Signs of Life by Anna Raverat Read Free Book Online

of her recovery, I saw a great deal of her and my parents, and maybe that
period was so intense that we all needed some time off from each other afterwards. Besides, a terrible thing had just happened to my sister’s friend, and my sister was busy looking after her.
The terrible thing was this: Her friend ended a long relationship because she’d met someone else and her boyfriend was so distraught that he hanged himself on a tree in front of her
house.
    The reason I kept stopping the affair was because I was going to marry Johnny. We weren’t engaged; it was understood. Johnny proposed three months in. We were crossing a
stone bridge on a foggy wet evening, a romantic setting but gothic weather. Halfway over he stopped to face me and took both my hands in his, holding me a little way off so that our arms made
another bridge between us. The muffled light of a streetlamp was enough for me to see his face. He didn’t look nervous, in fact he was beaming as though about to give me something I’d
always wanted but he said my name a little too loudly and when he repeated it more quietly, it seemed as if the first time he was using my name to make a space to speak into, like someone clearing
their throat, so perhaps he was nervous after all. After he said, Will you marry me? I made a happy sound and hugged him tight, but I didn’t give him an answer. It was too soon. During the
brief silence while I squeezed him, I wasn’t feeling like all my dreams had come true, I was just hoping to stall him because I didn’t know. I’ve always assumed he took my
reaction as a yes because we never discussed it and he never seemed to have doubt, but maybe he didn’t take it as a yes, maybe he always wondered what it meant but was too afraid to ask.
    I haven’t revisited this moment for a long time, and now that I have written it down I wonder whether the gap between Johnny and me, that I thought opened up around the time of the party
and the glass slippers, was always there. I think we were each afraid of falling into the space between us, and being lost. I think we wanted to close the gap and so we worked hard at our intimacy
with frequent visits, letters and daily phone calls even though we were at different universities, separated by hundreds of miles.
    I suppose we must have grown more secure as time went by. Once, after we left university and were living together but long before I met Carl, we were driving through the streets in our little
silver car when I asked Johnny if he would be able to forgive me if I had an affair. He thought about it for a minute, and then sighed and said, Probably, as if he regretted that this was his
honest answer. Then he put the same question to me; would I be able to forgive him if he slept with someone else? No, I said, trying to see it and only being able to imagine murderous rage and
intolerable pain. I know, sighed Johnny.
    I was curious about Carl. He was outside my experience. He told me that he once had sex with a girlfriend and then her sister, in the same day. He didn’t tell me, or I
can’t remember, whether the big sister knew about the little sister and vice versa. I was fascinated that he had had so many lovers because I had had so few. Apart from Katie, and the
sisters, the one that stood out was a girl called Lorna with bright red hair. I could tell he had loved Lorna more than he ever loved Katie because the few times he spoke about Lorna it looked like
it hurt him to remember. I asked why he and Lorna had split up if there was so much passion, and he said things between them were too extreme. They fought a lot. He told me she hit him a few times.
I asked if he had ever hit her back and he said no, but once, during a particularly vicious fight he shinned up a Stop sign at the end of the street and battered it until the metal buckled. After
he told me that, I had a good look at one of those signs to see if it was possible to dent the metal with bare fists, and I