Signs of Life by Anna Raverat Read Free Book Online Page B

do anyway .
What a marvellous coincidence that there just happened to be another man I wanted! For a long time I believed that the affair with Carl only became a possibility after things had already started to
go wrong with Johnny. This has been an excellent place to hide. I’m not saying it isn’t true; it may form part of the truth but sometimes part of the truth is no better than a lie.

Seven
    I entered each of his habits as if they were rooms I had never been in before, looking around to see whether I might make myself at home. I didn’t like all of his habits,
but to begin with it may have seemed to him that I did because I was exploring with a fascination that held off judgement, if only for a little while. I discovered a way to get him out of a sulk.
Once, when things were not comfortable between us, Carl walked out of the cafe where we were having breakfast. I drank a second cup of black coffee to put off the moment I had to encounter him
again. It was sunny outside in the street, a beautiful fresh morning, like today. The car felt airless but I couldn’t coax him out. He sat in the driver’s seat with his back to me, I
stroked his head, combed his hair with my fingers. We stayed there like this for some time, two bored monkeys, until a strange closeness had grown up between us again.
    I came home one evening, I don’t know where from, and as I turned into our street I saw Johnny drive up the road away from me. I didn’t know where he was going so I
ran back to the main road and down to the next street where he would almost certainly come out. Sure enough the silver car appeared. I waved, but he did not pull over. He stopped at the junction
with the main road. I saw then that he was leaving me because the car was piled high with his possessions. I went to the window, already wound down, and asked where he was going but he didn’t
want to say. He was unshaven, and the shadow made him look gaunt, unless he had lost weight during that time and I hadn’t noticed. What shocked me most was that he had a bottle of beer in his
hand and this was something that Johnny would never, ever do. He didn’t want my concern; he swigged his beer and drove off, leaving me standing in the road.
    This picture of Johnny is still clear in my mind because although he was distressed, it suited him. He looked guarded, as if his only protection was to get away from me. I wanted him more then,
just as he was taking himself out of my reach, than I had in a long time. I had taken him for granted for so long that I had stopped seeing him. All the time I was carrying on with Carl I
couldn’t look at Johnny because I didn’t want to see what I was doing to him. It took him leaving me like this, his things in the car, drinking and driving, without telling me where he
was going, to wake me up to him again.
    Something else has been bothering me about the young man who hanged himself outside his girlfriend’s house. It’s this: on some level, his death was to be her
punishment for leaving him. And she took her punishment: I saw her, she wept and wailed, she lost weight, she couldn’t sleep, she stopped work for a while. After some time, she began her
recovery, and a few years later she married. I’m glad for her, I am, it’s just that, from a distance at least, there was something formulaic about the whole thing.
    Long before Johnny left, Carl and I were scheduled to go on a business trip together. We had already started and then stopped our affair several times. The trip had been
planned for months and would have been tricky to get out of without our director asking questions I did not want to answer. We were to have a week in Wales, making presentations to new funders and
meeting existing ones. The Friday before we left, I got Carl alone on the fire escape. Nothing’s going to happen in Wales, I told him. OK, he said. I had already booked and confirmed
reservations for separate rooms in each B&B or hotel.
    On Sunday