He was surprised to find
himself back in The Weekend It All Fell Apart.
Everything physically
seemed to be the same: the solidity of the cottage, the foreignness of the feint
background bleating, the characterfully dilapidated guitars on the wall, the
comforting aroma of cold lasagne, the silent Olympic highlights flickering across
the old tv. The way he felt was the same: that special emptiness that comes
with not having slept, that tension of needing to create but being prevented
which is so like taking too deep a breath so your lungs are crying out to
exhale, that ill-defined cocktail of anger, frustration, uselessness,
disappointment and waste.
The difference was him. He
was residing in the person he once was, but fully in the character of the
person he was now – complete with the knowledge of what was about to happen and
the over-analysis he had subjected it to in the intervening time. He was
getting another chance.
He turned down the volume
of his passive-aggressive slide guitar exercises – which he had also
editorialised to a far greater level of competence than he had probably
actually achieved – and as he channelled his aggression into the barely-audible
instrument he was formulating what he wanted to say.
She was still disturbed
and still came down to tell him to shut up, though with a significant reduction
in the level of her rage. He got her to sit down, and began the speech he had been preparing for so long.
“Why don’t you understand,
Soph*” he implored, “I have spent considerably more money than I actually have
and endured the second most uncomfortable journey of my life for the
opportunity to come here and work to save one of the most important things in
my life. When I say work, I mean really work hard. I came here expecting long
hours of sweat and aching fingers punctuated by moments of drunken, exhausted
solidarity. I fully intended to be asleep right now too, because I thought we
would not long have finished yesterday’s epic eighteen-hour session. I spent
the whole day yesterday slowly lowering my expectations with each wasted second
and convincing myself that working harder for eight hours at night would at
least be enough to justify the whole thing. When you went to bed after three uncooperative,
unproductive hours you broke my heart. It was all I could do to stop myself
screaming after you ‘why don’t you care?’ because, seriously, why don’t you
care? How can something that means so much to me mean so little to you? Didn’t
you realise that, however much we try to pretend otherwise for the next few months,
yesterday means it’s all over? Can’t you see that, despite my own numerous shortcomings
and failures, whenever I cry myself to sleep wondering where it all went wrong I’m
going to look back at yesterday and hold it up as example of everything being
your fault? In real life I was so much less erudite than this and spent this
morning fuming silently at you and childishly annoying you. In real life after
today I never speak to you again, so in real life I never get to explain how
much you’ve hurt me. In real life I never get to beg you to explain: why don’t
you care?”
“I don’t know the answer
to that,” she admitted, “because I’m not really her. I’m an avatar of her
created by your imagination and as such am unable to understand her emotions
any better than does your subconscious mind” and with that she faded from view
along with all those tangible memories of the room until all that remained was
fuzzy Olympic highlights and a distant baa.
“It is, at least,
comforting to know” he thought “that even if in this situation neither of us
comes out of this any better.”
*names have not been
changed to protect the innocent
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