Lovers, the dear the vibrant loved. Those who say they cherish you and who debilitate you. Everyone has at least one ex that mars them, who persists as a scabbed yet seeping wound long after the coupling has ended. Mine was Allison, a scrappy literature student with an air of Hope Sandoval to her features and bearing that I dated when I was twenty-three. I found her by accident. A meet-up arranged in a Soho back-street dive with another woman who didn’t show and I got talking to Allison instead while sat solitary by the bar and brooding into my pints. ‘Why so glum tonight?’ she said, ‘have you been stood up? Me too. Why don’t we talk to each other instead?’ and we saw each other for six months after that, cohabited for three. It was a few weeks in before she opened fully to me, her past unfurled; the childhood rapist uncle, the mother dead in a car, the father in prison, the sister on crack. There was little damage that I’d not separately seen in one or another girlfriend before her but Allison wore each hit with a sense of ownership, not that it made her ability to process them any easier. I remember three thirty am one Saturday night in our New Cross flat and us post-sex and subtly stoned, she weeping into the darkness as Nick Drake played out low on the stereo, Bryter Layter, and I did what I could to console her. At The Chime Of A City Clock will ever be the sound of her sorrow.
‘It’s only when I listen to this album that I realise how alone I am in this world,’ she said.
I traced her pallid arms, the tidy lines of self-harm scars her skin carried there, the scars that would go to the grave with her. Like her words, like her memories. Just another one of the broken. Just another one of the weird and lonely. Just another cutter.
‘But it’s okay because now I have you,’ she said. ‘I’ve found somewhere to belong.’
We had sex again then, our bodies so slight against each other, her hands tight in mine throughout as if mere contact could be salvation. The too-brittle that break too soon. Allison took her own life in the end, twice over; swallowed pills upon pills and then cut both wrists to be certain, an Easter weekend while I was away with friends. I returned home on the Monday evening to find her naked on the bed, blood-pools and empty pill blister-packs spread around her. The loved, ever in the mire of their own shattered centre. Ever in the wake of their damage; to themselves, to the world, to each other. Allison my precious until she wasn’t. Until her blood was spent. Until her breath was gone. I adored and I went to bed alone and with buried dreams.
A hotel room in Monterey facing onto the wharf, me thirty-two then and sat by the window, Laura standing in front of a full-length mirror, Pixies tee-shirt hiked up to and tucked under her breasts, she spreading her hands across her yet-sleek belly.
‘I can’t have a kid,’ she said. ‘Can I? Kids are for other people. I’m still too young for it.’
‘Too young? You’re thirty-five. Some people have got adult kids by the time they’re your age.’
‘It’s still too big for me though. It’s still too much. I can’t make a decision like that.’
‘Who else can make it for you though?’
‘I don’t know. Who is ever adult enough to make a decision like that in this day and age?’
I looked out through the window and down at the wharf, at all the people milling there, each existing only to have sex and then to die. Each existing only to replicate DNA, the function of the human or any organism. I’d had little desire to reproduce in the past. I always thought that it was because I was too selfish, too preoccupied with my own wants, that perhaps this would change as I got older. I didn’t know if it had. But if I didn’t breed, didn’t pass down my coding, did that make my existence a failure? And now the possibility of a child with Laura was there I remained ambivalent. Like her, how could I make a determination like that? What criteria should I employ by which to weigh it? Laura walked over to the bed, sat there, smoothed her tee-shirt down over her belly, watched me as she did so. We’d been seeing each other but a few months and I still deemed our relationship casual; the California trip was the first thing we’d really done together as a couple. Until then our liaisons had chiefly consisted of alternating visits to each other’s flats for sex. I could no more gauge her prospective parental qualities than I could my own.
‘Well you need to make a decision, and soon,’ I said. ‘Otherwise a decision is going to make itself for you.’
‘I need to make a decision? Why isn’t it your decision too? You’re as much a part of this as I am.’
‘Of course I am.’
We went out then, deferring any choice for another day, for another conversation. Walked Cannery Row, visited the aquarium, sat on the beach watching seals and sea otters, just another hand-in-hand tourist couple. We returned to our hotel room at twilight where Laura sat before the mirror for hours gazing at her belly and declining to talk to me. I was right though in a sense; the decision did make itself for us. She miscarried eight days later on the flight back to London. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she said, returning to her seat from the toilet as the plane attained peak altitude. Our relationship hobbled on for another five weeks after that, the loss drawing us further together if anything until the end; her decision. ‘You know, now it’s gone, now it’s been taken from me, I do wonder if I did want it after all,’ she told me on the evening we parted. But the ever-possibility, and that it never happened, haunts me. How different my days could have been. How different I could have been. Another signifier. Another definer. Another claw in me.
How many people have come and gone in my life? Not just lovers, not just girlfriends, but friends, associates, work-colleagues, acquaintances? How many have left a trace? When I reflect on it few seem significant. They arrived and then they departed with scarce a mark on me. Only a sprinkling truly mattered in all my eighteen thousand yesterdays. Memories now of Sophia, a fifty-something woman who drank alone in many of the same Oxford pubs that my ex-wife Jessica and I frequented. Ever-dusty and bespectacled with hair grey as spiderwebs and always with a bank of books on the table beside her glass, which provided our first conversation-opener when a sozzled Jessica asked her what the titles were. Sophia a former professor of history dismissed from the university after one too many still-drunken lecture mornings. She lived alone and I got the sense that she didn’t have many remaining friends, was eager to have someone to talk to aside from her numerous cats. Her three marriages, her five children dotted in as many overseas nations lived in, the seven medieval history text books which bore her name on the cover.
‘You two young things make for such an adorable couple,’ she slurred through double slugs of whiskey. ‘Why would you let such good genes go to waste? Go home right now and have plentiful unprotected sex. Make more just like you. Heaven knows we need more beauty in this world.’
‘I don’t know if I want to,’ Jessica replied. ‘I don’t mean the plentiful sex bit. I’m never averse to that. But why would anybody willingly bring children into a world as messed up as this one?’
‘Whatever else are we here for, darling?’ Sophia said. ‘Whatever else are any of us here for? Forty years of studying the past and that’s the one and only thing I know for sure these days.’
A different night, a dozen drinks down, and us booze-flushed enough to feel as if we could take on all the world’s ills.
‘Don’t aim for the top,’ Sophia said. ‘Never aim for the top. Nobody at the top has any real power anyway. Take out the middle-men. Take out the bureaucrats. Take out the meddlers and the busybodies. Then we can all go about our business and mind everybody else’s.’
Another evening she told me of her surety that god loved her, ‘my god at least.’ I didn’t know how to adequately respond to that but Jessica answered for me.
‘Just what do you mean by god?’ she asked and Sophia laughed, full-bodied and from the gut.
‘Isn’t that the question, darling?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that ever the question? One that needs another drink. Every best question always needs another drink.’
Jessica ordered a fresh round for us with chaser shots and I watched and listened as the pair of them settled in to debate the point. I supped until I was emptied, until alcohol’s meagre light was all I could see. Booze is so slippery. I knew that, then as now. It persuades me of best, that all is good. It lies.
And as for Sophia; the last time I saw her was a handful of weeks after Jessica and I separated and I was living alone in a dim hole of a rented studio flat on the Oxford periphery. A Saturday afternoon in one of my favourite city centre pubs, Sophia and I shared scotch shots and beers as dusk drew the day to a close.
‘I’ve been told by my doctor I’ve got two months left,’ she said. ‘Maybe six weeks. My liver’s shot to pieces.’ She raised her glass, knocked it against mine.
‘Sophia, I’m so sorry to hear that.’
‘Oh there’s no need for you to be sorry, darling. There’s nothing to be done. It is what it is.’
‘Do you regret it?’ I couldn’t think what else to say to her.
‘The drinking? All the drinking? No, I don’t regret it. All the days I’ve had and I don’t regret what I did with but one of them. Though that’s enough about me. We need to talk about you. I still can’t believe you and that lovely wife of yours are no longer together. That’s of far greater significance than me shuffling off, in the grand scheme of things.’
‘You told me before that you believe in god. Your god at least. Do you believe in an afterlife too, if you don’t mind me asking?’ I hoped she did, that she had that comfort, that surety, even if I didn’t.
‘How could I know? How could anybody know?’
We drank and we talked until last orders cry, toasting each other over and again with each successive round and sliding deeper into alcohol’s thrall, then I bade her farewell one final time, walked out into a smear of chill rain. Nothing remained for me except for my drunkenness. Booze ever the pimp. It tarted me out, promised all I could be and all I could have if I worked the tricks, but it owned me entirely. Was Sophia a guiding factor in my soon-made decision to pause my own drinking? Perhaps. I saw where I was headed if I didn’t desist and knew that I had taken it as far as I could. So I pulled back, six months short of alcoholism. And whenever I’m in a bar these days supping on my modest pints I think on Sophia, silently raise a glass in her honour and let my lips form the shape of her name.
.
Darren Francis
Photos from Room at the Top
.