Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

Of course, in my many long walks across the city, I’d already proved to myself again and again that the past wasn’t even as substantial as a shadow. With my rational head I knew that my time with Nicola had no more substance now than the ghostly former selves I imagined when I looked back at the empty pools of lamplight behind me. But at the level of emotion, I couldn’t accept it. Perhaps it would have been easier if she hadn’t been the first, and if the whole thing hadn’t taken place inside that bubble of secrecy and finite time that had made it seem so much brighter and more vivid than everyday life. Perhaps it would have been better too if I hadn’t imbibed all those heroic stories of impossible doomed loves like Tristan and Iseult’s. But, for whatever reason, I strained and strained against the great numb wall of intervening space that separated me from her, not knowing where she was, or who was now basking in her lovely gentle smile, but determined not to admit to myself that she’d gone.

I never got over that grief in the way that other people around me seemed to do, ending love relationships, pushing through the sadness, and then beginning new ones with the same optimism as before. But I was a human being with needs and I made pragmatic choices. I couldn’t give up Nicola, but I learnt to divide my heart into two compartments, and in that way, I was able to persuade both myself and a woman called Julie that I was in love with her. When we married, I regretted it almost at once, and we were apart again in less than eighteen months. I met another woman called Mary not long afterwards, and in due course married again, but after twelve unhappy and destructive years, that ended too, this time very bitterly, with Mary demanding that I leave, keeping the house and our two kids, and making it as difficult as she could for me to see them at all.

I remember how I searched out that cold hard marble on the day I left them, taking it from a hiding place at the back of a drawer, and slipping it into my jacket pocket. I drove over to my parents’ house, where I was going to stay until I’d found a place of my own. It was a longish journey, and I was exhausted by weeks of almost sleepless nights. Pausing for a rest in a layby, I took the marble from my pocket in the solitude of my car and turned it over in my hands, feeling its solidity and smoothness. Then, as I’d done many times before, I held it up to the window, so as to let the sunlight shine through that cold unmoving flame and make it look, if only very slightly, like something actually alive and burning.

‘I still love you best, Nicola,’ I whispered. ‘Underneath everything else the fire’s still there.’

But even I had to admit that this wasn’t a fire that could actually warm me, so I divided my heart again, looked around me and eventually got together with another woman called Patrice, moving back to Bristol to be with her.

The thing with Patrice lasted for about a year and a half, until she made the decision that it was over. She didn’t make a scene, or punish me as Mary had done, she simply informed me that she no longer wanted to be with me.

‘I feel like I’m dealing with an automaton most of the time,’ she said. ‘Some kind of robot that you’ve placed on Earth to represent you, while the real you goes off alone to somewhere deep inside yourself, where I can’t possibly hope to follow.’

I knew she was right. She’d spotted the compartments in my heart: the small one I’d allowed her to enter, and the big one behind it with the padlocked door. And so, without even attempting to argue, I found myself a little flat and moved out.

This was a dark time. After so many failures, I’d lost all confidence in my ability either to love or to hold the love of others. But I still had the glass marble. I still had the frozen flame. It couldn’t speak to me, or smile at me, or kiss me, it couldn’t caress me or warm me in bed, but it still could, at least to some degree, reassure me. I could be loved, that was what the marble told me, and I was capable of love, for I had once loved and been loved most wonderfully.

One day I put the marble in my pocket and drove over to Clifton, looking for the café where Nicola had told me we were two of a kind. Of course, it had long since gone. Clifton was way too upmarket by then for sleepy little hippie businesses, and the café had been replaced by a shop selling hand-made fabrics. I’d planned to sit at our favourite table, but now I decided instead to recreate the walk to that place in the woods where Nicola and I had shared our first and last kisses. She wouldn’t be with me, of course, but I persuaded myself that if I moved through that same space again, holding her present in my hand, it would bring her at least a little bit nearer.

Halfway across the bridge, though, I stopped. I don’t know what had changed inside me, but I was suddenly appalled, almost to the point of nausea, by the idea of going over the same wretched ground, prodding that same old wound, and attempting yet one more time to construct the semblance of a living being out of absence and empty air. Clutching the marble tightly in my hand, I looked down into the drop. A wire mesh had been installed since my student days to prevent people throwing themselves off, as so many had done in the past, but there were small square holes cut in it, so as still to allow an uninterrupted view.

What did I remember of Nicola, I challenged myself? What did I really remember? I could call to mind, at least approximately, the colour of her hair and her eyes (brown in both cases, though her hair had likely faded by now, as my own had done). I could remember roughly how tall she was, and the fact that she was fairly slim. But now I tried, I couldn’t call to mind even the vaguest image of her face, or hear in my head the sound of her voice. Yes, and apart from a few iconic words – ‘You and me are two of a kind’ – which had very possibly themselves been worn into new shapes by constant rehearsal, like buffeted pebbles in a stream, I couldn’t clearly remember anything she’d said. All I could really be certain of was the fact that, at the time, I’d found her words engaging, and that she’d found my words engaging too. But that was a long time ago. I fancied myself to be a communist back then. I found Monty Python funny. I thought On the Road was the greatest work of literature I’d ever read. And Nicola, though I still thought of her as excitingly older than me, had been twenty years younger than I was now.

Wasn’t it really the case that what I most loved Nicola for was simply her interest in me? Hadn’t I loved her so very much because she was the first grown-up woman who’d treated me like a grown-up man, when I’d feared that might never happen at all? I remembered Nicola’s friend Fay, that other mature student on the course. She’d been really strikingly beautiful, like a model or a film star, and I’d actually noticed her before I noticed Nicola, though she’d seemed so far out of my own league as not even to be worth fantasising about. But suppose Fay had sought me out to help her with her project, and suppose she’d been the one who’d leant towards me over a café table and told me that she and I were two of a kind. Was there really any doubt that I would have fallen for her just as I fell for Nicola?

After all, I didn’t know who I was back then. Dear God, I didn’t even experience myself as having a face ! Wasn’t it the truth that I’d have been happy to be told I was just like them by any halfway attractive human being, perhaps even men as well as women? And wouldn’t I have been happy to believe it too?

I opened my hand and looked down at the marble. I’d been clutching it so tightly that it had made a small bruised dent in the flesh of my palm. Tears came to my eyes. I had invested so much in this little ball of glass. I had laboured so long and so hard to keep the cold flame burning.