Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: betrayal

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • to her hinge

    Just found a line in a notebook which I wrote, on July 15 last year, and I’ve no idea what I might have meant by it. ‘In the mornings/we are proud of his everyday miracle together.’ Is it about sex? I guess it must be. My relationship was in the throes of some difficulties and a page later on July 20 I find, ‘his insignificant other.’ Then a cry from the heart, not mine, but which I wrote down after it came from the mouth that had applied itself to another woman’s hinge: “My beautiful Cathoel.”

    Even then, I was glad of the possessive.

    To be possessed, whilst remaining free and sovereign: isn’t this the essence of sexual love.

  • that, and all the gods of grief

    For four weeks now, this terrible grief. It takes up residence in my throat, is heavy, slides into the sweet solar plexus where self-belief resides. Crushes back my breathing. Gives me the tired. It makes bed seem a dire, unavoidable residence, where I will spend my days: all of them. Though I enjoy so much in the world and spin always silks out of myself like a dim spideress, though I am happy and joyful, resolve to be joyful, and happy, the grief comes in big crashing waves and will not be turned aside, it comes over me from above or up from within, I can’t tell, turns me outside-in, a paper bag with only crumbs. It feels the grief displaces me, so I have to make way for its passage, a weight of a body in water. I hold it and I feel the weight. I am lonely with grieving and savage with it, and cannot turn it by.

    It’s been a month now since breadsticks at dawn, I have counted over the perfidies in my mind. I’ve tried telling myself it would hurt worse if he had found someone in any way interesting to or compatible with him. Within days he had started to outgrow the one weaving acid threads around him, her ‘devotion’ as he called it and her sudden love that reeled him in. This rancid manipulator and her stale routines. I guess it would feel worse, and it would also feel better. He told me how they wound up having breakfast together, because she rang him from outside his house one day: Oh hey! I just happen to be in your street. What, no – did I wake you? Have you had breakfast? Her first thought on climbing out of their consummated bed was to message me: can I see you? I am worried about you. The remorseful emails which that day began, from him, the trickery and campaigning of his superficial mistress, brought little comfort, and their literal fuckery, an eight-day wonder, hurt me unbearably. His weakness. His actions. His inaction. The lies.

    What man is proof against the machinations of a predatory woman. She had brought him it seemed to me only an assiduous, an arduous mimicry of human emotion. Are you ok? I am worried about you. Within a week he and I were talking again, missing each other, trying to reach us, even as he fucked her for good measure a couple times more. When we finally met up he seemed to be suffering that solitude that wrongful intimacy alone inflicts: the grief that is like mourning a suicide, as the suicide. I felt the lack of real connection, he said. I was just so sad she was not you.

    The sex wasn’t planned or premeditated: it just happened. Sure, I said. Not planned by you. What married woman does not carry condoms in her wallet? His weak passivity was gut-weakeningly terrifying to me. In debunking our closeness, so natural, so hard-won, to somebody so shallow, so utterly self-serving, he had pulled the plug out of the sea and it was draining. What mother would not leave her three-year-old at home all night to go out on the fuck? “That you chose that,” I ranted, “over me – it’s so insulting. It’s not even an honest comparison.”

    Meanwhile the everyday experience of foreignness, sharpened now: an aching displacement and fog. My visa, which cost us both some struggle, came through – kind of. Provisional and freeing. Immediately the terror and suspense ebbed away and I entered a teeming fugue of dismay: what am I doing here? I feel so sad. The chic little creameries on my street, in a neighbourhood where I am part of the rapid hated gentrification, the perplexing, frantically delicate flavours they manufacture and interminably sell: white chocolate and parmesan; matcha pistachio; ‘caramel fleur du sel.’ The American menus in New York last week which made me cry in booths in diners, over breakfast: actually cry. Home fried chicken – with waffles – and maple syrup – butter – and collard greens – why? I don’t understand, I whispered miserably to our host. I ate the American food, or a quarter of it, felt myself weighted and sinking to the bottom of a crowded bowl.

    The fortnight before, in still-familiar Germany, a sudden brain freeze at the local bakery. It is just an ordinary shop on a high street, but they sell so many varieties of bread I could not, half-awake in mid-morning, decide. The mechanically helpful German lady repeated, mechanically, Was darf’s sein. From hazelnuts. Sesame. Poppyseed, rye. The half loaf or the whole biscuit, the whole wheat, the full corn. I stood back from the counter and tried to count them, to marshall some sense out of the world. Counting was hard and I had to do it twice. This was a half hour before the announcement over breakfast that my beloved was falling in love elsewhere, when everything began to dissolve. Eventually I counted up 71 different kinds. These did not include strudel, incompetent croissant, sweet rolls, buns, fruit tarts.

    Summer is in full swing and all the seats are full, like a children’s game. I used at first to find it intimidating walking past those cafes, European, where all the chairs face out into the street. It is a theatre, I dislike treading the bored. Dispiritingly, every chair til June has a blanket folded over its back, so you can sit in the sunshine and enjoy the sun’s light on your skin when you’re too numb from the cold to feel your face. All that light without warmth, it’s confusing. Now disorientation reawakens my foreignness, if I had a hometown I would go there.

    I watched a movie where the woman dithers between her husband and a new alluring man. They are young, but they’re bored; at least, she is. The movie was quiet and slow, dimly glowing, like a fish tank. The husband is boring because he is just being himself. I wuv you, he says, routinely at night on the couch, unaware he is being compared. He is dull, he’s unable to step up for them both: I’d have left, too. But the doubting wife is working in secret, in the dark. She’s pursuing something that cannot exist: how tantalising. She is unable to say to her man, we are stale, you are losing me, and I want you to pull me back. I don’t want you to lose me, I want you to love me. Another man is making his intentions plain. If you want me you will have to speak, you will have to act.

    Call out for me, love, come claim me now. The double story of her wishful affair, his wistful half-knowing, made uncomfortable viewing. Somehow it was as if they were on a date that he’d been looking forward to; as if maybe he thought this girl might be the one for him; but that she was only speed dating.

    We made late night phone calls in whispers, walks where we both cried and cried. Our meetings were painful and very often angry, very often tender. “My beautiful Cathoel,” he said, wrenching my heart. Trying to touch me as I ducked away. Yet hope springs infernal. The affair had dwindled into a recital of her trauma, some of it so lurid it seemed to me almost improbable, an edge of lunacy, a frightening unhingedness; he took her to drug therapy, said she was in meltdown. Even three days after we’d first parted he told her, this is all happening too fast; I need some time, I need some space. Please don’t call me for twenty-four hours. This she took as an instruction, as controlling people do. Immediately there followed an announcement to the husband, I’ve been fucking elsewhere. She called, sobbing. I’ve told him! and he is so angry! The manufactured and the precipitated dramas, the tiny ideas in giant font, the three a.m. text messages, the darling self-regard. The improbable and faintly perplexing flavours, parmesan cheese with white chocolate. And his decision, more important in my world, to preference this over our everything. So you compared us, I said, and you chose, if only for eight lousy days, her. But you worked in the dark. Had you shone a light on it, she would have shrivelled in comparison. Because she lacks honour, depth, truthfulness, interest, and evidently, humour. She only had what you projected onto her. In another mood I would write, you too lack truthfulness and depth. So I think maybe the two of you are ideally suited.

    Dutifully he retailed her story of the nice guy husband who simply doesn’t understand her. When I started to laugh he looked less offended than surprised. He shared their emails with me. We began to talk anew. We had the opportunity, suddenly, to fly to New York, where he texted her: I’m thinking of you all the time. In a bar in the lofty blue brainspace dome of glorious Grand Central Station we got drunk when the American barman didn’t know how to serve pastis and brought us two brimming tumblers, four or five drinks apiece. Have you got a photo of her, I said. Yes, he said: are you sure? He went down to the bathrooms and I turned to the woman sitting beside us, who had been scrolling and scrolling on her phone for half an hour. I said, Can I ask you about something? Something personal. I need some girl advice.

    Yes, she said. She put down her phone. She turned on me her large, grave eyes. As rapidly as I could, I told her: my partner – indicating the empty stool – cheated on me. He told me he was falling in love. I’ve just asked him to show me a photo. Because otherwise it’s been tormenting me. Now I’m not sure. What would you do?

    Hmm, she said: that is hard. Of course you’d want to see, see what this is. See her face. But it might make you feel bad because she might be really… Yes, I said, and we both sort of smiled. She said, suddenly, I think – if it will put your mind at rest – then you should do it. But if you do it, then after that you have to really let it go. No reminding him, every time you have a fight. No throwing it in his face. You have to look her in the eye, and then forget it.

    I think you’re right, I said. My mind was lightening. Thank you so much. I put my hand on her arm. That is really good advice. You are wise. I asked about her own situation. She had moved here from India, with her husband. Now her husband has died. She’s decided to stay on. “I want to make a life here, have children.” I said, I know you will have really beautiful children. We smiled at each other. Then my ex-partner came back, slid into the stood between us. He showed me the photo. She was so plain and so winsome that I gasped, without meaning to, “Seriously?”

    Three years ago there were no ice cream shops in the street where I am now living. Now a fourth is being built, on the corner where the tiny meadow springs. Up and down the street graffiti blare. If you want to speak English, go to New York. Berlin hates you. I walk along among the summer bicycles, the tiny children pressed in folds of cloth, the strange stridency that some German women’s vowels have that carries in the open air. The American accents, belling and unwelcome on the street. It has taken me all afternoon to get dressed. In my favourite cafe the barista won’t meet my eye, he lets me stand by the counter and wait. I give him my order, the same order I give him every day. He spreads his hands and tells me, strangely, we’ve run out of honey, we’re not getting it again. Stupidly I think, But – I’ve only ever spoken German in here. I turn away without a word, my chest aching. Grief is an animal looking for its place in me. It displaces my salt ways of being in the world. Summer in Berlin is a time for rejoicing. Beer bottles stand empty on top of all the bins. People line the canals. A Russian woman with spiky lashes stops me, carrying a map: Excuse me please. Where are the shops? Some days I don’t leave the house til nightfall, and walk proudly, carrying my head on its stalk, defeating an agony of alienated shame. Under the trees I let men’s glances wander over me in the dusk. I wake in the night, which is when things seem hardest. I ask myself should I even be writing about it. For no matter how scrupulous, however fair-mindedly I try to write, I only have my own experience. I can only ever render some tiny sliver of the mosaic mechanism, a peephole, untruthful because partial. Life is complex and hard. The ache is acid, residual, lasting. In the mornings its breathing overcomes my breathing. It climbs down heavily to the chest, to the base of my ribs where I was torn from my Adam and I miss him, raw, sore, and hunting. There was only one man whose eyes I sought, on summer evenings: that will never now be true again for us. I get dressed again to go out at last. I feel the agony of love we neither of us had courage for, and have both betrayed, lost out there in the long blue evenings which alike are visitors to this iron country, a brief season uncharacteristic of the place which all too soon begins to gather in its deep chill, its oppressive dark. At weak moments feeling sad, and lost, tired, and bereft, I am asking myself, are you ok? I am worried about you.

  • falling, and small, and very far away

    I had an email from my partner’s new lover. It was my fault, I wrote to her first. This exchange happened last Saturday night, about three or four hours after he first told me. I’m falling in love with another woman. I could do nothing but feel it, I braced myself and grieved. Threw him out of my house. Held myself and ached. There seemed nothing to discuss – if he’s in love, then it’s over. On Sunday a stream of forlorn calls came in. Four, five, six calls in a row, none of which I picked up. Emails, one after the other: Please no. Don’t just cut me out of your life like this. Is it really all worth so little to you?

    That one, I answered. “Actually I think that’s my line.” I had found a resurrection in a certain short-term supply of wry dry humour, an emergency stash I’d kept under my seat but had never thought to have to use in this context. Fit your own mask first before assisting others. The fifth call I picked up because its disguised number seemed to me to herald a call back from my close friend in Denmark, who earlier that morning had been listening patiently. But instead it was… I don’t know what to call him. To say my partner seems now ridiculous and cruel. It was the guy I used to know. His voice sounded falling and small and very far away, as though he had tumbled down a well in some distant galaxy and didn’t have anybody to haul him out. “Hullo,” he said, two hollow syllables, like Eeyore. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. Sorry.” I hung up.

    Meanwhile I had worked out at last who this person was and I decided to write to her. It wasn’t because I needed to stir the hornets. It was for comfort, to make it real, for my bewilderment. I had this slippery tipping feeling like in the snow, when you’re climbing a hill. There’s the pain, and there are moments of a surf-like salty emphasis where you can’t be sure which way is up. My instinct is to open out the emotion, but lance the drama. I wrote to her as quietly as I could. “Hi, Name of Woman. I’m Cathoel, the guy I used to know’s partner.”

 I said, he’s just told me the two of you are in love and you want to be together. I am reeling. I’m struggling to understand, I can’t grasp it. It would be a great kindness if you would be willing to meet me, some day, maybe… just have a coffee, or something.

    Within ten minutes she had written back. Yes, very gladly, she’d love to meet. There was so much to say, how about tomorrow night. Or the night after that.

    A little, warning ping went off deep in my reptile brain but I stumbled on. “Ok, I think so, thanks. That’s kind of soon… do you mind if I let you know later, let the dust settle, see how I am feeling.” Her profile photo was glamorous but abstract and she wanted to meet at the park. Maybe we could both carry a red carnation, I said, so we can recognise each other. Because that, at least, would be amusing.

    Next morning another email from Name of Woman. Long, impassioned, faintly accusing. She didn’t think she could now meet me, after all. She had seen the story I wrote about my experience, about his news, about how we were broken, about how I was hurt. Did I really feel entitled to violate his privacy? Sure, she could understand I felt terribly wounded and wanted to lash out in turn. But, Cathoel, she wrote: people get hurt.

    All curiosity, all desire to meet her, dissolved. I could feel it fizzing out of me leaving the dry sand behind. As I started to type I was asking myself one of those good-instinct questions: why am I bothering to answer. Hi, Name of Woman. Fair enough, no problem. I can understand your feeling. I said I had written out of my own turmoil and shock and that writing helps me to try and understand the world. I felt I had done it respectfully, anonymously, and certainly hadn’t done it to wound or punish anyone, “because that would be mean.” And by mean, I mean: lame.

 Her answer told me everything you could ever need to know about Name of Woman. “But, Cathoel, you’re forgetting. There is somebody you are hurting by publishing this story. You hurt me.”

    I could feel myself physically rear back from the screen like it had farted, my chin tipping to the left, my brow crunching. Out loud I said, “How self-absorbed are you?” This of course was a foolish question and illustrates how stupid a smart person can be. I could instead have recounted. Let’s see. What do we know about this person, so far? She is married and she’s a mum. She’s gone out of her way to fan a heavy flirtation with a man who is already spoken for. The rest of the story I should have been able to tell, myself.

    “And what about the people who read your writing?” she went on, gently as though admonishing me. Pointing out to me a moral lack I’d not myself had the sensitivity to see. “They are hurt. Because it’s such a painful tale.” I was feeling the pain by now, alright, but possibly not in the way Name of Woman meant. This was first thing in the morning, my first day of singledom, I was sleepy as well as rather clouded by heartache and had turned to my emails while barely awake. Hoping for some sort of shaft of light, Hollywood, Biblical: it had all been a dream, it never happened at all, he’s made a horrible mistake, he’s not going to see her again, he loves me. They had only met twice, both times in public. They hadn’t even kissed. How can that be ‘in love’? Somehow aside from the agony this whole thing felt mortifyingly lurid, improbable, a shlock production.

    And yet here I was clutching my pillow like it was a person, drowning in my own saliva, grappling to gasp. The absurdity as well as the viciousness of the breach cut through my body again and again. I had an ache in my throat that would be there for four days. This person lacked the humanity to understand the situation she had helped him to create. Let them love each other, they deserve each other, let her leave her marriage.

    I didn’t answer the email, decided not to answer again. But she didn’t like that. Within ten minutes the first reminder showed up. “Where are you now?” Sure, I thought, unbelievingly: why don’t you come over? Maybe you can give me a smiley face and a hug. While I was making tea a third message arrived. “Where are you? Can I see you?”

    You can’t see me after all, but you must see me: I was beginning to lose track. The sudden spate of demands, the multiple unrequited emails, the purple emotionality: it felt so false, a mimicry of how you might speak to a hard-hearted lover who says abruptly, It’s over, and will not meet to discuss it. Recanting the whole story into my friend’s ear over Skype that evening I said, “If I said to you, ‘Where are you? Can I see you?’ – wouldn’t that come off as kind of… flaky? Desperate?” From Brisbane she said, “I am shivering. What on earth has he done, getting himself entangled with this person?”

    Half an hour later I got an email from the guy I used to know. She had recruited him. “Name of Woman thinks the three of us should meet. What do you say? She is worried about you.”

 In German this phrase is, “she is making herself sorrows about you.” Easy solution, I thought, my lip curling. If you’re concerned about me, how about don’t mess with my boyfriend behind my back? I closed the computer and walked away. The urgency, the manipulative pressure, the attempts to control other people’s behaviour – the unctuous false sympathy. It was boring as well as outrageous. If you’ve read this far, though, I have to warn you: if all of this seems unbelievable now, it soon got far worse.

    As a child I spent hours alone with a great joy, rummaging in the world, musing, dreaming, lighting on strong understandings that then lit me like honey. At ten I found the dusty old books up the back of the library and learned about witchcraft, my best friend and I practiced spells by tying knots in ropes and brewing up fearsome potions from the garden, at eleven I invented a religion one weekend at the beach and converted all our friends. All my life I’ve been translating for myself joyously, soberly, freely the musings that I hear in the trees, in running water, and with my face close to the ground. Petals at the gatepost, curtains at the doorway, the sober whispers of ceremony: as a teenager I felt that god must be like being in water, I would sink into the pool in our backyard and think about that, underwater, rain coppering the green water-surface sky. This day was a Sunday and Solstice, turn of the year. I am in Europe, the thieving place, that other dark continent. I search for the sense of a continuous culture, a blood known by me, in my bones, in my waters, the elusive thin feeling of a processional ancestry, going back generations, faint but audible, disappearing into the hills of the thunderous and fire-lit past.

    I couldn’t bear to stay home by myself in the wreckage and just feel the loss of all that was now gone. During the day as the lost, lovelorn emails arrived from my – from the guy I used to know, don’t cut me out, I don’t want to lose you, was that all it was worth, a sense of self revived in me, probably through rage, and at seven I crept under the shower at last and tied up my hair in a spike and got dressed. It was still light outside as I left the house: the longest day of the year. My girlfriend and I had a huge German beer in the bold blue daylight of 8pm. The film her musician mate had crowdfunded was debuting for the second time in a narrow Kino at the back of the bar, all red velvet curtains and comfy 50s cinema seating, like a womb. A New Zealand woman sang plangent old songs, in Eastern European languages and tone, of unbearable, heartbreaking beauty and transliterated for us the lyrics: Now we go down into the dark.

    We are happy, because we have light and the warmth.

    But also we are sad: because we know the long darkness is coming, the days are growing shorter, we are going to have to work hard to harvest enough to get us through the miserable winter. She toasted the shy film maker, gloriously. In the audience we sang out and stamped our feet. The film was complex and evocative and followed a journey, into the kitchens and courtyards of some of eastern Europe’s female elders and their healing gifts, their frayed folk magic. Music, it was music all around. The crone in her stony kitchen in Greece stroked the head of the sweet film maker and crooned, What a good boy he is, he is a good boy. Afterwards she danced in her kitchen, threading an offering of some sacred substance she’d unwrapped from brown paper, singing roguishly, for him, forty years younger: My love loves another, o, my love does not love me.

    Watching, I felt revive in me certain dark and numinous elements of my own self and our place in this webbed world. I got on the train home lit with my own love of the place, the dark, the swollen great everything. Then Monday morning, an email from the guy I used to know. “The only woman I want to talk with every day,” he wrote, “is you.” He reiterated that he didn’t want to be with her, he didn’t love her. Can we meet? I felt hesitant. I was angry. I felt mistrustful.

    In Germany, official procedure is torturous. On a forest walk you will pass signs which in English would say, perhaps, Keep Off the Grass. In German they are like long, open letters which begin, “Dear Forest Wanderers and Forest Wanderesses. Please be advised…” When he and I were still us we had made a clotted string of appointments to do with my visa application, which entailed filling a three and a half page list of requirements, reports, business plans, health insurance, pension insurance for old age, income projections. I was to register my address, now I finally had my own place, with the Citizensresidentialaddressdetailsregisteroffice.

    So on the Tuesday I said, why don’t you come out and have a coffee with me before my appointment. You can help me read the forms. He said, “Let’s melt this block of ice.” We spoke, by email, for the first time about his sense of frustration and how he always felt it wasn’t ok to talk with me about it, somehow. And he shared with me the screenshots of their two-week chain of emails. I thought, maybe we need to sit down and I will just really listen. I skimmed the emails and felt wryly disappointed, or do I mean relieved, at her badgering pace, cheesy emoticons, unrequited hugs, carefully littered suggestions. The next day I read them again, properly. She suggested they meet up and he was very keen. Clearly they had made a strong impression on each other. She wrote again, to pin him down to a time. He and I were still a couple then, and I knew nothing of this. Five times she said in her subsequent messages, we can just let it be spontaneous, I’m so spontaneous. I read this as a flag intended to advertise her sense of herself as sexually available and adventurous, like certain kinds of tattoo you see now on very young insecure women.

    In between the proclamations of spontaneity were repeated attempts to lock him down to a solid plan: how about we walk our dogs one day? How about tomorrow at one? How about a bike ride? Or how about we meet down by the river and talk?

    When I got to the cafe, locking my bike to his – actually, they’re both his bikes – he was inside, long-faced and remorseful. I thought, I have so loved you. Now I’ll never trust you again. I was sad at the ruin of something so fine and fruitful. In the early days we had fiery arguments as we began to shake down, to build a life we could share. We’d get furious, shout at each other, and then meet the next day, in a park, under trees, “come for a walk” he usually said, and the moment I spotted him in whatever crowded public place I always felt the smile breaking over my face however unwillingly, however angry I might have been, however angry I still was. Seeing him walking towards me with his hysterical dog (“he’s been sitting by the door all day”) I would see that same smile on him, spreading his cheeks back, an involuntary smile, a smile we shared. Goddamnit. Such a waste. But, maybe –

    We ordered tea and he said, You can ask me anything you want, and I will answer. I said, almost at random, Are you still seeing her? 

He said, I have seen her one more time. I said, How was that. And he said: “Intimate.”

    

Forgive me. These words seem to me today almost sensual. I didn’t hear them, they’d have done no good, I long for someone – some guy – some man – to sidle up from somewhere and whisper them into my ear, those hot words: I want you, I miss you, I love you. And if this guy ever did it I would have to turn my head. They met on the Saturday night. That is, the moment he had freed himself and got shot of our sense of commitment. He was angry about the story. He was sad. But she wanted to go dancing. He “got dragged out into the night.” They fucked. But afterward he felt sad. “I was lying there wishing it was you beside me.” I turned away my head, burning with nausea. “I got asked what I was thinking and I had to lie,” he said, sadly, almost wistfully. Oh, the vile.

    When liars lie, they always say the same thing about it. “I didn’t want to hurt you.” What this means, of course, is, “I didn’t want to hurt myself.” I started choking. Trying to speak. Asplutter. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t look away. “So – then… so, but why did you spend all of Sunday calling me? You called, like, eight times! Again and again! Sounding so sorry for yourself! Saying you – ” I sat up, staring. “And when she was claiming, so patronisingly, so falsely, to be worried about me – you mean she still had your juices inside her? What kind of people are you, anyway? It’s so fucking disgusting!” The fear and the rage made me savage. I was savage in an undertone because, hipsters, cafe. 

Like children who think they deserve abuse because it’s less destroying than seeing that mummy and daddy are cruel, I could feel myself slipping into the cardinal error women make in these cases: we blame the woman, to avoid the pain of blaming the beloved.

    He tried to tell me it was I who broke it, or who made it all irreparable – because I wrote about it. He said he wanted to block her but was afraid of hurting her “more than she’s been hurt already.” He began to cry. Told me this hideous story of abuse, a sour history, from before her birth. I put up my hand to say No more. I got up and we both left the cafe. Outside in silence we unlocked our bikes. Unable to take it in, grasping for solids, I said, “What does your other friend Designer Guy say about all this?” The guy I used to know bowed his head. “He says I should be honest with everybody involved.” “What do you mean, honest with whom, what, you mean honest with me? Or – you mean… do you mean, be honest with her?” He said: also, her ex-lover. Her ex-lover? You mean apart from her husband? Yes, he said. Mutual Friend. Mutual Friend who introduced us had an affair with her a year ago.

    We were cycling away from the cafe when I learned this, on a shuddering, cobblestoned street. The whole moral bankruptcy of the situation made me begin to howl out loud. I felt my gorge rising and had to howl and howl. “Ahhhh!” I said, “Ahhhh! I’m going to vomit! I feel sick!” The violent nausea so painful, unexpected. It felt like the sounds would maybe purge me, save me. “So – what, he just… handed her on to you, like she was a bowl of fruit? What the literal, actual, living fuck?” The stormy conversations we had had all day Monday by email seemed nostalgically innocent by contrast, silent movies instead of porn, almost sepia. He’d said what can I do to show you I was wrong. I’d said if he was serious, he could send me their emails. I wanted him to show himself which privacy he was loyal to. He had discussed with this woman, this stranger, our relationship. Now he said that in order to betray their conversations to a third person – me – he would have to abandon one of his chief principles: Privacy. He said he needs his freedom. Isn’t it interesting, I wrote back, how the principles that mean most to you are the most self-serving kind: your freedom, your privacy. Isn’t it telling, I told him, how the principles you’ve been willing to abandon so easily are the socialised ones: loyalty, trust and honour. Our privacy, our love, and the agreement we made in our sweet hearts when we decided to be monogamous, to become a couple, to be close in the night and to whisper to each other all the things that are so hard to say to strangers in the bewilderness of estrangement that is sometimes the world.

  • backbone

    Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this be the first I am hearing of this. Because it is very new, he said. Also she’s married and has kids so it’s complicated.

    I think I said, Oh, how dramatic. I felt filled with pain and contempt, and the pain of contempt. I got up and took my breakfast into the other room, shutting the two doors between us. I couldn’t eat. Naturally after a while I went back and had to ask some more questions. He met her two weeks ago, at a friend’s. A friend’s of mine, as well. They talked for ages. The two of them really understood each other. They’ve been ‘texting’ a lot. I was outraged. How could you get to the point of asking a woman for her phone number – without saying anything to me? Oh no, he said, as though that made a difference: we talk online. I said, Why didn’t you just come home and say to me, after that first night, I met a woman last night and we had this amazing conversation, I feel very attracted to her. Everything might have had the chance to turn out different. It might have been the beginning of a new closeness for us. Or is it just that for some reason you wanted out – you don’t wanna live in Australia, you wanna stay in Berlin – and you lack sufficient emotional self-awareness to break up our relationship without using this lever.

    His emotional honesty and his courage were the qualities I most cherished in this man. Now those were gone, I felt nothing but a bitter disdain. The dry, unflinching, writerly part of my brain was saying, What a convenient trap. I cannot say or do anything. If I howl and cry I will be making myself more unappealing while this stranger, this mother and wife, remains mysterious and alluring because blah honeymoon. If I say, I’m so angry I feel like I could crack a dinner plate over your head, then I’m a monster and he can take refuge with her and be relieved to get away and thus basically whatever I do, I am making myself easier to leave, easier to get over. The cold tight tiny childhood feeling in the pits of me which whispers: didn’t we always know this, you are unlovable. How old is she? Young. What do you talk about in your endless emails, do you talk about how the two of you are falling in love and how you want to be together? “No, not really, we can talk about everything! Everything!” Oh, how divine. I could feel the grief and fury in me congealing over with a self-preservative lard of dry humour. Underneath this cold gel, the endless pain lurked dark and wild. I thought, well if he is prepared to jettison a three-year love affair, and to leave me in the middle of Europe alone; and if she is prepared to leave her husband and two (or three?) presumably quite young children – they must be made for one another. I just couldn’t get over my feeling of disgust. I said, I’ve never respected you less.

    The whole conversation took less than half an hour. He burst out at one stage, But I love you, Cathoel, I really do! Yes, I said, sourly… I can see that. He said, I honour and respect you so much. That cannot be true. For then how could you treat me so poorly? How can you have been so close with me the last two weeks while this was going on, and never even mentioned it? I said, Can I see your emails? “No,” he said, almost primly. “Those are ours, that is our private communication, and I protect that.”

    That hurt more, in the instant, than the rest of everything all put together. My wounded child soul was roaring, Wait! What? Help! No! Help! Isn’t it… our privacy that you should be protecting? We are so interwoven into one another’s lives. I thought we were. I threw him out. I went out, too, after he’d gone and walked in sunglasses through the dim afternoon along the green-shaded river. Berlin, so much pain. I passed the spot where in August of 2012 I had sat down on a park bench and cried, overcome by the dismaying enormity of what I had done: locked my house door in Melbourne behind me, and come to Berlin for a week, on a whim, on an instinct, and stayed on and stayed. Homesickness choked me and I did not love the swans. The man, who until this morning seemed so darling, so honest, so filled with love, went off into the greenery and scuffled. People were walking past smoking joints and wheeling their bicycles, I was busy crying as quietly as I could. Moments later he reappeared, holding out a sweet handful of fresh soft summer leaves, heart-shaped they were, I did not know the tree. He said, “Brush your nose,” which was the way he’d learned to say “blow.” In spite of everything I’m sure I must have giggled. He had graded the leaves, choosing only the softest, from smallest at the top of the pile to palm-sized below, so that I could ‘have a good blow’ as Gran used to say and reassemble myself. I thought, all my life I have never been loved like this. And I was right. And also, I was wrong. It is painful to love a weak person, it hurts. And it seems there are only two choices here, as to what might happen. 1: in a few weeks he comes over crying and saying, I’m so sorry I hurt you, I will never hurt you again. Gee… that’s attractive. Or 2. He really is falling in love – ugh, that phrase, in this context, it just fills me with contempt – and this is the end of the nicest, kindest, wisest love affair I have ever been a part of. Thus it is not only over but was partly imaginary. Aye… there’s the raw.