Island Hideaway 39 - Endings and beginnings

Mo left Eric the day he finished his final exam. "I didn't want to be the cause of his screwing up God," she explained.

 

"You don't seem too distraught," I observed.

 

"To be honest Terrence, we had nothing in common. He's all God and morals. Even the sex was pure missionary work. Oh, and I'm going out with Phil."

 

"Phil?"

 

"From the radio station."

 

"That was quick."

 

"As I say, I didn't want to leave him before he'd finished his exams. We've been going out for two weeks now."

 

"You and Eric? It's been two months hasn't it?"

 

"No, me and Phil."

 

"Ah."

 

"It's okay, I'm not the one training to be pope."

 

​​All things come to an end eventually. Mo and Eric and our first year at uni. I had learnt a lot. After much effort I had mastered opening the miniature milk cartons they served at the cafeteria. I knew six Welsh swearwords, had Latin grace ingrained in my brain forever, and had learnt that fascism was just like jelly. All in all I had learnt much that would serve me well in later life.

 

I spent the summer working in a local factory back home, brainless stuff, but good money. I went to visit Yvette a couple of times in Bristol, spent a weekend with Eddie, a weekend with Mo and wrote loads of letters, but it was still a shock to be severed from the cosy new clan I belonged to at university. I saw old friends from school and other people I knew, but they no longer seemed important to me, they were like figures from a history book, no longer part of my life.

 

I worked, I read, I wrote letters and spent my earnings on beer and whisky. And in this way the summer passed, as all summers do.

 

In our second year, I moved in with Eddie and Kaz, Phil and Mo and Nick from our politics course. ​​I was still going out with Yvette, but she looked aghast when I suggested moving in together.

"Maybe after uni, when we're a bit more settled," is what she said. 'I don't think this is going to last another twelve months' is what she meant.
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Nobody remembered asking Nick to move in with us, he just seemed to turn up when we viewing the house we ended up renting, like a stray cat that invites itself to move into your home when you have the back door open - though to be fair a cat would be more likely to do its share of the washing up and cleaning than Nick ever did.​​
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The good thing about Phil and Mo going out was that I could continue to do stuff with Mo, just the two of us was we had before, but Phil also shared our interests, so we would go to Barons as a group, or the cinema, or a gig, or just the pub, it was as if Mo had finally realised the benefits of going out with someone who wasn't her complete polar opposite. ​​

 

Yvette would occasionally join us and we'd make up a foursome or even a sixsome, other times I'd see Yvette for one-on-one time or serve gooseberry duties with  Mo and Phil or Eddie and Kaz, and I'd still spend time alone with Mo and time alone with Andy. 

 

Nick didn't hang out with us much, very much like a stray cat he would disappear and do his own thing. Some weeks the only sign we would have of his continued existence would be the pair of unwashed pants he invariably left on the bathroom floor after a shower. In many ways, a cat would have been infinitely preferable.​​
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The second year was when the serious study started. My non-spare time I spent wrapped up in the work of Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke and Kant. Spinoza argued that we were all individual modes of being, with our own individual relation with the multiverse, only connected by God's will and work, like satellites sharing the same orbit when god chooses to guide us towards each other.

 

For the first term my mode continued to orbit Yvette's mode, our modes even docked two or three nights per week. We saw each other over Christmas and she even brought me a present (a Jules Verne collection). At the start of the second term we went for a walk on the beach. She dumped me on the very same section of the beach where Sarah had left me ten months before, as if the spot was marked with an ex.