Disclaimer: Not necessarily funny.
Tuesday 28th
May 2012
David stood up.
“Here's a list of
things that I'm NOT expecting of you-”
“Buh-” she'd
wanted to interrupt, but wasn't given the time of day.
“Ready? One, no
sympathy. I have absolutely no need for fellow-feeling, whether it be
yours towards me, or some old guy standing in the park, trousers
round his ankles towards the kid he's just paid 20 quid so suck his
old dangly balls.
“Secondly,” he
paused, checking her eyes to see whether they had drifted at the
balls-bit, but when he found they hadn't yet, he felt he could do
without the rhetorically cute repetition of the word, but since he
was on a roll anyway, he decided to go for it, raised his chest and
repeated, with a higher cadence this time: “Secondly, I don't want
you to try and change my mind. You're not the most convincing person
I've ever known. No, wait, no-no-no-no-no! Wait.” A breath.
“Thirdly, no pity. There is no reason – well” he interrupted
himself, sneaking a look at her to see whether she'd grasp the
opportunity to interject, which she let fly. “I actually meant no
love.”
A shattering pause. He
tried to keep his voice steady, which he wasn't fully in control of
anymore. “You've shown to me that this is perfectly possible, over
a number of years- running nearly into double figures now- No Alice
don't even try-”
But his refusal was empty.
Alice sat, her dark brown hair cascading over her shoulders,
focussing her eyes on a flowerpot in the middle distance and fixing
her mind, trying to think very hard about egg cups. She'd always
preferred them orange. She also thought about Nick. In her vicinity.
Naked, the hairs on his chest and forearms bristling with excitement
and the magnetism of her and of what they'd just been engaged in. His
smell, the taste of the inside of his mouth, his sweat streaming in
canals along the ridges of his spine as he thrusted into- “ALICE!”
Her reverie was broken by
David, who appeared to be having one of his moments of misplaced
grandeur again. That she could deal with. Him no more. Not for nine
years. After all the- Not the- she-
“Alice, I...” a
broken David addressed her now. She could obviously see his grand
oration failing miserably, so without sympathy, pity, love or even
much interest she -having bored herself on the subject of the colour
of egg cups- asked him the 10.000 dollar question.
“So what IS your
plan, David?”
He raised his shoulders,
which had been forming the left side of the hypotenuse with the
doormat and his feet in a Euclidian triangle, over-back, as if he
were the base of anti-aircraft machinery, erect, very much like the
ones you get in packs of plastic green toy soldier; catapulting
unbidden truth in the direction of his girlfriend: “I'm going to do
a bike ride.”
Alice spat out some
biscuit crumbles over the kitchen table. “You what?”
“Yeah,” he said,
as he was building himself up again from that salvo. “I'm going to
cycle, and I'm going to go end up in the mountains. And I'll live off
the land.” Just then, he realised that he should have demanded that
she would address him without ridicule, which was a late realisation
of Homeric proportions. He was going to feel the full blast of her
ridicule. He bit his lower lip and closed his eyes to narrow slits,
as if he were trying to avoid salvos of archers firing from the back
ranges of the front, all the while preparing his fragile ego for the
Howitzer of mockery that Alice was about to deploy.
In the meantime, she
cleared up the biscuit crumbs off the table and dropped them into the
bin, before taking offensive position number 24: left arm akimbo,
hips out, right foot over the other -toes uncurled and straight-,
right arm leaning into the door frame, her head ever so slightly
sideways. All he could do now was prepare for the assault. He knew
there was no way he would be able to cope. No way.
She then began. A sigh.
“Ok,” she looked at the tiles, at the floor, as far away from the
man she used to love as she possibly could. “So! Cycling!” she
tried, with the drag of feigned optimism in her voice. “Whereto
exactly may I ask?”
That was it. He had been
defeated. His great, heroic plan was noting more than dead shit in
someone else's garden. He tried to suppress his tears. “Highlands. The Highlands.” he blurted out, surprising Alice, in that he still had some
sort of faculty of speech, not to mention not having desintegrated
before her very eyes.
“There I will
cycle to. All the way up to the mountain top. And then-” he raised
his shoulders one last time. “I want to jump off. I want to jump
off the highest mountaintop and fall. I want to fall and fall until
nothing is left and my bicycle bell will be found by a fucking seven
year old in fucking Dundee for all I care.”
As his lungs tried
expanding outwards for air, they hit so many physical blockades that they
eventually had to find some spare space in his neck which then expanded and
retracted, making him look even stupider than the words he had just
spoken. The term 'unattractive' would never carry the full significance
of exactly how repulsive David then was.
“Because Alice, I
would die for you.”
Alice sat down, took a sip
of tea and turned her thoughts to where Nick might leave his stuff as
the main obstacle to their relationship had apparently gone the way of the
lemming.
“Alice I will.”
He started to undress. A hideously unflattering lycra pair of shorts
and bicycle shirt unveiled themselves. All of David's bodily flaws,
faults and bumps (of which Alice could draw the Michelin maps blemish
by idiotic useless blemish) were more visible to her than if he had
stood naked in the kitchen before her.
She said: “I don't know
what to say anymore. You denied me giving you love, despite all the
arguments against and how you seem to have turned into a fat lemming
in lycra. By the way, who's sponsoring you? Gregg's?”
David was as ever silent. Alice looked up at his face for the first time in five years.
“So what you need from me is – forgive me if I get this
incorrectly- some kind of blessing? Is that it? So you can chuck your
sorry self off a mountaintop?”
She paused, feeling her
anger rising, and looked at that man there, clad in lycra, 38 years
old. Infertile, jobless, on lithium since October.
“David, I'm
telling you this as a friend. Ok? Go and, you know. Take a break. No.
Listen to me David. Pack your things (he'd started to silently weep
by this point) and go. Take these fucking things off first, you look
ridiculous. No! Don't fucking look at me like that, I'm not taking
you back.” She made an attempt to leave the room but felt she
couldn't yet. “I deserve a life of my own too. I'm not just there
to deal with your shit. I refuse. If it were, fucking if it even were
washing a wannabe lemming's disgusting lycra shorts. I still would
not. David I cannot deal with you any longer.” She inhaled with
force now, but started her exhalation before she even commenced to form her words:
“Now leave.”
So he did. David left Alice, who couldn't even bring herself to kiss him goodbye anymore as he boarded the train to Aberdeen. The highland streams were tainted that year. The water under the bridge coloured red at places. A stone in Pembrokeshire was now illegitimately used as advertising space for Gregg's the baker's. It took Alice a week to stop feeling guilty and two years to stop thinking about him every day. She never taught her and Nick's children how to cycle, which always puzzled Nick. He would have to forget about it too.
