Chapter Twenty

 

 

IT WENT ON FOR YEARS: she was in a relationship, all while I fucked anything that moved. The cycle just repeated. At university, there was a period of time when we were inseparable study partners and I actually thought she might even turn around and leave him, she was so flirty with me. However, it was just as I was getting my hopes up that she fell pregnant and shot all my hopes to shit. After that, I tried to put her out of my mind, but I couldn’t. Within weeks of us first meeting, maybe not even that… I’d decided I loved her. Trouble was, she was out of reach – always had been, always would be. I wasn’t to know that things would get even worse after she fell pregnant a second time. It was like she dropped off the face of the earth, never texting anymore.

It was around about this time that I landed my first professional appointment. I thought about Liza a lot but there was no hope, was there? She was married with two kids. I didn’t stand a chance. The most I could hope for was friendship.

I bought my first flat and a nice car. Everything was changing for me. No longer did I have to rely on my parents for anything. It felt brilliant. I felt worthy, finally.

However, I had no idea I was about to hit rock bottom.

I’d taken the train into town with a mate from work. We had a few pints before getting separated. I don’t know what happened, but I think he went into the toilets with some girl and didn’t come out.

I was standing at the bar when I was approached by two blondes. Their intent was clear and they no doubt saw what sort of man I was. They were both tall and slim, confident and forward in their approach.

“Our place or yours,” they said.

I remember grinning, even as a voice in the back of my head screamed, “Liza, Liza…”

We went back to their flat on the Marina, conveniently placed around the corner from the Fruit Market, where we’d been drinking that evening.

I can’t even remember their names and to this day, even if I saw them again, I probably wouldn’t recognise them.

All I remember is doing lines off their bodies and getting so jacked up that I was so hard, it hurt. The girls pleasured each other as I watched. I found out they were a bisexual couple often on the hunt for a man to join them.

I fucked one of them as I licked the other.

Then we switched.

It continued throughout the night.

Totally meaningless and driven by nothing but the need to vacate.

I left their flat in the morning, still high and wired.

I walked to the station and vomited in the toilet on the train home.

I remember feeling utterly hopeless that morning, as I arrived home to an empty flat and an emptier life. I sat in the shower and cried like a baby. I even contemplated giving up my new job, selling everything and going travelling. It seemed like there was nothing left for me around here, not anymore.

Then as I stared at my phone with bleary eyes, willing a text to appear from Liza – even just a ‘how’s you?’ would have sufficed – something else caught my eye. My personal email was blinking with one unread message.

There, in black and white, was a full email – from Liza!

I almost wept, but I was too excited. So, I read it…

 

*

 

Dear Sam,

I’m in Paris! Oh my gosh, I’m Paris! I would ask you how you are but I’m in Paris and I want to brag and pontificate and sing from the rooftops. You would have loved it today! Oh, you would. I know I haven’t scribed in so long, but I came away today thinking of you and how much you would have enjoyed the day – so now here I am writing this email to you.

Hetty’s asleep in her bed. She’s experiencing pregnancy fatigue, bless her. I’m sat here in bed in my new silk pyjamas and the windows are wide open, letting the night air in. There’s something magical about an autumn night in Paris, something calm and cool and quiet about it. A perfect ‘soft October night’, remember? (Prufrock). Anyway, I wish you were here to smell it because it’s difficult to describe. I think it’s all the dirt and gunk of vehicular pollution mixed with the scents of bakeries and fallen leaves and brasseries that drives me wild. The voile drapes are blowing gently against the windows and I don’t think I’ll shut the curtains tonight. It would be a damn shame to.

Joe paid for us to come on this babymoon, of sorts. He’s too busy with the football season and everything, but with Hetty needing a break, he asked if I would oblige and so here we are. In beautiful, gorgeous Paris. My mother is looking after Rupert and Emily while Gage is off doing god knows what. I’m so glad we’ve come away because Hetty’s been able to get everything off her chest about how scared she is to have a baby and I’ve been able to assure her it’s going to be fine. She’s needed to vacate – badly – and I’m glad Joe could see that. She’s not due until February but she’s already huge so it was probably the right time to come away now.

Our hotel room is beautiful. We have two double beds. Hetty has been swimming in the whirlpool bath for most of the day. We’ve come to bloody Paris and she’s more in love with the tub than anything else! It was rather funny though, and we had a laugh and a joke about it, then I left her to go off exploring on my own while she remained in the room.

I’m not going to lie, there were a few hairy moments today. I walked into a couple of dodgy boroughs and thought I was going to get whisked off in a car and sold into slavery or something. That’s the thing about Paris. You can be walking down a billion-dollar street one minute, and stumble into the ghetto the next (I’m perhaps exaggerating a little, but I think it was probably my dress that was getting all the wrong attention – obviously I should’ve dressed down for certain arrondissements). 

With my trusty new brogues on, I’ve walked and walked, today. Oh, I have Sam! I’ve walked! My macabre side was fed on the ghoulish sights of the catacombs to start with. I was naughty and used my old student card to get a discount! So sue me! I walked around the Notre Dame Cathedral and got a serious crick in my neck and some serious blisters on my feet while climbing the stairs. I had to make a pitstop for plasters and used one of the gardens to give my feet an airing before off I went again.

I found a corner in Shakespeare and Co and sat and read for a while between shelves of old books and people trying to pass by to get to other sections of the shop. If only I could go back in time and tell my younger self that one day I’d be swanning around Paris and visiting one of the most famous bookshops on earth… she wouldn’t believe me! I was thinking about my old battered library card today and how much use I made of it. How I used to reserve so many books at my local library and drive the librarians insane! How nothing changed when I was at uni and everyone would complain they couldn’t get hold of certain books – because I’d taken them all out! Anyway, from Shakespeare and Co I purchased some books and I have one for you, too. I bought you a beautiful old edition Proust. I know people think he was vague and detached, but I really feel like there’s something evocative in his setting a scene. Please remind me to give you the book next time we meet for coffee (I’m so, so sorry it’s been so long).

I ate in the Eiffel Tower restaurant alone (fish and chips) and watched the world as if I were the Hunchback, looking down upon everyone and everything from a great height, with such a vantage point as to be able to reason that sometimes, you just need a different perspective – to realise that each and every one of us is so small, but together we all make up this massive collective puzzle of human existence.

I ate opera cake at a tiny café and nearly had my head blown off by the espresso there. I pretended I still knew some of my school French as I buried my head in a fashion magazine from the complimentary newsstand.

As I sit here now in the hotel room, I almost feel guilty that I’ve made the most of this babymoon while Hetty has wiled away her day bathing and enjoying spa treatments downstairs. Almost, I said. Almost. Like I say, if I could have shown my younger self what I would be doing with my life one day – the friends I would have and the people I would meet and know – she would not have believed me. No way.

Anyway, I brought Hetty back a huge foot-long baguette full of ham and cheese – not the crap room service food you get – but the proper stuff from around the corner with half a packet of butter spread over doughy bread with a crispy outer crust. She forgave my absence today immediately and we danced to euro pop on the beds before cracking open boxes of chocolates and macaroons that I picked up from the common or garden supermarket over the road from our hotel.

Tomorrow I want to walk around graveyards while the morning is still dewy and fresh. I expect I’ll have to leave Hetty while I go off exploring again. She doesn’t mind anyway – she’s happy to have me explore and tell her all about it, living vicariously through me she says, while her belly is fat and her ankles are swollen.

Ah, if you were here Sam, we’d go to the cemeteries in the morning, drink Irish coffees and then buy a ticket for some sort of devastating French movie, before spending the evening searching for some live music to go and listen to. We’d get drunk and our feet would hurt, but it’d not matter. We’d stay up late talking nonsense in some all-night place and people would jeer at ‘those stuffy English’, but we wouldn’t care. I’d buy you a cravat and a stupid moustache and you’d be forced to wear them. It’d be so funny.

Alas, you’re there and I’m here, but for some reason this place really made me think of you today… maybe because you’ve told me about Paris so many times… about the times you’ve been here. It so made me want to come too and now I’m so glad I have.

We’re here for a few more days and I think we’ll try to fit in Disneyland too if we can – if only to buy a bunch of stuff for Hetty’s baby, plus Emily and Rupert.

Signing off, for now, with a glass of that aniseed drink in my hand and a lot of fuel in my soul. Love, Liza x

 

*

 

I couldn’t even articulate how happy she made me feel, just with her words. She gave me hope. There were a few indicators, but her email told me she’d not forgotten me entirely – also there was the slight dig about her husband, who she’d never talked very glowingly about over the years.

The only problem was… even if we one day did manage to find ourselves on the same page, would she ever forgive my past?

Would she understand my guilt, or rebuke it? Might she appreciate the will of a young boy to wish his sister back to life, even though his memories, though blurry, told him it was unlikely she was?

Abandoned… left out in the cold for much of my life… why would any of that change now?

I could dream about one day being with Liza, and for the time being, dreaming about the impossible was better than continuing my debauched lifestyle, which I vowed not to continue.

I was done with that.

Done.

That speck of light her letter provided could become as big as the sun, if only I had faith to hold on tight and be patient. I would need an inordinate amount of hope, but perhaps the way she made me feel and the way I seemed to have influenced her was hope enough.