Last night your mother and I planned a Boxing Day party. Please come.
Whatever has gone before.
Though life with you in the not-too-distant past seemed unbearable, it’s become undeniably clear to me recently that life without you is much worse.
I’m trying to find the courage. I want to put the past behind us. I’ve looked at my life and I see it clearly now: it was never for me, always for you. But something is broken between us, something more than my heart.
‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’ Albert Einstein
I’d like to accept your mother’s invitation; I’d like to be introduced to the new you. I’m not sure how I will cope if you say no, if I’m not allowed in your presence at Christmas and if I’m banned from seeing your play in March, from congratulating you at graduation and celebrating your twenty-first birthday in July. From being a part of your life.
So please.
Please.
I will be good. I will try very hard to obey your rules, to avoid ‘us’.
I’ve always tried to be there for you and now I just want to be your friend. I’m living my life: walking the streets and making my plans like I always do, but it’s nothing without you.
I paid Carson what he was owed because I want you to be safe. I don’t want to know the details of what is going on, but I am here to help you. I hope you know I am not requesting this information for myself, nor am I hoping to buy your friendship. It is worth nothing unless freely given anyway.
So please consider it, in the spirit of Christmas and the love I promise not to mention again. I promise, from this point forth, to live by your law.
Yours humbly
Matthew
*
From: MandyPerrett@vmail.com
To: Natalie Lucas <sexy_chocolate69@sweetmail.com>
Sent: 5 December 2004, 18:32:16
Subject: See you in January
I got plane tickets now. I have work all night and all day. My boy says me, Mummy, why I never see you? I say I saving for him, to make his daddy pay. And now I saved. I buy plane tickets to come to luvvy England for christmas, see his daddy and his girlfriend. I know you live in Durham. I saw his emails to you. Love love love he talks about. They all say he’s beside you right now, don’t they? How romantic. But you feel ALONE! Haha. You should hear him talking about you in the bars once he stops his Fuck Bus. His little trick. Easy English girl. Cute ass.
Well I teach your ass a lesson.
You better run back to Mummy miss middle class woman daughter. Maybe she let you suck on her titties and protect you, because you going to need it when I arrive.
Mr Carson tell me not to contact you. Well fuck him, Mr court sympathiser. He can’t protect you now.
I’m coming and he can’t stop me.
You better make me tea when I arrive at your door. Yes.
Say sweet things to me.
English muffins and tea. Crumpets too. La di da. You say sorry. Tell Mandy sorry over and over. Down on your knees like the whore you are. S O R R Y.
You will be. Bitch. I make you sorry.
One month not so long.
Then you pay.. You made me a criminal. Now I make you pay.
You write to judge and say sorry, say Mandy not a criminal, I the bitch whore fuck the bus driver like a slutty slut.
Cos if you don’t. I mad enough to do anything. I swear I do anything. Why shouldn’t I? I a criminal now anyway. So I do criminal thing.
You fuck my man. I fuck you. That fair. Only you stay FUCKED.
You better be home.. Better open the door and say you sorry. Else I beat down your door and burn down your house. I hunt you down and make you pay.
S O R R Y
You will be.
My set texts and the library books I’d kept past their due dates were scattered around my bedroom in various states of dissection: marginal pencil notes highlighting devices, questioning assumptions and hoping to justify my place at a top-ten university. In contrast, Matthew’s communications were only ever read once, scanned in horror then placed hastily in a box beneath my bed or filed uncritically in a corner of my hard drive. If I’d printed all the emails, bundled them up with the letters and carried them into a seminar group; if I’d asked six or seven Literature undergraduates to inspect and analyse them, I may have seen a different story:
Click for example transcriptions of these letters
Perhaps this activity might have saved me weeks of insomnia and months of anguish; perhaps it could have pointed all fingers at Matthew and eased my mind into labelling him a miserable, psychotic freak rather than questioning its own sanity and directing the same words inwards. Or perhaps such marginal notes as these are only the manifestations of my psyche as I try to make sense of a seemingly senseless situation; perhaps they only bleed onto these pages as I try so hard to capture Matthew’s distinctive tone, cadences and voice without pilfering his exact phrases and opening myself up to a plagiarism prosecution. Either way, they haunt me now, niggling at my nervous system in the same way a phantom whiff of Matthew’s aftershave seems to find my nostrils once or twice most weeks, causing me to swivel in the supermarket aisle or turn on the street.
Unfortunately, at the age of twenty, my literary common sense was relegated to the classroom. My reactions in my bedroom, on the hallway floor where the post landed, in the living room where I half expected Matthew’s face to emerge from the darkened garden at the window, and in the shower where I soaped and scrubbed my foolish tattoo, were anything but rational.
Finally, three more counselling sessions and another breakdown in front of Tim later, I went to the police. An officer came to my house. She sat at the Argos table in my dining room and listened while I sobbed through an incoherent account of what had happened. I held printouts of the most recent emails. She glanced briefly at the one on top and told me it seemed like one of the men was lying. I should talk to both Matthew and Rob. I should also close the email account and encourage no more communication.
‘Ring this number if you have any more problems.’
I glanced up the street as she climbed back into her blue-and-white car, relieved that none of my housemates had returned from lectures.
I then sobbed in the hallway and shrieked at the stairs.
‘Hey you.’
‘Hey.’
‘Isn’t it like 3am for you? What are you doing up?’
‘I need to ask you something.’
‘Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good. Are you okay?’
‘Not really.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Uh, quite a lot.’
‘More about the old creep? Well, you want to tell me?’
‘Do you have a wife?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘A wife? Do you have a wife and a child?’
‘What is this?’
‘I’m sorry, but do you? I need to know.’
‘You’re serious? You think I have a wife I haven’t told you about?’
‘No . . . I mean, I just have to ask.’
‘Wow.’
‘Now you’re mad.’
‘Well, yeah. Why would you ask me that?’
‘Because I’ve been getting more emails and I had to go to the police and they told me to ask you.’
‘So, you don’t trust me any more?’
‘I don’t know who to trust. I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Some old creep has been harassing you for more than a year, but you think it’s me who’s lying to you? Jeez.’
‘No, don’t be like that. I just needed to ask.’
‘I’m hurt that you have.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I mean, you only told me about all this shit a few weeks ago. And I’m on your side, I think it’s awful and I want to help, but you gotta know this is a lot for me to take in anyway. And now I’m being dragged into it too and you don’t trust me.’
‘I do.’
‘You obviously don’t, or you wouldn’t have rung.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not coping very well.’
‘I know. I’m sorry too. But I don’t know how this makes me feel.’
‘Please understand.’
‘I do, but I’m still hurt.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I think I have to go.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t deal with this right now.’
‘You can’t just hang up.’
‘I’ll, uh, call you tomorrow.’
‘Are we okay?’
‘Get some sleep.’
‘I love you.’
‘Bye.’
Click.
*
Natalie, you were once the actor, the actress, the voter, the politician, the emigrant and the exile, the criminal that stood in the box. I was the stammerer, the well-formed person, the wasted and feeble person. And together, for the briefest of moments, we were something beautiful. But now, we stand, simply a man and a woman’s body at auction, waiting for the highest bidder in this heartless world. You became she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly, who cried for more and tossed her withered lover away. As I undulated into the willing and yielding day, you bit into its sweet flesh and spat it out, demanding something sweeter, crying out to be filled with the charge of the soul even as you closed your own soul off to the world.
Don’t worry, closing your email account doesn’t mean you’ll get a flood of letters from me instead. I’ve tried not to be involved. I too have cut my email connection to the ‘mafia’ that is Rose’s lawyers and to Carson. I haven’t wanted to know any details so that I couldn’t be accused of being involved. I’ve always had your interests at heart, you must know that. I would have done more had you asked. I saw one of the adverts and I was in shock. I jumped in as I’m sure you would have in my place: to help. To save your reputation, and you. Your safety has always and will always matter to me.
I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you and your opinion of me in the process. The world is yours now. I’ll avoid your places, our places. I give it all to you. I always have. I won’t come to Durham in January, unless you ask me to. As of this letter, all the money you owe me is written off. I will stay out of your life unless you ask me back into it, unless I have written instructions in a letter or email. I will avoid your play in March if you want me to stay away.
All I ask is that you come to the Boxing Day event at your mother’s. You know how I feel about socialising with them all; my only reason for going is to see you. So please, come for an hour, just one hour. Smile at me doing my droll persona thing, then leave. Let’s begin a truce with a smile.
You wanted your ‘normal’ life and you almost got it. Almost because, however many times your mother tries to say it is, there is nothing ‘normal’ about a relationship with a middle-aged bus driver on another continent. But it is your life and you’ll see that soon, I hope. Or perhaps he’ll grow bored with your tantrums and your stubborn inability to take advice.
I forgive you, though. And I forgive your mother for making you who you are. For all of your impossibilities, you are still that wonderful woman and girl I met in 2000. We wouldn’t struggle with each other so if it wasn’t the purest of loves. We knew it back then, even if we sometimes forget it now.
You have left me in the dark, Natalie, but even in my blindness, I pray for you, and I beg of you never to forget that if anything is sacred, the human body is sacred. Look after yours, my truant lover.
Have a nice Christmas. I wish you laughter and happiness and I hope to see you, for just one smile.. that’s enough for now.
Matthew
What happened on Boxing Day? Not much: nothing out of the ordinary, nothing devastating or unexpected. But the day haunted and tortured me from the moment I woke from my worried non-sleep to the first polite opportunity I could find to excuse myself to bed. Before the party, my mum snapped at me for not helping her prepare the house and told me I was spoilt when I muttered I wasn’t in a sociable mood. I fluffed cushions and arranged cutlery with a sense of impending doom. Two years ago I’d been excited to help set up for our festive meal; I’d spent the day buoyed by the euphoria of my erotic secrets, and I’d probably disappeared to masturbate and text Matthew about it just before our guests arrived. I’d offered people drinks and made idle chatter while stealing glances across the room and whispering more and more dangerous things as I became increasingly tipsy. Even a year ago, brooding for a seven-hour flight and wishing I could have stayed in America, I hadn’t dreaded the joint of pork and strawberry trifle with such alarming intensity.
This year I felt haunted by the ghosts of my past selves. Child, lover, liar. Had Matthew known the familiarity would turn my stomach? Had he hoped I would be lured back into my pre-Rosella state? Was I supposed to forget the emails, the private detective and the promised lawsuit because he smiled and handed me a Christmas present? Or was he planning something? Should I be afraid rather than just apprehensive? Might he ruin the evening with a clink of his spoon against a glass and tell everyone everything? Would he get me kicked out of my house on the day after Christmas in the hope that, with nowhere else to go, I might knock on his door? Could he tear apart my family at a time when it should be most united? Or perhaps he would protect himself and just bring up the emails, the woman in Boston, Rob and the pictures on the internet? Might he call me a whore in front of my mother and her friends?
But Matthew created no scene, he made no pointed comments during general conversation, and I noticed no furtive glances. He was polite and charming to everyone. He persona’d his way around the dinner table and enquired about my studies. He and Annabelle gave me a notebook and a candleholder, and once we were done with dessert, he suggested we take our coffees to the lounge to watch the Charlie Chaplin shorts he’d dug out this morning. He didn’t even try to sit next to me. As he’d promised in his letter, he was on his best behaviour. And somehow that was worse. I clutched a teddy bear in my old bed and tried not to close my eyes for fear of drifting into the dream world that so often pricked the backs of my eyelids lately: a monsterless nightmare where Matthew and I didn’t hate each other and I still snuck off to see him, still told him I loved him, still touched my lips to his. I woke in sweats from images of us laughing at the others and playing cards in his kitchen, making love and checking into hotels. I lay in the dark trying to bring myself back to now, but reaching out my hand and tormenting myself with disgust, I touched the wall of my childhood bedroom; the wall on which I’d stuck poems and quotes and the bronze ankh Matthew’d given me summers ago. There was no escape here.