Читать книгу More Short Stories to Read on a Bus, a Car, a Train, a Plane (or a comfy chair anywhere) - Colin Palmer - Страница 3

FOUR

Four! Life wasn’t meant to be this way. Four! It was supposed to be better than this, it should be better.

The first one he understood, and should have learnt from the experience, thought he had – he was young back then, heck, they were both young – childhood sweethearts through high school that everybody said were the perfect couple. Both parents were resigned to and accepting of the fact that the two were inseparable, bound together for life. It seemed the natural thing to do but he knew they’d only done what everybody had expected of them. He’d never mentioned marriage. She hadn’t either, well not directly but there had been a few occasions where she’d hinted, like one of the many times they wandered along the main street, hand-in-hand, she pointing out a ring in the window of the local jewellers, you know, nothing obvious to the manboy he was then! He knew better now.

So why did he do it? Expectation, peer pressure, parental pressure – all of those, after all, it was what everybody else wanted. Oh, and of course there was the sex. It had been the first for both; messy and awkward to begin with then settling into a seeming never-ending series of quickies wherever and whenever the desire was mutually demanding, and the surroundings suitably discreet. It provided no real reason to get married. Ah, but it was the first – short and sweet and full of lessons he would go on to relearn over and over again.

Number two was a surprise. He was still young but on the rebound, and not over the embarrassment of the first short-lived union, so he should have known better but there were extenuating circumstances, or so he told himself. It was payday, and with a full wallet he’d gone out on the town with a group of friends. Like many young people, alcohol fuelled desire, and there she had been on the dance floor, gyrating and swiveling her hips in a suggestive motion he believed was only for him. He woke up beside her the next morning, in her bed, in her bedroom, in her parent’s house. They swapped numbers, he gave his work number and not his home phone, and they passed like anonymous ships in the night.

Four months later, yes four, she rang him at work and asked if they could meet. Her voice seemed bright and there was no hint of reproach that they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since that one and only night. He vaguely remembered her, and was startled when she walked into the coffee shop a few hours later at the appointed time. She was beautiful, and that came as a surprise to him because he hadn’t even been able to recall the colour of her hair. They exchanged a brief uncomfortable hug and he looked at her over the table with a question fixed firmly across his face. He didn’t have to wait long – she was pregnant! More of life’s lessons learnt the hard way.

He did the right thing, they married. When the baby comes, everything will get better they told themselves and each other. Her parent’s disapproved, his parent’s disapproved, friends – his and hers – disapproved, and he strongly felt it would turn out perfect because they were starting off almost exactly the opposite to his first marriage.

Twenty-four years old, married twice already and this time with a baby on the way. The learning curve was fast – it had to be because they knew virtually nothing about each other. It remained a marriage of strangers however, and when the baby did come, there followed a short period of elation that did bring them closer, even disapproving family and friends appeared to soften. In an instant his perspective of everything in the world had changed because now he had a daughter – but he was still married to a stranger. Then the real father, the biological father came onto the scene, returned from overseas deployment. The baby, his baby, was one year old and no longer his.

Number three happened ten years later and resulted from a blind date of all things! He never thought it would happen again … the bitterness of losing a family, the distrust, the lack of loyalty and honesty had honed a keen edge of self-protection which he believed would never be breeched. He was older and wiser now and so was she, having a failed marriage herself. They took it slow, the show of becoming familiar with one another had no apparent time limit but as the clock ticked, so did she begin to share the desire for a family, something she didn’t have a chance to begin in her first marriage. She explained her fear of menopause and he listened intently with complete awareness of the painful loss of his daughter fresh again in his mind.

After four years, uhuh, four, of dancing around it and in the complete belief they were doing the right thing for each other, they married. He was forty. Four years later, of course four, after trying desperately and unsuccessfully for a baby, they divorced, a mutual decision after numerous visits to doctors, specialists and even IVF clinics.

He thought he was scarred for life but then his best friend brought home an overseas bride. He observed how hard that little lady made the marriage work, always doting on her husband and even when the kids began to come, she still made sure her man was never feeling left out or forgotten. On the birth of their third child, her youngest sister came from the home country to visit. She appeared to be a more beautiful version of her older sibling with the same attention and focus to what was important – her family.

On his fiftieth birthday, they married in the backyard of his friends’ home. This time it will work … he was positive and he was happy – positive that she would have the same inane desire as her sister and happy that this, his fourth, would be the last. What a disaster! How was he to know that she’d grown up totally dependent on her older sister? She didn’t know how to cook or care for him and she spent all her time helping her sister at her place, which was okay to begin with but then she began staying overnight, saying she had to help with the kids, then finally, after protracted arguments, admitting she had only married him to stay in the country with her sister.

Alone again. Alone but not lonely, he had his thoughts, his many and varied thoughts to occupy his time. Those very thought processes became self-assessment periods where he tried desperately hard to discover how he could have been so wrong four times.

Four.

His father passed away after a short illness and he became occupied for some months helping his mum to sort out the family home. He saw the sadness, and more importantly, the loneliness his mother displayed after the grief began to slide away. The grief disappeared first, the sadness took much longer but the loneliness never seemed to leave her. Amongst many questions he’d broached during this time, he asked one he wished he’d asked forty years earlier. How did she and his father manage to stay married together all those years? Sprinkled amongst her many responses was a recurring theme to which he scoffed, but never forgot.

Love.

Love. Such a fallacy, a fairy tale perpetuated by books and movies. Novelists were full of crap and movie makers were driven by the almighty dollar and none of what they produced had anything to do with reality. Love, ha!

Four.

Four times he’d tried it and apart from the emotional blackmail of the second, he thought he’d been in love. Even that second failure he’d been willing to try and when the baby arrived, he felt he had fallen in love – but with somebody that wasn’t his to love.

Love, phooey!

Seventy years old, retired and living in his old family home now after his mum died a few years ago having never got over her loneliness. He spent his days doing odd chores around the home, occasionally visiting or being visited by old friends, doing the necessary shopping but always, always occupied with his thoughts.

The walk to the shops wasn’t far – there was a big mall only a block away but he usually chose to walk in the opposite direction, to the corner store his family had patronised ever since he could remember. It had changed hands many times over the years but successive owners had stayed true to the spirit of what a neighbourhood store should be, except malted milks were replaced by slurpees and redskin lollies by chup-a-chups, plus the large windows and entry door were sealed after hours behind roll down steel shutters these days.

On this particular day, his walk to the store was like many before it, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, the traffic on the relatively quiet suburban road hummed slowly by. The sounds were natural and normal and unheard as he walked, until a loud screech of tyres prompted attention. His eyesight wasn’t as good as it used to be of course, and he had to squint against bright sunlight and the halation off the windscreen of a car now stalled in the street.

He heard rather than saw a woman loudly shrieking, and he hurried toward the sound as he made out her silhouette in front of the vehicle, evidently hers. As he approached, only a few meters from her now, he saw the body of large dog lying on the road in the shadow at the front of the vehicle. The woman continued to shriek and he was aware of other people coming out, looking over fences or through windows but he was the closest. He glanced quickly at the dog which hadn’t appeared to move so he grabbed the woman to draw her away from the scene, and as he did, realised she had her back to him surveying the relatively minor damage to her car and not looking at the dog at all! She let him drag her off to one side before she turned to look at him.

Her eyes were twin, dancing, blue flames, full of venom and anger that he didn’t understand, until he managed to interpret her muted threats at the stupid mutt that had spoilt her day and damaged her car. He released her and stepped back away from this thing full of her hate, shaking his head to clear the vision she’d imprinted on him, an image he was sure he’d seen somewhere before.

He turned his attention to the dog which was now feebly attempting to lift its head. He quickly knelt by her, cradling her head for support and to stop her from trying to stand. She was a large breed, Newfoundland or something similar, and knew it would be impossible to lift her on his own. Her big head lay still on his forearm and he thankfully saw no blood but never having owned a pet of any kind before, he had no idea what other damage she might have sustained. The weight of just her head was considerable on his old arm so he slid one leg underneath to provide more support. As he did this, her long tongue slid out and licked his hand, her way of showing appreciation. He gently patted her with his other hand and she moved a little to tilt her head, then opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her gratitude was evident but there was something else as well, something beyond pain, something he thought he’d never seen before but recognised nonetheless.

He closed his eyes as his mind wandered to the hate, loathing and disgust of the woman who stood nearby, now screeching loudly to others who had come to either help or from curiosity – heard her heinous and scathing comments about dogs roaming loosely and how it had received its just desserts, and he could feel her eyes again, those horrible eyes which twigged a memory, the memory of seeing his own eyes many times over the years, peering back from a mirror as he questioned himself about the sad choices he’d made. The answer had always been there but he’d been too selfish to recognise it, too self-centered to understand but this graphic and tragic demonstration had finally shown him, after seventy years, seventy long years, how wrong his own perspectives had always been.

He opened his eyes and the dog still looked at him, patiently waiting as if it knew his internal suffering – he sobbed and did his best to change what seventy wasted years had mistaught him … looking back with all the love he could generate from his old but inexperienced heart. She licked his hand one more time, a gentle slow tickle against his skin … and then was still.

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