Broken (12 page)

I feel like I’ve found a true friend, and I know as you get older, that becomes harder and harder to do. Without her support, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the stresses of the trial. Without her there for me over the last week, I don’t think I’d even be here at all.

I think about suicide a lot, but I think more about what it would be like to be dead, rather than the act of actually killing myself. After everything that Jo and Martin have done for me, I wouldn’t be able to go through it knowing what seeing me like that would do to them. I’m much more conscious of that now. Despite the general picture being nothing but blurry lines, the specifics seem to me to be a lot clearer. Although I think about being dead so I can be with Alice, I know I’m not going to kill myself. Although I want justice, I know I’m not going to be able to get it myself. It’s like the world has been inverted, and I’m on the outside looking in. Or the inside looking out. Like I say, I get confused still. The therapist says the medication he’s put me on is responsible for the intensity of the dreams I’m experiencing and the general disassociation with my perception of time passing. I guess the more time that passes and the less I notice it, the quicker I will be able to heel. That’s if my shattered life can ever truly be mended.

I spend hours trying to picture Alice and when I can’t, I panic, rush upstairs and break open the carefully packed boxes I’ve stored in the attic, searching for every single printed photo I have of her. I force myself to stare intensely at every image I find, until I can close my eyes and picture every single line, hair and wrinkle on her entire body. I fall asleep up there, and Martin wakes me just before dinner, his face now permanently wrapped in concern whenever I do something out of the ordinary.

I don’t have an appetite, but I try to eat as much as I can just so he won’t worry about me.

1
7 January 2016. One hundred and twelve days after.

My trial has been put back over three months. Some fucking bullshit about missing case files or evidence or something. My dad is furious. Part of me is too, after spending so long trying to get myself mentally prepared I now have to wait longer to get it out of the way, whereas another part of me - a much larger part - is completely and utterly relieved that it's not happening now for at least another three months.

I know no-one is really ready for anything serious until it actually happens, but I can say with complete authority that to say I was bricking it would have been a massive understatement. Now I can put the panic attacks to the side and try my best to forget about it completely. I know this is not the way to cope, and if my therapist heard me say it, she'd have a fit, but the truth is, I've been dreading it since the court date was fixed, and I'm definitely not ready yet to go forward with it.

Of course, I didn’t tell Dad that. As far as he knows, I’m just as furious as he is. I really hope he doesn’t have any success in appealing it. That would be the last thing I need right now.

I’m worried about the feelings I’m beginning to develop for Ethan. For a number of reasons, it seems like possibly the worse thing that could have happened to me. How the hell can Ethan, who has just had his wife murdered, and me, who has just been raped, ever have any kind of intimate relationship, if indeed that is something that would interest him at all? I’m barely able to let people touch me yet, let alone get close enough to take my clothes off. I nearly freaked out completely when I got caught unexpectedly in a crowd at the park the other day, and had to literally run away so I wouldn’t be jostled.

I guess we just need to take things slowly. That’s the advice my therapist has given me. It may happen but not for months, years may pass and it may never happen at all. If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be. I know all the platitudes, but what I don’t know is what’s happening between us and what it means. I can’t talk to Ethan about it, because I don’t want to risk freaking him out and losing him. The thing is, we are spending so much time together. I’m with Ethan more than I’m with anyone else. We do things that couples do. Or friends do. Or both. I know his pain and I want to see his happiness. I think I can provide that happiness for him too. I see what me being with him does to both of us. I know Martin sees it too. Fuck, I’m just so confused about the whole thing. I don’t want to fuck it up because I know it could be special and then I don’t want to promise Ethan something I can’t give him. What if I just can’t fuck him? Christ, I don’t even know why I’m thinking about fucking him. I know it’s maybe because I want it, but can’t bring myself to do it because of what happened to me. Maybe I’m just wrong about the whole thing. Maybe I’m misinterpreting his friendship as something more. I’ve known him for less than  two months - is that enough time to fall in love?

Am I falling in love with Ethan? Or am I just broken, and because of that I’m unable to see things clearly. Maybe I do need to speak to him before this whole thing eats me up from the inside out.

2
1 January 2016. One hundred and thirty days after.

I’ve been feeling more positive this week. I guess that doesn’t really mean all that much based on how low I’ve been feeling in general, but I’ve been up more, eating more, spending less time in bed and actually even spending a bit of time outside of the house. Jo and I took a walk around the park this morning - I still haven’t been brave enough to take the bike or go on my own - and we’re back at the house now chatting a little before she has to head off to work.

My life feels so surreal sometimes. One minute I can be crying my eyes out, the next laughing so hard about something my sides hurt. I used to feel guilty about laughing at all, but now that the lines of reality have blurred into one huge squidgy mess, it doesn’t seem to matter.

My emotions have been hitting me strongly, as though they are finally returning to me. The one that confuses me most of all is the intensity of the emotion I feel when I think about Jo. Jo and I have been spending a lot of time together. I spend more time with Jo than with anyone else. I miss her when she’s not there. I look forward to her visits. I find myself thinking about her a huge amount of the time, even more so sometimes than Alice. It’s a stupid thing to say, but I feel like I may be developing feelings for Jo that might have the potential to complicate my already complicated life. I don’t like thinking about it, so I try not to, and then I find my brain going there again and again, as though it’s a kind of automatic default setting. I have so many questions I cannot even comprehend finding answers to. I think about Alice, I think about what I need and I think about Jo, and I chastise myself for being stupid, male, emotional, confused, sensitive, animalistic and weak. But it’s more than that, and no matter how much I tell myself it will, I know it won’t go away.

It sits between us stronger and stronger each day, neither one of us ready or willing to admit it.

It isn’t unusual for people who have experienced trauma in their lives to find solace in those who have experienced the same. At least that’s what the internet tells me, as though google knows exactly what advise to provide.

“Eeeethan?”

Jo is waving at me and I know I’ve drifted out again.

“Shit, Jo, I’m sorry”, I say. My coffee has gone cold. Stone cold.

“I know graphic design is pretty dull at the best of times, but, come on, this is a really interesting project!”

“Sorry”, I grumble again, and look down at my half drunk cup.

“It’s alright”, Jo says. “I’ll just tell you again next time I come round.”

She’s pretty, but it’s not even that. When I catch myself thinking like that, I try to tell myself I’m appreciating her purely in an aesthetic way, as though a photographer or an artist might, and not in the way that makes me feel guilty for betraying my dead wife.

“Ok”, I say. “Deal.”

Jo looks at me for a moment like she wants to tell me something, only she doesn’t and the moment passes so quickly I wonder if it existed at all. Just before she puts her coffee cup to the side, while she gathers her things before taking it to the kitchen to rinse and leave on the draining board like she always does, when she looks frail and weak and completely alone in this world, and I have an urge to hug her tightly and make her never feel alone, ever again.

She’s gone before I have a chance to do so, and in the two hours after Jo has left and before Martin gets back home, I think about all of the different ways I could kill myself if Jo somehow found out what I was thinking and said she couldn’t ever see me again.

3
1 January 2016. One hundred and forty days after.

If I read you the list of things we’ve done together, it would sound like a compilation of suggested activities for some kind of middle class dating app. Film night, walk in the park, scrabble, coffee mornings, ice skating - her idea not mine - jigsaw puzzle - my therapists idea to help my concentration - you get the picture.

I was thinking about ex girlfriends before Alice, lovers, one night stands, and one thing struck me about all of my past acquaintances - the longest I knew anybody before sleeping with them was Alice, and that was only a week. I kissed her the same night. Everyone else I’d known for less time and in some cases, much less time. I’ve known Jo for over three months.

“So what do you think?” she says, her arms flat across her chest, her legs crossed too, her thumbs tucked into her fists and her fists tucked up under her armpits. Closed as much as she can be.

“It’s very you”, I say.

“That means you don’t like it.”

“No it doesn’t”, I say, quick to defend myself, and worried I’ve hurt her feelings. “It’s great, I love it. That was a compliment.”

My smile diffuses any misunderstanding there might have been between us. This is a huge thing for Jo, inviting me to her apartment, and I’m conscious of keeping my distance and giving her space.

It isn’t until these things happen that you realise how difficult some things can be. Jo’s dishwasher has been broken for months, not because she can’t be bothered to organize for it to be fixed, but because having someone she doesn’t know in the house when she is alone is something she can’t bring herself to deal with right now. It’s not the dishwasher that I’ve come to look at, although I would be happy to even though I know nothing about dishwashers, I’ve come to help her fix her bike, so she can begin to use it for work, and we can go out on bike rides together at the weekend.

“You’ve got a lot of books”, I say, distracting myself while she wheels her bike out from her bedroom. “Alice liked books too.”

“I can’t live without books”, Jo says when she appears. “It would be like living without dreams.”

“That’s something I could probably get used to at the moment”, I say, letting Jo pass me to wheel the bike into the living room.

“Are you still having the dream about Alice?”

I don’t want to answer the question, so I kind of nod and then go to where Jo has leaned the bike up against the table.

“I told you in was in a bit of a state.”

The bike is caked in mud and one if not both of the brakes look like they have either seized up or broken completely. Both tires are flat too, but that’s an easier fix. I want to take it apart and look at it bit by bit, examine every detail of it, touch the metal, run my fingers along the grease that’s embedded itself in the chain, lose myself in it like I do with most things. This is perfect for us both. Ever since they put him away, I’ve been looking for a new project to get my teeth sunk into, while I wait and figure out what to do in the long run. Getting Jo’s bike up and running is ideal.

“Do you have any old rags or newspaper”, I say. “Just so we don’t ruin the floor.”

Jo has a stack of old newspapers at the back of one of her cupboards, and together we line the floor with them. She brings me a toolbox, a bunch of cleaning stuff, and a bucket of hot soapy water, which she places next to me and then looks at curiously as though she has no idea what purpose it might serve.

“You might want to change into something you don’t mind ruining”, I say, looking over my glasses and up at her. “We’re going to take it apart, clean as much as we can and see what needs fixing.”

“Do you think it’s going to be worth it?” Jo says. “It might just be better to buy a brand new bike, not that I can really afford that at the moment, but anyway-.”

She trails off. It’s the kind of thing I got used to doing myself. Many conversations of ours at the start of the month took the same form, as though both of us were in some kind of dream world and normal rules of reality didn’t apply. I still feel like that when I come back from a zone out, or there is something that just feels too difficult to deal with or I’m suddenly surprised by a memory or too strong an emotion.

“No way, it’s a decent bike”, I say. “It’ll look completely different when we get it shining.”

Jo goes off to change while I rifle through the toolbox looking for anything that looks like it might be useful. She comes back in old jeans and a wool jumper that has holes in the right arm near the elbow. She does a little twirl for me, perhaps just to cut through the embarrassment, make something out of being the centre of attention when the attention is immediately on you, so as not to hide behind it. She looks good, a little more casual in what she’s wearing, relaxed.

“Perfect”, I say, trying not to draw too much attention to her.

Up until now, I’ve always seen Jo dressed in smart, work style clothes. Her hair always tied up, or placed in a simple pony tail, but never like she has it now, loose and wild to fall across her shoulders. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in baggy, casual jeans either. Most of the time we have spent together inside or outside of the house she’s worn either tight jeans, long skirts or work trousers. She sits on the ground alongside me, cross legged, her hands allowed to fall into the gap created by the spacing of her legs, her back arched comfortably forward.