The telly was flashing images and making the usual noises, but neither of us were really watching. The phone would ring. At first we’d jump like cartoon characters. I didn’t answer, that was her job, but I listened and I moaned, ‘what’s he being doing now’. I didn’t need to know, but had to.
I don’t think we talked much. Every day was like the day after New Year. Brain cells had edged north; eyes glued-shut, but open; grunting noises for speech, and for legs that felt as if they were pulling snow sledges.
Cassie couldn’t eat anything, but cooked cardboard things, which I ate. There was always tea, urns full, sloshing about inside me, so that I felt slightly imbalanced by a full moon, when I walked to put the kettle on, and look out the window.
Cassie just tossed and turned, and huffed and puffed, the night away, her blue eyes settling upon me whichever way I turned. She woke me by continually shuffling up and down, to go to the toilet, like a geriatric. The phone rung a few times during the night, but I wasn’t going to get up and answer it, and by the time Cassie got there, it had stopped. But that was always enough, to keep both of us up, wondering if it was good news or bad. It didn’t matter if there was a number on the machine, which we could phone. We wouldn’t, unless it was important, but we didn’t know if it was or not. And we couldn’t phone back, at that time, because although it seemed much later, it was the early hours of darkness and silence, without even bird’s call.
We passed each other in sleep, and in waking, the wreckage of any kind of plan loping, wolf like, through my head. In the background, a staggered litany of memories, scrambling up and over, threatening to overwhelm, and unbalance me. The flushed silence of seeing Cassie for the first time, elbowing my pal Kenny, and asking who she was. Knowing then, that she was too much, and I was not enough, but at least I could watch in dazzled silence, and listen for her smile.
Later, the far off sound of film star type rumours, splashing like clear water, down into my humdrum life: that she was going with him, had split up with him, and was going with someone else.
Like most drunk men I was drawn to her beauty in the same way as a noisy child, standing close enough, and hoping to be acknowledged. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she spoke to me. She’d an easy manner, and spoke to mostly everyone in my pub. It helped that I knew her pal Robbina, and I knew her pal’s boyfriend, Tam, and I seemed to know everyone else, apart from the person that stole her bag, with her purse in it, of course. I had to drop her off in a taxi, and dropped myself off instead. It was never much of a fare, going from here to there.
I had a rucksack that took most of my clothes. I was never one for hoarding things, but black plastic bags quickly grew like mushrooms in a darkened room. I’d prodded and prodded Cassie, until she finally mouthed the words I’d been waiting for: ‘If that’s the way you feel then you can just leave.’
She was crumpled up and crying, tears spilling down her cheeks, but making no noise, just waiting, her big child like eyes shining, but steady.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ I said, as if I was handing her a parking ticket. But the weight of words that I had to say slowed me down, and I choked on them. I didn’t need to say them. She already knew them, from countless corny movies, played out in real life. They all said the same things. I’m going. You’re staying. ‘I look ahead tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And this isn’t going to get any better. Bob’s always going to be like this, for the rest of our life. And I just cannae handle it. I want a life’.
‘Just go,’ Cassie said, turning her back on me, turning her back on us.
