Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

I merely nodded. Even speaking might doom the moment and break my happiness.

‘Can I ask you something, Jack?’

I managed a grunt, but already I was aware of perfection slipping.

‘Don’t be angry.’

‘I promise.’ I was immediately on my guard. What dangers lurked in this simple request? I felt her body tense.

‘Do you find me…boring?’

I almost laughed with relief. ‘Of course I don’t. What on earth makes you think like that?’

‘I mean intellectually boring.’ She moved away so she could turn to look at me. ‘It’s just that you are so, well, bloody clever and I’m so average. Do you find it difficult, I mean a strain, to be with me? Do you feel like you have to lower yourself to my standards, to my level?’ She paused and noticed my smile. ‘Jack, I’m serious. Caroline said something to me and it’s kind of freaked me out.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Basically that you’d tire of me and when you did, you’d leave.’

‘Mary, I promise, I don’t find you the least bit boring.’

‘How can I be sure of that, Jack?’

‘I don’t sit here thinking about questions I’d like to ask you or subjects to discuss and then say, “Shit, this is Mary, so there’s no point in asking.” Come on, Mary, it doesn’t work that way. I’m with you because I love you. I’m not looking for an intellectual equal, I’m looking for someone to love.’

‘There, you said it, I’m not your equal—that’s what you think.’ She stood up and walked from the room. Moments later I watched her stride along the beach with the comical waddle of someone trying to walk through sand quickly. She looked like a cartoon character: all movement but no gain.

She returned an hour later and sat in the chair opposite, one leg lazily dropped across the arm. ‘I think that was our first argument.’

‘I think so.’ I went to her. ‘You know I don’t think like that about you, Mary. Come on, would I be here if that was how I felt about you?’ I smiled thinly at the top of her head as I kissed it. My words sounded cheap and hollow—and they were.

The holiday passed without further comment on Mary’s intelligence. That night we kissed and made love to heal the wound of our argument and the subject was closed. However, a shadow was cast and although we ignored the darkening when we were together I had no doubt Mary was as aware of it as I was. The near perfection of the return to the bach was broken and could never be mended.

Mary returned to the maelstrom of wedding arrangements and the plethora of small arguments turned large by stress. In contrast to the chaos of the Roberts’ house, I returned to the maudlin silence of my home. I had lived in the red brick bungalow all my life. It was square and functional with a back lawn that sloped down to thick hedges. The garden was useless for playing with balls, which always rolled down and lodged in the sharp lower branches of the bushes, but it was ideal for the re-enactment of siege warfare. As a child, under a fierce summer sun I would play the crusader knight attacking a desert fortress. With plastic sword I would slay Ottomans on the deck battlements and gain possession of the flowerpots by slicing off the head of the last defender.

I was standing on that slope the day Dad came to tell me Mum had left. He stood there, suddenly brittle in my memory, beckoning me to his side. Awkwardly he put a hand on my shoulder and patted me as though that act alone might soften the impact of what he had to say. I cried until he told me he thought she would be home by the weekend and she was just tired and needed time to rest. I still don’t know if he believed that to be true, or whether he just wanted to protect me. Maybe he just wanted me to stop crying. I can understand that: seeing me so distraught couldn’t have helped him to cope with his own grief. Whatever he thought, though, I’m sure he never contemplated the possibility that neither of us would ever see her again. If he’d known that, I think he would simply have given up then rather than slowly sliding down the following years as it dawned on us both that she was never coming home and we would never know what had driven her away.

At first I assumed it was my fault. Who else made her tired? What mother could leave her child unless the child deserved to be left? Perhaps she couldn’t cope with my precocious talents. Dad ignored them, but did Mum just up and leave? However, as I grew older and became aware of what adults are capable of inflicting on one another I started to blame Dad as well. For exactly what I was unsure, but I imagined awful scenes of abuse behind closed doors. But I never blamed Mum for going.

Christmas dinner passed with little celebration. Dad and I shared a simple meal, a bottle of wine and long periods of silence broken by brief conversations like sporadic gunfire on a sleepy night at the Western Front. After the meal he poured himself a whisky, which he drank in two gulps, then poured another, which he drank nearly as quickly again. I’d rarely seen him have more than a glass of wine at a time before. By evening he’d drunk half a bottle of whisky and his cheeks were flushed red. I shared a couple of drinks with him and smiled the inept smile of the half drunk.

‘Your mum never liked me drinking.’

‘Right,’ I replied, my usual response to one of his brief remarks. Inside, though, I felt as though a bomb detonated. This was information on an unprecedented scale, even if it had been delivered as though reporting the weather.

‘It seemed wrong to change the habit once she’d gone. You had enough on your plate, what with her going like that.’ He spoke with precision, as though he’d brooded on this conversation for years and now that he had finally spoken wanted to be sure what he said was correct.

‘I never remember you drinking more than a glass.’

‘I used to keep the whisky in the shed.’

‘What about at the bach?’

‘In the boat shed.’

‘And Mum never knew?’

He just shrugged his shoulders at the question. ‘I don’t know for sure. She never said anything, but that’s not the same thing, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’

He caught the hard edge to my reply. ‘It’s not why she left, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

His offhand remark angered me. How dare he make such presumptions? ‘How do you know?’ I asked with some trepidation despite my anger.

‘I think your mum just wanted more, more than you and me. I never got drunk, Jack. I just shot a few drinks in the evening, it wasn’t enough for her to leave us like that.’ There was a sudden bitterness in his voice that I could hardly begrudge.

‘She had to leave for a reason, it had to be someone’s fault.’

‘I don’t know, Jack, I just don’t know.’

‘I wonder if she found what she was looking for?’

‘I doubt it, people rarely do, but most acknowledge the failure.’

We sat in silence for a moment before he poured us each another drink. ‘There’s nothing wrong with liquor, Jack, as long as you master it, never let the stuff control you. Once that happens, you’re finished. Then you’ll lose everything, and I mean everything. It never happens immediately and that’s the danger, Jack. You think you can keep what you have got, but eventually you lose everything. It will just slip through your hands like sand and before you know it, you open your hand and the sand has all gone.’

It was the longest thing he’d said to me in years, but I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t think there was anything he could teach me. Next day I forced down an early morning drink as a dare to him and me. I could be different, as I was in so many other ways. I could prove my old man wrong and tame the drink. I could keep the sand in my hands—what a victory that would be. The whisky tasted awful but I would not be defeated.