From Gone to Goodbye

Out of place? You bet. A great cockroach of a car, a Mercedes with eight black windows, waiting on a country lane.

She lives on the edge of the village. The sign on the gate says Leighton Hendred Pottery in Celtic script. Everything here is close at hand: home and business, business and home. The house is three farm cottages knocked through into one, a living space suitable for the modern family, its hopes and aspirations, its pets and furniture. The pottery showroom has been keyed, new stone into old, on to the side. There’s an area for customers to park, a stack of bricks and a pile of rain sodden sand in one corner.

Moods are funny things, because I don’t feel bad even though feeling bad brought me here. I feel good behind my darkened glass. I look, I watch, I search for a flaw and find it. The building work has a way to go, dream and reality still stand apart.

She left me for this. Back when I was gone.

The body is an impatient mechanism, eager to pre-empt events. A restless muscle ticks in my left eyelid. I press it, hold it trapped beneath my thumb, and slide down in the seat. Breathe slowly, I tell myself, relax, but the spasm ticks on, a tiny betrayal. Why doesn’t it accept that everything is fine, that the waiting will soon be over?

I turn my head and read the signs in the sky. Smoke-signals curl from the back of the house. A proper breakfast sets you straight for the day, my mother used to say. There will be the smell of coffee and the clack of plates, the rasp of the butter knife as it passes over the toast. Signs. Kitchen smoke curling upwards, green archipelagos of moss of the roof, two crows sitting in silent confederation on the telephone wire.

I listen to the radio like a tourist. It says, without razz, that “rain will continue to effect most regions throughout the day.” What more can I ask? In Los Angeles old England has always glistened green and grey in the imagination. There is pleasure to be had here, I’m primed to enjoy the low sky, the soupy smell of rot in the air. The sun will wait. I paid cash for it after all, bought it along with a swimming pool and a view of the coast.

Moods are like the weather, uncontrollable, unpredictable. Any doctor will tell you that at times of stress they can change rapidly, the heat wave, the calm, the storm all in the space of an hour.

Memories are unpredictable, too.

A door slams. I sit up, breathless once more. I ease the window down a fraction and listen. A shout. A woman’s voice. Is it her? Maybe. I hear children, voices twittering, the sound only intermittently musical, high calls, screams, argument. More door slamming; an engine starting: the clunk of reverse gear.

It’s a drab car, a station wagon, mud-splattered. Suzy, my Suzy, the wife I mislaid, wanted a flamingo pink convertible, movie-star glitz. We shared a sense of the ridiculous back then, back in that first rush of being in America. It was a fuck you to the system, we said, two raggle-taggle gypsies in the office of Honest Abe’s car lot, peeling off big bills from a roll of record company money and slapping them into the salesman’s hand.

The station wagon reverses slowly out into the road opposite me. The time has come. One look is all I want, one look will be enough; one long look. I search for her face and for a moment we’re only a few feet apart. She frowns at me at that familiar way and I smile back one of my best smiles. I get nothing in return. She speaks sternly to the two children sitting behind her. They, not yet having learnt to hide the secret of their concern, stare directly into my face, absorbed with the problem of eight black windows, of a car with a missing interior. Suzy is pale and her hair is short, combed back, at the temples there are two finger-stokes of grey. She’s no longer mine. The girl made of gold and laughter. The girl who turned the music on the radio up as far as it would go as we sped, cruise control on, down the long, straight highways of the Midwest. One hand beating time on the steering-wheel, her bare legs up on the white upholstery, her hair loose in the wind as she sang along, out of tune, to a country song . . .

I watch as my lost stranger and her strange life disappear forever in the rear-view mirror. I stare at the empty lane for a long time. Angling the glass, I look at what I’ve become, at the distance I’ve travelled. There’s grey in my hair, not silver but dull grey, the effect more extinguished than distinguished.

Who knew the road to today would double back on me? That the here and now would become the there and then? I remember. After dosing on forgetfulness for most of my life, chasing it into the night, paying for it, I remember.

The dead acoustic of the car muffles my voice as I say out loud, “None of this has happened.”

I turn on my telephone and start the engine.