Peeled. That’s how you feel, when it happens. Flayed. People who tell you to get out and move on, they’re standing there in a thick layer of skin, cushioned and comfortable, brimming with their easy clichés like something off a desk calendar. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger […] You were too good for him anyway. There’s a queue of their text messages on my phone. Call anytime, they say, if you need to talk.
Live in the world, and there’ll be a trail you leave behind you, even if it’s a trail of crumbs. That’s what they call them, don’t they? Cookies. No matter how vigilantly you try to cover your tracks, they’ll be there. The recorded minutes of a meeting you attended, some team you’ve been; there’s your name on the screen. Try it for yourself and see. Google your name, in one of these extended empty sessions of free time when the cursor’s waiting like a foot tapping, and there’s nothing else in the universe you can think of that you need to find out about. There you suddenly are, undertaking all the trivial pathetic things you think are hidden, so that anyone in the world can see you exposed.
It’s not as if I’m going to go over there, drive past his house, lie on his lawn drunk and make a scene, harass him. It’s just a few shreds of information I want. I supported him for a year, after all; surely I have a right to know whether he’s finally submitted that thesis and where, incidentally, the graduation ceremony is going to be held. If he’s joined a church group or a golf club, I need to paste that into my new identikit. I’ll take any crumb, any trail, any vague lead.
I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning.
Down through the layers of US family-tree pages and rambling travel blogs of dull strangers, I hit paydirt at last. My heart knocks in my chest. I find he’s attended a conference but not presented a paper there. Thesis still unfinished, then. Too many emotional upheavals. His thoughts too scattered after a traumatic breakup, distracted by guilt and second thoughts. I’m settling into this train of thinking, hungry for its possibilities […]
It’s ten past four. Jittery with caffeine and MSG, I snoop in the desk drawer Google has no qualms about throwing open for me. He’s way down the ladder: coming thirty-fourth. That must be humbling. Thirty-fourth in a field of what—fifty or so? That would make anyone feel like a nameless nobody in a crowd, face blurry in the back of someone else’s photo, reduced to nothing but pixels.
‘See, you can reduce all this to just a system of binaries,’ I remember him explaining […] ‘Just infinite combinations of zero and one.’ I wonder if he understands that better now, struggling home in the middle of the pack. How it feels to be rendered, finally, to those low-resolution dots of shadow and light, a conglomeration made up of nothing and one.
See, this is the difference. Your partner dies, and everyone comes over with casseroles; they clean your house and hang out your washing. Your partner leaves, though, and you don’t need nurturing apparently; you need avoiding. Your washing grows mouldy in the machine, your friends who told you that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger look at you uneasily, taking in your greasy hair and unwashed pyjamas, and leave you to go back to bed at 5p.m. Impossible to explain to them the humming, welcoming warmth of the screen later, the peaceful blue light, the endless possibility of an explanation that would make sense.
There’s a short film looping in my head and, in it, I’m pounding easily along over a hilltop in an interclub event. I’m not even puffing as I overtake him, despite the spurt he puts on. He glances sideways; he sees it’s me. I flash him a surprised-yet-calm smile of recognition, a flutter of the fingers, and pull away. Later, at the picnic, I’ll turn when he approaches, and let that awkward moment stretch out. In some versions, I have a little trouble placing him so that there’s the slightest hesitation before I say his name. Then I ask him how his thesis is going, and watch his face fall.
Any day now, I think as I lie heavy as a stone under the quilt, I’ll go out and buy those shoes.
From the stack of discarded CDs, I pull out the country-and-western collection a girl group sold us one night at the pub. They were great, those girls. Big hair and pointy boots and, up close, plenty of in-your-face eyeliner and juicy-fruit lipstick as they laughed and signed my CD. He hadn’t liked them. Didn’t like the venue (too smoky), didn’t like the audience (nobody there to converse with about Thesis), didn’t even feel comfortable ordering a couple of beers at the bar. All twitchy about the two guys playing pool, the ones who might have even had a dance with me or at least found it in themselves to relax and enjoy some live music.
What do you do in a cross-country run? I have a hazy picture of splashing across streams and jumping fallen logs, slogging up muddy hillsides and crashing down the other side through rugged bush. […] I wonder too if there’s a back-up vehicle, some support staff who tail-gun the runners, just in case you fall into a puddle or a ditch and lie there overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all, the ludicrous challenge you’ve imposed upon yourself; your foolish desperate need for purpose. I imagine being lifted from the first by kind hands, and given a bottle of Gatorade and a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. Oh, I would give in without even a pretence of fighting spirit if someone offered to drive me to the finish line. Who wouldn’t?
I wander into the study as he talks, my fingers absently, lovingly, grazing the keyboard of the computer. Double-click on the internet icon, go straight to the club site. Last week’s results are posted, and there he is, placed forty-second now. A nagging cold, maybe. Slipping down the ladder into numb mediocrity, driving back to his new Ikea sofa and wonder bleakly whether he should open a couple of those cardboard boxes, pull out the old photos from where he’s hidden them, and then, and then…swallow his pride to pick up the phone. He’ll ring late, sheepish and sad, voice thick with tears. Ask me if I feel like some Thai takeaway, or just a bottle of wine. If we could talk. It seems so possible, so likely I feel my throat tighten in anticipation.
‘Rebecca? Hello?’ My boss is still on the line.
[…]
‘I’ll bring something in for morning tea,’ I say.
So what I’m going to do, I’m thinking, since I have every right to, nothing to do with him, is ring the number and ask about joining. I’m looking for a phone number I can try, and I refresh the screen and start again.
Just two small words again, going off in a blinding flash like a grenade. What they say is: Under-fourteens. I sit staring at them, dully open-mouthed. It’s like being doused with a sheet of muddy water, like a final jarring stumble on wrenched ankles […] Click the icon, close the screen. Windows is shutting down. I almost hear it, the decisive thud as it hits some imagined sill somewhere. I need a shower, and then I need a long cold drink of something at an outdoor table, but first I linger, watching the innocuous sky-blue screen. I’m waiting for the little melody it always plays before it sighs and switches itself off, that melancholy minor-key tune that tells you that whatever you’ve been watching, ready or not, it’s time to roll the credits.
