Autumn's Fall

The phone rang and rang.

Paul knew it would. He listened urging his friend to be home. It was
playing a tune that he wanted to hear. Needed to hear. It meant that he
didn't have to talk to Suzie. Suzie - all hands-on-hips -
screaming-in-his-ear Suzie. It allowed them both respite. He pretended
that he had to speak to Martin and she had to stop shouting. Yet she
just waited. Knowing that as long as he never spoke, the phone at the
other end was never answered. Paul knew it would soon be round two but
this tone - this intermittent dull ache that was ringing in his ear -
was music compared to that voice.

He hung up.

Bastard's not there - he heard himself saying.

Then he busily began to send a text message. This was desperate yet it
worked. Suzie held off. As if his frantic button pressing was a
conversation waiting for an answer, 'it would be rude', he could almost
hear her thinking. Then there was a pause as he sent the message and
waited, expecting an instant response.

Then Suzie continued.

"This can't go on Paul."

It was a terse full-stop to the last two hours of shouting.

It said so much more than the short words allowed,

It said 'we are finished', it said 'let's call it a day', it said 'you
win, I can't take any more'.

It said 'Love has died'.

Paul looked up, not at her, but out towards the garden and his mind did
a sort of fast forward of them, planting, cutting the grass, building
fences - and it seemed like a waste. But a necessary waste. Like the
water scooped past by breaststroke in a swimming pool. Necessary in
order to go forward. But the structure that he could see in the garden,
in the house; the walls they had painted, the curtains they had hung -
looked as strong as he felt weak. He was internally damaged. An empty
can, rattling and useless. And as men do he wondered about recovery -
and towards the next relationship (and towards hers) and he felt a kind
of plastic hope that the next woman would really understand him (and
that her next man would be a bastard). It raised his spirit and dashed
it at the same time.

"I know." He agreed.

He pulled the door shut and looked up at the house as he had done when
they had first arrived to view it. He saw the bricks close up and homed
in on the one or two crumbling ones and the external sill beneath the
window that still needed sanding and repainting. Paul hummed a goodbye
and walked away down the path, still not believing that this was it.
The end of their chapter, where their lives would actually fork and
they would flap their butterfly wings and begin to affect different
lives. And it was hard and easy at the same time. His walking away, her
staying. Easy to go but hard to leave.

The taxi driver was as cockney and chatty as usual. Full of stories of
early retirement and bad driving and always verging on the mildly
fascist. It made Paul uneasy. This guy swam in a different sea to him.
He splashed and shouted in uncertain waters while Paul put his face in
the sea and calmly made for shore. He was glad when they arrived at the
airport and he could wrench the door open and expel the car's
atmosphere into the fresh air. Tipping the driver, Paul took one of the
taxi firm's business cards and mentally trashed it.

"Thanks," he said. But he knew it would not be needed.

The departure lounge was not full. Of course there were plenty of
people milling around, standing gormless with trolleys, paid, Paul
assumed, to get in the way of arriving, genuine travellers. He had
timed it well, arriving after the lunchtime rush, people were on
wind-down, beginning to see late afternoon - the end of the day in
sight.

"Passport please." And as he went through the checking-in procedure,
nodding in the right places, following the pointed finger as his
gate-closure time was highlighted, lifting his luggage to be weighed,
Paul realised that he had not been thinking of Suzie, until now, and
that was a good thing. As he had to move on. To become someone else.
The someone that Suzie had really wanted but had not had in him. And he
wondered if in this way that by the time he was fifty he would have
evolved into some sort of super new man.

"Why can't you be more 'real'" she had said to him once. "You live in
your world of offices and trains and taxis - you should see the working
man in people. Be more real!" she had shouted.

And in his own way he had understood what she meant because Suzie knew
Paul as well as himself. He faltered in the presence of electricians,
decorators, gardeners, and plasterers. People who 'do things' Suzie had
said. They made him feel superficial and the way that Suzie flirted up
to them, asking questions, nodding as another of life's mysteries was
answered, reiterating his uneasiness. And now he had made his mind up -
he would become more 'handy' in the future. Take courses. Learn. So
that when Suzie number two came along he would be that person as well.
He would evolve.

Now he was at the gate, handing over his boarding card to be sucked and
split by the machine, his ?275 original ticket reduced to a slither of
cardboard. And he was being smiled at again as he entered the
aircraft's tubular environment, queuing, waiting patiently for
passengers to hoist heavy bags into overhead lockers, some huffing and
puffing, others forcing bodies into 'S' shapes to allow him to pass.
Then he was in his seat and he could relax, shut everyone out, stare
out through his circular optic as his world became more and more
focussed on him.

"Why can't you accept me for who I am? You won't change me. I refuse to
change. Not for you."

The last bit had meant to hurt. The first two were slaps to the face.
The last was a lunge with a hidden knife. Paul wondered how he had put
up with it. But in the final throes of a dying thing it had certain
logic about it. Striking out at anything near. And loved ones always
stay close by - right to the end.

Different cultures always hit Paul hard. And New York hit harder than
most, which is what he needed. Well that was what he had told himself.
Go somewhere that buzzes, somewhere to distract and excite. Somewhere
to think about starting afresh. A week should be enough. Distance
enough to look across the Atlantic and put his small life in
perspective. He could think here, think about selling up, and think
about decorating a new house. Distance does work, he decided - he just
had to make sure he was far enough away to focus clearly. And from here
Suzie seemed very, very small.

Paul walked out into the bright, winter sunlight and pushed the Raybans
across his view. The exit from the airport never failed to amaze him in
its mundanity. You always expected so much yet all that was delivered
was a string of yellow and cream taxis. Paul didn't mind. He knew that
the real city lay close by - this was just a tender tease of what was
to come. You couldn't have it all at once after all.

Little by little, drip by drip. All round him life was showing him the
answers, all he had to do was learn how to read. The taxi joined the
highway and Paul felt the surge of acceleration forcing him to relax
further into the leather seat. Soon the New York skyline would come
into view but until then he feasted upon the oranges and yellows of the
autumn fall blurring past his window, watching, as shoals of leaves
left their branches, making way for new buds. New life. Moving on.