After a few minutes other people turned up, Andy, Lucy as expected and surprisingly Christine who I had never seen at a post meeting gathering in any of the pubs in Lancaster. They nodded then took up a couple of sofas over by one of the big glass doors that opened onto the terrace. My resentment toward Chris dissipated, he hadn’t been muscling in, couldn’t have known that I had been hatching secret plans and fantasies, had just turned up a bit ahead of everyone else and was being sociable in his slightly awkward, slightly goofy way. I was surprised by my own quietness at the bar, letting Chris do most of the talking. Perhaps I was half relieved really, perhaps by turning up he had rescued me from the pressure of trying to be charming or seductive, the broad general demand that meeting an unattached, attractive women was supposed to make of me in my mid-life loneliness.
It was also surprising because generally in group conversations I had always felt a need to dominate, especially when I was younger, partly from the urge to impress, partly just the typical, competitive fear that if I didn’t establish a pecking order immediately with myself at the top I would be ridiculed, lose status and purchase. It came from growing up in a tough town, a shipyard town I suppose, as a child and as a teenager I had felt vulnerable. I wasn’t tough, quite the opposite, I was a reader of books and a daydreamer, an odd mixture of extroversion and self-consciousness. Later, like many people I drank in order to make the pressures of social life, the fear of it, manageable and usually I drank too much. I wanted attention but when I got it I found it too intense, unbearable and wanted to deflect and retreat, but couldn't and so drank more.
Well, that was a pattern that had changed little over the years, even if my drinking had more or less stopped. I glanced at Mariam, her hair purple-black, her lively expression, high cheekbones, dazzling smile all intensified by the warm low light of the dimming sun and understood sharply as I raised the martini glass and a Hen-night went noisily past behind me trailing streamers and balloons that all my relationships had been the same. The same underlying dynamic, the yearning, the fixation and then the instant regret the moment I had succeeded in getting together with someone, barely perceptible, masked by the excitement at first, then slowly intensifying. Even before we were together I was planning my escape, escape from the concrete demands of a relationship, from family, age, routine, responsibility, from becoming one of those beaten, grey men, ill in body and spirit scowling at the world on the bus back from the shipyard in the evening. It wasn’t the pleasure of capturing someone I wanted, though that was a necessary first stage, my real motivation was the pleasure of escaping them, though what I still thought I was escaping I didn’t know, I was so far beyond the life of the town, the Yard, all the things that had seemed to be my fate.
I took another sip quickly, Mariam laughing generously at some foolishness from Chris. Stop wasting other people’s time, Carl, stop making people invest in you simply so you can run away from them. Mariam was talking about her job now, the local area, the cuts, the way the coastal towns were hopeless places, how they had become sinks for lost people who were drawn there by the promise of some comforting echo of childhood pleasures they had lost or never had but felt somehow they still deserved, candyfloss and flashing lights, and running shivering up the hot sand from the sea into a towelled embrace. She was so obviously an admirable person as I listened to her I started saying to myself, no, no. Don’t drag her into your mess, don’t drag yourself into it.
Poor Ayako, all that travelling back and forth she did, all that expectation of some kind of life she might build only to have me sit stubbornly there in the corner, arms folded tight, refusing to have my hand taken, to be guided away from myself. All I do is abandon and start again, the books I claim that I am so devoted to writing left half written or rushed through and tossed aside, relationships I somehow believe will transform my relation to the world sabotaged from the start, each commitment parleyed off against the other as I tread water, stall for time. I have not proven able to rise to the level of the love that has been offered me. I cannot give myself to anything, anyone, not fully. Even her, in all her quiet beauty, patience and love for me. If not her, who?
This insight should have made me miserable perhaps but instead it lightened me. Another renunciation, another compulsion identified, cut off, cauterised. Soon enough perhaps I would be completely empty, the state, I imagined, of nirvana. My mother came out of the lifts opposite and gestured to me from across the bar. I was happy to see her, immediately felt foolish for my earlier impatience.
You are never too old to learn, lass I said in an exaggerated Cumbrian accent as she came to stand beside me at the bar. The Martini had hit me instantly, Chris and Mariam seemed to be hitting it off.
True enough, she said, scanned the menu I handed her. That’s what your dad used to say at any rate.
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