an ending…

She left at the end of summer. After a year he knew he would never see her again. He left the french windows open and locked the door. Eventually removing the door frame and jamb, pinning plaster board in the recess, a skim of plaster. Hanging paper on the wall, painting it in a soft modernist grey paint. And then…

Some time before, Marcus looked at the light through the mist, the low cloud that was passing slowly over the roof of the house and thought that he’d better hurry back. The path was long and at first steep, paved with tarmac and stone. It was damp in the morning light. There were clumps of rosemary, seal and young beech trees besides the path. the air was damp and bleak and when he looked down the hill he could see across the valley to the fields to the north. Here we are again, Marcus thought, walking up the hill again. Perhaps it’ll rain again tomorrow. Marcus always found himself thinking in the first person plural in those days. He wasn’t really sure when it began, perhaps when she became ill. He had spent too long at the pharmacy, looked in the window of the bookshop and felt a moment of worry as he thought of how nice it would be to browse. It was nearly irresistible for him, just to look and find something different. Later he thought, later. And walked back up the hill to the path. From the path he could see the house roof and the side windows. The rose bush that climbed up the front of the house and fanned across the front elevation. The lights embedded in the ceiling of Lou’s room were on, he could see the tall book cases, whilst he couldn’t make out the titles from the path as he walked towards the house he could see the phenomenology head and knew that the shelf above it contained copies of books by John Cowper Powys. As he entered the garden Marcus reviewed the objects he remembered on the shelves, wooden jewelry boxes, a few of her favourite classical music CDs, shelves of books on psychoanalysis. Out of sight to the left he knew that there was a chest of drawers that contained white Egyptian sheets and duvet covers. It had been a long time since Lou had sat down at the desk beneath the window to write, either laboriously in her elegant long hand, or typed into her Apple computer. In the past, before, Lou had loved writing for a purpose, detailing her clients sessions, working to record the actuality… Whilst Marcus had tended to read and eventually write in an attempt to escape from the tyranny of the taught language, nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives behaving like orders, as if they and he were imprisoned. He knew it was far too late to say to her that the fuzziness of language, the undefined edges of the word(s) as ideological objects, had enabled him to escape from the prison house of language. Before he went upstairs to give Lou her medicine, he went into the kitchen and whilst cold water poured from the tap he looked at the books laid out on the table. “The books of a life” He said aloud. Pavese, Brecht, Simak, Jung, Freud, Klein, Von Arnim, Taylor, Woolf, Volumes of obscure poetry. As he drank a glass of water he thought of how the months of her illness were making these things vanish…

Marcus looked at the photographs on the wall, above the chest on the wall to the right of the window, there were other photographs on the chest, mostly of Lou and himself, and a photograph of her mother and family which contained a picture of her as a child. Marcus had a few photographs of his family on the bookcases in his office library. The photo on the wall was of Lou standing beside him, his arm around her her her. He is smiling broadly, she looks serious in her straw hat with a dark blue asymmetric dress bias cut to the left, he has a dark linen suit on, a dark blue shirt with yellow threads which he still remembers with affection, but cannot remember when it was disposed of… Her dress would no longer fit her wasting away body. I loved her in that dress, Marcus thinks, how did I love her for so many years? That moment so well captured by the camera lens was full of other significant details, the garden, the forgotten hopes of a woman who still imagined she would have a child with the happy man standing beside her. Immediately after the photograph was taken she had put her arm around his waist and hugged him. Spoken to her friend who was pouring lemonade into glasses and smoked a cigarette… The choices we made… Marcus said out loud[…] There are some photographs of the last good summer, in one they were walking arm in arm past the blackberry bushes on the other side of the wire fence. She had a serious expression on, perhaps she was already thinking of leaving? Why did she choose that ? And here there are photos of a dinner party, they are happy and drinking. The photo had been taken towards the end of the evening and most of the people looked relaxed, slightly drunk perhaps […] There were family and friends, a few young bohemians looking stern and neurotic, neurotics out for a walk drinking red wine and eating fish soup. He was sitting besides her, neither of them looked particularly happy. He remembered that they had both lost. What brought us to this ? what made us look so cautious in that picture? Spacetime is as strange as any place. Last of all there was a photograph of her, already ill, thin faced and grey when she returned…

The nurse told him that Lou was having another attack, it must have been bad because she had buried her head in the pillow to stop crying, moaning until the drugs took effect. She is asleep now. The nurse was a youngish woman, perhaps in her late twenties who had been coming to care for Lou for the past year, for 24 hours a week. Thanks for helping this morning, I’ll take over now see you on Monday. The girl went home, walking away with a familiar swaying motion. There is some food I prepared for her. As Marcus took some water upstairs he could hear her walking down the gravel path. Upstairs he quietly opened the door into Lou’s room. she was breathing heavily. he looked down at her, oh Lou. He went to his own room and hung his jacket on the chair. Opened the window and enjoyed the breeze. Once he’d slept in the bed in the room behind the wall, the two of them. He didn’t understand why he was well and she was so weak and ill. After the separation they would have been separated by a virtual wall anyway. If she hadn’t returned they would probably have hated one another by now, perhaps even finally divorced. Paper documents between them, fuzzy, covered with meaningless legal terms. Now though the only way out was death, of him or her. Perhaps before when they had loved one another it had been more definite and identifiable. Now though it wasn’t like that, (duty, and responsibility, he thought ) sometimes the hatred and resented made him want to hurt her.

Lou moaned through the wall. This was the noise she made when she woke up, she only ever woke up in pain and with screams now. The sounds of her misery punctuated their days. Marcus got up and unwrapped the medication from the paper bag and the packaging. Inside the box of were glass bottles of pain medicine, some form of morphine he supposed. He placed them on the circular Arne Jakobson table. There was a metal box containing sterilized injectors wrapped in plastic. The vials of medicine, pills of chemotherapy in neat rows. Lou was awake and knocking softly on the wall. Attracting his attention. He filled the first syringe with morphine. The second with… (you get the idea) removed the air bubbles and taking the alcohol swabs. “Ï’ll be there in a second Lou.” He supposed as he left the room and went into her room that he should not be feeling hate or love as he opened the window to allow the cold air into the room. He sat beside her hold her hand after the first injection. “I’m sorry Lou, I wish it could have been different….” And after a few minutes injected the second and then the third injection… Marcus’s hands were steady until it was over, only then did his hands his hands start shaking. He almost fell down the stairs on the way to the kitchen. He drank some vodka. Turned on the Pavoni and phoned the Doctor…

I watched him leave in the winter. Driving away to leave his persistent misery behind. It began to snow as he loaded his three bags into the car, a bag of clothes, a Rabelaisian trunk of fifty books and another bag of technical things into his car. He stood for a few moments looking at the car as the snow began settle on the roof and garden. I enjoyed watching him turn off the gas, electricity and the water, leaving the grey folding doors at the back of the house open, snowflakes swirling into the house and melting on the floor. In the evening as it grew dark it froze…