The exhilaration of change

And in the end it was easier than she expected. A sleight of hand; a momentary distraction; the entirety of who they were, what they had been, done away with. Deleted like an email or a phone number, she consigned him to the past.

The small grey and white cat lay curled and purring on the sofa beside her, nose clamped between pressing paws, lost in a world unknown to anyone but her.

She listened as the rumblings of contentment faded; she relished the silence when it came.

On the table in front of her sat a half glass of ruby red wine. The day had begun with champagne; her present to herself. The tail end of a bottle, she had finished it with toast before moving through the house, cleaning up the aftermath of the party.

She was a success at last, in her own right. She had long ago cast off his Svengali-like posturing and need to control. She had flicked through the scrapbook of characters he had chosen for her to wear and had seen through each one of them; she had seen through him.

In her widow’s weeds, she had entertained her guests. In the elegance of black, in the simple black georgette sheath that skimmed her curves and rippled at her feet on the floor, she had shone with happiness and glory. Everyone was there to fête her; people from her past, people from her now. People she knew would be important in her future. Like Mrs Dalloway, she had planned this social triumph. Unlike Mrs Dalloway, she deserved it.

The returning prince was herself. She was the one wreathed in laurels. All it had taken was a moment of faith; to accept the risk that all she would ever know was the obscurity he chose for her, and to seize the chance to prove him wrong.

And how wrong he had been! She was a diamond in the sky, a bright glittering jewel. She emerged from the shadows he had placed her in; the cloth was pulled free of the statue he had been sculpting all this time, but was never (he said) ready for exhibit.

And all it had taken was a few drops in his food, in his drinks, in his toothpaste. All it had taken was patience and time before she at last was rid of him.

Put the poison in the well, let him drink.

She had raged at him; she had simpered and pleaded; but all she had needed to do was kill him.

She dropped him, dead, that long weekend in New York. She swore blind to him, before she went, that she would never leave him. That was just the prelude. The inevitability of that statement was, of course, that she was leaving him. An act of will. Not a slipping away, but a leaving.

And in that city that never sleeps, in that town of eight million souls, she had found peace. She had discovered that who she was mattered more than who she was supposed to be, and that nothing that came before that fact was important.

He had always said that she would be the one that quit; in a way he was right. She had stopped wanting the fight. She had stopped wanting the instruction. She had stopped wanting.

She was not satisfied with the lack of things on offer. When you have exhausted all the nourishment from something, all you can do is throw out the husk. That was how she looked on it now. He had fewer dimensions than she had thought; or she had wanted more than he could ever have given.

In that city of no sleep, she had found the thing she wanted. Acceptance. Indifference to the wheres, the whys, the how-comes. Indifferent to where she had been, what she had done, he had taken her for the moment in which they were living, and he had given her back her own mind.

He didn’t even know it. He had no need to.

Her mind had been taken and kept from her for too long. Alternating current that changed direction and magnitude as often as their heartbeats, it was all she could do to keep up with moods at times. The positive pleasure and the negative withdrawal that kept the current moving burnt out the filament eventually; forgetting to step-down the voltage left her shaking. Electrocatalysis wasn’t what she was seeking.

The exhilaration of change had seduced her and enlightened her; she would admit that to anyone; he wasn’t entirely bad. But the exhilaration of not being found lacking meant more to her now than he ever could.

The day after the restoration of her mind had been bright. She had risen before anyone else in the house. She had showered and finally washed away all traces of what had been. She made breakfast; she read the papers; she felt the lightness of freedom all over her skin.

The liberation carried her past all awkwardness in the presence of the one who set her free, although he didn’t know where to look or how to stay. All she could do was laugh at the way the world sometimes turned out. Turned itself out, and you; inside out and upside down. All she could do was laugh.

He hadn’t understood, standing with his head inside the fridge, exclaiming over the existence of cheese, why she had laughed. He hadn’t understood, but he enjoyed it.

“What did I do?” he asked.

She couldn’t say.

That long weekend in the city that never sleeps; that long weekend that brought her here.

“He will be there tonight,” her friend told her as she helped her to dress.

“Who will?”

“Both of them.”

“Oh.”

A heart beat. A pause. A moment. Then: “Let them be. That’s alright. It doesn’t matter any more.”

Her daughter ran into the room, four years old and charming; blonde curled and blue eyed, she carried her doll whose hair she had hacked until the doll looked like she should be the singer in a new wave band.

“Does mummy look nice?” she asked her daughter.

The girl paused and stood in front of her mother with her head on one side, her lower lip bitten by her upper teeth. She took stock of the woman in front of her; the dark hair pinned up; the white skin against the black of the dress. She weighed up all the evidence inside her four year old head, and then she nodded.

This night was hers. She had waited five years since shedding the skin he had placed on her. She had worked towards this moment without a backward glance.

It didn’t matter that he would be there. It didn’t matter that the father of the girl would be there. Her prize possession, bizarrely bound up in that bundle of three and a half feet of need, was her independence.

So one had travelled thousands of miles across an ocean to witness this moment and undoubtedly would try to spoil it. And the other had come from where? She didn’t know where in the city, or even if in the city, he lived these days.

The grey and white cat slept on beside her as she remembered the sight of the one and the presence of the other. Two wildcats believing in nothing. Two toms who liked the same parts of her body. Two children who would never grow up. One who had meant the world and threatened to take it; the other who just was.

Her daughter had woven her way around the guests until it was time to say goodnight. Sleepy kisses and damp hugs, her dress creased, her face happy, she bade her child goodnight.

There would be nothing she would do better in this life than create that child; she knew that, but she knew also that this night meant as much in a different way.

Skilfully, she managed to avoid him. To the unknowing father, she was all grace and distant approbation. He was working hard, successful on his own terms. He was older and she appreciated the changes in him. She appreciated his coming.

Their hands touched, as they had that night, in a bar, the day before the child was conceived. The touch was familiar, and so too was the look that passed between them. Acceptance and recognition that they were who they were, and nothing other.

2011, the start of another decade, approaching the end of her 41st year. Success had come late to her, to him. The other had had his share and she no longer wished to know him. She let him stand there across the room from her; always across the room and never near her; she sensed when he tried to cross the divide and made sure she moved on; or she refused to acknowledge him, so that he had to go away again or appear foolish, listening in on someone else’s conversation.

“I think he wants to talk to you,” he had said.

“Let him,” she had replied, and drank from her champagne glass, keeping her eyes fixed on him.

“Your daughter’s beautiful,” he told her.

“She is. She’s like her father,” she said.

“You’ve never told. You’ve been asked. I’ve read the interviews. And you’ve never told.”

“I never will.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t need to know.”

“Is she his?”

She had laughed at that. “Does she look like him?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

She remembered, as the cat stretched and yawned and sat up before hurrying off to continue her day, the way her agent had swept her off just then; carried away across the room to talk to someone this and someone that; none of them important, all of them demanding.

She had looked up at one point, in time to see him leave. He had looked at her once and held up the glass he was about to set down on the tray by the door. A salute she did not return.

Yes, he was dead to her now after too much time spent coursing through her veins. She regretted it in some ways, when she let down her guard. Some small, silent part of her still thought it could have been different. Wrapped tight in bubble wrap and put away, she checked its condition every now and then. It still said love, in faded pink across a white shell; if you held it to a mirror, it still said hate. That fine line of beaten polished silver.

The door closed after him and her life continued. In the end, it had been too easy.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006