Unfinished business

I was never entirely sure what the right analogy was for my first proper relationship.

At first, I thought that it was like a radioactive element, slowly degrading over time so that with each passing season there was so much less of it. Perfect at the start, toxic later on. In the latter stages, I started to see it more like an arcade game end of level baddie or Yul Brynner in Westworld; every time you thought it was dead, every time you thought you had got to the end it would lurch to its feet again, angrier, noisier and more destructive than before. And then one day we got to the end and the corpse didn’t even twitch, it just lay there in unnatural silence. I was just shy of twenty-one years old in my final year at university, and I had absolutely no notion of what would happen next. There was, after all, no precedent.

After getting through the awkward phase when we didn’t speak came the awkward phase where she was convinced I was seeing someone else, a friend of mine. She would wake up every morning at seven o’clock and check the curtains of her suspect’s room, and then she would get on her grotty bike and cycle glowering into town, scaring the traffic and the policeman gesturing elegantly with white gloves on the crossroads at the top of the hill, to check my curtains. They were never both drawn on the same day. Then came the awkward phase when she took her investigation to the next logical step, camped outside my college room, all angry spiky angles and barely contained fury, pretending to read a copy of More magazine, convinced that I had another girl in there.

Finally came the very awkward phase – morning, to be precise – when her suspicions were confirmed.

Even after the dust had settled from that awful day she wanted us to be friends, and to my surprise I found I wanted that too. When we finally separated, I had realised that one of the main things I felt was sadness that I’d never find out how everything worked out for her. It seemed crazy to me that you could spend years closer to one person than anybody else, that they could be the person who heard and told you the smallest details and the tiniest quibbles, that you could share all the most significant pieces of nothing in particular, and that when it was all over you were supposed never to speak again.

It’s a very long fall from all to nothing, or at least it feels that way when you’re not yet twenty-one and there is no precedent. Now, with the benefit of many years of bigger and sillier mistakes, I wonder whether in truth that drop gets even more perilous as we get older. I think perhaps as we grow and develop the concept of “all” gets larger and more complex and our memory of what it’s like to have nothing at all gets hazier and more distant, and therein lies the danger.

As we went about trying to be friends after two years of trying and failing to be so much more, it was a different analogy which came to mind. To do otherwise would have felt like putting down a novel halfway through, incomplete and not right.

I wanted to know how it would all end; whether she would ever make sense of her parents’ marriage and whether they were happy, or why they stayed together if, as she suspected, they weren’t. I wanted to find out why her brother was so vile and how she could protect her sister from those feelings of gloom and lack of confidence that had blighted her own childhood. I wanted to see how she would find a place in the world where she belonged. Even if we hadn’t had a happy ending I still wanted to stick around to see her find hers.

Over the fourteen years that followed we managed to stay friends with varying degrees of success, fourteen years in which she went out with a range of guys, none of whom was remotely like me and none of whom I remotely liked. Meanwhile, I went out with a number of women, most of whom she seemed to barely notice. I spent an unsuccessful month staying in her flat, hiding in the kitchen with her flatmate when she got home from work in what we both called “one of her moods”, but never to her face.

She visited me numerous times and got off with most of my friends. There were many long and bafflingly oblique phone calls. One unsuccessful affair she had with an attached man took up hours and hours of my life, talking round and round in circles about why he wouldn’t leave his girlfriend. I was forever being asked questions that he probably had no answers to, or none that he’d tell her anyway, and I certainly didn’t have any magic words to say. I would always come away from those conversations simultaneously thinking I hope she gets what she wants and Thank goodness that isn’t me.

The last time I saw her, a couple of years ago, she got very drunk and nearly trashed my front room by accident.

We haven’t spoken in over a year now; things just petered out, and I’m not sure we will again. But what I learned from the friendship, partly from her and mainly from me, was just how naïve I was. Relationships and friendships, partners and friends – they are indeed like novels, but not the type we all used to read in the good old days with neat conclusions, where wonderful things happen to the richly deserving. No, they’re more like the books I read now, where the end seems to be an arbitrary point in time that could just as easily have come twenty pages sooner or a hundred pages later.

I’m not sure she ever worked out what was going on with her parents. Her brother, as far as I know, is still vile. Her sister grew up normal and happy despite everything, not because of anything she’d done. I don’t think she seems any more at ease in the world now than she did when I met her, when we stayed up in her college room until six in the morning and I thought, for that very first time, this is it, I’m really going to kiss her (I didn’t know then that it takes a very rare relationship for that not to be the finest moment). Nothing gets resolved, and life goes on all the same. We all fight with these themes all our lives, and only sometimes do we make sense of anything. If we do, you can bet it merely serves to shed more inconvenient light on all the other things we still have to learn.

That is, I’ve discovered, just how things work. If you feel cheated when the book closes, not to be revisited, then maybe you’re just missing the point. There will always be a minor character lurking in a couple of stray paragraphs that you wish you’d found out more about. There will always be a relationship unresolved between people you are willing to find one another, only for you to never discover whether they do. There will always be conversations unfinished, opinions you wish people hadn’t kept to themselves or letters unsent which only exist somewhere in somebody’s head.

And when the ending comes, whenever that is, twenty pages too late or a hundred pages too soon, there will always be a tangle of loose ends like a nest of snakes.