50 Reasons to Say Goodbye (10 page)

The man's face is red; his eyes are too. For some reason, I stand. I put my beer down on the counter and take a step back; it's automatic, instinctive.

The man moves between Michael and myself.

Gilles turns, says, “Hi th …” He pauses mid sentence.

For maybe half a second no one moves, but then, before I can begin to understand what is happening, Gilles starts to run to the end of the bar, to the opening. As he runs he shouts, “Christophe! Non!”

My mouth falls into a silent
no
. I see the back of the man's head recoil, then thrust forwards. I hear a sickening crunch.

Michael's glasses fly through the air and land at my feet. His head lurches backwards. He staggers, his nose already sprouting jets of red, staining his white shirt. He falls against a barstool and Gilles catches him from behind.

Christophe turns, still dripping, towards
me
. “Fils de pute!” he says. –
Son of a bitch
.

I frown at him; my eyes burn with outrage. “What?” I spit.

We glare at each other for half a second. Instinctively I remove my own glasses, place them on the bar.

He glares at them, glares back at me.

Gilles starts to speak, “Christophe, you can't just …” but he's already heading for the door.

He turns back briefly to face Michael. “Salope!” he
shouts.
– Slut
. The door swings closed behind him.

Gilles lifts Michael to his feet and nods calmly towards the door. “Can you lock it?” he asks me. “In case he comes back.”

But Michael wobbles on his feet, one hand on the bar, the other holding his bloodied nose. “No,” he says walking slowly towards the door, “I have to go.” I reach down, grab his glasses before he walks on them, and hand them to him.

He pushes the door open – the rain is falling in white illuminated sheets. A channel of water gushes from an overflowing gutter to the right of the entrance. He pauses momentarily, looking back at me – still holding his nose. “Snice to meet you,” he says. “Au revoir.”

The door swings closed behind him.

I turn to Gilles. “D'you still want me to lock it?” I ask.

“No, not now,” he says, reaching over behind the bar to grab some kitchen roll.

I shake my head and open my mouth, searching for words.

Gilles crouches down and starts to mop up the blood specks.

“What the fuck was all that about?” I ask.

Gilles snorts, sighs, shrugs, and shakes his head. “They take it in turns,” he says. “It's what they do.”

“What, beat each other up?”

He nods his head from side to side to mean
sort of
. “Cheating on each other, getting drunk, beating each other up … that kind of stuff.”

I raise a hand to my nose. I wince. “Nice,” I say. “Real nice.”

“Et oui, ce sont des filles très chic,” says Gilles. –
Yes, they're very chic girls
.

Madonna is still singing.

I bend my knees the way I was taught, lift the box from the floor, heave it onto my shoulder, and start tremblingly up the stairs. Sweat trickles down my face, my arm, my neck.
“Why would anyone move in August?”
I wonder.

I look at the guy in front of me carrying one end of Yves' sofa. My eyes are level with his arse; he's wearing tight, faded jeans. “God, I feel so butch!” he laughs.

When the lorry is empty he says, “I'll drive you back if you want. I drive right past anyway.”

I hesitate.

“Get in,” he says.

His name is Guy; he talks constantly. “I intend to be living with someone by January,” he tells me. “Are you single?”

A single light flashes on a console somewhere deep down. It says, “Run away! Evacuate!”

I don't know why, maybe too many evenings watching T.V. alone, but I choose to ignore it and swap phone numbers.

Monday he phones to ask me to dinner. I say I'm busy and end up feeling bored and depressed in front of the T.V. again.

Tuesday when he phones to ask me to the cinema, I say, “Yes.”

I want to see
High Heels
, the latest Almodovar film; Guy wants to see
Notting Hill
. We watch
Notting Hill
. The warning light flashes faster.

He phones me on Saturday Morning. We wander around Nice Etoile together. He seems to know a shop assistant in every store. I listen to the chitchat and feel my feet ache.

We buy CDs at the FNAC – I buy Nitin Sawhney, Guy buys Celine Dion.

I resist sleeping with him or even situations where it might happen – for a while. We meet in cinemas and restaurants and bars, I want to be sure about something, sure that there is at least some point to it, and I'm not at all sure that there is.

My friend Yves raises an eyebrow. “If you want to be sure, then shag him,” he says. “Then you'll know right away.”

Two weeks later with a couple of drinks down the hatch, it happens. Guy covers me with slobbery kisses; afterwards he says, “I love you.”

It's all wrong, and I know this – the warning lights are accompanied by a small siren. So why am I doing this?

He invites me to dinner, and I meet his friends. They're all women and strangely, without exception are shop assistants. He defrosts the sauce, pours it over the pasta, and serves it on flowered plates.

I watch him being camp and pretentious, showing me off in front of them; I wonder what I'm doing here.

Guy kisses my head each time he walks past. He's always buzzing, always talking. I find myself zoning out, unable to listen to the word-by-word, act-by-act, argument-by-argument story of his day, but slowly, surely, I get used to it. At least it doesn't feel so empty when he's around.

He meets my friend Isabelle. “What the hell are you doing with him?” she asks.

“I don't know,” I say honestly. And it's true, I don't. Even so, I feel angry with her for not liking him.

In October, Guy says, “I want more, I want us to live together.”

I say, “No way.”

“If you loved me you would,” he says. “It's all or nothing.”

I try to bluff. I say, “OK then. Nothing.”

So we split up.

I spend a week sitting alone in my apartment eating dinner with my cat. My heart's not broken; I know that. But I miss him all the same.

“Maybe I am in love,”
I think. Maybe I just don't want to admit it.
And how come the bastard doesn't call anyway?

I wish I had two lives, so that in one I could go back to Guy, whilst in the other I would give up. At the moment of my death I'd compare the two and see which one worked out best.

I know it's not right, but I choose to move in with him.

I see myself from the outside; feel detached from my own actions. I watch this Mark character in surprise and I don't understand what he's doing any more.

I watch him miserably pack up boxes, shift them out, move them in. I see him negotiating the mixing and matching of furniture.

I keep thinking,
“Why are you doing this?” –
I carry on anyway.

Sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's good. He's not a
bad
man.

Sometimes he's sad and I empathise, then I momentarily connect to him –
“Maybe I do love him after all,”
I think.

It's just that there's so little man to love, so much of his character that is superficial cliché, all cynicism and retail-queen attitude. The substance of him flakes away the more you chip at it. His opinions can change on any subject within the hour, and then change back again; it just depends who he most wants to agree with.

I hang on to the old apartment for three months. There is no logic to it, but I just don't get around to dealing with it. I'm very busy, very stressed with my job. That's my excuse anyway.

Guy knows. He says, “It's empty, get rid of it.”

I say, “I just don't feel ready.”

He says, “If you loved me you would.”

He says, “Maybe you should just move back out if that's how you feel.”

I consider it for another month, a month of sulking and arguments, a month of dreading coming home and dreading having to discuss it again, then I hand back the keys.

“Are you sure about this?” asks the man from the agency, looking into my eyes.

I shrug, say nothing and walk away.

“I've been offered that job in the States,” I tell him one evening.

It's a week after our first anniversary. I didn't have the heart to mention it a week ago when they told me.

Guy pauses, a forked prawn halfway to his mouth – it drops back to Earth. “You're not
thinking
about it are you?” he asks. “You wouldn't.”

The weather forecast is there for all to see, storms
brewing. I laugh. “No,” I say, staring at my plate.

I marvel at my own weakness.
What has happened to me?

Guy sulks for a week anyway.

We look through holiday catalogues, but none of the holidays appeal to me, I really just want to go travelling in a camper van.

“You'll like it,” Guy insists. “It's just what you need. The perfect anti-stress: palm trees, beaches …”

I imagine the sea lapping at my feet. I look at the man in the picture, sipping a cocktail at a beach bar.

“Maybe he's right,” I tell Isabelle. “Maybe it
is
what I need.”

She looks at me as if I am an alien. “Whatever,” she says.

We book it; I pay. It's the most expensive holiday I have ever had.

But I hadn't imagined the trilingual Italian DJ. I hadn't imagined the shared breakfast tables, the children's disco, the jugglers, the clowns or the Club-Med representative prodding me awake as I doze on the beach, prodding me to tell me that I'm missing all the fun.

I wander up to the pool, to see what exactly the fun is.

Guy is there – I see him lined up with everyone else. Everyone is drunk, everyone is pink and sunburnt – a couple of hundred people in a circle around the pool.

Euro-disco is blaring from the speakers – a Swedish sounding girl-star with a horrible high voice singing a Madonna song.

The Italian DJ is on a platform overhanging the pool. He's moving his hands to the right, moving his
hands to the left – he's shimmying and rubbing his arse.

They copy him: the fat middle-aged women, the wiry old men, the six year olds, the blonde Essex girls, Guy …

I look at him uncomprehendingly as he wiggles his fingers above his head, his face distorted with childlike joy.

I am frozen, I cannot move – the flashing light becomes a whole panel of flashing lights, a stream of roaring, screaming sirens, and they have all been there forever, except suddenly now, I hear them. They fill my head and I know what they mean.

“And ready, and one two three
spin!”
shouts the DJ.

As Guy spins he catches sight of me, smiles broadly and beckons me in.

I force a smile and as I wander away the sound fades behind me. The man on the beach tells me again that I am missing all the fun.

“Fuck off,” I tell him.

“Why didn't you come?” asks Guy over dinner.

I tell him that I hate it, that I can't think of anything worse.

He says, “You'd have such a good time, come tomorrow?”

I shake my head.

“Just try? For me?” he says. “If you loved …”

I shake my head. I interrupt him. “I'm sorry, we're very different. I hate it, I think it's bollocks. I think it's the worst holiday experience imaginable,” I say.

His face falls. He eats in silence for a while. “You're so uptight,” he says, finally.

“Not uptight,” I say, “just different.” But in a way I think he's right. Even if I did want to get up there and dance, I couldn't. I'm too reserved.
“Too worried about looking stupid,”
I think. Too aware that I
would
look
stupid.

“Well, if that's the way you feel,” he says.

“Look, does it matter?” I ask. “I mean why do we have to agree on absolutely everything?”

He looks sullen; he pushes his plate away. “You have to spoil it,” he says. “I haven't had such a good time since …”

“I know,” I say.

He stares at me. “We never have any fun together,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“I'm sick of it,” he says. “I'm sick of you. I want more, and if you can't give it then maybe …”

“I know,” I say. “Look, I've been thinking … About that job in New York …”

We first chat via Compuserve, the proprietary pre-Internet email and chat service. My company is sending me to New York for six months and though I'm happy to escape; I'm scared: New York equals death on the streets, the sound of gunshot, police sirens that wake you up in the night. It's also a place where I don't know a soul, not one contact.

I decide to post an ad in a New York gay forum and see if anyone wants to befriend me. Julian Barclay is the first to answer my ad.

He replies immediately and the following messages show an openness that astounds me. He's a warehouse manager; he lives with his boyfriend, Bill. They're bikers, he'd be happy to show me around.

After a week or so I have received other replies but they are all either weird, or as the Americans would say, after my ass. I'm quite scared enough as it is.

Julian and I exchange a few more emails before I leave. He lives on Long Island, they have a big place; I must go and visit sometime.

My own apartment turns out to be tiny, hugely expensive (for my company) but very central Manhattan, thirty-seventh and sixth.

On the second day, I call Julian from my new phone. I hear his voice on the answer-phone for the first time. It is rich and masculine. He calls me back around eleven-thirty p.m. – I've just got into bed. I tell him this and he asks if I am naked and laughs.