Grand Gestures

She stood just inside the doorway of the pub. The rain dripped from her hair and clothes onto the tiled floor that said this pub used to be a bank.

She could hear Dusty Springfield on the juke box, her voice coming through the inner doors over the swirl of muddled voices from the bar within. A hundred different conversations from across time landing simultaneously in this pub.

First instincts. They are there to be listened to. It was drawing to a close, now, this thing she couldn’t put a name to. She felt it.

The door through to the bar was pushed open, outwards, towards her, and two laughing men exited the pub in their acrylic football shirts. The man in front was laughing over his shoulder at something his friend had said. He walked into her.

“Sorry, love,” he said, holding her by the shoulders, still smiling, still laughing. “Are you drying off?”

His acrylic shirt would be no protection against the rain, and there was no sign of a coat or jacket. His friend was the same. They squeezed past her, still laughing and joking. The closest she had been to another human body in weeks.

How could she have guaranteed the things he had asked of her then? She had always known that trust would be broken eventually and the dam would have to break. How could she have promised not to breathe a word of any of it to anyone? She couldn’t, and so she didn’t.

She held a brown envelope. His name was written on it in thick black marker. The envelope was wet at the edges. She had protected most of it from the rain by holding it underneath her coat as she ran to the nearest place she could shelter.

Twice today she had walked up his path to his front door. The first time she knocked. She always intended to hand his things back to him, so that he would know this wasn’t some petulant action. You can’t keep gifts when the meaning has been wrenched from them. You can’t keep them when the meaning was always a lie.

She had even been going to return the most precious thing he gave to her. The thing that carved its way into her. The thing that carried twists and turns along paths through gardens that spoke to her of him and her.

Nobody had answered when she knocked at the door, so she had left the envelope on the front step; face up, positioned so that his name would face him when he opened the door.

As she walked back along the street, beneath the trees, she sent him a message, telling him that the envelope was there; telling him what was in it.

‘You just missed me’ said his reply. ‘Currently stuck in traffic near Northampton. A sad fate for such a fine book, to be left on a doorstep.’

She had made it as far as the centre of the village. She turned around and walked the fifteen minutes back to his house. He had known that she would. He had understood that she couldn’t leave the book lying there for anyone to take.

So she had retrieved it and, as she walked back once again to the centre of the village, she had protected it from the rain by holding it beneath her coat.

There she stood, in the pub doorway, unable to move. Unable to think what to do. More people emerged from the bar, some walking into her, others acting as though she didn’t exist. She could have been a statue. She stood in her dripping coat, with her hair plastered to her forehead and the brown envelope in her hand.

She was lost. In that moment she had known it, when she read his text. She was lost and her compass was gone from her. It was as though someone had reversed the planet’s polarity, or held a giant magnet above her head, so that her inner needle spun uncontrollably. Now this way, now that, searching for true north; searching for home.

She had found the first place of shelter she could think of. The pub where he had first identified her species. The pub where he learned that, catlike, she only responded to movement. She was paralysed in the doorway, dripping rainwater onto the tiles, buffeted by the passage of drinkers entering and leaving the bar.

Eventually, the bar manager came out. Someone must have mentioned the strange woman standing beyond the doors.

“You alright, love?” he asked, wary and on the defensive. He didn’t understand her behaviour, she could tell. He was wary of it, didn’t trust it.

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice surprised her. That it still existed. For a while she had thought that she would never be able to speak again, because she felt that she no longer knew how. The world had pulled away from under her in the moment that she realised that he was gone and it was over. Finally, irreversibly over.

“Can I help you at all? Only, you’re blocking the doorway and if you’re not meeting anyone or coming in for a drink, I think you’d better move on.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure.”

The bar manager looked at her. “Can I call you a cab or anything?” he suggested.

“A cab. Yes, a cab.”

“Where are you going to?”

“Home, I suppose,” she said. She looked down at the envelope, at his name written in black marker, permanent ink, untouched by the rain.

“And home is?”

She told him. He went back into the bar and she followed him, not knowing what else to do, now that her paralysis had left her. Now that she had been acknowledged as existing.

She stood at the bar.

“Can I help you, love?”

That same question. Can I help you? She looked at the barmaid blankly.

“Drink?” she asked, gesturing to the pumps in front of her.

“Oh. No. Thank you. Your boss is just ringing for a cab for me.”

The barmaid looked at her as though she was a born again christian, and shuffled off further down the bar to where a group of young men were huddled over their pints. She leaned on the bar to chat with them, every so often looking back towards the woman with the dripping coat and the brown envelope.

“Be ten minutes,” said the bar manager, putting the receiver down on the phone behind the bar. “Do you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. No.”

“Perhaps you’d like to wait over by the door, then.”

She realised that he meant that she was stopping his customers from getting to the bar, even though the pub wasn’t that busy.

Dusty Springfield had finished singing long ago, and the juke box was working its way through a batch of Northern Soul classics. She went to stand by the door and leaned against one of the wooden pillars.

Two songs came and went, and from the outside world she heard the beep of a car horn.

“That’ll be you, love,” said the bar manager, nodding his head towards the door. “Mind how you go, now.”

“Thank you,” she said, and left the pub.

The cab driver was waiting with the door open, in spite of the rain.

“Hello, love,” he said as she got into the car. “Where am I taking you?”

She told him. As they set off, he tried to talk to her, to engage her in some sort of conversation, but she couldn’t think of any answers to his questions. She stared out of the window at the shops and the trees and the houses they drove past on their way to her house.

The meter ticked up and up, the red glowing numbers flicking higher. She held the brown envelope to her, as though it were a teddy bear, or some childhood treasure meant to comfort her.

Her grand gesture, her last goodbye, gone wrong and back in her arms again. He was one hundred and thirty miles or more away. He was a lifetime away already, her grand gesture missed by a matter of hours. She had been saved that particular embarrassment at least, then.

The meter continued its upward motion, the numbers growing larger, like the waxing moon.

The real moon was waning. She had seen it last night as she drove home for the last time from his house. The full moon had passed two nights ago, and now it was giving away slices of itself to the shadow of the earth.

She thought of him, sitting in a different car, one hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred miles away from her now. Maybe even in another house by now. A lifetime away, and her forgotten.

She pulled out her phone from her pocket. She looked at its sleekness, at its metallic sheen. She almost rang him, to say some pointless words to him, knowing that he was in a car or in a house with someone else. Knowing that she would get his voicemail and her message would be heard by him in the solitude of a different kitchen that she didn’t know the geography of.

She almost rang to tell him that next time he was back up this way he should ring her and they could go for a drink, as friends, knowing that she wouldn’t mean it, knowing as well that he would say “Yeah” and “Of course” and “I will” and that he wouldn’t mean it either.

He had said to her once that she could ring him anytime and that, if he was busy, he would ring her back. He had said many things to her once. She had learned in the days leading up to this one that none of them had gone any further than surface deep. All of them were floating on the surface of the moment. All of them forgotten when his attention had drifted elsewhere.

And if she did ring him to tell him that they should go for a drink in the realm of never-never, and if he did say “Yeah” and “Of course” and “I will”, she would say “No you won’t. You’ll forget me.”

And that was where her story ended, because she wouldn’t allow herself to second guess his response. She didn’t want to acknowledge to herself just how unconvincing his “I won’t forget you” would be. She didn’t want to hear it put into words, the fact that this was really over and she would never see him again.

She realised with a jolt that he would have left town without ever telling her so, if she hadn’t decided to make her failed grand gesture. Even when she had tried to say goodbye, he had managed to leave things dangling. Finished without being completed.

The driver pulled up outside her house and read out the numbers from his meter. She pulled notes from her purse and handed them to him. He scrabbled for change in some hidden pocket and the transaction was completed. The circle of service closed.

She got out of the cab and walked up her front path, the brown envelope dangling from her hand.

She placed it on the sofa, next to her handbag; the one she had left behind when she rushed out on her spur of the moment sally forth, riding the bus across town to her failed denouement.

It would stay sealed, with his name written across it, and it would be hidden away from view. The other things didn’t matter. The cds and such. It was the book that mattered. A sadder fate than doorstep abandonment for such a fine book. Hidden away in a sealed brown envelope; locked away from view.

The tears began to fall at last. The crash of the world falling away from her again. The knowledge that this was what it all came down to. A book sealed away forever.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006