Wish You Were Here

Geoffrey calls me from the road.

Background noises suggest trouble: some horns honking, some voices raised, a clatter of maybe hailstones against the roofs of cars.

“So, listen, I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine.  Fine.  There’s no drama, it’s just… you should see the weather.  The snow’s so thick, when it isn’t hail.  Road’s blocked apparently.”

“There’s no way around?”

“Look, we’re snowed in out here.  Nothing’s moving.”

I don’t know what makes me say this: “Are you going to freeze?  What if people start dying out there?”

“That’s what they army’s for, I guess.  It’s okay, it’s all really quite collegial.  Some guy’s starting a fire.  Yeah, right next to the motorway.  Hey, I’m sorry babe, I’d get home tonight if I could.”

“Okay love.  Okay.”

            #

I put the phone down.  I don’t know why I want to cry.  Okay, I do – of course – but I don’t why I’m feeling weak enough to give into it.  Or why it’s such a big deal.  I don’t know why I picture him sprouting wings and flying over the morass of stranded vehicles, coming home to me at all costs.

I don’t know why I’m being pathetic.

Or do I?

Here’s the thing about me and Geoffrey: we’re a one in a million.  We’re a stroke of blind luck.  I don’t know what else to call us.  There’s me: so big.  I’m just going to put this out there: so big.  The fat girl.  The one who sits around the house.  I’ve grown up being the butt of so many jokes, being so side-lined, so lonely.  I’ve seen myself in the mirror, I know there’s nothing sexy, nothing svelte and glamorous.  I’m never going to move with swanlike grace, or have the smooth lines, the enticing silhouette.  I’m the lump.  And I know by now – what girl doesn’t learn this before she even starts school? – that I live in a world that’ll always define me by it.

And Geoffrey.  So out of context in his own way.  His Mum always told me she thought there was something not quite right in his brain.  Told me, that is, while he was sitting there right next to me.  She wears her disappointment on her sleeve.  She wears her runaway husband – Geoffrey’s father – as a badge of martyrdom, hinting at times that Geoffrey might be the reason he left.

He’s come a long way.  Climbed up out of dyslexia and stuttering, but he still displays an awkwardness around people – the ones he knows more than the ones he doesn’t.  He still has a tendency to fidget, to lose concentration, to always be looking at the doors.

But he’s mine.

He’s more than girls like me expect to get.  Come home, love.  I just really, really, really want to see you tonight.

            #

They’re going all-out next door.  They really are.

Must have invited the whole neighbourhood.  Well, not me and Geoffrey, obviously - though in fairness, they and I - and most other people - all know we probably wouldn’t have gone.  Geoffrey’s a loner.  And I’m just ashamed to walk in there.  I’ve defined myself by my body, just like everybody else has.  So, there it is.

They’re having fun at least. 

The combination of music and voices that flows over the fence to me is a bitter contrast to my loneliness.  I catch the occasional scent of beer, of salt, cheese – I think Molly’s made pizza for everybody, and her pizzas are great.  There’s a few lights flashing, and they catch in the drift of snowfall.

I could walk over, right? 

But then the music would stop, and they’d all be turned around looking at me, all the conversations dying as if I’m poison to voices.

It’s too much.

            #

I keep to the house.  I don’t have anywhere else to go.

That was where Geoffrey found me when he came over to ask if he could use some planks stacked up against the wall that I didn’t seem to be using, and sure he could pay me for them if I liked.  He just saw them disused…

“Yeah.  My ex-husband…”  Letting that drift off and fall at his feet.

“You’ve been married?”

“Oh?  Surprising, that?”

“Uh-”

“Sorry.”

“Well, you don’t look like… the right age… for somebody who’s already divorced, I mean.”

Nice save, buddy.  “Take as much wood as you need.”

“How much?  Money… for them…?”

I shook my head.  Tired of life.  “Nothing.  Nothing.  They’re all yours.”

            #

A few weeks later.

“I’ve finished with the planks.”

Standing up my door, not really sure what he wants me to say to that.

“I just…” his nervous laugh took the edge off things, “thought I might thank you again for letting me use them.  There’s two left, I’ll bring them over.”

“No need.”

“And… um…”

“You need something else?”

“Just… I was going to go down to the pub and get a drink.  If you wanted to come that is…”

            #

I won’t call him.

Who am I kidding?

How many magazines does a girl have to read before she catches on: don’t be too needy, don’t be too clingy, too close.  In short: don’t call.

So, I call him.

“Hey, Dori.”

“You still trapped?”

“Oh yeah.”

“So, there’s no way…”

“There’s no way.  It’s all right though.  It’s almost fun.  They’re cooking sausages over there, and you can hear them-” he’s holding up his phone for me to listen “-they’ve started a sing-a-long.  There’s some guy with a guitar.”

Say it.  Say something… something right…

“Hello?  Dori?”

“Yeah.  I miss you.”

“You too.  I wish you were here.”

I wish you were here.  That’s a start.

            #

I don’t know when I first starting clinging to the house.  To these four walls.  I think maybe when Mum died.  When I really started eating.  I don’t even remember that we were all that close. I know that she remembered Dad and I don’t.  That we talked about him sometimes – when we talked at all – so maybe it was the breaking of that link with a past I can’t recall.  But suddenly, absent, she’d been everything to me.  The gap left by her ordinariness had been gaping and wounding, horrible to look at, unbelievable, astonishing.  Her incidental presence throughout my life had been a lifeline, had been my rock.  And I’d never even known it.

Too late: crying over her grave, tearing up the flowers instead of laying them down.  Too late to be missing her when I hadn’t known how much I’d had her.

And I couldn’t get a job.  In soft voices, fearful of saying so: “to be honest, it would make a lot of difference if you could lose some weight.”

And then: you say ‘no’ to enough phone calls, enough invitations, and they slowly stop coming.  They dry up, leaving silence where they used to be.  The house becomes a familiar prison.

I did it to myself, of course. I know that.

            #

He sends a picture.  It’s a picture of cars all lightly dusted with snow, more snow coming down, blurring across the shot.  In the middle there are a group of people, and there really is a bonfire.  I don’t know what they found to fuel it, or how they’ve kept it going; and there’s a makeshift barbecue set up, with sausages on it, and tarps or blankets slung between car aerials to make for some shelter.  All hooded and scarfed and sitting around holding thermoses in gloved hands. 

I wish I was there.

So very much.

And then he sends me a text.

Awesome.  Civil Defence are onto it now.  They’ve come in with food and hot chocolate and warm clothes and diesel generators.  It’s cool.  I hope you’re having a good time where you are, babe.  And I love you.

            #

Am I having a good time where I am?

Not exactly.

The lighting’s dim.  And that’s on me, because I can’t seem to find the energy to get up and turn a light on.  I gave up reading once the sun went all the way down.  The TV’s on, but quiet, and I’m only glancing at it now and then.  Mostly I’m looking at the window, watching the snow flutter down onto the grass.  It’s beginning to settle at last.  Not like where he is, not where it’s white on the ground, and there’s frosting on the rim of hoods and collars.

It’s not as if I can remember getting this big.  Exactly.  It just happens so slowly, you only see it in occasional glances in a reflective surface – passing a window, a bathroom mirror; or you see an old photograph and do a then-and-now.  It hits you then.  You think: how did I let this happen?

I think this with a cupcake in hand, with an empty plate sticky from the aftermath of toasted cheese sandwiches.

I find it hard getting upstairs at times.  I sometimes have to stop for a moment to catch my breath.  If it happens in public I just burn with shame.  But these days, I avoid public: you can get your groceries delivered these days, you can order a pizza, you can buy clothes and shoes online, and return them in the post if they don’t fit.  It’s easier than ever to live inside a homely, heated, ugly-wallpapered vault.

There’s pain in my ankles at times when I walk.  I have trouble sleeping.  And here: I did it all to myself.

But sometimes me and Geoffrey dance.  Here in the living room, with the curtains drawn.  His arms still seem to fit around me, his breath is always warm on my cheek.  I don’t know what I’d do without him.

            #

Something breaks next door.  I’m leaning back in the chair, not quite dozing, and then there’s the bang and the shattering of glass.  I jolt awake. I can hear the shouting and laughing from across the road.  I don’t even want to, but I’m drawn to the window.  Over the road I can see the glass panel in the front door is shattered.  It was pretty, coloured glass in a pattern of grapes and lilies.  Now just in pieces on the doorsteps – a scattering of jewels.

From inside there’s laughing and arguing.  Everybody’s drunk.

I hate it, but I do the right thing.  I lumber out onto the front step and lean across the railing.  “Are you guys all right in there?”

Molly’s boyfriend comes to the fence. I think his name’s Luke.  He says, “Hey, sorry about that.  Hope we didn’t scare you.”

“No.  Is anyone hurt?”

“We’re fine.”

“You sure?”  They’ve been drinking since mid-afternoon.

“Yeah.  Swear.  Nobody even scratched.”  He’s had a few, but he’s not written off.  “Hey, what are you doing over here on your own, neighbour?  Why aren’t you partying it up like the rest of us?”

I just shake my head and walk away.  Did I manage a polite ‘no thank you?’  I’m not even sure.

            #

Midnight creeps up.  I watch the hands on the clock.

You see, this would have been our first New Year together.  We were supposed to be celebrating this with wine and dinner, curled up in each other on the sofa, with nobody else around.  Snuggled up, listening with amusement to the party going on next door.  With each other for company it wouldn’t have cut like a knife.

Instead…

And he rings.

“Geoffrey.”  I jump on it too quickly.

“They’ll have the road cleared inside the hour.”

“That’s good.”

“We won’t all freeze in place like ice statues lining the road.”  There’s some singing and chatter in the background.

“I’m glad you’re okay, love.”

“Nearly midnight.”

“I know.”

“I am really sorry not to be there.”

“It’s not your fault.”  Images of a winged man soaring over stranded cars.  The winged man coming home at all costs. I try to put them out of my mind.

“You ready for the countdown?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Here it comes.”  He has his phone on speaker.

“Ten… Nine... Eight...” Geoffrey’s new snow-friends are counting.

Slightly out of time, the party next door chimes in: “Ten… Nine…. Eight…”

I’m not sure which count to follow.

“Seven… Six….”

“.. Seven… Six...”  And they scurry to catch up.

“Five.”

“Five.”

The two parties slip into unison.  “Four.  Three.  Two.  One.”

Over the road they erupt in a mass of cheering.  I can hear the same sounds coming over the phone.  In town there are fireworks.  I can see them above the roof across the road.  They sparkle into the sky, eclipsing the sky.

“Should old acquaintance be forgot…?”  Both parties start up, but they can’t keep time with each other.  They don’t even know they could be trying to.  “…For Auld Lang Syne, my dear…”

“I love you, babe.”  He says from a hundred miles away.

“I love you too.”

I feel as if I want to walk out into the street and gaze at the lights reflected off low clouds.

 

Picture credit/discredit:  author's own work