Bones (A Monologue)
My attempt at writing an Alan Bennett-style monologue. Part of a creative writing course I did a while back (and didn't complete, obviously)
This morning I got up feeling lousy.
I am not sure if it's the bottle of wine I drank last night or the cold that makes my nose run and my head hurt this morning, but I don't feel great today.
What it was - I got home late enough last night from work and rather than going straight to bed I decided to check my email. And as I turned on the computer, I knocked over a box resting on the shelf above the spare bed, spilling the contents all over the floor. In between the CD's, unpaid bills, unsharpened pencils, elastic bands, foreign coins and on, at the bottom of the pile on the ground, I found a brown envelope.
Inside the envelope I found these letters, a cassette, and this photograph.
The hand in the jacket belongs to me. The head belongs to my ex-fiancé.I don't recall now when it was taken, but I do know where this was taken, and even who took it. I placed the picture between keys of my keyboard and I stared at it for what felt like hours but which was probably more like minutes until I was disturbed by the sound of the central heating switching on. I took the picture and the letters and put them back in the envelope, then quickly threw everything back into the box and placed it back on the shelf. The cassette I left out for listening to later.
So last night, probably as a result of all this, I had a very disturbing dream. One of those dreams that ruins your day before it has even begun. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember it was a reunion somewhere, with me begging her for reconciliation and a return to the old days. I remember one scene in particular. In it, I ask her to "come back with me". She says "she cant" at which point in my dream, and quite possibly in reality - I don't remember - I cry uncontrollably.
I rang in sick for work today. I just can't face it.
I had a listen to the cassette that I found last night. The music on it is nothing to write home about. A mishmash of early 90's indie; the Wedding Present, the House of Love, Slowdive, James, All About Eve, REM, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Like I said, nothing remarkable.
But the one that sticks out is the one right at the very end. For some reason, about a minute after the end of what I thought was the final track, "Groovy Kind of Love" by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders suddenly comes on.
It seemed so out of place amongst the other tracks, but it's only when I read through the letters that the words finds their place. In every letter she wrote to me, she ends with the line “when I'm feeling blue / all I have to do is take a look at you”. I wonder if my letters to her ended with the rest of the song "When you're close to me I can feel your heartbeat / I can hear you breathing in my ear".
Unfortunately I don't remember, and the letters are not here. She never did return them to me when it all ended.
So I've been reading through them, trying to remember and understand our relationship, to see if I can put it into some kind of context, and hoping to find something in her spaghetti handwriting that might help me to remember how she was. Perhaps I'll find me in all this too, and how I must have been in those days.
She was the quiet friend of a friend of mine. When I first saw her walking in, two steps behind my friend, I fancied her immediately. She was at the same college, doing a different course mind, but mutual friends brought about our first meeting. April 6th. See? I remember the date. I mistook her quietness for cool, which I found very attractive. I mistook it for cool, but she was of course terribly shy. I only found that out on that first date, probably the quietest first date in the history of romance; not so much a date as a silent movie.
Nevertheless, we worked out and we survived college and one minor breakup, and eventually moved into a flat. This flat. The only condition her parents put on us was that we could have the flat as long as we agreed to get married within six months.
Looking back on it now, that was probably the moment that the clock started ticking, in more ways that one.
I went along with it because all I wanted was to be with her, and the flat meant I could have her all to myself. I didn't need anyone or anything else. Just her. It also meant an end to going around to her house every night, sneaking quietly and guiltily around her bedroom, making as little noise as possible to avoid her sister and her brother and her parents and all their oppressive Protestantism.
But then a funny thing happened. After we moved in together, and as the seasons changed and the traffic roared loudly past our window on its way to somewhere else, we just stood still. We had become a married couple before we were married. With all our friends fucking in their flats and making full use of the freedom that having your own property brought, we slept silently in the dark, back to back in our king sized bed. It wasn't so much a house of sin as a library. So four years after our first date, the silence that marked the start of our relationship had become a bookmark for its inevitable end.
In the end I ended it up because it was the only thing left to do, and when I told her she took it very badly. I had mistaken her silence as cool indifference. Clearly I had gotten that one wrong too. But there was nothing else left to say and so she moved out and she moved on. I, on the other hand, stayed firmly where I was and where, truth be told, I probably still am today. June 1994.
In the weeks and months that followed I tried, pleaded even, to get back with her, but she had already found someone else. I wrote to her on more than one occasion but never got a response. Then one day someone suggested I write a letter explaining how I felt. They said I should write it, seal it, but not send it. It would be a symbolic ending of the relationship allowing me to pour out my heart, to bring closure and to move on.
I didn't exactly feel comfortable with it. It's not as if she died or anything, but I wrote the letter anyway and tried to move on. And I might well have done if only I hadn't sent that letter too.
Like all the others, I never did get a reply.
[pause]
When she went, she took everything except her engagement ring. I found it a few weeks later at the back of my underwear drawer.
It's funny.
It's been more than twenty years since she packed her things and left. And despite the two of us living in the same city, it has probably been three years since I last saw her, out on the promenade, pushing a pram. She hadn't changed much except for a strange reddish tint to her hair which, truth be told, didn't suit her.
The letters don't give much away. They talk of the things we did that week ("I loved that film"), mentions of the nights out ("you were so drunk"), gossip about our friends and so on. There is the occasional hint at a future together ("There is a wedding fair on next week", "what names do you like for kids?"). They hint at a normal life, the conversations any couple would have.
But we didn't talk, we wrote; doing anything else would have disturbed the silence.
And though I don't need the photo to remember what she looked like, I do wish I had something to remember what she sounded like, or the way in which she walked, or the way she used to sit on that
couch to watch a film, biscuit in one hand, cup of tea in the other. Or a video perhaps of a drunken Christmas party, with the two of us doing karaoke.
I have deconstructed and reconstructed that time so often that I don't really remember what she was like anymore. All I have now is this photo and these letters and my rapidly fading memories of a time when everything just seemed so right.
And if I had to pick a song to end a letter to her now with, it'd be from "Thanks", by the Wedding Present: "it's been this long and all the flesh has gone / but the bones remain".
They certainly do.
They certainly do.