What is this constant need to escape? We escape with booze, with books, with films and telly, with drugs, with daydreams ... anything to drag us away from the reality of the present, this moment, the here and now. I constantly weave fictions round my life. Alternate realities where I am the master of every situation, where I star as avenging hero or the silent and deeply wronged. My mental life is a constant replay and re-scripting of what I should have said and done, or of extrapolating the real into the possible and exploring every angle of it. I am the callous Lothario and the devoted and tender husband, and the man so scarred by love he can never love again. I am the eloquent politician denouncing the brute, the rapist, the molester of children; I am the judge deciding fair and just sentence; the vigilante deciding on his own. I am the victim and the perpetrator, the audience and actor, the hero and the villain. I walk upon the moon and the Antarctic, plumb deep-sea depths and travel to the stars, cross scorching deserts and trackless jungles ...
I scribble words on paper, drop the pages in a box.
And sometimes the boundary greys and blurs. Sometimes it is hard to remember where one world ends and the other begins. My life is a ghost story in which I am both the spectre and the haunted. How can I be anything else? My past and present hover round about yet, even to myself, I'm a vague and insubstantial thing, a will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly presence inhabiting neither world. I know my alter ego better than I know myself, or anyone else for that matter, and yet he is a mirage, not-even-ghost, the fiction of a fiction.
But better that than the vision I had of Marie. That wasn't the true her but some mythical form, some ideal vision, a fiction of my own devising that I overlaid on her frame. And off I went again, not seeing the trees for the forest.
How can I of all people — despiser of the image, the front, the pretence — believe in love at first sight? Yet I am still the victim of the fairy tales of my childhood. In the cold reality of the adult world I still, deep down, believe in, long for, hope for, the beautiful princess and the happy-ever-after.
I have let myself indulge in a fantasy about her and I know the cure for that. I began by imagining the courtship, now I'll fantasise the split. It will end with me turning away down a darkened street and walking off into the distance, a sad but resolute figure stepping into the gloom between guttering street lamps as the music rises to a climax and the final credits roll. Or perhaps on the tarmac of Casablanca airport where I'll deliver a few poignant lines and steer her towards that painful parting that we both know is really for the best. One last kiss and goodbye forever.
At least I am conscious of my illusion. Dreams can fade, can crash and burn, and we survive, can pick up the pieces, console ourselves. But what happens when those pieces are themselves mirage? What happens then?
Woz was guilty, sure, but she could understand. Who hasn't been tempted by possessions or the touch of young flesh? ,
She could forgive, she could wait, she could continue, holding fast to some vision of the future. And when he slipped away ... how typical, you couldn't help but laugh! Always alert to any chance; they should have seen it coming. Some day perhaps a cryptic card, a letter, a ticket to exotic lands, a summons to his side ... And consolation even if it never came: a fading dream, new life slowly seeping in to replace the old, time healing and distracting. Perhaps in years to come, 'I wonder what became of him ...'
The cruellest thing I have ever known; the most brutal, fiendish torment ever devised. The four most vile words ever spoken, what Woz said of my mother: 'Which one was she?'
There are emotions beyond tears. There are feelings beyond description or comparison. Just the void left when everything else is sucked away. The falling aircraft in the fateful dive, just praying for the impact.
What else of Woz remained after the death of dreams? A few old gifts and book-pressed flowers to be looked on fondly and stroked with care. Memories. And the thing they'd shared at close of day, sitting on the porch-swing or side by side on the sofa, or slumped across the kitchen table too tired to even go to bed; a cigarette.
And even I, in the precocity of teenage years, realised the importance of the Sunday legal more lethal than an ice-block stick. It was not the thought of you-know or the ingrained images of another documentary that kept me silent. It was the look in her eyes, the downward cast of her face, the loss, the pain, the shadow begging for the crash-and-burn as she drew in deep and tried to hold, like clinging to his memory. At last the exhalation, sometimes, often, shaky, close to tears. Another gasp, another grasp, but nothing can be held forever. And later, on her deathbed — Sunday legals had done quick work, a will too frail to fight — in a miasma of drugs and pain, slipping in and out of consciousness, reality and dreams, she took my hand and clasped it to her, murmuring with a lovely smile, 'Oh Warren, Warren, you silly, silly man. You shouldn't ... You mustn't ... You really cant ...'
Dear Mum. I hope your dreams were sweet.