I Believe in Kaitlyn Gold

I am sitting in my bed looking at the Internet. Not because I'm lazy or masturbating but because ever since a receipt for my desk was found with Beth's card details on it the desk has lived at Beth's house with Beth and her new lover. As for me I have to make do with just the bed.

I'm reading a sentence over and over, thinking, Oh god, I hope not. The sentence is the title of a blog by Kaitlyn Gold, a girl I used to live nextdoor to. The sentence is this:

Do you ever think you might be expecting too much?

I've just found Kaitlyn's blog after googling her name for the first time in years. This is something I used to do much more frequently in times when my life was only slightly less pathetic than it is today.

I'm remembering her saying a similar thing to me, one spring morning in the park when I wasn't expecting anything in particular. Her eyes looked brighter than the whole season ahead and she was close enough that I could smell the Juicy Fruit fresh on her breath, would have kicked down all the early daffodils to get closer to that mouth.

Her blog goes on.

When you're looking out the window at a sky that's grey again and you can feel the ache of a new hole opening up in a tooth, do you think to yourself, is this really it?
Does an anger build inside of you, threatening to fill you up? Are you staggered by a sense of injustice bigger than you are?
Do you feel you are being cheated? Are you certain you have been ripped off?

If the answer is yes, I can help you.

Everytime I saw Kaitlyn Gold I got a twitch in my balls that felt like being swallowed, that spread like a shiver up my spine.

“D'you think you're expecting too much?” she'd said to me once, in her accent that wasn't from round here, the one that made the local girls bitch about her behind her back, that set her apart, and I kicked my foot against the cricket shed, ignoring her. Trying to think of a way to make this continue. The two of us together.

I needed to do something to stop her realising that maybe she was expecting too little, standing behind the cricket shed with a boy four years her junior, but I didn't have any ideas. That was the thing with Kaitlyn though, she was full of ideas. She was one of the special ones. Her Mum had been a big star on Broadway, had photos of her wedding in glossy magazines, got married after giving birth.
Kaitlyn still remembered the wedding.
“We used to have famous people round for dinner,” she said to me, “everyone was beautiful.”
I kept kicking the door, kept trying to think of something to impress her. Nervous any idea I had would make her go away.
“D'you wanna come and meet my Mum?” she asked and I stopped kicking.

“Hello doll,” Kaitlyn's Mum said, looking up briefly from painting her fingernails on the settee.
“I've brought Joe round, can I show him your pictures?”
“Of course. Joseph, I'm Cassandra.”
Cassandra stood up from the settee and walked towards me, graceful in tracksuit bottoms.
“I'd shake your hand but I've just done my nails.” She leaned in to kiss me on both cheeks and not knowing what to do I just stood there, smiling as she pulled away.
All the way up the stairs I felt those kisses on my cheek, the tiny wetness of Cassandra Gold's lips stinging minutely as it dried.

We walked up thirteen steep stairs to a narrow landing. The walls were swirled with different coloured paints, white and blue and green.
“Cassandra decorated the whole house by herself,” Kaitlyn told me as we got to the top of the stairs. “She has read all the books on this bookshelf.”
“This is her room,” she said, sitting on a double bed and I began to feel Iike I was in a museum. ”This is her when she was in Cabaret in New York. This is her at a film premiere wearing jewellery worth a hundred thousand pounds.”
“It didn't last though,” she said to me, showing me a picture of Cassandra's wedding, and looking round Kaitlyn's Mum's DIY bedroom I didn't need to ask what she meant.
The last picture she showed me was of her Mum and Dad, her Mum looking just like Kaitlyn was starting to and her dad looking like royalty. Little Kaitlyn was there too, in the centre, her hands full of petals, about to throw them all up in the air.
“That was the best day of my life,” she said to me. “No question.”
Then she leaned over and gave me the tongue.

Remembering it now, I wonder if that was the best day of my life, uncomplicated by future events, unchanged in my memory. Until now.

Learn how to tether your anger and make it something great. Learn how to tame yourself.

Talk to me: kaitlyngold@goldpower.co.uk

I stare at the page, thinking it must be a trick, thinking things can't be this easy. But when I click on the link a little window pops up, happy, eager even for us to get back in touch. I start typing straight away.

I expect too much. I want to tether my anger. I want to quell my enormous sense of injustice. But more than that I want to see you again. We went to school together. You kissed me on your mother's bed. You were always more promising than I was.

I sign my real name and before I can reconsider I click send.

When I get up the next morning there is still mail that I need to ignore on my doormat, there is still rotten milk in the fridge, but suddenly, I feel optimistic. I'm whooping at modern technology, at the fact that I am living in this time, when to make contact with forgotten crushes is the easiest, most natural thing in the world, a time when stalking, if not actually legal is actively encouraged.
For the first time in weeks I feel like having a shave.

I spend the next day checking my emails obsessively. I get all the marking that I was planning on leaving until the end of the holiday out of the way so that if Kaitlyn gets in touch I am free to meet up, to travel to Versailles, or Egypt, whatever I need to do.

See, as an eleven year old, I suspected Kaitlyn was special, her red hair and sophisticated sense of style made it easy to guess, but as a thirty five year old with a recently failed marriage and a dozen previous unsatisfactory relationships, I know it.
More than anything I have ever believed in, and there have been many things along the way, I believe in Kaitlyn Gold.

Everyday, I shave, I put on clean boxers and I check my emails. I ignore post from Beth's solicitor and concentrate on my anger, on my future, on being reunited with Kaitlyn Gold and then, at last, her message arrives.

Joseph Keating. I can't believe it's you. Who would have thought we would be brought together again like this?

I would like to meet up if you mean what you say.
You need to ask yourself: Am I ready to change the way my life is headed? To stop it in its tracks and say NO. This isn't what I want. Am I willing to act?

If your answers are yes, I look forward to hearing from you. If you are less than one hundred percent certain then good luck. You are still alone.

You are not expecting enough.

Kaitlyn Gold

I get a semi just reading her email. I can imagine her voice, can remember her intensity, the way she crackled with energy, with potential.

I email back straight away that I have no doubt at all that I am ready to make a change, that I am ready to take action.

I hear from Kaitlyn the next day. She says I must do a test, that I must show her I am powerful, that I'm brave. These adjectives send shivers through me they are so far away from what is usually expected.
Beth wanted to know I was committed and trustworthy and I proved to her that I was both right up until she slept with someone else, somebody charismatic, an adjective she had never let on was required from me.
Powerful and brave will get me something different. Powerful and brave will get me Kaitlyn Gold.

I await instruction.

The reply comes within minutes.

Arrive naked at the river and be ready to jump. Be ready to jump and to save yourself in the same moment.

Kaitlyn outlines where exactly by the river she means and I close my eyes at the thought that she could still be here, in this same town, contained by the same borders that I am.
She tells me of a spot where there is a bench named after Stewart Worthington, a man who drowned in the river when it was at its deepest, the last time this city experienced floods.

Nobody knows whether or not it was a suicide but the bench marks a spot where the bank is metres higher than the water, where it's possible to jump into the river without breaking any bones.

I turn my computer off. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. Perhaps it was something less physcal, something less real.

The river is deep. It cuts the city in half, willows weeping along both sides. As a child I waded in from one of its banks, felt its mud between my toes, threw myself at ducks, trying to make the sunbathing girls take notice.
But that was in daylight with people around. I was a teenager in swimming trunks. I had nothing to lose.

Just then, the phone rings. I've been ignoring it for the last few months, preferring the vague excitement of wondering who it might be to the mild disappointment of knowing, but today I answer.

It's Beth. She wants to know why I haven't answered her solicitor's letters, if I've changed my mind about the divorce. She wants to know if I'm okay, if I want to talk, that she misses me.
I draw breath. This is the woman I have wasted half my life on, whose name is on the papers of this house, who I have spent the last year trying to impregnate only to find out she's now carrying someone else's child, but for once, as she talks to me in a voice heavy with our history, weighted with concern for me, I feel detached. I feel like I can handle it.

“Beth,” I tell her. “You don't need to worry about me. We are nothing to each other anymore. I will answer your letters. We will get a divorce. And then that will be it. We will be over. Please don't call me again.”

As soon as I put the phone down I email Kaitlyn.

Just tell me what day.

*

It's a Thursday and I'm naked at the wheel of my car. There's a towel on the back seat in case I get stopped by the police, though I'm not sure what difference that will make. I'm naked in the front seat of my car and I've got butterflies that are nothing to do with my ex-wife or the father of her baby.

I get out the car calmly, clearing my mind of anything but Kaitlyn and my childhood, this landscape I have lived in for years. I walk carefully along the potholed car park to the grassy path that leads into the park. I've walked my dog here with Beth many times but I've never been here naked. I've never been here feeling like this. My skin is cold, every hair standing on end, my balls pulled up into my body. The wind blows the hairs on my neck, makes me shiver, and for the first time since I can remember, I'm scared and I'm smiling.

I pad along the path, long grass tickling my knees. There are woods full of silver birch on either side of me and I feel relaxed, powerful, confident that I can duck into the woods if anyone comes along. Confident that I am free. The moon is big, not far from full and it lights the path for me, makes everything enchanted.

I can hear the river and the thought of how it will feel at this time of year, after a long, cold winter makes my stomach contract. I swallow, light and unencumbered by anything. I wonder if Kaitlyn will be watching somewhere, if she will stop me the moment before I jump in, or if she will help me out, hand me a towel and a flask full of tea.

The river is black and silver, swirling past without a thought for me, swollen with the recent rain. A cloud passes over the moon and a bird calls, flies out from a branch above my head, making me jump. I see the bench that I know bears the name Stewart Worthington and I go to it, stand looking at the plaque, imagining the man who used to sit here, wondering who paid to have the bench engraved with his memory, if they were guilty in some way.

I look at my cheap plastic watch, bought from Argos especially for this moment when it would tell me the time, that I had two minutes before I had to jump. To jump and save myself in the same moment.

Wanting more significance, craving some kind of ritual, I touch the cheap plastic to my forehead. I take it off, place it over the back of the bench so the strap rests on the plaque of Stewart Worthington. I stand on his bench and hold my arms out, look up at the sky, at the moon which is bright again, unshaded by cloud and I drop my head back.

I close my eyes thinking, Goodbye Beth, goodbye Woodgrove Community School. I find myself saying goodbye to myself, Goodbye Daniel Jerome Keating, as if I'm about to be reborn. Reborn someone else, someone better who won't find themselves in the middle of their local park in the middle of the night one quiet Thursday, about to throw themselves into the river because they don't know what else to do.

I step down from the bench, walk to the edge of the riverbank and look over its edge to the black water two or three metres below. I'm hoping I won't break anything, feeling the cold air against the skin of my whole body, thinking about the corpse of Stewart Worthington, and then my alarm goes off and I don't even hesitate.

The water is cold and noisy, then muffled as it covers my head. It swallows me completely, noiselessly, so for a second I don't know which way is up, what I'm doing, if I'm going to feel land again.
Then I hear it, crashing past me, carrying me with it. Reeds claw at my ankles, twine themselves around my thighs. The moon lights up the threads of the current and I start to swim across it, diagonally, like I read you are meant to once.
I think back to my distant self reading that, thinking, You should remember this Daniel, this could save your life one day, almost hopeful at the thought of my life being in danger as I sat, safe in the staff room toilets, pretending to have a shit so I could avoid the sympathetic questions of my colleagues.

The water splashes over my head again, surprising me, pulling me under without time for a breath, not cold now, just covered up, starting to fill up.

Something swims beneath me, makes me think of pikes and eels, of reeds that won't let go and I swing my arms more powerfully, kick my legs until I reach the surface. I thrust my arms into the water, one then the other until I reach the bank. I try to grab onto something but my fingers slip through mud.
I try again and brambles tear into my palm but I don't let go. I lift my other arm out of the surging black water, grab a thick handful of grass, a willow root. I stay where I am, my face pressed against the river bank. I try to catch my breath.