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"This Damn Woman. . .

From the moment that the word passed his lips I suspected that I knew the culprit.

". . .then this damn woman turned across two lanes and almost took the front end off of my car!"

There followed yet more circumstantial evidence which convinced me with absolute certainty of the identity of the guilty party.

"Bloody women driving their poxy little Renault Clios," he fumed, " in the adverts they're always driven by slinky, sexy French bints who say 'Papa' and have quirky smiles, but this bitch just raised two fingers at me then sailed off down a side street."

I decided that now was probably not the time to inform Alan that 'this damn woman' who he was ranting about, was due to meet us in The Tumbling Sailor in about half an hours time. Alan's tirade on Susan's driving ability did not surprise me. There isn't really a time which I can recall that I didn't know Susan, we joined school together when we were four, she wide-eyed and quiet and I buck-toothed and bawdy. She was not the kind of person who makes a lasting first impression, indeed I was aware of her for a long time before I noticed the physical presence of this small, waif-like girl in a chequered dress who frowned slightly as she worked and bent her head down over the desk until the tips of her hair brushed the gashed graffitied wood. In my teens she became perhaps my first love, we had a great deal in common and would talk for hours. We were destined to keep in touch long after the relationship fizzled out, dying as it did from far too much in common. It is also one of life's little mysteries, the friends we stay in touch with and those who we never hear from again. Some friendships seem to require proximity and others appear to flourish with only sporadic contact. This appeared to be the crux of my changing relationship with Susan, acquaintance, friend, lover, friend and then old friend (acquaintance-style). For the past five years our contact had been brief but friendly, some scrappy letters and hasty phonecalls, the odd message conveyed through mutual friends. Susan's brief blooming as she entered her early twenties seemed to have been cut short by a cataclysmic bust up with her partner and uncomfortable relations with her parents. Theresa, her mother would badger me to find out how her own daughter was doing every time I nipped in to the coffee shop that she runs in the town centre. Ongoing feelings of guilt about the rows of recent years seem to plague her cheery mind. Yet Susan was always a more cerebral person than her mother, having more in common with her father, a solemn man. The gregarious side of her personality had subsided once again and her retreat was both mental and physical. She moved out of town and into a quiet village near the forest where she nursed a hurt ego and seemed to reach conclusions about the course of her life. I had been a great surprise to me when she rang up and suggested we meet, for it had been years since we'd seen each other face to face.

Indeed, the last time I'd seen her she had driven me back from the cinema in the early hours of the morning and had scared me senseless.

She'd wanted company, it still being only a month or so after the break-up with Louise.

"That was a great film!" she enthused, "The computer generated effects just took my breath away. I mean it wasn't long ago when films had actors standing in front of a blue screen, waving their arms about while some poor 'action' footage whizzed unconvincingly behind them. But now it's just impossible to know what's real and what has been knocked up on a computer."

"I liked the bit where the wind just swept the barn away."

"Yeah," she laughed, "still, it was just a complete rip off of 'Twister'"

"Who cares! It passed the time."

As the words eeked out I realised I'd put my foot in it and an extended silence followed. She led me to her car and drove quickly from the deserted car park. The late night showings only sold out very, very rarely.

"I still miss her dreadfully" she sighed in the end, taking a corner too fast in fourth gear. "The weight of her body beside me in the bed, the gentle sleeping noises which sounded so odd at first and then so odd now that they're absent."

In my mind at least this seemed to be the acid test for whether you are destined to be with someone. I had never felt comfortable lying next to Susan, young though we were at the time. I was afraid to breathe too deeply in case I kept her awake and pissed her off, I was afraid to roll over incase my jiffling disturbed her and I was worried about what my breath would smell like in the morning. Lying there, barely breathing, feeling as though I would have to gasp for oxygen at any moment, my arm going dead beneath me I understood that I was simply not comfortable sleeping with this girl. I suppose I didn't trust her.

It is trust, not love in the end that has dominated my relationships for there is an etiquette in love which is shattered at the moment a relationship ends.

"She said that she didn't feel comfortable sleeping with me," growled the driver as she veered onto the wrong side of the road, "sound familiar?"

"Look, I think we both know why WE didn't feel comfortable." I smiled.

"Don't you lay all this on me!" she exclaimed.

"Whoa! I just meant that it's subsequently become clear that I was never going to be the right person for you."

"But I thought that she was!"

"I know, I know, I still can't for the life of me see why Louie left you so suddenly."

"Is it something I do?" she asked, I hoped she was asking rhetorically when she unfortunately elaborated, "she told me that I was bad in bed."

"Now, don't dwell on things like that, it's just sour grapes Susan. Everyone says things like that when they bust up."

"We never did."

"We never had the chance to." I corrected her.

"I just can't understand why she has to be so mean."

"It has been quite a stressful time for you both. I mean, after you brought your relationship out into the open you didn't really get much support, you know, from friends and family."

"We upset so many people on the way." she sobbed and then swerved heavily to avoid a pigeon which was sitting unruffled in the centre of the road.

"Yes," I had to concur, "you did."

She drove the rest of the way back in silence, concentrating on the road but not driving any better, the tears swamped her vision.

"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked as we drove into Kidderminster.

She shook her head and pulled straight on to a roundabout without slowing down at all.

"I haven't got work tomorrow, I could kip on the sofa, keep you company, if you wanted me to." I grinned, "At least you can be certain this isn't a come on."

She giggled, nodded and croaked a reply, before veering the car off towards the side of town where she rented a flat. After the hair-rising ride, she parked the car with consummate ease and grace, then let us into her flat, the chubb lock sticking slightly as she turned the key.

The flat was dishevelled and there were strange patches of clear space where furniture and belongings had once stood, before being removed by the absent partner.

"She came during the day with a transit van. The old lady next door told me about it, if she hadn't I might have thought I'd been burgled, except it was so tidy and neat and precise. Every little thing she owned she took with her, every little thing I bought her too. She left the stuff we bought together, but some of the things she took were just so petty. When we moved in we both had kettles, it's one of the funny things you find when you move in with someone, just how much duplicate stuff you end up with. Anyway, I'd lost the lead for mine and Lou's kettle got knackered shortly before she walked out. So we started to use my kettle with her lead. Then, the day I got back to find she'd taken all her junk I went to make myself a cup of tea to try and settle down, but the bitch had taken the lead with her, she'd left the damn kettle and taken the lead! It made me so angry, I had to boil the water in a pan. I just couldn't believe how petty she was being. I don't think that I ever wanted to strangle that blond bitch more than at that moment."

I could never get used to Susan swearing. The words sounded unnatural on her tongue, unused as it was to saying them.

"I really need a drink." she announced.

I took a seat in the front room and looked around, in the corner was a NICAM video recorder hooked up to a small black and white portable TV, another couple of mismatched things  forced together in the wake of separation. Susan returned with an armful of bottles and two small glasses.

"It's a weakness I have, I know, but I can't bare to finish off a bottle of spirits. Help me clear some of this debris."

I selected a green triangular bottle of whisky which had only a glassful left in the bottom.

"That was her favourite." sobbed Susan as she watched me fill up my glass and stand the bottle carefully at the side of the sofa.

Susan sat at the other end, the bottles rattling slain between us. She poured herself some Grand Marnier.

"I like this stuff on pancakes," she grimaced as she tossed the empty bottle onto the floor. It fell by a copy of 'The Rainbow' with an uncrumpled spine which suggested that it had never been opened.

"I really thought we'd be together forever." and then knocked back the spirits in one, "After a while you just reach a state of mind where you can't imagine a chain of events which would lead to a separation, but I was caught out, I was so naive, there was no chain of events, only a terse, unreal, dreamlike conversation and a half empty flat."

She pressed the palm of her hand hard against her forehead and the flesh between the bones in her hand looked waxy and white.

"Then, in a mindless state of blissful ignorance you start to rely on your other half, you begin to plan for a future that the other person never intends to honour. But do you know what galls me the most? It's the fact that I was so certain, so complacent of our love that I went and had this done."

She turned her back to me and pulled her top up and there, etched starkly beneath her white cotton bra strap was a perfectly circular celtic knot. I sat and stared transfixed at the cords of interlacing black spinning and spinning in neverending waves. It covered an area between her shoulder blades the size of a saucer.

"Have you got any idea  how much a fucking great tattoo like this hurts when they prick your back with endless injections? I had to sleep on my fucking front for months!"

Again, the vulgarities seemed strangely swallowed in her throat, as though she was having trouble eating a boiled sweet.

"And she ducked out of it." came a muffled encore, "We were going to have symbols of our love etched forever on our skin. But despite all of her declarations and urgings and cajoling  she took one look at the tattoo she'd bullied me into, at the pain she'd put me through and backed down. But still I wasn't aware that it was all about to end."

Then, red-eyed she turned her back to me and slumped. At that moment life seemed to have left her and I was suddenly reminded of my friend's dog, sedated and old at the vet, and about to be put down.

*  *  *  *  *

Yet there was little of that wrecked soul before us as we strolled in to the 'Tumbling Sailor'. Susan was carefully applying a pale lipstick to her thin lips, peering uneasily into a pocket mirror. She smiled wanly and greeted us.

"You wouldn't believe the day I've had!" she moaned, "the traffic was just dreadful!"

"Yeah," I concurred, trying desperately not to burst out laughing, glancing conspiratorially at my companion, "Alan, was just telling me that his drive in had been hellish."

But Alan missed my glance, indeed he barely seemed to notice me at all. He held out his hand and in all innocence addressed Susan,

"Pleased to meet you."

İMark Sexton 2000