Walking from Murder Mile with a bag of my clothes in a holdall, I stop to call Vanessa from a pay phone.
“It’s me,” I tell her. “Is it cool to come over?”
“Sure. What’s going on?”
“I left Susan. It’s done.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe later, but not now.”
It is curious, because the relationship that I have had with Susan would be unfathomable to Vanessa—indeed, sometimes it is unfathomable to even me—and I feel like I am talking in riddles when I try to explain it. I have been through breakups before. Some extremely messy, some protracted, but none as oddly noneventful as this one.
I started the conversation by telling Susan that Vanessa and I had been sleeping together. I had spent most nights over at her place since that first time. I expected that she already had assumed this, and Susan seemed entirely nonplussed by the information. She said something along the lines of “Well, if that’s what you need to do.”
“It is what I need to do.”
“Well, fine. What are you telling me for? Is this supposed to turn me on?”
We lapsed into silence again. I had waited until Susan was high on dope, because I had seen her completely break down about the smallest thing—from a phone call from her father to a charity appeal on television—if she wasn’t sufficiently insulated from reality with drugs. But so far, so good.
“I am telling you, because I am going to move in with her. I think we have a future together, and I don’t think that you and I have a future together.”
Susan lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking. I was struck again by how much like a little old lady she was beginning to look. Her eyes betrayed fear, despite the opiates in her. She sucked in a lungful of smoke.
“What about my paperwork? I’m illegal here. You’re abandoning me and now I will never be legal here.”
“You won’t be legal even if I stay. We didn’t even begin to file your papers in the whole time that we’ve been here.”
“But what am I going to do?”
I could hear that old hysterical note creeping into her voice. This was it. I had to do it now. “I can’t help you anymore. My life doesn’t lie here. You knew this wouldn’t last. We never got married thinking that we would grow old together. I’ve found something else I want.”
There was silence again.
“Then go,” she said, quietly. “Just go.”
And that was it. No tears, no screaming, no begging to stay. I packed my things and walked out. What do you do, when you make a suicide pact but both of you survive? Was I a coward for not trying again?
As I walked toward the train station, I realized for the first time in years I was walking with purpose. I walked Murder Mile, past the Jamaican patty stand, and the fried chicken and halal kebab signs, past the junk shops and the kids lurking by the pay phones hawking crack and stolen mobile phones. I felt my chest loosening, as if I were really breathing for the first time in years. I walked into the sodium glow and train rumble of Clapton station and I realized that for the first time in recent memory I was not afraid.