Chapter 17 #2
For us, there was no way out. None. No escape, no end.
It all went simply on and on, just as it had begun, long ago.
With the people who had begun it. With us.
Any other contact was fleeting and insignificant: that was a fact we had to accept.
And yet here I was, thinking about a woman who was already slipping away from me with every breath.
And I’d never even let myself hold on to her as tightly as I wished I could.
‘Life breaks everybody. But it breaks us a little harder. Just got to make the best of it.’ Norah’s voice cracked with the sound of tears through her smile. ‘You remember how she always used to say that?’
I had to smile myself. ‘As if any of us could ever forget.’ Although the words always set off a dull pressure in my chest, I loved to hear them.
As long as it hurt to remember, the emotion was still real.
And we owed her that much. We’d promised her.
A real life. I thought about it often, but lately I’d been wondering more and more if perhaps we’d had a different understanding of what that meant.
Because the most real moments I’d had in a long time had been with Mabel, even though she could never be part of my life – our life.
Norah nodded thoughtfully. She reached for the watch on my wrist, with its unmoving hands. ‘You know, sometimes I think Ashton’s whole personality is shaped by how much he misses her.’
‘We all miss her. Just in different ways. Some of us more problematically than others.’ I thought of the gold chain in Ashton’s wallet, threaded with two rings, which I only knew existed because it had once fallen out while he was paying for something.
I hadn’t mentioned it, and forbade myself to tell Norah.
If he’d kept them all this time, it had to mean that, somehow, he was still the same.
I clung to that, whenever I felt like I no longer recognised him.
Grief had many faces. The one Ashton wore was among its ugliest. But that didn’t mean the emotion behind it wasn’t beautiful.
Love wasn’t always easy. If anyone knew that, it was us. All of us.
I shook my head, thinking of the fourth person included in that us. ‘Speaking of, have you heard anything from Nox lately?’
Norah’s lips pursed into a thin line, as they always did when she heard that name. Sometimes it felt convulsive, like she was having to tamp down her spontaneous reaction. ‘Not since Canterbury.’
‘I assumed he’d jump at the chance to tag along with Henry.’
‘I didn’t.’ She fiddled with the neckline of her dress.
It was violet, the same shade as her eyes.
Nox’s favourite colour. Although I couldn’t remember now which of those two things had come first. In any case, it told me that part of Norah had been expecting him to show up, too.
‘If he has his way, I doubt we’ll be seeing each other anytime soon. ’
‘You were the one who split up with him, Norah.’
‘Splitting up with someone who’s already checked out isn’t really ending things.
It’s accepting that it’s already ended.’ She shrugged, as if to shake off the weight of the memory.
For years I had seen it grow heavier day by day.
Her eyes drifted past me, and I watched them meet those of her reflection in the windowpane.
The shadows smudged the violet of her eyes into a pale grey.
‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she murmured. ‘When we lost her – she took so much with her.’
‘I think it just made us more aware of what we actually have. What we … are. Losing her tore off a mask we didn’t even know was there.’
She smiled and laid a hand on my forearm. ‘I thought we were losing you too, Cliff. Truly. But for a while now … ever since Mabel, it feels like you’re coming back to us a little.’
What she said was so true it ached, in a way that made me dig my fingernails into my palms until it hurt. Physical pain was more bearable. Anything was more bearable. ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter,’ I snarled bitterly. ‘We all know how this is going to end.’
‘Still, I’m happy for you. It’s good to be reminded every now and then why we’re all doing this, isn’t it? It’s no less precious just because it can’t last. There’s no point living a life like this if you’re dead inside.’
At least if you’re already dead inside, you don’t feel like you’re still dying, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.
It wouldn’t help. Besides, I’d known from the start what I was getting into.
I had seen the light, and knew what it would cost me to reach my fingers towards it.
Getting them burnt was just part of the deal, one I was willing to accept because I’d been so cold so long, and because Mabel and her radiance were the first in many years to hold such allure.
Perhaps the first of all. I’d never felt anything like it, which was fascinating and soothing and beautiful and … deadly. For the both of us.
‘The pain will fade. It always does, you know that.’ Norah leant her head against me, her hair tickling my chin, her words in her eyes. ‘In the end, all we have is each other.’
I didn’t answer, only stood, breathing, trying merely to exist and not to be.
I’d been doing it more and more these days.
Yet I couldn’t ignore what, deep down, I had already realised: I didn’t need to have Mabel to know I was going to lose her.
To know that she was already losing something herself.
Much more than she could possibly know. If I’d been stronger, if I’d been better, I would have protected her.
I would have kept my distance. But I wasn’t strong or good, I was exhausted, and at the same time strangely elated.
As if being near Mabel had dug a hole at the very core of me.
It had been so hardened for so long I’d thought that was impossible, yet there it was: a chamber softly scratched out at my centre, and I felt her in it.
Suddenly, somehow, I felt many things. It hurt, but the hurt was what made it good.
After all, what was a wound, if not a sign you were alive?
I knew that every second I allowed myself to feel this way would only make the end feel even worse. But in that moment, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to let it go yet. I didn’t want to let her go yet.
What did that make me? A fool, a monster, or a human being? Perhaps it didn’t matter much, because in the end, it all came to the same thing. For someone like me, living always tasted like dying. And finding something always tasted like losing it again, in the cruellest possible way.