Until You Hit The Rocks

One bright day in September 1985, I was passing by a café on the Rue des Renards. I sat down at a table and ordered a lait russe. An older woman was sitting close by. She seemed lost in thought. Her hair was poorly dyed; her roots and strands of hair at the temples showing grey. The rest was brown like a mug of hot chocolate. Her eyes were the colour of the sea, and filled with as much history. She was well-dressed; not wealthy, but with a pride in her appearance. She drank English Tea. I recognised the yellow Lipton label that dangled from the bag. Her bite of cake sat untouched on the saucer of her tea glass.

She must have felt me looking at her, because she raised her eyes from the table before her. I bade her goede dag and she smiled. We began a conversation. My lait russe arrived, and I ate my bite of cake first. She smiled at that.

I took my chance. I knew it was an impertinence. I was at least half her age. I could have been her son. But I asked her, why was she so pensive.

She told me that she knew a man, once, who would eat his cake first, before drinking his coffee. She had believed that she loved him. He was dead now.

I asked her what had happened.

She told me this:

“I wanted to know if he could live without me. The answer, of course, was yes. I wanted to know that, if I disappeared forever, he would do everything in his power to track me down again. I knew that he wouldn’t.

“It’s funny how you can assume that you know everything about another person from the fragments of information they give out. It’s funny how easy it is to judge others by your own standards and your own life, without giving them credit for being their own person, with their own past building up to this present state of being.

“It’s equally funny how someone, with a line flung out after too many drinks and not enough sleep, can reel you in. Maybe it was truth that left those lips. Maybe afterwards it was regret at having let too much slip. Maybe it was just loneliness and booze talking. On both sides of the table.

“He thought I was the same as him.

“And I wanted to know how it would feel. Loving someone. I wanted to know that it was possible. Both of us experimenting with a momentary crossing of paths. Shame on me, I believed the trick, and I learned that it is possible. That I could love. And I did. Shame on me for opening myself up.

“He thought I was the same as him, and I wasn’t. As much as he protested the opposite as though it was fact, simply because he believed it to be so, I was not the same as him and couldn’t ever be.

“The two year anniversary of his death just went by unnoticed by me. How quickly I forget the things that drove me in the months that immediately followed his demise.

“No-one was ever hurt by driving a car at a wall until the moment of impact. Jumping from a cliff won’t hurt you until you hit the rocks. Understanding love won’t hurt you, until you do it and it means nothing."

She paused to take a mouthful of tea from the glass, holding its metal handle between gloved fingers. I said nothing, but waited for her to continue.

“I wanted him to miss me, like I thought that I missed him, and he didn’t. The only thing I was sure of was that he was indifferent to the specifics. He was only interested in the mechanics. The end was as nothing. It was the means he wanted to examine. It was never the things that I said, or didn’t say, but the way in which I said them.

“And yet, for all this examination, he still couldn’t see that we were different."

She looked at me. Her eyes were grey and bright, filled with the story of her life.

“The past few days, I have forgotten again to pay all sorts of bills. My living room table is piled high with pieces of paper, most of them junk, some of them important to continued good credit and peace of mind. Membership of a professional organisation. Credit card bill. Right to vote. Renewals and payments and good citizenship."

She looked away from me again, and laughed.

“It’s not as though we were involved. It’s not as though we were available. One married, the other too fucked up for anything but experiments in pain and self hatred. It’s not as though we could have even been friends. The way he put it. The existence of a wife."

She was lost in thought for a moment, and I wondered whether she expected me to say something. I had no words and the silence stretched out between us before she spoke again.

“I wanted something different to him, but he organised it under his terms. Impossible. No bending of limbs, no compromising of desires or principles or self-respect would make it anything other than what he chose.

“And he chose it to be something he had done himself, millennia ago, in another time, another existence. Like a Time Lord here to prove that human nature never changes. Like a guilty man who wants to atone for past mistakes, but can only do so by projecting his guilt onto someone else. Quick to name it before I had chance to. And what did I know? My own experiment was in an unknown realm. I couldn’t have named it if I tried. Like a puppet, I complied with the strings that pulled me this way and that.

“It makes me tired to think about it.”

She ended her monologue there. I didn’t know what to say. I tried to judge how old she was. My guess was late forties. I was too young then to understand what she was talking about.

She looked at me and smiled and said as much herself.

“You’re too young to understand this, my dear. But thank you for listening.”

I assured that, although I did not understand, it had been my privilege to hear her words. I begged her to continue, but she smiled again and drank her tea.

I asked if she were English. Her accent, although good, had hints. She told me yes. I asked if he were English. She told me yes.

I told her I was sure that it had meant more to him than she thought. She smiled again.

“Is that because you want it to have been so?” she asked. “Do you have some romantic notion about love?”

Her tone was not bitter. I felt no offence as a result of her question. I admitted that I probably did have a romantic idea of what love might be. I laughed and said that I was too young yet to know.

She smiled too and reached out a gloved hand to pat me on the arm.

“You are a good boy,” she told me. That irritated me slightly. Aged twenty three, I liked to think of myself as a man. I said nothing. She must have read my mind, or remembered what it was to be my age, because she apologised for her words.

She stood, then, and left some coins on the table. She did not bid me vaarwel. She simply left, trailing perfume in the air and a sense that life is not always what you wish it to be.

I remember her now, twenty years later, and I have more of an understanding of what she meant.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006