Intimacy Read Free Page B

am frightened now I will feel worse tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. All this, in the name of some kind of liberation. But terrible feelings go away after a time – that is one of the terrible things about them.
    At university I met a woman as sad as me, if not sadder. For six years, before I met Susan, we lived together. To me now, that seems a long time. But then I imagined there would be time for everything. We slept in the same bed every night, and cooked and ate together. Our friends took it for granted that we wereone, though at times we had other lovers. About once a month we would have sex. It was the late seventies, and relationships were nonchalant and easy, as if it had been agreed that the confinement of regularity made people mentally sick. I think I believed that if you didn’t have children monogamy was unnecessary.
    I want to say the smell of mimosa reminds me of her. I want to say she will always be with me in some way. But it has gone, and she is an unmourned true love.
    But Nina has not gone from my mind. I am unable to let her go, yet.

I force myself to eat
    I force myself to eat. I will need strength in the next few days. But no tomato has ever tasted so intransigent. Suddenly Susan touches my face with her fingertips.
    ‘You,’ she says.
    ‘Yes?’
    Maybe she can sense the velocity and turmoil of my thoughts.
    ‘Just you, Jay. It’s all right. Only that’
    I stare at her. The kindness of the gesture shocks me. I wonder if she does somehow, somewhere, loveme. And if one is fortunate enough to be loved one should, surely, appreciate it. I have been anticipating an argument. That would certainly get me out of the house tonight. But I know I must do this sane and sober, and not run out of the door with my hair on fire, or while hallucinating, or while wanting to murder someone.
    Tonight I want to be only as mad as I choose; not more mad than that, please.

This is not my first flight
    This is not my first flight. You see, I have run away before. As a boy I would sit in my bedroom with my hands over my ears while my parents raged at one another downstairs, convinced that one would kill the other and then commit suicide. I imagined myself walking away like Dick Whittington, with a spotted handkerchief tied to a stick over my shoulder. But I could never decide on a destination. I did consider going up north, but Billy Liar was one of my favourite films and I knew that northern malcontents, when they could, were fleeing down south.
    A few years later, one dreary afternoon, a friend and I walked out of the house and took the train from Waterloo to the coast, and then a ferry to the Isle ofWight, where we expected to catch Bob Dylan performing ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. All night we lay out in the drizzle in our tie-dyed T-shirts and frayed jeans, returning home the next day, disappointed and afraid. My mother was crying ‘What have you done?’ as I stepped back into the house. I was muttering, ‘Never the same again, never the same again.’
    I was right. My excursion was all round the school. It increased my standing with the hippies who had previously scorned me. They invited me to a party where I met their group – girls and boys from the local area, aged from thirteen to seventeen, who spent most evenings and all weekends together. They smoked pot, or ‘shit’ as it was called, and took LSD, even during classes. In the houses of absent parents, the parties were orgies, with girls and boys openly copulating and exchanging partners. Most of the children were, like me, fleeing something: their homes. I learned it wasn’t necessary to keep one’s parents company. You could get out. A decent teacher had shown me a Thorn Gunn poem, ‘On the Move’, which I tore from the book and carried in the back pocket of my Levis. At parties I would lie on the floor anddeclaim it. ‘One is always nearer by not keeping still.’
    You gotta go.
    Again.

After we have cleared