“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m really sorry.” I’m back to the funeral murmur now, even though I feel like screaming. “But you know, Liz … I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day. And maybe you think I should, but it’s not much of a life, you know?”
Liz shrugs.
“That’s not good enough, Liz. You’re dead wrong, and if you don’t know it, then you’re dimmer than I thought.”
She sighs theatrically, and then sees the look on my face.
“Maybe I’ve been a little unfair. But is this really the time?”
“Only because it’s never the time. We can’t go on apologizing all our lives, you know.”
“If by ‘we’ you are referring to men, then I have to say that just the once would do.”
I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m just not.
I walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk.
The Lydons live a few miles out of the nearest town, which is Amersham, and I don’t know which way the nearest town is anyway. I walk round the corner, and round another corner, and come to some kind of main road, and see a bus stop, but it’s not the sort of bus stop that fills you with confidence: there’s nobody waiting, and nothing much there—a row of large detached houses on one side of the road, a playing field on the other. I wait there for a while, freezing in my suit, but just as I’ve worked out that it’s the sort of bus stop that requires the investment of a few days, rather than a few minutes, I see a familiar green Volkswagen up the road. It’s Laura, and she’s come looking for me.
Without thinking, I jump over the wall that separates one of the detached houses from the pavement, and lie flat in somebody’s flower bed. It’s wet. But I’d rather get soaked to the skin than have Laura go mental at me for disappearing, so I stay there for as long as is humanly possible. Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon. “Is it better than lying facedown in a flower bed after Laura’s dad’s funeral?” I shall ask myself when the bailiffs come into the shop, or when the next Laura runs off with the next Ray, and the answer will always, always be ‘Yes.¹
When I can’t take it anymore, when my white shirt is translucent and my jacket streaked with mud and I’m getting stabbing pains—cramps, or rheumatism, or arthritis, who knows?—in my legs, I stand up and brush myself off; and then Laura, who has obviously been sitting in her car by the bus stop all this time, winds down her window and tells me to get in.
What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what’s the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person’s life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel … well, you’re up the creek without a paddle, aren’t you? It’s OK if I die first, I guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a necessity that cheers me up much: how do I know when she’s going to die? Could be run over by a bus tomorrow, as the saying goes, which means I have to throw myself under a bus today. When I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium … how can you be that brave? Now what does she do? To me, it makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and die alone and what’s so terrible about that, when you look at the alternatives? There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a name, but I could see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.
When I nestled into Laura’s back in the night, I was afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end. I’d rather not take the risk. I’d rather not come home from work one day in ten or twenty years’ time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman saying that she’d been shitting blood—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but this is what happens to people—and then we go to the doctor and then the doctor says it’s inoperable and then … I wouldn’t have the guts, you know? I’d probably just take off, live in a different city under an assumed name, and Laura would check in to the hospital to die and they’d say, “Isn’t your partner coming to visit?” and she’d say, “No, when he found out about the cancer he left me.” Great guy! “Cancer? Sorry, that’s not for me! I don’t like it!” Best not put yourself in that position. Best leave it all alone.
So where does this get me? The logic of it all is that I play a percentage game. I’m thirty-six now, right? And let’s say that most fatal diseases—cancer, heart disease, whatever—hit you after the age of fifty. You might be unlucky, and snuff it early, but the fifty-plus age group get more than their fair share of bad stuff happening to them. So to play safe, you stop then: a relationship every couple of years for the next fourteen years, and then get out, stop dead, give it up. It makes sense. Will I explain this to whomever I’m seeing? Maybe. It’s fairer, probably. And less emotional, somehow, than the usual mess that ends relationships. “You’re going to die, so there’s not much point in us carrying on, is there?” It’s perfectly acceptable if someone’s emigrating, or returning to their own country, to stop a relationship on the grounds that any further involvement would be too painful, so why not death? The separation that death entails has got to be more painful than the separation of emigration, surely? I mean, with emigration, you can always go with her. You can always say to yourself, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll pack it all in and go and be a cowboy in Texas/tea-picker in India,” etc. You can’t do that with the big D, though, can you? Unless you take the Romeo route, and if you think about it …
“I thought you were going to lie in that flower bed all afternoon.”
“Eh? Oh. Ha ha. No. Ha.” Assumed nonchalance is tougher than it looks in this sort of situation, although lying in a stranger’s flower bed to hide from your ex-girlfriend on the day that her dad is buried—burned—is probably not a sort, a genre of situation at all, more a one-off, nongeneric thing.
“You’re soaking.”
“Mmm”