1001 Nights Cast

I lived in an old house; rickety, and the stairs were steep. Whether it was in the despair that lurks in the small hours or in the way I got worn down at work that day I don’t know—it was frantic, I mean truly frantic from before lunch until well after midnight and I had to find time to skip out for—anyway I don’t know, but when my girlfriend came in, 2.30am, she found me passed out under the bright lamp, a book I’d been reading folded on my chest.

Of course she thumped around the room just like an elephant, and I woke tired and grumpy with my head all broken to hell and her saying hello in her warm, fuzzy, drunken voice.

‘Hello! Aw, look at you.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Did you catch up with your brother today?’
‘Mmm.’

(I had met him for lunch near his work after a job interview. It went disastrously and I was looking for consolation. I felt like I was starting to get a sermon instead so to cut him short I said, ‘Look mate, save your new age shit. I’m not in the mood for it today.’
My ever mild-mannered brother raised his eyebrow.
‘You’re never in the mood for listening to anyone other than yourself, and all you do is bitch and moan and mope about. And since you’ve been doing exactly that for more than an hour, I’m late now. I’ve gotta go.’)

‘So how did it go?’
‘What?’
‘Your brother. The interview. Everything.’
‘Mmm. I just want to sleep.’
‘Okay, okay.’

I vaguely recall her folding the book shut, laughing at the grumpy state I was in, but I must have fallen straight back asleep.

The second time she came in it was a whole two hours later, nearly quarter to five in the morning. She thumped into the bed and tried to cuddle up to me, her hands all over my face, her freezing body against my backside, the fresh smell of liquor on her breath. Something told me she’d been crying.

‘You’ve been downstairs drinking?’ I asked her, incredulous. She mumbled ‘No’ and ‘no fun’ and something I didn’t quite catch that ended with ‘after all it’s Friday’. Wanting sleep more than any story, I let it slide.

But I was still annoyed and though in truth it wasn’t all that bad, I couldn’t take the coldness of her body against mine. Each time I moved she moved into me. In the end, I lay awkwardly on my side on the edge of the bed with my hands extended, holding her away from me until, not knowing in her stupor which way to turn next, she seemed to settle down.

Seemed. Minutes later she rose and fell on me hard as she scrambled for the door. It took my breath like a sucker punch. She apologised, and then immediately fell on me again.
‘Sorry sorry. I feel like I’m going to be sick.’

I was fully awake by this time and listened with concern as she negotiated the treacherous staircase, slipped and fell again on the stairs with an enormous thump—breaking the worst of her fall, I saw the next morning, by tearing the old wooden hand rail from the banister.

I listened until I heard her thick vomitty coughs.

And then, just when I could relax, it hit me harder than any of the physical pummelling she had put us through: a wave of infinite sadness that had everything to do with me and nothing to do with my drunk girlfriend. It was the accretion of things and my whole and continuing genius for failure, which I knew was a little melodramatic but was also how it seemed at the time. I just felt wretched in every direction.

It’s easy to say in hindsight, I saw it coming but, even though we had never really fought that night, I do think there was something of a premonition of our impending split in the hollow of my stomach. And a week later when I came in from work, there it was on the table downstairs, without any little ‘x’s, or even a goodbye, her note:

‘I’ve thought about it all day. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. Anyway, in answer to your question last night—Yes, I am going to leave you. I’m going to leave you not because I want to, but because in everything you do and say you seem to be wanting me to leave you. With you there is nothing positive, in anything. At the very least not where I’m concerned, but I think it goes way, way deeper than that. And after a while, a person like that just gets—YOU—get too hard to prop up all the time. I’m tired and I want something different, something fun. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I hope you are looking for something.’

The strange thing about it, the real reason I think I recall that day so vividly, is not just that both my brother and my girlfriend were saying essentially the same thing at the same time, but that it marks the point when I actually started to listen to them and found something else: the positive side of the coin.

So the way I choose to remember that night, to remind myself, is not my despair, not my green-at-the-gills girlfriend or what I lost when she left me, but her all cuddly and affectionate late the next morning when we woke, smiling—beaming at me, and repeatedly telling me how lucky she was, how much she loved me, and saying: ‘May flowers grow from your heart’.