The End Of The Innocence

“There’s no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself”.
Raymond Chandler : ‘The Big Sleep’.

This week marks ten years to the day since he passed away.

PASSED AWAY.

You know, it always makes me smile when I think of how we dress up death in a cloak of quaintness, as if somehow we can’t quiet bring ourselves to acknowledge the ultimate finality. The Dearly Departed who have been Called By The Almighty to ensure that they can be taken to A Better Place in order that they may enjoy An Everlasting Life. No priest has ever stood on the edge of a freshly dug grave and proclaimed with a gleam in his eye that the newly deceased has just been sold a one-way ticket to Hell. It’s always so nice, always so sweet, always so phony.
These days I find it hard to believe that Jesus ever wanted me for a sunbeam, but then again, these days I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe in anything at all. If, that is, I ever believed in anything to begin with. And if I did, then why? Was it because I believed that somehow the very process of believing would enable me to believe in myself?
Like he believed in me.

At first it felt strange to see myself immortalised in print.
I mean, none of us live forever. Right?

IMMORTALISED.

Those were his words. He would read the half formed ideas I used to pass off as perfect prose and say, “Karina, keep plugging away, and mark my words, one day you’ll be immortalised in print. And if you’re not, well that’s their loss”. Which always used to strike me as strange. After all, who were they and what did they have to gain?

Remember when the days were long and rolled beneath the deep blue sky? We didn’t have a care in the world, with mummy and daddy standing by.

It’s another of those bleak northern Monday’s - wet, windy and brutally overcast. I’ve just got back from dropping Carla off at nursery. She’s three and a half going on fifteen, smarter than a performing seal with a wisdom way beyond her years. Days like these, kids can frighten you with their intensity. Carla can be a real handful sometimes but I wouldn’t swop her for the world. She means everything to me. She’s all I’ve got that’s of any real worth.
Except for my memories.

When I first read the story that so called friend of his had written I was angry. I mean – the liberty of it! Broadcasting his name for everyone to see. That’s the one thing he was never interested in – fame or recognition. In fact he always said that seeing his students do well was the real reward, better than any pay rise or pat on the back, and although kind words don’t exactly pay the rent, I for one knew he meant it. He used to go on about how proud he was of me. I mean, no one had ever said that before, and since he’s been gone no one has ever said it again. Not even Alex, the would be light of my life, the one who was going to take me on the journey of a lifetime before we took a wrong turning and missed the bus. The one I promised to love, honour and obey. The one who goes out every day and works hard to provide for Carla and me; to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.
Which is why I find myself sitting here gazing out of the kitchen window at the grey Sheffield sky, wondering how I ever ended up at this place. A place I never thought I’d ever see again. At times I feel so incredibly guilty and selfish, like a spoilt little schoolgirl I never was, and it’s then, over the gentle easy listening emanating from the portable radio perched precariously on top of the breadbin just beneath the drawing Carla brought home from class last Wednesday – the one featuring two stick people with a tiny stick person nestled between them, the one that says ‘I love you Mummy & Daddy’, written in her lovely infant hand in red crayon and sealed with about fifty kisses, that I hear his voice, calling me back through all those years. The years of High School, College, University, and the wonderful Alex. Bright, happy, exciting times – filled with glorious sunshine, boundless enthusiasm and seemingly endless optimism. Days of wine and roses, of smiles and kisses, of love and promises.

PROMISES.

I promised myself it would never, ever, come to this. That I was too good, too smart, too nice to ever become what I now see reflecting back at me. This was never in the script I wrote for myself all those years ago, long before my senses became deafened by the sound of wedding bells. Now all I know is that I’m married, but I can’t remember why, and sometimes I wonder what it would feel like with some other guy.

Who knows how long this will last, now we’ve come so far so fast? Yet somewhere back there in the dust, is that same small town in each of us.

He used to call it the end of the innocence and said that no matter how much we felt in control, one day it would catch us up, shake us about, mess our heads around and turn our little worlds upside down. Happens to each and every one of us. No exceptions. No exemptions. No excuses. It was the price we paid for growing older, when all those things we thought we’d got figured fall apart at the seams and we find ourselves having to learn again from scratch, like infants at a nursery. Like Carla. Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, turning up on your doorstep like an unwanted visitor just when you least expected them.

I cry a lot these days. Dry, silent tears, but tears nonetheless. I haven’t done that in a very long time.

The way that friend of his told it, I simply drifted in and out of his life in little more than a blink of an eye. But in reality that isn’t how it happened, and if that’s what he was told then I honestly believe it was done in order to protect me, and me alone.
In truth, I’d been hanging out among the shadows, living in the periphery, walking on the edge, desperately trying to pluck up the courage I needed in order to approach him. I wasn’t entirely sure why – I mean, he’d never taught me and I don’t think we’d exchanged a single word in the preceding five years. But if I’m a great believer in anything then I’m a great believer in fate.
So fate it was that shoved me in his direction, thrusting a bunch of scrappy stories into his hand then disappearing before he’d even had time to respond. Sitting at home hoping I’d done the right thing, worrying about the quality of my prose, fretting over his reaction, wishing I’d never bothered in the first place.
Then the huge sense of relief when, after what seemed like the longest weekend of my then short life, they were returned to me with a friendly smile and words of encouragement. Walking home feeling ten feet tall, just wanting to get up in my room to start writing again.

I thought I knew what love was, but what did I know? Those days are gone forever – I should just let them go.

Beneath the anger and heavy words Alex cares. I know he does. I know that, despite what he sometimes says when life takes a hold and the whisky loosens his tongue, he loves Carla and me. I believe him when he says we’re his world and that he can’t imagine living without us.
So why do I find myself despising him and wishing that, like he sometimes says when the alcohol takes hold and he forgets what he is and who we are, I’d got the guts to just pack my bags and walk?

What are all these voices outside love’s open door, that make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?

He used to tell me it was my life, my rules, my boundaries, and that I should always be prepared to walk away. From work, from relationships, from people whose negativity would eventually drag me down. He told me that how, as little more than a teenager, he’d walked away from the job for life, the disconnected parents, the small town life, and climbed aboard a Magic Bus. Said he went away for years before returning but, judging from the intensity of his words and the fire in his eyes, I knew that he’d never really come back. Oh sure – he was standing there in front of me, but his head and heart were in another place entirely. He told me that I needed a warm place somewhere in my heart I could go when the winds blew cold and the sky turned dark. That’s what I had when I first found him, and that’s what I need more than anything now.

I loved you Alex, more than I ever loved anything. More than anything except for the one thing you never truly loved me for. The thing only one person ever truly recognised.
Which, despite what his friend may have thought, is the real reason why I ended up in that classroom.

I remember he once said that about every ten years or so we become different people; that we constantly evolve, moulded by circumstances that surround us, forged by the hands of time. He told of how the wild rebellious teenager inspired by a young English teacher and a handful of not very good GCSE’s had evolved into an adventurer, travelling off to foreign lands on little more than a wing and a prayer, eager to experience the sheer essence of unpredictability and the thrill of the unknown. How, by his mid-twenties, he’d made a three-sixty degree turn and become the family man, husband and father, the nine to five management Mr. Nice Guy; mortgage, savings account and a wardrobe full of suits, but how that had slowly come tumbling down.
So you change your job, ditch your wife, change your life…move to a different part of the country and start all over again. Like his hero Bukowski, you work night shifts in some mind numbingly tedious job but use your spare time to read, write, and educate yourself. Get a couple of degrees, a new set of suits, and end up in a classroom in front of a bunch of kids who, barring the odd concession to the progression of fashion, looked exactly like him and his mates did God knows how many years ago. Then one day you glance in the mirror and realise that, despite being twenty-one in your head, you’re pushing fifty in your face. Lie there in the darkness listening to the sirens wail, thinking that maybe you should be someone different, somewhere else. But you’re getting older; the odds are getting longer, and the chances slimmer. So you look for salvation in the one place it’s always been. In the generation whose values and energy you left behind decades ago. Which is why he bumped into me, although he probably didn’t realise it at the time.
See what I mean about fate?

The more I know, the less I understand. All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning again.

His friend was right – I did go to the funeral. I wanted to get closer to the coffin, take one last look before they lowered him into the ground. Somehow say thanks for lending me all those books by authors I’d never heard of; for challenging me to write in genres and styles way outside of my comfort zone, and then generously praising each and every effort. For making me re-write and revise, and for showing me the value to be gained from observing others. For all of those things I was eternally grateful, for I had finally found someone who truly believed.
Re-write and revise, he always used to say. You do it on the page and you do it in your life.

I think of Alex. I think of Carla. I think of myself, standing like a statue among the mausoleums in that sad and lonely cemetery, so near but yet so distant. Sometimes I think those closest to us are the furthest away from our touch.

I need to remember this, so baby, give me just one kiss. Then let me take a long last look, before we say goodbye.

But I was overcome with nervous emotion, and when I saw his friend turn and look at me, I fled. Back home in my room I cried tears of sorrow for him and tears of anger for myself, as if somehow I had let us both down.
I vowed I would never let it happen again.

Alex also believed.
Well I suppose he did at the start, when having a girlfriend with literary ambitions and a lexicon of love was a cool way of impressing your friends. Probably figured I’d make a pretty funky little wife and me, being the shy, retiring kind, didn’t see the warning signs until it was way too late; until the optimism evaporated and the reality of a shrinking job market kicked in and our lofty ambitions of careers and salaries were replaced by jobs and wages. Outplayed. Outnumbered. Outsourced. Forget spending your days writing drivel that nobody’s going to read. Get out there and clean some office floors. Get some shopping done. Sweep that supermarket for bargains. Then come home, clean my house, iron my shirts and fix my supper. Housewife. Mother. Superstar. Slave. Is it any wonder I sit here and shed bitter tears?
But when happily ever after fails and we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales, the lawyers dwell on small details and I sit here, gazing out of a back window, wishing I could be somewhere else. Wishing that he were here to help and encourage, to needle and push, to make me better. To make me happy.
To make me ME again.

But reality always dictates otherwise. It drives us on. “Don’t look back, you should never look back”, it sneers through the rear view mirror. But I’m not fooled one bit, for I still remember those words he said to me the last night we were truly together. Words that, at the time, were so confusing to my young mind that I never went back. Words, which now, after ten years have slipped by in what seems like ten seconds, resonate in my head with an eerie sense of profoundness, as if being uttered from beyond the grave.

I know a place where we can go, to wash away the sin. We can sit and watch the clouds roll by as the tall grass sways in the wind.

I was frightened by it then, and I’m frightened by it now, but for reasons seemingly a thousand miles apart. I can feel myself changing and I’m scared by what I may be about to become. But I can’t fight it because I don’t want to fight it. I have to move on. I have to find myself or, if not myself, than the next piece of the jigsaw.

Just lay your head down on the ground, and let your hair fall all around. Offer up your best defence, for this is the end of the innocence.

His friend got it horribly wrong. He didn’t die because of what he did, but rather for what he had never done. He parked his motor on the hard shoulder if life’s highway, climbed out from behind the wheel and took a good long look in both directions, out towards the horizon where the earth meets the sky, where the past meets the present and the future stretches out far into the desert haze. I can picture him now as he looks back with a smile on his face, safe in the satisfaction of a road well travelled. The present, seemingly so secure under the hot sand, would have offered little, if any, consolation, while the future, somewhere further down that long and winding road, seemed as empty as a politicians promise.

What the heart makes heavy, the head makes very clear.

He’s gone because there was nowhere else for him to go. His train was stuck in a siding and he found himself at the end of line. So he went out alone, all dressed in black, checked out of the station, and he never came back.

They say Jesus died so we could live. But not me. My own particular saviour lived a life far more ordinary.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t occasionally worship another.

I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter. But I think it’s about forgiveness – even if you don’t love me anymore.

The urgent buzzing of the phone drags me back from my daydream - more news from nowhere. It’s the nursery. Carla’s had a bump and is feeling a bit poorly. Could I pop down and pick her up?
I pull on my coat, open the front door, and step out in to the street. I begin to walk like a somnambulist - slowly, deliberately, unconsciously. I have no idea where I’m heading to, but for the first time in a long time I finally feel I’m going places.
For now, at least, the innocence has ended.

I am indebted to Don Henley for the use of his lyrics.’ Boys Of Summer’, ‘The Heart Of The Matter’ and ‘The End Of The Innocence’ are songs I played back in the late 1980’s when I lived another life in another town and was another person entirely. Like the real life Girl With The Faraway Eyes, I’m very different now, although for how long I’m not entirely certain. And that, like everything else in our lives of quiet desperation, is in the hands of fate. I wish her luck on her journey through life, for although I won’t be there in person, I hope that she’ll take a little bit of my (and Mr.Henley’s) spirit out on the road with her. I pray it will be a trip truly worth taking and, on the way, she inspires others as she inspired me.