Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
And it should end there, your story. In an ideal, animated movie-style ending, with an inciting incident, stated moral and arc, a feeling of satisfied contentment, credits rolling.
But it is the things you don’t actually think about, the things you don’t see coming, when you are worrying about deadlines or overexposure or the wrong shade of paint in the hall or the clogged gutters you never clean or the way she won’t look you in the eye or how a stranger tells you, historically, he does not do the right thing – the wrong things – the actual, real-time, threatening things, are what take you down.
On your wedding day, of all days.
Crazy, that; how heartbreaking, how tragic, is what they’ll say.
Because that low-level, long-term pain in your head? Turns orchestral, overnight.
You tried to tell Nora about it. Tried to call her as you stumbled back home but your phone was dead and then you were on your laptop searching for answers before sleep and then she was there, proposing.
In the most glorious pressure point of your entire luck-filled life, of all the moments that do not flash before you like they say they will, but play out as a film that nobody else will see, flickering and then falling away.
Falling, still, as you get up and dress in your favourite shirt.
Find your best shoes – are they your shoes – kiss your soon-to-be-wife on the forehead and tell her you’ll see her at half ten and she stirs out of sleep, says good luck, because you’d promised to corral witnesses, most likely Goose and his flatmate whose name you forget.
The flatmate who forced you to leave because he was playing his music so loud and you couldn’t sleep for the pain and the drum and the bass but first, on this day, out your door, you’ll make a stop.
See a pharmacist or a doctor or one of the two you tell yourself as you leave her alone and the paint is rolling off the walls and you’re on the bus into town to find your brother or the doctor and what is the difference what day is it where are you as the trees slip by and the buses drive on and the houses blur, early morning, tricks of the light, you were thinking about Peru and you both loved Paris, walls of pointillist paintings made out of needle-tipped pressure and pinpricks and pain, so much pain.
Something wrong even as things are, finally, right.
Your last memory of the bus, not of Nora now or back then, but a tear in the film reel, a sentence, when you get to the counter – you say it, and someone is saying things back, and you try to say more
but find that
you can’t