Jack of Tales

The bridge is cold against my back, and the gorge at this time of night is a vast, dark emptiness. Far below me I can see headlights moving, and I can feel the river flowing slowly beside the road, between the stinking mud banks.

            I think it might be beautiful if the sun was over the horizon. But there is no beauty anymore. Not now that he’s gone. Not now that he left the world and me and everyone behind. I wonder what it’ll be like? To let go of the handrail and fall. Below me, directly below me, hundreds of feet down, is the river. I stand with both arms outstretched, like Jesus on the cross. There’s not much room for me to move. I carefully balance on the slippery girder, use my right arm to slowly bring the vodka to my mouth. Another swig or two. Another swig or two and I’ll go.

            Will it be cold? I don’t like the cold. Dan didn’t either. He liked the warm. The heat. The blaze of summer and swampy dance floors. Will I scream? Will my arms pinwheel around and make me look stupid until I hit the water? I don’t know. Dan might have known. It’s the sort of thing he knew about.

            ‘Are you okay- wait, fuck, that’s a stupid question.’

            The voice is such a shock I almost fall off. I’m not ready to go yet. I feel my hands grasp tightly to the rail behind me without even meaning to. Cold, harsh metal, white knuckles in the dark.

            ‘Fuck off!’

            I shout. I can’t help it. They have to leave. This is a private thing. A personal thing. This is my death. My own.

            ‘No need for that,’ says the voice.

            It’s a woman. I don’t want to look round. I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want her to keep talking, but she does.

            ‘I couldn’t anyway,’ she says, ‘you’re on the wrong side of the handrail and it looks like you’re planning to, y’know… I couldn’t just… I couldn’t just walk on. I don’t think anyone could.’

            ‘Please,’ it comes out as a whimper, I don’t want anyone else involved I this. I don’t want my death to touch anyone else, ‘please leave.’

            ‘No.’

            I can hear her coming closer. I don’t want her to but then it happens again. Another wave. Another crashing wave. That bleak and total certainty that he is dead, and that I am forgetting him, and I’ll never see him again. I know it anyway, of course, I know he’s gone, but sometimes it hits me so, so hard. Sometimes I know it in my mind and in my bones. Sometimes I don’t know anything else, it fills my whole being. Like standing before a tidal wave. A tsunami. It is everywhere. It is everything.

            I whimper again. Pathetic.

            ‘What’s your name?’ she asks, ‘I’m Holly.’

            ‘Ryan,’ I tell her, ‘now fuck off.’

            ‘You’ve already said that,’ she says. Something’s rustling behind me. There’s no traffic over this bridge at this time of night, and hardly any pedestrians.

            ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

            ‘Sitting down,’ she says, ‘is that alright? I’m about a metre away.’

            ‘Why are you here?’ I ask. I’m trying to think of something. Trying to think of a way to get her to leave. Anything.

            ‘Because it’s on my way home,’ she says, brightly. Sing song. A little slurred. She’s been drinking. Well, I’m in no position to judge her for that.

            ‘Where from?’

            ‘A wake,’ she says, soothing, a little sad, ‘my friend. Best friend, really.’

            Shit. Shit, shit, shit. That’s too much. That’s too much death around me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say.

            ‘What was their name?’ I hear the question, it’s my voice, I didn’t mean to ask it. I don’t want to know.

            ‘Jen,’ she says, ‘her name was Jen. I miss her a lot.’

            I can’t think of anything to say, but my mouth is moving anyway, speech without thought, sound without reason.

            ‘I miss him too… I miss him… I miss him so much…’

            ‘Ah,’ she says, behind me, ‘who was he?’

            ‘Dan,’ I say, his name shudders from my lips, brings moisture to my eyes again, ‘my husband.’

            ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

            ‘What are you sorry for?’ I snap, ‘you didn’t know him! I knew him. I loved him.’

            ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘okay… tell me about him.’

            And I realise I want to. I want to talk about him. Which bits do I remember clearly? It’s all too big. Too broad. How can I even begin? You might as well ask me to describe the whole world and everything in it.

            ‘He was…’ I will try. I will do this. I can describe him. I won’t fail. I won’t fail him. I won’t forget bits of him anymore. I can say why I loved him. I take a breath. A gull flies past me, near and fast. I flinch. I speak again.

            ‘He was everything. I… He liked to wear yellow, and he…’ start at the beginning. ‘We met at a bar in Soho when we were both, well, plastered, really. And he was so hot, the sort of stubble on his chin that take ages to get right, you know? And then he, he took me to the dance floor, and he was bad. I mean a really shitty dancer. He looked like, I dunno, an octopus having a fit. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t, because he didn’t care, and because he smiled, and he laughed at the end of every sentence. He was everything. He was everything.’

            ‘He sounds wonderful.’

            ‘He was…’ I can’t. I need a moment. I need to think about something else. I can feel the wave coming again. The tsunami.

            ‘Tell me about Jen.’

            I don’t want to know about Jen. I just want to stop talking. Let her do the work.

            ‘Okay,’ says Holly, ‘I met her in school. Primary. She told me I was pretty and asked if we could play. She liked to wear black, and when she grew up she listened to gloomy music and hung out with a bunch of other Goths. I never got into that stuff myself. She was lovely.’

            ‘How…’ I’m not sure I want to ask; I know where this conversation’s going. I ask anyway.

            ‘What happened to her?’

            The question is heavy. Pregnant. It pushes down on the future. My hands are getting numb. I loosen my grip on the rails behind me and push my back into them with my feet. Then my shoes slip a little on the girder. My heart is racing.

            I hear her breathe out, long and slow.

            ‘She got run over,’ says Holly, ‘some dickhead got drunk and decided to go for a drive and didn’t brake when she was in the road in front of him.’

            ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘that’s… that’s shit. A shit way to go.’

            ‘Maybe. I suppose.’

            Silence. Then I hear the gull make that horrible noise that seagulls make. This is all going wrong. I don’t want someone here. I wanted peace. I wanted a moment of quiet, then oblivion.

            ‘What happened to Dan?’

            I knew she was going to ask, but it still sends a chill down my back. I don’t want to go into details, all those disgusting words. ‘Lymphoma’ and ‘chemotherapy’ and ‘metastasized.’ Those cold, impersonal words that all lead to different flavours of horror. The wave comes again, vast and crushing, smashing the tattered ruin of the part of me that still loves him.

            ‘He was everything,’ I know I’m speaking, I know I’m on the bridge, but all I can see is the past, ‘and the doctors, they… they pumped him full of chemicals. And he got better for a bit. And he slept so much, and I helped him as much as I could. And he couldn’t work. And neither could I, eventually. And then the cancer just… it just started to take him. He looked so different. His hair was gone, and he was thin and he just kept getting thinner and thinner and it… I…’

            She’s saying something but I can’t hear it. All I can hear is my screaming. Weeks and weeks ago. When I woke up. And he didn’t. When I woke up next to that yellow skinned half mummified husk that used to be the beautiful man I loved in that unfamiliar hospice full of kind staff and sighing relatives.

            ‘Ryan?’

            My name. Her voice.

            ‘What?’

            ‘You went quiet. I was just checking you were still… y’know, still there.’

            I stopped talking? I did. The wave took me. Quietly. It took me and washed through me and over me.

            ‘Tell me something from earlier,’ Holly says behind me as a lorry rumbles past on the road far below, ‘tell me about him before he got sick.’

            ‘Why?’

            ‘Just… just do. Please? What harm could it do?’

            She has no idea. Neither do I. I decide I’ll tell her, I’ll let my last thoughts be happy ones.

            ‘We went to Glastonbury. The festival, not the town. We got there later than we should and pitched our tent in the dark and we’d never been there before so we had no idea what we were doing. That first night we just, like, had a beer and poked around a bit and slept because the music wouldn’t start until the morning.’

            I shift my weight again. My legs are aching.

            ‘We woke up and it was boiling in that fucking tent and there was this… this really, really loud reggae coming from somewhere and this weird smell and neither of us knew what the fuck was going on. I remember watching Dan open the tent and the sun shone on his face when he looked out and began to laugh and laugh. We’d put our tent really close to the main stage, the pyramid stage, and really stupidly close to the loos and the smell, my God, by the time the weekend was over it was fucking revolting, and Dan knew it would be, and he was just laughing and laughing at how stupid we’d been and… and…’

            The wave. The endless, crushing wave. I am speaking. I can’t stop.

            ‘I don’t think… I don’t think I’m remembering it right. I don’t…’

            The wave. Please. Please make it stop.

            ‘I can’t… we bought some shitty pills from some dodgy dealer and I don’t know which night it was. I think it was the Friday but it might have been the Saturday. And I can’t remember his face. Not really. I look at pictures of Dan and I think… is that right? I can’t picture him. I can’t see him. My Dan. I can’t hear his voice. Not properly. Not for sure. I know I’m getting it wrong and that’s… that’s why I have to go…‘

            I can’t… the sobbing. The pain. It’s not me speaking now. It’s the wave. Speaking through me.

            ‘I can’t remember him properly. And every detail I forget it’s like… it’s like he’s dying again. Every bit I remember wrong is another bit of him that’s gone, lost, always. If I go now that won’t happen anymore. All the bits of him. I won’t kill him by forgetting. He won’t have to die again, slowly, turning into something that isn’t him. I… I can’t-‘

            I try to step forward. I try to go. I can’t. I’m weak. He’ll die again, in my mind, bit by bit, slipping away, just like before.

            ‘Fuck you.’

            What?

            ‘What?’

            ‘Fuck you.’ Says Holly.

            I am speechless. Even the wave pauses its assault.

            ‘You conceited prick,’ she is furious, ‘you think, what, that he’s going to vanish because you can’t remember the shape of his fucking eyebrows? Is that what you think? Everyone forgets! I can’t even remember Jen’s smile. That’s taken nothing from her, it just means people’s memories are shit. I loved Jen. I remember her birthday parties and her hobbies and the things that she said and your man-‘

            ‘Dan!’ I shout. I don’t mean to.

            ‘Dan! Fuck! Dan! Your man, he was real! He was with you, and he loved you. So what if you can’t remember some night out or the way he blew his nose? So what? That’s not the point!’

            She’s close now. I can hear her moving towards me.

            ‘That’s not the point,’ she continues, calmly, quietly, ‘you had a life with that man. It all happened. All of it, and nothing can take that away. Those days are in the past, but they’re set in stone. You were there. He was there. Forever.’

            I feel the breeze on my face. I see the dark gorge below. I turn to look at her, see her hand stretched out toward me, over the cold handrail.

            I take it.