and inexplicably change their mind about loving you. I mean, how long ago was it they last told you? A week or two? No more than a month surely? Nobody could stop loving that quickly. It doesn’t make any sense. There has to be another explanation.

  ‘Time and space, time and space’ - that’s what they ask for. The time to load their weapon, the space to have the room to manoeuvre it and take aim ... at you, you fool ... at you.

  She wrote back a couple of times, as if she had to, as if she still cared enough to try to help me through - telling me she did still have feelings but it was best we both got on with our lives - but in the end she must’ve realised there was nothing she could do, and it abruptly stopped.

  But not from me. I continued to send an avalanche of paper surging down her hallway every week. I can’t believe some of the things I wrote. I guess you never really know a person till you’ve seen them in love, in which case, God protect me from what’s inside my head. But the thing is - and, please, if nothing else I say matters, this does - until Frances came along, I didn’t even know it was there. I’m getting a little thin on top these days, and my stomach muscles can no longer achieve social reining of the gut, but over the years, I’d like to think I’ve had at least a normal share.

  It was almost always me who did the walking. And the times it wasn’t, I didn’t really care. Not for long. I’ve always seen myself as - I’m utterly convinced, I’ve always been seen as - an ordinary, average, easy-going bloke. Yet when I felt Frances starting to slip away, when she finally left me, I found myself chained to a madman.

  Over and over I tried to stop myself doing what I was doing, to rebuild, to regain some scrap of self-respect, even if it was only to give myself a position to bargain from. You’ve got to stand your ground. The moment you start trying too hard, losing your dignity, following them step by step till they’re backed up against a wall, screaming ‘Enough! Enough! Please, leave me alone!’, you’re finished. Yet what little hope I had of regaining my composure, of retaking any old ground, was lost the day Frances disappeared altogether.

  It was like having her leave me all over again. I came home one afternoon, picked up the post and found my last letter to her sent back marked ‘return to sender’. Immediately I phoned, ignoring one of our earlier hard-fought pacts that I never would, and got that continuous echoey tone, when the line’s been cut adrift somewhere, leaking words into nothingness like an unattended garden hose.

  I tell you, I really panicked. I couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to write. All night I barely slept a wink. And yet, with dawn came the realisation that she’d probably just moved flat, that I was worrying for nothing. I could write to her at the office. A few weeks later, a whole batch came back, again marked ‘return to sender’.

  She used to work for this small advertising firm, Kentish Town way, doing graphics. When I called them they told me she’d left over a month ago, and that no-one knew where she’d gone.

  “What about her P45? All that stuff?” I asked, feeling that familiar flush starting to form on my face – the Mask of Mr Hyde.

  “As far as I know, she’s already got it,” replied a voice that I was beginning to recognise as someone Frances had once introduced me to at a Christmas party - Jeremy, I think his name is.

  “You must have some way of contacting her? What about Sally?” I asked, knowing she was the closest thing to a real friend Frances had there.

  I heard him cover the phone for a moment. “Nope,” he replied, soon returning. “She doesn’t know any more than I do.”

  I hesitated for a moment, trying to keep the madman in his box, but shit, that catch had got so faulty. “I don’t believe you.”

  There was a pause, and when he spoke again, there was a new edge to his voice, as if it was time to let me know he knew all about me and everything that had gone on. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Someone can’t just leave like that.”

  “Well, she has,” he said, and I had this sudden mental picture of everyone in the office stopping to listen; him adopting a slightly camp aggressive posture, seeing his opportunity to get a laugh or two at my expense. And yet, even then, it went through my head that surely something was wrong here? That it should be me in his position. I wa
s the one who always turned out for Sanity, and never once for the Sad-Fucks Eleven.

  “And no-one knows where she’s gone?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “What if you wanted to contact her for some reason?”

  “Be out of luck, wouldn’t we?”

  I gave a long and frustrated sigh and he reciprocated by leaving the kind of silence that could only be filled by goodbye. Finally I slammed the phone down, my impotence provoking a surge of rage, cursing him but, of course, actually hating myself.

  It’s just a matter of how far you’re prepared to go. That very evening I looked up Frances’s widowed mother’s address - we’d visited her a couple of times down in Portsmouth - and started to write there. Just sending the one letter at first, marking it ‘please forward’, seeing what would happen. A week or so later, with no apparent repercussions, I posted a couple more, until soon I was back up to my usual two or three a week.

  I knew it was wrong. I was beginning to feel like a stalker. But the point was, as long as I was writing, there was hope, and frankly, I just couldn’t bear the thought of life without it.

  I didn’t hear anything for a month or two and assumed the letters were being sent on, that somewhere Frances was receiving them. I even began to fill that empty space of silence with some moments of optimism. But late one night, like she’d been worrying about it for a long time and couldn’t take it a second longer, her mother called.

  “Simon?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Dawn - Frances’s mother.”

  She needn’t have told me. I recognised the voice immediately. The same emotions high-lighted, the same turning melodic circles, and though over seventy, you could almost mistake her for her daughter.

  There was a long pause. We both knew why she’d called.

  “I just thought you should know Frances isn’t here,” she told me. “And I’m not sending your letters on.”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage in reply.

  “You have to forget her, Simon.”