Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still our overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
William Shakespeare
Everybody, I should imagine, has at some point contemplated what life is all about.
Of course, wiser men than me have come up with enough answers to fill a book of quotations a million times over. Who these men were and why they thought that anybody should listen to them just because they had the gift of eloquence and wit is beyond me, but this is where I jump onto the bandwagon with my own theory…
As far as I’m concerned, life is a road that forks left or right, and these new roads in turn fork again, and again, until you turn to look back to where you started from and realise that you haven’t got a clue. Every decision we make alters our path, and the hopes and dreams that we start out with are a million miles from the hopes and dreams that we end up with.
Sometimes the decision is trivial and unimportant, and these decisions send us down a road more or less identical to the original and do not affect the outcome of the day at all. But there are other decisions – big life-changing decisions that we try to ignore in the hope that they’ll just go away, but which never do, that can send us hurtling down a completely unfamiliar road so fast that we don’t even get the chance to stop and admire the view. Fate is a complete bitch that even the other gods are afraid of – she cares neither for the options nor the outcome. Her only concern is the next fork in the road, and the glee she derives from the look on our frowning faces as we pace up and down the hard shoulder, pondering, wondering and calculating…
I had weighed the options and reached a decision… I would tell Rachael how I felt. I would spit in the eye of Fate and take whichever road my decision led me down. Left or right. Good or bad. It was either that, or go crazy wondering. It was decided. I had made up my mind. Nothing was going to stop me…
In the end, of course, it made no difference. Fate was so far ahead of me she was almost behind me. Concentrating so hard on left or right rendered me oblivious to the fact that the malicious schemer was busy creating a detour – one that would rocket me off into a completely unexpected network of freshly asphalted roads.
With more forks than the Queen of England’s cutlery set.
But I’m jumping the gun again…
***
I woke up earlier than usual that Thursday morning, like a kid on Christmas day. I washed and dressed as usual – well, almost as usual… I caught myself looking in the mirror more often than I normally would, trying to see what I looked like through Rachael’s eyes. I decided that I needed a haircut, then almost immediately decided that I didn’t, and had a shave instead. I grinned at myself in the mirror, decided that I looked like a gormless wazzock, and concluded that I needed a haircut after all. Then I convinced myself that a goatee would have looked debonair and exciting on me, and I scolded myself for shaving so hastily without thinking first. It was only when I caught myself idly wondering where I could buy a false goatee that I realised how absolutely pathetic and ridiculous I was. I turned away from the mirror and headed downstairs for my usual caffeine and nicotine breakfast. With a bounce in my step.
***
All that morning I drove around in a blissful daydream, one percent of my brain taking care of the driving, the other ninety-nine percent euphorically conjuring up fantasies of what lay in store that evening. We hadn’t actually said where we were going, but my mind effortlessly provided all sorts of romantic backdrops. We were sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant. Rachael was laughing at something brilliantly witty that I had just said, her eyes sparkling, her hand reaching out to touch mine… we were dancing cheek to cheek on an empty dance-floor, a spotlight following our every move as we glided magically together as one… suddenly the backdrop changed again, and now we were dancing on a beach in the rain, a grey sky overhead, indifferent to the people around us who were hunched under their black umbrellas as they hurried home. I realised that this scene was actually stolen from a painting that Rachael had hanging in her hall at home, a beautiful picture entitled ‘The Singing Butler’, painted by a Scottish artist – Jack Vettrioni or Vettriano or something… and then the image dissolved again, and we were driving home, a slow song on the radio, Rachael’s head resting on my shoulder as I skillfully manoeuvred the car through traffic… and so on and so on…
Reality hit me, or perhaps ‘bludgeoned me over the head' is a more appropriate phrase, at around noon, when I stopped at a phone-box to call the salon. Rachael had told me to call her that afternoon. She had probably meant later in the afternoon, after work, but her exact words had been ‘Call me again Thursday afternoon for final arrangements’, and I was pretty sure that one minute past noon qualified as ‘afternoon’.
“Hello, Curl Up And Dye?”
“Hi. Can I speak to Rachael please?” I could hear a hairdryer thrumming in the background, and a radio somewhere playing a song that I knew I had heard before but just couldn’t place.
“Sure. Hang on a moment. I’ll go and get her”.
There was a clunk as the receiver was placed on the counter, then, seconds later, the hairdryer was abruptly cut off. I listened to the end of the song on the radio, trying to remember the title. Then Rachael picked up.
“Hullo?”
“Hey you”, I said cheerfully.
“Joey? What’s up?”
What’s up? What did she mean what’s up? I stared at the telephone in horror – she hadn’t forgotten, surely? Oh my God, she had! And I didn’t want to remind her – that would be too embarrassing. I could feel myself going red as I stammered into the phone.
“I… um… I…”
“Hey!” she said suddenly, “you’re not phoning to cancel tonight, are you?”
The sun suddenly seemed to be shining brighter. I almost kissed the receiver.
“Course not”, I said.
“Good, ‘cos I’ve got a wax doll in your likeness at home. And a pin-cushion bristling with very sharp, very long pins”.
“Ouch”.
Rachael chuckled.
“So, Mr Bishop, now that we’ve established that you’re going to live, what can I do for you?”
“Um… I was just wondering what time I should pick you up, ma’am…”
“Pick me up? Joey, I live five minutes away from Da Quiri’s on foot. We can just meet there”.
Da Quiri’s?
That’s when reality booted me in the teeth.
Rachael and I weren’t lovers out of a fairy-tale. We weren’t characters out of a romantic novel, or some Scottish painter’s vision… I had blown this all out of proportion. Rachael and I had been out together before, and not once had we eaten in a fancy restaurant or danced cheek to cheek on a beach in the rain. We were pals, best friends, going out to a familiar haunt for a drink and a chat. Nothing had changed. What the hell had I been thinking?
The realisation that every hope, every dream and every fantasy was nothing but a castle in the air, intangible as smoke, was mind-numbing. I felt as if I was Santa Claus being told firmly that Father Christmas didn’t really exist. I didn’t trust myself to speak, knowing that whatever I said would come out sounding stupid, unnatural or insincere. I looked through the dusty glass of the phone booth, where someone with very little or no imagination at all had fingered in the words ‘also available in transparent’. A little old lady was standing outside, obviously waiting to make a call. She was wearing a huge lime sunhat made of straw, and an enormous pair of white-framed glasses that could have easily doubled as a shop window. She gave her watch a meaningful look as I caught her eye. I gave her a weak smile and lifted the receiver back to my ear.
“Joey?” came Rachael’s voice. “Are you still there?”
“Uh-huh”.
“So d’you wanna meet at, say, half nine at Da Quiri’s then?” There was a pause, then, “or did you have somewhere else in mind?”
“No no… Da Quiri’s is good”, I said quickly. I wondered if Rachael could hear the disappointment in my voice.
“Cool”, she replied. “So I’ll see you there, ‘kay?”
“Half nine”, I said dully.
“Right. Back to work then”.
There was a click as she hung up, goodbyes being something that happened to other people. I hung the receiver in its cradle gently, and stood there staring at it blankly until an impatient tapping brought me back to the present. I looked through the grey glass where the old lady, one red-painted fingernail still tapping, mouthed the words ‘are you done?’
I gave her a small nod and, opening the door to the booth, stepped out into the blistering sun. The old lady pushed past me with all the grace of a buffalo in a turnstile, but I barely noticed her. I got into the car and cranked the volume of the radio up to a brain-threatening ten. The Pretenders were complaining that they didn’t ‘make ‘em like they used to’.
I drove towards La Vallette, the capital, with one percent of my mind concentrating on driving, ninety-nine percent elsewhere…
***
I had once asked Charlie, before he had vanished off the face of the planet, why he had never asked Rachael out.
It was a boring winter Sunday afternoon; the kind of afternoon where there’s nothing to do but lounge about in the living-room, occasionally getting up to slouch over to the fridge, open it and stare at it’s meagre contents for a few seconds before sighing deeply and heading right back to the comfort of the sofa. The rain outside was tapping out an audition on the windowpane; the sky was a brooding shade of grey that Charlie described as ‘sulky’. On the television, a smiling weatherman in a charcoal grey suit which clashed horribly with his brown and beige striped tie was telling us what we already knew – it was raining, and not likely to stop.
Charlie was on the sofa, smoking yet another cigarette, his previous one a still smouldering dog-end in the ashtray. I was sitting at the dining-room table, playing with a bright blue plastic gun that could supposedly shoot soft foam projectiles ‘over fifty metres!!’ My boss thought that these ‘Funguns’ had ‘huge selling potential’, which basically meant that once the neon yellow projectiles got lost, as they inevitably would after flying fifty metres through the air, we could introduce the convenient refill packs, which cost almost as much as the gun itself. I wasn’t so sure – to me, ‘Fungun’ sounded vaguely pornographic. Little kids running around shouting “Let’s go to my house and play with my Fungun” wasn’t something that I wanted to contribute towards. Nevertheless, my boss had given me one to take home for the weekend, with the instructions “Try it out and see what you think”.
I aimed the gun across the room at Charlie’s head, and pulled the trigger just as he leaned forward for the TV remote. The yellow missile whizzed over him and bounced off a cushion onto the floor.
“Hey, a film’s coming on”, said Charlie, sitting back and turning the volume up, oblivious to my murdering ways. “Double Jeopardy”.
“Seen it”, I said indifferently, reloading the Fungun, “and so have you. It’s the one where her husband is…”
“Whether we’ve seen it or not is besides the point, Mr Two Thumbs Up”, Charlie interrupted me. “The point is that Ashley Judd is in it, and any piece of celluloid that she chooses to grace with her gorgeolicious presence is worth seeing twice”. Charlie tossed the remote aside and took a deep drag of his cigarette, before adding, “Now, you can carry on playing with your Fungun if you like, but I have a hot date with Miss Judd”.
I sauntered over to the sofa and leaned over the back of it. On the telly, Ashley Judd was watching in admiration as her screen hubby gave a speech.
“You are aware, of course, that dear Ashley doesn’t know you exist, and that even if she did, she wouldn’t go out with you?”
“Yes, smartarse, but for your info, I wouldn’t go out with her either”.
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, right”.
“Nope. You see, the fantasy is always so much better than the reality”, Charlie said knowingly.
“So what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t go out with anyone you’ve always dreamed about because you’re afraid that it wouldn’t meet your expectations? That’s ridiculous!”
Charlie just sighed and waited, a small smile playing on his lips. I knew what he was waiting for. This was turning into one of our ‘okay, would you… if…’ games. The ones that always deteriorated into the kind of preposterous ‘okay, would you have sex with a diseased wombat if, as a result, it would give you super-powers?’ question. That was how the game worked, each question getting more and more detailed and ridiculous until the most stupid question, the one that couldn’t be topped for pure banality, had been asked. Those were the rules.
Instead, I found myself asking, “Would you ever go out with Rachael, for example?” To him, it must have seemed like a weird question, to me it was perfectly relevant.
He tore his eyes away from the screen and looked at me, a slightly quizzical look on his face.
“What… our Rachael, you mean?”
“Uh-huh”.
“Why d’you ask?”
I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “Just curious”.
“Oh”. He turned back to the telly and took another puff on his roll-up. I waited for a couple of seconds and then circled the sofa, sitting down next to him.
“Well?” I said after a while, when it became apparent that Charlie wasn’t going to answer.
“Well what?”
“Would you?”
“What? Me and Rachael? No”. He leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, simultaneously reaching for his tobacco pouch with the other hand.
“Why not?” I persisted.
He turned to look at me again, a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead, his piercing blue eyes watching my face intently as if he were trying to read my mind.
“Not my type”, he said firmly, and immediately focused his attention on loading a Rizla skin with tobacco.
I leaned back in the sofa and digested this for a second or two.
“Not your type”, I repeated incredulously. I found that hard to believe – how could Rachael not be anybody’s ‘type’?
“Nope. It’s a cliché, I know, but there you have it”. He licked the gummed side of the paper and used his fingernails to form a perfect cylinder.
“Charlie, you don’t have a type! You’ve been out with allsorts…”
“Jesus, Joey, will you drop it?” Charlie snapped suddenly, shocking me into silence. Ramming his cigarette into his mouth he shot up out of the sofa and patted his pockets angrily. “Where’s my bloody lighter got to?”
Outside, the wind whistled like a jet-plane. On the telly, someone screamed.
“What the…” I started, finding my voice.
He glared at me, and yanked the unlit cigarette out of his mouth.
“Look”, he said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “I would love to go out with Rachael. It would be great. She’s charming, beautiful and intelligent. She’s funny and witty and everything that all my ex-girlfriends weren’t, and going out with her would probably be… would be, well, really fantastic. But I can’t, and I won’t”.
“Why the hell not?” I demanded, beginning to lose my temper too.
“Because I don’t love her that way”, Charlie said simply. “And it’s so blatantly obvious that you do”.
***
The telephone was ringing when I got home from work that Thursday afternoon. Dropping my rucksack in the hallway, I hurried to answer it, only to discover when I reached it that I was reluctant to do so. What if it was Rachael, calling to say that she couldn’t make it tonight because… oh, I don’t know… because Colin had finished work early after all, or one of a million other reasons? I stared suspiciously at the grey plastic box as if it were a ticking parcel, an emotional time-bomb waiting to go off in my ear. It was as if I had suddenly developed a phobia of telephones – phonophobia, maybe, or some other technical term that Charlie, if he had still been around, would have known the name of, if it even existed at all. I had read somewhere that the best way to overcome a phobia is to confront your fear head-on. Arachnophobic – pop down to the pet shop and ask to hold a big hairy tarantula. Scared of answering the phone –
“Hello?” I held my breath.
Silence. Only for a second or two, but to me it seemed like an eternity. Then a female voice said, “Bishop?”
I relaxed. Only one person I knew called me by my surname, and only one person pronounced it like that, with the ‘bi’ as ‘bee’ and the stress on the second syllable…
It was Yvette.
***
I suppose I should explain about Yvette now in order to avoid confusion during the telephone conversation that follows.
First of all, Yvette wasn’t her real name – I had no idea what her real name was. I called her Yvette because her voice reminded me of the sexy waitress of the same name who used to drive Rene’ wild in the British eighties sitcom ‘Allo Allo’ – a lilting musical French accent which, for some reason, conjured up images of croissants and blue and white stripy jumpers, berets and long cigarettes in slim black holders. I also had no idea what she looked like, but in an attempt to put a face to the voice I pictured her as that same waitress, with long black wavy hair and lips to die for, a crisp white blouse and a short black skirt. It was as good an image as any – in fact, it was better than most.
Yvette had come into my life on the thirty-first of November. I had no problem remembering the date because it was on that very day that Rachael had met Computer Bastard Colin at a Christmas party and fallen into what she thought was love, not knowing that all the love she needed was standing right at her side in the shape of little old me. But I digress…
I was sick with what Charlie called a Viscous Circle Cold – one of those awful colds where blowing your nose reduces you to a sneezing fit, after which you immediately need to blow your nose again, hence starting another sneezing fit, and so on. My eyes were red and watery and the combination of this plus my being forced to breathe through my mouth made me look like a pissed-off goldfish.
It was a freezing cold Saturday night. Charlie was upstairs in the shower, getting tarted up for a date with some girl he had met the day before at – of all places – a petrol station, and I was slumped out on an armchair in a cloud of self-pity, wearing a threadbare, yet almost supernaturally comfortable, dressing gown. The stove was hissing and crackling as the dancing flames forced the sap out of the huge misshapen log sitting in the grate. The television was off for once, partly because I was mesmerized with watching the fire, but mainly because I was feeling too apathetic to search around for the remote control. And then the phone rang.
“If that’s What’s-her-name”, yelled Charlie from above, “tell her I left five minutes ago!”
I groaned as I tried to reach the receiver from halfway across the room without actually leaving my seat, a feat that proved impossible. Getting sluggishly to my feet, I trudged over to the phone and picked up while simultaneously collapsing onto the sofa.
“Hello?”
“Pierre?” The voice practically spat out the word. It wasn’t a voice I recognized.
“Hold on a sec”. Covering the mouthpiece and lowering the receiver to my lap, I called out towards the general direction of upstairs.
“Charlie? You didn’t tell What’s-her-name that you were called Pierre, did you?”
“What? No!”
“Okay”. I lifted the receiver to my mouth again. “Sorry, no Pierre here”.
“Sheet!” came the voice, and there was an abrupt click as the unknown caller hung up. I gave the receiver an evil glare and slammed it down into its cradle.
“Where’s my wallet?” said Charlie, suddenly hopping into the room on one leg as he tried to tug a tan Doc Marten boot and walk over to me at the same time. He somehow managed to get to my freshly-vacated armchair before falling over. “Who was on the phone?” he asked as he tied his laces.
“Either a really bad bed linen salesperson, or a wrong number”, I told him.
“Oh”. Anyone else would have asked for an explanation, but Charlie was not a curious person by nature – a characteristic that occasionally pissed me off, especially when I thought I was being witty. He finished tying his laces and stood up. He was wearing a baggy white shirt and blue jeans under a long bright maroon raincoat. Unable to control his fetish for badges, tonight he was wearing a small blue one, which read, in tiny yellow print – “Thank God I’m an Atheist”. Charlie had over four hundred badges – he kept them all in a two-litre plastic ice-cream carton under his bed. I had once asked him why he was so fascinated with the things and he had replied, “It’s fun to watch people trying to read them while pretending not to”.
Charlie leaned over and plucked his ever-present tobacco pouch from the coffee table.
“Seen my wallet anywhere?” he asked as he started rolling a cigarette.
“It’s on the table”.
As Charlie limped his way past me, the phone rang again. I sighed and yanked the receiver up to my ear.
“Yes?” I said, waving Charlie away as he started mouthing the words ‘If that’s What’s-her-name…’ over his shoulder.
“Goddamn it!”
“Not ‘sheet’?”
There was a pause, then, “What?”
“You said ‘sheet’ before. What is ‘sheet’, incidentally?”
“I ave a wrong number”.
“Correct. This is not Pierre”.
“Sheet!”
“There you go again”.
Charlie walked past me, pocketing his wallet, and gave me a questioning look. “Not What’s-her-name then?” he asked sotto voce.
I shook my head. He responded by blowing me a kiss and waving goodbye. I rolled my eyes at him and waved back. Seconds later, the front door clicked shut behind him.
“I am terribly sorry”, came the voice in my ear, “I am trying to phone Pierre but I keep getting you”.
“Don’t worry about it”, I said amiably, “I’ve got nothing better to do. Who is this Pierre, anyway?”
At this point I was expecting her to tell me to piss off and mind my own business, so I was quite surprised when the voice responded, with a certain amount of vehemence –
“’E ees a bastard son of beech!”
I blinked and tried to find something intelligent to say, but she carried on as if talking to herself, her voice increasing in both anger and volume.
“’E is… was… my boyfriend. We ‘ave been ‘ere only one month, and today I am finding this!”
“Um… this?”
“This leetle note! The double-timing son of a sheet!”
“Two-timing”, I offered.
“Two-timing son of a sheet!” she corrected herself before lapsing into a stream of French which I couldn’t understand. Nor did I need to – it was obvious from her tone that she wasn’t exactly showering the hapless Pierre with compliments. I waited patiently – this was possibly the most interesting thing that would happen to me all evening and I was suddenly reluctant for the conversation to end, no matter how one-sided it was. Besides, her voice had an amazingly seductive quality to it – the kind of voice that can promise the earth and the moon and the stars in a single breath. It was at that moment that the image of Yvette came to me. Whoever this wretched Pierre was, I decided he was a fool.
Her voice finally petered out. I heard her sniff, and stifle back a sob.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Very much”, she said in a small voice. “You are a good listener. Like a… eh.. like a priest”.
“Bishop, actually”.
“Bishop then. Thank you very much. But I will go now. I must to find Pierre. I will tell ‘im that it ees all over for him and me”.
“You do that”, I told her. I paused, then added, “Let me know how it goes”.
“Oui”, she answered softly, “I will. Goodbye for now, Bishop”.
All that night I found myself glancing at the telephone, half expecting Yvette to call again. She never did. Not until a week after New Year. We spent three hours on the phone that evening. I told her all about Rachael and her new boyfriend Colin. She told me that he sounded like a ‘deeck’. I then went on to tell her about my feelings for Rachael while she clucked sympathetically. She then told me about ‘the dumping of that son of a sheet Pierre’, and her decision not to go back to France just yet. “I will not let ‘im spoil my time ‘ere”, she maintained. I told her about Daryl and Claire and Amy and Charlie. She told me about her new salesgirl job at some boutique or the other, and her wish to permanently live on the island. After that, we just kept in touch, and after a while it was as if she had always been there. She became my shoulder to cry on, my sounding post, my conscience, my invisible friend. And I became hers.
She never asked for my first name, calling me Bishop instead, and I never asked for hers. We knew nothing and everything about each other. The anonymity seemed to suit the both of us.
***
“Hey you”, I said now, falling onto the sofa and propping my feet up on the coffee table. Charlie would have thrown a loopy if he had been there to see me – he had always hated me putting my shoes on the furniture. But tough – Charlie wasn’t there anymore.
“Guess what?” I told Yvette. “I’m going out with Rachael…”
“Oh Bishop! That is good news”, she interrupted me. For some reason, she always sounded breathless. “Ees it everything you dreamed it would to be?” She chuckled, then added, “’Ave all your dreams become true?”
I grinned. “Slow down, mon petit croissant. You didn’t give me chance to finish. I’m going out with Rachael tonight”.
“Oh, you mean she still ‘asn’t dumped that freaky deck, Colin-dot-com? She ‘asn’t yet realised that you are ‘er one true amour, ‘er knight in the shiny armour, ‘er Casanova…”
“Not yet. But I intend to tell her tonight”.
Yvette gasped. Coming from anyone else it would have sounded artificial and overly dramatic, but from her it sounded perfectly natural.
“It ees true?” she asked.
I paused. It was true, or at least I had intended it to be true, but the minute she asked the question, I felt that old feeling of self doubt gnawing away at my adamance like a rat on Parmesan.
“Bishop?”
“Do you think I should?” I asked.
“Oh Bishop!” she cried, “do not ask me such questions. I might to give you the wrong advice! I am not very good at the love! Do you not remember Pierre?”
“That son of a sheet”, I intervened.
“Yes. That son of a sheet. And Ralph? And William? And all those other losers I thought were the Mister Right?”
“You have a point”, I conceded. From what she had told me over the seven odd months I had known her, she seemed to have a tendency of picking out her boyfriends from an Utter Git Catalogue.
“I guess I’ll just play it by ear”, I said.
“Play… what?”
“See how it goes, I mean”.
“Ah yes. If the feeling is right…” she paused, as if in thought. “Now you guess what”, she said suddenly.
“What?”
“I queet my job!”
“You quee… you quit your job? Why?”
“Ah… this new manager girl, she is the beech. Just out of the school, and she walks around like the sun shines out of the derriere. All because the is the niece of the owner. She don’t like the way I fold the clothes, I told ‘er to fold them ‘erself…”
“Did you quit, or did you get fired?”
“I will tell you”, she answered impatiently. “She said she could get me fired if I went around with that attitude, and I told ‘er that she didn’t see the attitude yet, and that I ‘ad plenty more of the attitude coming up, and she started to shout, and then I told ‘er to shut ‘er silly face and she shouted more, and then I took a deep deep breath and shouted more than she and told ‘er…” she paused for a breath and then finished, “… I queet!”
“Good for you. So what are you going to do now?”
“Oh, I ‘ave decided to, ‘ow you say… keeck back for a few days, maybe one week, and then I will find the new job”.
“It’s not that simple, Yvette”.
“’Ow would you know, Meester Feesher-Price? You ‘ave been selling the toys for the last nine years”.
“Touché”.
“Anyway, Bishop. I will now leave you to go and get yourself together for your date with Rachael. I wish you the good luck with whatever you choose to do”. She sighed, and added, “They are never easy, the decisions of the love. Let me know ‘ow it goes”.
“I will”.
“Au revoir, Bishop. I ‘ope Fate she smiles on top of you”.
“Upon you”, I corrected her, but it was too late. She was gone.
***
Smile upon me? The evil bitch was practically doubled up on the floor with laughter.
Of course, wiser men than me have come up with enough answers to fill a book of quotations a million times over. Who these men were and why they thought that anybody should listen to them just because they had the gift of eloquence and wit is beyond me, but this is where I jump onto the bandwagon with my own theory…
As far as I’m concerned, life is a road that forks left or right, and these new roads in turn fork again, and again, until you turn to look back to where you started from and realise that you haven’t got a clue. Every decision we make alters our path, and the hopes and dreams that we start out with are a million miles from the hopes and dreams that we end up with.
Sometimes the decision is trivial and unimportant, and these decisions send us down a road more or less identical to the original and do not affect the outcome of the day at all. But there are other decisions – big life-changing decisions that we try to ignore in the hope that they’ll just go away, but which never do, that can send us hurtling down a completely unfamiliar road so fast that we don’t even get the chance to stop and admire the view. Fate is a complete bitch that even the other gods are afraid of – she cares neither for the options nor the outcome. Her only concern is the next fork in the road, and the glee she derives from the look on our frowning faces as we pace up and down the hard shoulder, pondering, wondering and calculating…
I had weighed the options and reached a decision… I would tell Rachael how I felt. I would spit in the eye of Fate and take whichever road my decision led me down. Left or right. Good or bad. It was either that, or go crazy wondering. It was decided. I had made up my mind. Nothing was going to stop me…
In the end, of course, it made no difference. Fate was so far ahead of me she was almost behind me. Concentrating so hard on left or right rendered me oblivious to the fact that the malicious schemer was busy creating a detour – one that would rocket me off into a completely unexpected network of freshly asphalted roads.
With more forks than the Queen of England’s cutlery set.
But I’m jumping the gun again…
***
I woke up earlier than usual that Thursday morning, like a kid on Christmas day. I washed and dressed as usual – well, almost as usual… I caught myself looking in the mirror more often than I normally would, trying to see what I looked like through Rachael’s eyes. I decided that I needed a haircut, then almost immediately decided that I didn’t, and had a shave instead. I grinned at myself in the mirror, decided that I looked like a gormless wazzock, and concluded that I needed a haircut after all. Then I convinced myself that a goatee would have looked debonair and exciting on me, and I scolded myself for shaving so hastily without thinking first. It was only when I caught myself idly wondering where I could buy a false goatee that I realised how absolutely pathetic and ridiculous I was. I turned away from the mirror and headed downstairs for my usual caffeine and nicotine breakfast. With a bounce in my step.
***
All that morning I drove around in a blissful daydream, one percent of my brain taking care of the driving, the other ninety-nine percent euphorically conjuring up fantasies of what lay in store that evening. We hadn’t actually said where we were going, but my mind effortlessly provided all sorts of romantic backdrops. We were sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant. Rachael was laughing at something brilliantly witty that I had just said, her eyes sparkling, her hand reaching out to touch mine… we were dancing cheek to cheek on an empty dance-floor, a spotlight following our every move as we glided magically together as one… suddenly the backdrop changed again, and now we were dancing on a beach in the rain, a grey sky overhead, indifferent to the people around us who were hunched under their black umbrellas as they hurried home. I realised that this scene was actually stolen from a painting that Rachael had hanging in her hall at home, a beautiful picture entitled ‘The Singing Butler’, painted by a Scottish artist – Jack Vettrioni or Vettriano or something… and then the image dissolved again, and we were driving home, a slow song on the radio, Rachael’s head resting on my shoulder as I skillfully manoeuvred the car through traffic… and so on and so on…
Reality hit me, or perhaps ‘bludgeoned me over the head' is a more appropriate phrase, at around noon, when I stopped at a phone-box to call the salon. Rachael had told me to call her that afternoon. She had probably meant later in the afternoon, after work, but her exact words had been ‘Call me again Thursday afternoon for final arrangements’, and I was pretty sure that one minute past noon qualified as ‘afternoon’.
“Hello, Curl Up And Dye?”
“Hi. Can I speak to Rachael please?” I could hear a hairdryer thrumming in the background, and a radio somewhere playing a song that I knew I had heard before but just couldn’t place.
“Sure. Hang on a moment. I’ll go and get her”.
There was a clunk as the receiver was placed on the counter, then, seconds later, the hairdryer was abruptly cut off. I listened to the end of the song on the radio, trying to remember the title. Then Rachael picked up.
“Hullo?”
“Hey you”, I said cheerfully.
“Joey? What’s up?”
What’s up? What did she mean what’s up? I stared at the telephone in horror – she hadn’t forgotten, surely? Oh my God, she had! And I didn’t want to remind her – that would be too embarrassing. I could feel myself going red as I stammered into the phone.
“I… um… I…”
“Hey!” she said suddenly, “you’re not phoning to cancel tonight, are you?”
The sun suddenly seemed to be shining brighter. I almost kissed the receiver.
“Course not”, I said.
“Good, ‘cos I’ve got a wax doll in your likeness at home. And a pin-cushion bristling with very sharp, very long pins”.
“Ouch”.
Rachael chuckled.
“So, Mr Bishop, now that we’ve established that you’re going to live, what can I do for you?”
“Um… I was just wondering what time I should pick you up, ma’am…”
“Pick me up? Joey, I live five minutes away from Da Quiri’s on foot. We can just meet there”.
Da Quiri’s?
That’s when reality booted me in the teeth.
Rachael and I weren’t lovers out of a fairy-tale. We weren’t characters out of a romantic novel, or some Scottish painter’s vision… I had blown this all out of proportion. Rachael and I had been out together before, and not once had we eaten in a fancy restaurant or danced cheek to cheek on a beach in the rain. We were pals, best friends, going out to a familiar haunt for a drink and a chat. Nothing had changed. What the hell had I been thinking?
The realisation that every hope, every dream and every fantasy was nothing but a castle in the air, intangible as smoke, was mind-numbing. I felt as if I was Santa Claus being told firmly that Father Christmas didn’t really exist. I didn’t trust myself to speak, knowing that whatever I said would come out sounding stupid, unnatural or insincere. I looked through the dusty glass of the phone booth, where someone with very little or no imagination at all had fingered in the words ‘also available in transparent’. A little old lady was standing outside, obviously waiting to make a call. She was wearing a huge lime sunhat made of straw, and an enormous pair of white-framed glasses that could have easily doubled as a shop window. She gave her watch a meaningful look as I caught her eye. I gave her a weak smile and lifted the receiver back to my ear.
“Joey?” came Rachael’s voice. “Are you still there?”
“Uh-huh”.
“So d’you wanna meet at, say, half nine at Da Quiri’s then?” There was a pause, then, “or did you have somewhere else in mind?”
“No no… Da Quiri’s is good”, I said quickly. I wondered if Rachael could hear the disappointment in my voice.
“Cool”, she replied. “So I’ll see you there, ‘kay?”
“Half nine”, I said dully.
“Right. Back to work then”.
There was a click as she hung up, goodbyes being something that happened to other people. I hung the receiver in its cradle gently, and stood there staring at it blankly until an impatient tapping brought me back to the present. I looked through the grey glass where the old lady, one red-painted fingernail still tapping, mouthed the words ‘are you done?’
I gave her a small nod and, opening the door to the booth, stepped out into the blistering sun. The old lady pushed past me with all the grace of a buffalo in a turnstile, but I barely noticed her. I got into the car and cranked the volume of the radio up to a brain-threatening ten. The Pretenders were complaining that they didn’t ‘make ‘em like they used to’.
I drove towards La Vallette, the capital, with one percent of my mind concentrating on driving, ninety-nine percent elsewhere…
***
I had once asked Charlie, before he had vanished off the face of the planet, why he had never asked Rachael out.
It was a boring winter Sunday afternoon; the kind of afternoon where there’s nothing to do but lounge about in the living-room, occasionally getting up to slouch over to the fridge, open it and stare at it’s meagre contents for a few seconds before sighing deeply and heading right back to the comfort of the sofa. The rain outside was tapping out an audition on the windowpane; the sky was a brooding shade of grey that Charlie described as ‘sulky’. On the television, a smiling weatherman in a charcoal grey suit which clashed horribly with his brown and beige striped tie was telling us what we already knew – it was raining, and not likely to stop.
Charlie was on the sofa, smoking yet another cigarette, his previous one a still smouldering dog-end in the ashtray. I was sitting at the dining-room table, playing with a bright blue plastic gun that could supposedly shoot soft foam projectiles ‘over fifty metres!!’ My boss thought that these ‘Funguns’ had ‘huge selling potential’, which basically meant that once the neon yellow projectiles got lost, as they inevitably would after flying fifty metres through the air, we could introduce the convenient refill packs, which cost almost as much as the gun itself. I wasn’t so sure – to me, ‘Fungun’ sounded vaguely pornographic. Little kids running around shouting “Let’s go to my house and play with my Fungun” wasn’t something that I wanted to contribute towards. Nevertheless, my boss had given me one to take home for the weekend, with the instructions “Try it out and see what you think”.
I aimed the gun across the room at Charlie’s head, and pulled the trigger just as he leaned forward for the TV remote. The yellow missile whizzed over him and bounced off a cushion onto the floor.
“Hey, a film’s coming on”, said Charlie, sitting back and turning the volume up, oblivious to my murdering ways. “Double Jeopardy”.
“Seen it”, I said indifferently, reloading the Fungun, “and so have you. It’s the one where her husband is…”
“Whether we’ve seen it or not is besides the point, Mr Two Thumbs Up”, Charlie interrupted me. “The point is that Ashley Judd is in it, and any piece of celluloid that she chooses to grace with her gorgeolicious presence is worth seeing twice”. Charlie tossed the remote aside and took a deep drag of his cigarette, before adding, “Now, you can carry on playing with your Fungun if you like, but I have a hot date with Miss Judd”.
I sauntered over to the sofa and leaned over the back of it. On the telly, Ashley Judd was watching in admiration as her screen hubby gave a speech.
“You are aware, of course, that dear Ashley doesn’t know you exist, and that even if she did, she wouldn’t go out with you?”
“Yes, smartarse, but for your info, I wouldn’t go out with her either”.
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, right”.
“Nope. You see, the fantasy is always so much better than the reality”, Charlie said knowingly.
“So what you’re saying is that you wouldn’t go out with anyone you’ve always dreamed about because you’re afraid that it wouldn’t meet your expectations? That’s ridiculous!”
Charlie just sighed and waited, a small smile playing on his lips. I knew what he was waiting for. This was turning into one of our ‘okay, would you… if…’ games. The ones that always deteriorated into the kind of preposterous ‘okay, would you have sex with a diseased wombat if, as a result, it would give you super-powers?’ question. That was how the game worked, each question getting more and more detailed and ridiculous until the most stupid question, the one that couldn’t be topped for pure banality, had been asked. Those were the rules.
Instead, I found myself asking, “Would you ever go out with Rachael, for example?” To him, it must have seemed like a weird question, to me it was perfectly relevant.
He tore his eyes away from the screen and looked at me, a slightly quizzical look on his face.
“What… our Rachael, you mean?”
“Uh-huh”.
“Why d’you ask?”
I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “Just curious”.
“Oh”. He turned back to the telly and took another puff on his roll-up. I waited for a couple of seconds and then circled the sofa, sitting down next to him.
“Well?” I said after a while, when it became apparent that Charlie wasn’t going to answer.
“Well what?”
“Would you?”
“What? Me and Rachael? No”. He leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, simultaneously reaching for his tobacco pouch with the other hand.
“Why not?” I persisted.
He turned to look at me again, a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead, his piercing blue eyes watching my face intently as if he were trying to read my mind.
“Not my type”, he said firmly, and immediately focused his attention on loading a Rizla skin with tobacco.
I leaned back in the sofa and digested this for a second or two.
“Not your type”, I repeated incredulously. I found that hard to believe – how could Rachael not be anybody’s ‘type’?
“Nope. It’s a cliché, I know, but there you have it”. He licked the gummed side of the paper and used his fingernails to form a perfect cylinder.
“Charlie, you don’t have a type! You’ve been out with allsorts…”
“Jesus, Joey, will you drop it?” Charlie snapped suddenly, shocking me into silence. Ramming his cigarette into his mouth he shot up out of the sofa and patted his pockets angrily. “Where’s my bloody lighter got to?”
Outside, the wind whistled like a jet-plane. On the telly, someone screamed.
“What the…” I started, finding my voice.
He glared at me, and yanked the unlit cigarette out of his mouth.
“Look”, he said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “I would love to go out with Rachael. It would be great. She’s charming, beautiful and intelligent. She’s funny and witty and everything that all my ex-girlfriends weren’t, and going out with her would probably be… would be, well, really fantastic. But I can’t, and I won’t”.
“Why the hell not?” I demanded, beginning to lose my temper too.
“Because I don’t love her that way”, Charlie said simply. “And it’s so blatantly obvious that you do”.
***
The telephone was ringing when I got home from work that Thursday afternoon. Dropping my rucksack in the hallway, I hurried to answer it, only to discover when I reached it that I was reluctant to do so. What if it was Rachael, calling to say that she couldn’t make it tonight because… oh, I don’t know… because Colin had finished work early after all, or one of a million other reasons? I stared suspiciously at the grey plastic box as if it were a ticking parcel, an emotional time-bomb waiting to go off in my ear. It was as if I had suddenly developed a phobia of telephones – phonophobia, maybe, or some other technical term that Charlie, if he had still been around, would have known the name of, if it even existed at all. I had read somewhere that the best way to overcome a phobia is to confront your fear head-on. Arachnophobic – pop down to the pet shop and ask to hold a big hairy tarantula. Scared of answering the phone –
“Hello?” I held my breath.
Silence. Only for a second or two, but to me it seemed like an eternity. Then a female voice said, “Bishop?”
I relaxed. Only one person I knew called me by my surname, and only one person pronounced it like that, with the ‘bi’ as ‘bee’ and the stress on the second syllable…
It was Yvette.
***
I suppose I should explain about Yvette now in order to avoid confusion during the telephone conversation that follows.
First of all, Yvette wasn’t her real name – I had no idea what her real name was. I called her Yvette because her voice reminded me of the sexy waitress of the same name who used to drive Rene’ wild in the British eighties sitcom ‘Allo Allo’ – a lilting musical French accent which, for some reason, conjured up images of croissants and blue and white stripy jumpers, berets and long cigarettes in slim black holders. I also had no idea what she looked like, but in an attempt to put a face to the voice I pictured her as that same waitress, with long black wavy hair and lips to die for, a crisp white blouse and a short black skirt. It was as good an image as any – in fact, it was better than most.
Yvette had come into my life on the thirty-first of November. I had no problem remembering the date because it was on that very day that Rachael had met Computer Bastard Colin at a Christmas party and fallen into what she thought was love, not knowing that all the love she needed was standing right at her side in the shape of little old me. But I digress…
I was sick with what Charlie called a Viscous Circle Cold – one of those awful colds where blowing your nose reduces you to a sneezing fit, after which you immediately need to blow your nose again, hence starting another sneezing fit, and so on. My eyes were red and watery and the combination of this plus my being forced to breathe through my mouth made me look like a pissed-off goldfish.
It was a freezing cold Saturday night. Charlie was upstairs in the shower, getting tarted up for a date with some girl he had met the day before at – of all places – a petrol station, and I was slumped out on an armchair in a cloud of self-pity, wearing a threadbare, yet almost supernaturally comfortable, dressing gown. The stove was hissing and crackling as the dancing flames forced the sap out of the huge misshapen log sitting in the grate. The television was off for once, partly because I was mesmerized with watching the fire, but mainly because I was feeling too apathetic to search around for the remote control. And then the phone rang.
“If that’s What’s-her-name”, yelled Charlie from above, “tell her I left five minutes ago!”
I groaned as I tried to reach the receiver from halfway across the room without actually leaving my seat, a feat that proved impossible. Getting sluggishly to my feet, I trudged over to the phone and picked up while simultaneously collapsing onto the sofa.
“Hello?”
“Pierre?” The voice practically spat out the word. It wasn’t a voice I recognized.
“Hold on a sec”. Covering the mouthpiece and lowering the receiver to my lap, I called out towards the general direction of upstairs.
“Charlie? You didn’t tell What’s-her-name that you were called Pierre, did you?”
“What? No!”
“Okay”. I lifted the receiver to my mouth again. “Sorry, no Pierre here”.
“Sheet!” came the voice, and there was an abrupt click as the unknown caller hung up. I gave the receiver an evil glare and slammed it down into its cradle.
“Where’s my wallet?” said Charlie, suddenly hopping into the room on one leg as he tried to tug a tan Doc Marten boot and walk over to me at the same time. He somehow managed to get to my freshly-vacated armchair before falling over. “Who was on the phone?” he asked as he tied his laces.
“Either a really bad bed linen salesperson, or a wrong number”, I told him.
“Oh”. Anyone else would have asked for an explanation, but Charlie was not a curious person by nature – a characteristic that occasionally pissed me off, especially when I thought I was being witty. He finished tying his laces and stood up. He was wearing a baggy white shirt and blue jeans under a long bright maroon raincoat. Unable to control his fetish for badges, tonight he was wearing a small blue one, which read, in tiny yellow print – “Thank God I’m an Atheist”. Charlie had over four hundred badges – he kept them all in a two-litre plastic ice-cream carton under his bed. I had once asked him why he was so fascinated with the things and he had replied, “It’s fun to watch people trying to read them while pretending not to”.
Charlie leaned over and plucked his ever-present tobacco pouch from the coffee table.
“Seen my wallet anywhere?” he asked as he started rolling a cigarette.
“It’s on the table”.
As Charlie limped his way past me, the phone rang again. I sighed and yanked the receiver up to my ear.
“Yes?” I said, waving Charlie away as he started mouthing the words ‘If that’s What’s-her-name…’ over his shoulder.
“Goddamn it!”
“Not ‘sheet’?”
There was a pause, then, “What?”
“You said ‘sheet’ before. What is ‘sheet’, incidentally?”
“I ave a wrong number”.
“Correct. This is not Pierre”.
“Sheet!”
“There you go again”.
Charlie walked past me, pocketing his wallet, and gave me a questioning look. “Not What’s-her-name then?” he asked sotto voce.
I shook my head. He responded by blowing me a kiss and waving goodbye. I rolled my eyes at him and waved back. Seconds later, the front door clicked shut behind him.
“I am terribly sorry”, came the voice in my ear, “I am trying to phone Pierre but I keep getting you”.
“Don’t worry about it”, I said amiably, “I’ve got nothing better to do. Who is this Pierre, anyway?”
At this point I was expecting her to tell me to piss off and mind my own business, so I was quite surprised when the voice responded, with a certain amount of vehemence –
“’E ees a bastard son of beech!”
I blinked and tried to find something intelligent to say, but she carried on as if talking to herself, her voice increasing in both anger and volume.
“’E is… was… my boyfriend. We ‘ave been ‘ere only one month, and today I am finding this!”
“Um… this?”
“This leetle note! The double-timing son of a sheet!”
“Two-timing”, I offered.
“Two-timing son of a sheet!” she corrected herself before lapsing into a stream of French which I couldn’t understand. Nor did I need to – it was obvious from her tone that she wasn’t exactly showering the hapless Pierre with compliments. I waited patiently – this was possibly the most interesting thing that would happen to me all evening and I was suddenly reluctant for the conversation to end, no matter how one-sided it was. Besides, her voice had an amazingly seductive quality to it – the kind of voice that can promise the earth and the moon and the stars in a single breath. It was at that moment that the image of Yvette came to me. Whoever this wretched Pierre was, I decided he was a fool.
Her voice finally petered out. I heard her sniff, and stifle back a sob.
“Feeling better?” I asked.
“Very much”, she said in a small voice. “You are a good listener. Like a… eh.. like a priest”.
“Bishop, actually”.
“Bishop then. Thank you very much. But I will go now. I must to find Pierre. I will tell ‘im that it ees all over for him and me”.
“You do that”, I told her. I paused, then added, “Let me know how it goes”.
“Oui”, she answered softly, “I will. Goodbye for now, Bishop”.
All that night I found myself glancing at the telephone, half expecting Yvette to call again. She never did. Not until a week after New Year. We spent three hours on the phone that evening. I told her all about Rachael and her new boyfriend Colin. She told me that he sounded like a ‘deeck’. I then went on to tell her about my feelings for Rachael while she clucked sympathetically. She then told me about ‘the dumping of that son of a sheet Pierre’, and her decision not to go back to France just yet. “I will not let ‘im spoil my time ‘ere”, she maintained. I told her about Daryl and Claire and Amy and Charlie. She told me about her new salesgirl job at some boutique or the other, and her wish to permanently live on the island. After that, we just kept in touch, and after a while it was as if she had always been there. She became my shoulder to cry on, my sounding post, my conscience, my invisible friend. And I became hers.
She never asked for my first name, calling me Bishop instead, and I never asked for hers. We knew nothing and everything about each other. The anonymity seemed to suit the both of us.
***
“Hey you”, I said now, falling onto the sofa and propping my feet up on the coffee table. Charlie would have thrown a loopy if he had been there to see me – he had always hated me putting my shoes on the furniture. But tough – Charlie wasn’t there anymore.
“Guess what?” I told Yvette. “I’m going out with Rachael…”
“Oh Bishop! That is good news”, she interrupted me. For some reason, she always sounded breathless. “Ees it everything you dreamed it would to be?” She chuckled, then added, “’Ave all your dreams become true?”
I grinned. “Slow down, mon petit croissant. You didn’t give me chance to finish. I’m going out with Rachael tonight”.
“Oh, you mean she still ‘asn’t dumped that freaky deck, Colin-dot-com? She ‘asn’t yet realised that you are ‘er one true amour, ‘er knight in the shiny armour, ‘er Casanova…”
“Not yet. But I intend to tell her tonight”.
Yvette gasped. Coming from anyone else it would have sounded artificial and overly dramatic, but from her it sounded perfectly natural.
“It ees true?” she asked.
I paused. It was true, or at least I had intended it to be true, but the minute she asked the question, I felt that old feeling of self doubt gnawing away at my adamance like a rat on Parmesan.
“Bishop?”
“Do you think I should?” I asked.
“Oh Bishop!” she cried, “do not ask me such questions. I might to give you the wrong advice! I am not very good at the love! Do you not remember Pierre?”
“That son of a sheet”, I intervened.
“Yes. That son of a sheet. And Ralph? And William? And all those other losers I thought were the Mister Right?”
“You have a point”, I conceded. From what she had told me over the seven odd months I had known her, she seemed to have a tendency of picking out her boyfriends from an Utter Git Catalogue.
“I guess I’ll just play it by ear”, I said.
“Play… what?”
“See how it goes, I mean”.
“Ah yes. If the feeling is right…” she paused, as if in thought. “Now you guess what”, she said suddenly.
“What?”
“I queet my job!”
“You quee… you quit your job? Why?”
“Ah… this new manager girl, she is the beech. Just out of the school, and she walks around like the sun shines out of the derriere. All because the is the niece of the owner. She don’t like the way I fold the clothes, I told ‘er to fold them ‘erself…”
“Did you quit, or did you get fired?”
“I will tell you”, she answered impatiently. “She said she could get me fired if I went around with that attitude, and I told ‘er that she didn’t see the attitude yet, and that I ‘ad plenty more of the attitude coming up, and she started to shout, and then I told ‘er to shut ‘er silly face and she shouted more, and then I took a deep deep breath and shouted more than she and told ‘er…” she paused for a breath and then finished, “… I queet!”
“Good for you. So what are you going to do now?”
“Oh, I ‘ave decided to, ‘ow you say… keeck back for a few days, maybe one week, and then I will find the new job”.
“It’s not that simple, Yvette”.
“’Ow would you know, Meester Feesher-Price? You ‘ave been selling the toys for the last nine years”.
“Touché”.
“Anyway, Bishop. I will now leave you to go and get yourself together for your date with Rachael. I wish you the good luck with whatever you choose to do”. She sighed, and added, “They are never easy, the decisions of the love. Let me know ‘ow it goes”.
“I will”.
“Au revoir, Bishop. I ‘ope Fate she smiles on top of you”.
“Upon you”, I corrected her, but it was too late. She was gone.
***
Smile upon me? The evil bitch was practically doubled up on the floor with laughter.
***
Forward to Chapter Three | Part Two
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