Life After Joe (8 page)

Hope died. I let go a breath that turned into a moan. “Oh Christ.
Aaron…
”

“It’s okay.” I heard the smile resting in his voice. “More or less, anyway. I more or less understand, after what you’ve been through. But…please don’t ever do anything like that again. I’ve told you the truth.”

But you haven’t.
I lay against him in silence, rigid with self-disgust and incomprehension. Was he one of those men who genuinely didn’t know when he was lying—a psychopath or schizophrenic, maybe? Sitting opposite him at the table or our shared desk, rocking with him in the throes of a face-to-face fuck, I thought I’d never looked into a saner pair of eyes, but what the hell did I know? I’d believed Joe—who was also technically sane—for two years.

I could hardly challenge him on information I’d gained by violating his e-mails. His arm around me, treacherous or not, was warm; his touch still the sweetest thing I knew…After almost a minute, he yawned, rubbing his cheekbone on my scalp. “All right,” he said. “You’re freezing cold, and I’ve got a kink in my spine. We’ll both be better off back in bed.”

I had volunteered for two long Christmas Eve shifts, partly in a shameless desire to reingratiate myself with Dr. Andrews, partly to get the next day off. Aaron, who clearly took the business of forgiveness seriously, brought me breakfast in bed, and we parted affectionately, arranging to meet at the Metro station that night. Standing in the hallway, after giving my pallid face an anxious once-over, he had smiled and said, “I’m not sure what this is yet, but our first bust-up feels like a milestone,” and he’d given me one of his benediction kisses, the ones that bypassed all my erogenous zones and buried themselves in my heart.

Not much of a bust-up, I thought, sitting at a table in the canteen to recover after giving my fifth piece of bad news in the cancer ward upstairs. I’d done something unforgiveable, and he’d let it go with a smile and a breakfast tray of strong coffee, orange juice, toast and two aspirin. As for what this was, what we were to each other, I didn’t know either. I only knew my own part, brought home to me sharply when he’d told me he was due back on the rig the following Wednesday, his voice, his touch, his unstinting kindness put beyond my reach for a whole month: I’d fallen in love with him.

With a man who belonged, resoundingly, to someone else. Who seemed to be living some kind of double life so efficiently that not only could I feel thoroughly loved in return, but Rosie, off in her semidetached in the suburbs, was perfectly happy too. And where the fuck was that about to go? We both acknowledged each other—his lady for his surface life and church on Sundays, and his gay lover for the Powerhouse nights—and somehow shared him?

I tried to rest my face in my hands but only ended up knocking over my coffee. As I mopped up with paper napkins, I reflected that I was putting my cart way before the bloody horse. All right. I loved him. He’d never indicated the equivalent, and if all his actions seemed to declare it, maybe he was just like that with every boyfriend—so attentive, so adept at drawing from our bodies climax after toe-curling climax, so damned
nice
that anyone not made of stone must routinely fall for him within his fortnight’s leave. Maybe there were dozens of us, and the long term wouldn’t get the chance to be a problem.

I looked up at the canteen’s grimy ceiling. In the wards above me, vast dramas of life and death were playing themselves out beneath the tinsel streamers. Most of them were quiet and restrained—a shadow on an x-ray, hope draining from a human face to be replaced by mortal fear. Words, options, diagnoses.
How long do I have left?
I tried, always, to speak gently and with absolute truth, to feel how it would feel if it were me. But it wasn’t. For all my misadventures, I was here and well, my blood clean, with nothing worse than a fading hangover to mar Christmas. I didn’t know what I was to Aaron, but to me, he was—oh God, so much—warmth and life, proof I could, despite all post-Joe expectations, find it in my heart to fall in love again. I had three more days left with him. If he was lying, couldn’t I accept that, given what he was, his reasons must be good?

My pager buzzed, and I stood up, checking the coffee hadn’t spattered my white coat. Nothing less inspiring to a frightened patient than a dirty, bleary-eyed intern. All I could do was give the day—the hour, the moment—my best. The rest, for now, could take care of itself…

***

Aaron and I collided in a clatter of laughter and glass. I pushed back reluctantly from his embrace—the first one he’d offered in public, a massive bear hug under the Metro station neon, turning heads across the ticket hall—and laid a hand on the neck of the champagne bottle that had risen between us in absurd symbolism from his carrier bag. “What’s this?” I asked, not neglecting to give the rounded cork a caress. “Are you
trying
to unleash the beast?”

He grinned down at me. “This is for over Christmas lunch. You can handle it, can’t you?”

In his own quiet way, he was a great advocate of personal freedom and personal responsibility, this Aaron. He’d look after me to an extent, then help me look after myself. Insist I do so, probably. “Yes,” I said, convinced by his conviction that I could. “Great. Thank you.”

“And before I chicken out…Here.” He rummaged in one pocket and produced a small blue cardboard box. I felt my mouth go dry. I didn’t know what was in it, but I knew the jeweller’s logo. “Small present. No big deal.”

“God, Aaron. I didn’t get you anything. I didn’t know…”

“Where you stood. I know that. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk to you more. Can you stand it?”

“I…think I’m learning to love it.” I glanced up, letting him take that however he pleased. “Do I open this now?”

“God no. When we get home. When I’m out the back…chopping logs or whatever, for preference, so I can fade back into the forest if I have to. Come on! I’m freezing my arse off here.”

There was a feeling of a whole world shutting down. The most determined of last-minute shoppers had been finishing up as I walked through town, the most obliging of shops closing their doors. The night was cold and clear. A little starlight was making its way through cobweb clouds and neon, catching the pale strands in Aaron’s hair. Christmas trees in every other window we passed set their lights in his eyes. I walked at his side, trying to keep coherent thought together and make conversation. My fingers closed round the little box, which I’d tucked into my coat’s deepest pocket. A few days before, he’d come with me into the Northern Goldsmiths jeweller’s to help me choose a present for my sister. He’d been beautiful in there too—almost as lovely as he was now, the lights and the shimmer around him seeming to call out his own. I’d talked—I think I’d given him a little lecture—about my distaste for rings, for civil ceremonies, all the trappings of a mainstream society which had never honoured, helped or even acknowledged my choice of partnership, so why should I ape its symbols? Nevertheless, I’d looked for a while at a broad, plain silver band and admitted, when Aaron raised a brow, that if I
had
been going to bow to convention, that might have been where I would start.

As usual I was jumping ahead of my facts. The box could contain anything. And if I thought about it, what would Aaron be doing giving me a bloody ring? I knew—we both knew—he was not heart-whole. Not in a position to be offering signs of commitment and trust. Oh God, I didn’t understand—and suddenly I needed to, burningly. We were almost outside my flat. I put my hand into the crook of his arm, drawing him gently to a halt. “Aaron, love. Tell me, please. Who is—”

“Matthew!”

I spun round. Felt Aaron turning with me, to look at the open front door to my flat, which was unexpectedly ablaze with light. A figure was silhouetted in the doorway. For a moment, irritation seized me. God, was nothing sacred? I couldn’t believe even Lou would let in a viewer at eight o’clock on Christmas Eve…

The figure moved, began an uncertain track towards me down the path, then broke into a run. “Matthew. Mattie, sweetheart! Matt!”

Joe.
I couldn’t get a word out. He launched himself at me from three feet away, and I caught him on reflex, falling back against the frost and ivy on the garden wall. Instinctively I shielded him from too hard a meeting with the brickwork, and his embrace closed round me—so tight, so familiar, it was for an instant as if he had never been gone. The scent of his hair filled my nostrils. Johnson’s shampoo, an economical habit from council-house days that he’d never altered. It paralysed me. “Joe,” I choked out, helplessly grasping at him. His rangy, rawboned frame, sometimes feeling barely different from that of the skinny, scab-kneed boy who’d run at my side through hostile Shieldwell streets and parks. “What the…fuck are you doing here?”

“Home. Come home for Christmas, Matt. Come home for good.”

I got my hands onto his shoulders and heaved him back, far enough to see his face. Yes, he was crying. Joe never cried. I looked beyond him to Aaron, who had backed up to the gate. His expression was unreadable, just as it had been the night I first set eyes on him under the Powerhouse lights. And all of his had gone out. “Aaron…”

He quirked a smile. “There you go,” he said, softly. “You’ll be okay now. Not a bad Christmas present, eh?”

“Aaron, no. Joe, please. Back up for a second. This is…”

“Aaron?” Joe echoed, letting me go. He swept me and then Aaron with a bright, assessing gaze. I couldn’t remember when his eyes had gained that calculating light, like he was taking somebody’s measure, and not kindly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, holding out a hand. His other was closed tight on my upper arm. “And you are…?”

“A mate,” Aaron responded calmly. He shook the hand offered him. “I live up the road. Just walking Matthew home.” He gave us both a nod, the faint smile still in place, and began to turn away.

“Don’t!” I gasped, not sure what I wanted to prevent or deny. My heart was pounding wildly up under my ribs. Joe was here. Joe was back. My fucked-up head was having one last game with me, I thought, and whipped round to check. Yes. He was there, seizing my chilly face in both warm hands and stilling it, staring at me. I could have it all back. It hadn’t been perfect, but what was? It had been my life. My partner, my home, my day to day. Our circle of friends, our nice holidays, our evenings and our weekends…I said, lamely, hardly knowing why, “I think it’s too late. The place is more or less sold.”

“Oh, bugger that! That was all Marnie. I talked about you one time too often, and she freaked out and told me to sell the flat to prove she came first. I tell you what…” He released my face, whirled me round by the shoulders until I was looking at the agency sign on its wooden post by the gate. “Let’s get rid of this now.” He reached up, grabbed the sign by its little red and white two-bed-terrace label and began to tug.

And that would never bring it down. I don’t know what came over me. Adrenaline or hysteria maybe. Joe and I had been partners in crime for our entire lives. If he wanted to graffiti-tag the railway bridge higher than anyone else, I would give him a leg up. He would hang on to the seat of my pants while I dangled over the top to make my mark. Wild laughter burst from me, and I sprang up onto the garden wall and grabbed the sign at the top. “All right!” I yelled, getting a grip. “Pull now!”

They made the damn things pretty sturdy. After ten seconds or so, we both gave up and stood staring at each other, breathless. Slowly I realised I could see the whole street from here. That the street and our gateway and the garden were all empty, except for the two of us. “Aaron,” I said, voice still unsteady with laughter. “Joe, did you…I didn’t even see him go.”

“Well, he’s gone. Very discreet.” Joe held up his hands, and I took them automatically and jumped down off the wall. “Who was he? And don’t tell me your mate. He was bloody gorgeous.” Not waiting for my answer, he wrapped an arm around my waist. “Fast going, Mattie! See—didn’t I tell you you’d do okay without me?”

Air left my lungs. “Joe, you…you’ve got no idea.”

“Well. All that’s over now, sweetheart.” The arm tightened, and I found myself being half tugged, half guided towards the open door. “Come on. Come on in, and let’s start over…Oh, wait up. Grab that plastic bag—don’t leave your champagne behind…”

***

I sat with my coat still on, in the living room of my old home. It was very cold. Joe was rattling back and forth between the fire and the kitchen, switching on lights, chattering. He was back. I’d been given the one thing I’d wanted, and with perfect Christmas timing.

There were lines in T.S. Eliot. I couldn’t remember which poem they were from, and hadn’t paid them much attention at school, but somehow nevertheless they had stayed with me. Something about the passage of time, and the way the world answers what we think are our needs. “She gives when our attention is distracted / And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions / That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late / What’s not believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered passion.” I hadn’t liked those words. My twelve-year-old heart had rejected them, even while my brain recorded. They meant, didn’t they, I could want something forever—like getting into the Gateshead football squad—and burn and yearn and work my arse off for it, and when it came, it might not be worth it. Not even what I wanted anymore.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
was a tough one for preteens, as well. I had just the faintest suspicion—nothing concrete, mind—that Dorian and the artist who paints him and maybe even the author of the story himself were all batting for my team and Joe’s. Not that I was about to impart this to our poor English mistress, who had wanted to enter a convent and instead ended up teaching forty sneering council brats in Shields. Back then, being young, I hadn’t thought much of Wilde’s theory that the inner life could taint the outer man, make such differences to him that a portrait in the attic taking all the hits and moral decay on your behalf could be an invaluable asset. Back then, no matter what Joe and I had been up to, we could raise such clear and incorrupted eyes to teachers and to parents that, unless they had proof, we got away with everything.

Joe hadn’t got round yet to the lamps we had scattered around the front room, soft ones on low tables that shed light through coloured glass or nice silk shades. The overhead was on, a pale yellow glare. “Joe,” I said as he came back into the room, and something in my voice made him stop. “Sit down a minute.”

“In a bit. Just gonna make us a cup of tea, and…”

“No. Now. Please.”

He obeyed. I think he knew then the game was up, that whatever sweeping, overwhelming thing he’d meant to do, it was no good. He sank onto the edge of an armchair opposite to me. Perhaps he was just tired—or maybe two years of steadfast deception
had
done their work on his once-open, sweet-natured face. He looked…faded, and there was a twist to his smile I hadn’t seen before.

I was sure I was altered too. He said uncomfortably, “Come on, Mattie. I’ve got things to do.”

No one else in the world called me
Mattie,
not unless they wanted a punch in the mouth that had formed the word. It was a name from our deepest past, from bloody nursery school, for God’s sake, when Joe had been too young to pronounce my real one. I said, throat burning, “Marnie must be devastated.”