Socks, Rabbits

He had said goodbye, finally, cruelly, (before something happened) even though he had arranged things so he wouldn’t be home that night and it could have. Now he was travelling through the night, two hundred miles, his head a mess, the car driving itself.

He stopped for coffee, amazed he could feel so empty (because he was so ruthless) and because he knew (deep down) that this hadn’t been honour; he was punishing her.

On the smaller roads he became petty, flying through his night. He kept his headlights on full beam, making opposing drivers flash at him and curse or retaliate, swapping blindnesses, trivial, stupid, offered mutual destruction.

He was thirty miles from the cabin as the sky streaked purple. The moon was still up, fat over the moors. Rabbits appeared and he slowed slightly. He turned off the radio.

On a bend he saw a glimmer, then the other car, dead, fallow, the front wheels in a ditch, its rear-end across the road. He stopped, flicked a switch, and with his hazard lights blinking, making him amber-dark-amber-dark he crossed the road in socked feet, prepared for death, maybe to help. What surprised him in his separate night, was a sense of superiority.

But the car was empty, save for a little blood and glass. No publate boyos, dangling, broken, no couple, twisted, slapped silly. It would have been stolen, a joyride gone wrong, or Euan or Thomas or Dai, too bad for the drink, Gwynneth, walking home across the top, looking to avoid a drunk-driving charge.

It rained, and in his grey unshoed feet, he was suddenly impossibly angry, the night just as suddenly cold, the glorious scenery swollen, ominous and hostile. Then he knew, again he had thought of her, of the punishment, and now he knew how bad a man can be. A rabbit appeared to his left, small, grey, the tuft of white. His daughter would “oooh bunny!” had she seen it.

He looked at the blood, the glass, the dumb animal, and walked back to his car.

He started the engine. His feet were cold and sodden. He sat there, the radio off. He thought again about darkness, about night, and started to drive, the windows down so he could hear the moon, the wind, the slap of the tyres on the hill road. He drove quickly, carelessly. He did not try to avoid the dawn-hopping rabbits. Instead he aimed at them and called them stupid. He thought he killed at least three. He heard the thump of two. That was why he had the windows open.

When he got to the cabin, he fell on to the bed. He tried to sleep. When the sun rose it sliced between the curtains and cut into him where he lay, on the too-large double-bed.

He was dressed except for the wet socks drying on a chair.

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In the Loudness of Their Morning

In the loudness of morning, the sky an impossible blue, the blue of postcards, the track painter-perfect, poppies scattered across the corn, he walks, no longer effortlessly, but with his chest full of light.

Sarah has set off from her cottage, slightly downhill, towards that distant gold and red-dotted square, beyond the section walls, the fallen oak, the slow, blubbing summer spring, a clovered, rested-out field, a view of the coast, then the place they met.

Tom carries a flask of dark coffee, cut through with rum. Sarah is carrying biscuits, eight crisp-and-soft Garibaldi’s, and, because it’s how she is, a small, immaculately white, lace-edged table-cloth.

This is their affair.

Tom has learned to pace himself. In his lightness, sometimes there is a shallowness of breath. Once he felt dizzy, and once, terrified, he thought he might have to turn around, and shuffle home. Today he feels sprightly. He feels aware, sharpened by the edge of sunbrought ozone, the gloriousness of a Wessex morning, and of course, Sarah.

Sarah takes the downwards slope with ease, serene, quiet, savouring. It is only later, after, that she has to face a climb, her mental uphill steeper than her walk.

Then: “Excuse, me; do you have the time?”

She feigns surprise, glances at the sky as if it knows (one minute to ten).

“One moment,” she says, and she wriggles and slinks her arm skyward to let her wrist emerge from layers of wool.

“Ah!” she says. “I do believe it is exactly ten in the morning, and such a fine one. If I were I clock I would chime, right now.”

“Thank-you. Oh, I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name…” he says (halting, as if he should) but then, as driven as he was, as excited as him, she tells him, “Sarah.”

This is how it was, seven weeks, two days and fifteen seconds ago. He asked the time, she shrugged her sleeves away and looked at her watch.

Today is the fifty-third time they have met. This is how they have been for fifty-three days.

As the sun climbs they sit together (there is a log, an old downed tree, half-way between their cottages) and they talk. It is innocent. He tells her about Gladys. She tells him about Jack. They tell each other about grand-children, about what a palaver going to the doctors has become. They talk about this glorious, extended summer, how beautiful the field below them looks (they both love Monet) and one of them (they take turns) always says, “If we had been younger, what if, eh? If. What a big word, if.”

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Ghosting

On the first of January, he put Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita under the left hand cover of his two-pages-a-day desk diary, to level the page for writing. On Friday the second he did the job with a pristine copy of Best American Short Stories 2003, and on Saturday (the third) it was a novel, David Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley.

On the tenth a writer friend wrote: Jack, I can't place it. Best thing I ever wrote – can't place it, yet I've made nearly three thousand pounds this past month writing stories about cats who won't chase mice because they don't like getting their fur dirty!

On the eleventh, a woman wrote an email. Was it right to crush spirits with literary brutality? He wrote back. Was it OK to crush one if he helped twenty-one? Then in a flash of anger he reminded her he was a writer not a psychotherapist, not a counselor, no priest. On the twelfth, he contemplated suicide.

Once he had dreams. One day he began to capture them. Sometimes, the dreams he created were wrapped in dreams, but the people he sent his dreams were blind, and sent them back.

Drunk one night – the bar stank of cheap weed – someone said give them dreams on demand, the same dreams, re-arrange the opening, change names; dreams are business.

The someone was the man who still couldn't place the best thing he had ever done. Now he ghosted for a fat American.

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The Ends

You must lie, it's what you do. Tell them what they want to hear, tell them the things they will hear as they will without really attending the words, the truth in the words. Say it so they smile, so they can eat the lies, make the lies, tell them to themselves. Let them sail softly to oblivion.

Don't say "Of course I'll love you in the morning." This is a known lie that means people have to pretend, remembering the lie. It colours things. It taints.

Say, "I don't think I'll love you in the morning. I'm a bad person. I'm a man. No-one can save me. I cannot be changed. Walk away."

This lie is a special lie. It's a truelie, a lietruth. The lie is that you tell the truth knowing that they can tell themselves the lie which makes the truth your lie. You can say you're heartless, demand they believe you, insist. Say "Look into my eyes. I-AM-A-BASTARD."

This is good technique. You are so honest, so open, so confessional, so up front, so damn well decent as you tell them what a bastard you are that they can know you are and believe you aren't. Afterwards, afterwards, just remind them you told them, right at the start. "I told, you, right at the start. You went into this with your eyes open."

Here clichés are not only good they are de rigeur. They allow the connections to be made, Casablanca, Brief Encounter. You will be Bogart to her Bacall and as you drive away, collar loose, tie sagging, there will be music playing, the very hard to pin down happysadmusic, shweetart, the achey (head tilts here, the ceiling tiles are off-white, why did you never notice them before?) "But-I-was-alive, Francine, alive, and he said, he told me; he said, right up front he said, we had no future. But Fran, I was alive. Just the ends, yes."

© Alex Keegan