Jack hit the road

If you would just stop being so emotional, darling, we can communicate. But you’ve switched off, totally. I try to speak to you in between your crying, talking on the phone, talking to visitors, friends, the children, organising, driving here and there … But even when you sit quietly in my Chesterfield armchair with a glass of wine, I can’t get through to you. Your mind is whirring away, busy, busy, busy. No leeway for me.

Just now your cat hissed at me. She always was your cat, although it was me that found her in the bushes at the back of the supermarket when we went for a Sunday walk. We named her Sunday, our littlest and last child, all bonny and blithe and gay. And fair and wise and good always. Uhm, not really. Not really at all. She’s a tempestuous soul, this one. She doesn’t like me, her father who rescued her from a life of degradation on the streets, at the mercy of every passing tom, tom and tom. Nothing horrible happened from my side. I just offered the little lamb a lick of my strawberry ice cream. And pop! came the thought into her pretty little ginger head: I hate this person who gave me this delicious treat. I always said she needed Freudian analysis.

Life is not fair. I became the humble cleaner of the litter box, the pourer of cream into the princess’s porcelain bowl, the bringer of glad tidings of treats and toys. She, Sunday the fair, always showered you with gifts of thanks. To your shouts of horror. Little offerings like a mole’s head with an unfortunate overbite of two massive incisors, or an impressive length of rat’s tail, or a screaming frog, protesting at the indelicate way of being handled, or rather, mouthed …

Just now she hissed at me again, Sunday. Didn’t you see? Didn’t you wonder? I touched your shoulder. You lost weight, my strong one. You’re so proud of your muscles, trained by wheelbarrow, paintbrush and lawnmover. My handy woman. And I the Woody Allen look-alike nerd who made you laugh with my black humour, I the nearly-successful writer with potential. You know how I hate the word “potential”. Potential is for teenagers, young people starting out, amateur artists and writers. Anyway, anyway, anyway. It’s all done and ditched.

Why do I talk in the past tense? Is this it? Darling, don’t you remember how we talked about it? How we would open ourselves? How we would keep communicating, one way or another? Because, were we not special? Were we not prophesied for each other?

Remember the medium you went to after your last relationship? The last before us?

You were in pieces. How could something that started so well, so perfectly, end so sordidly? You found your soulmate in bed with your best friend. Male friend. Mills and Boon wouldn’t even accept such a story line. Just so vulgar.

Finito, you thought. This thing called love, this stupid, melodramatic thing people go apeshit about, I forswore it. Goodbye, world, I’ll become a nun. A deflowered nun, a bit worse for wear. Maybe they’ll let me work in the garden, I’m good with digging and wheelbarrows and weeding.

And then, you told me, your other best friend, this one female (who also slept with your ex, you found out later), told you about this medium. How good and accurate she was. How she could foretell the future.

A bad move to know the future, darling, I told you. Don’t you know God had his reasons for keeping us in the dark?

But you went to see her, you felt so desperate and lonely and empty. And scared. Are you destined to go through life alone? Maybe rather a handful of pills? An efficient lead capsule to the temple?

You told me the story of your visit to her mediumship. She lived in a nondescript block of flats of unpainted stucco. Unkempt little garden in front, yellow grass, green weeds, blue plastic bags. Suicideville, you said. Up you go in the creaky box of an elevator, the perfect place for a murder. You arrived at her door at the end of a long passage. The passage smelled of something … cat piss? … old sweat? … rotten mouth? … How about ghosts, I suggested.

She opened the door. You were taken aback by the middle-aged woman, looking like a check-out lady at a supermarket. She had yellow grass hair, shortish or longish, you couldn’t decide, big glasses with white frames long before the retro fad, heavy blue eyeshadow, a thick waist, and a dress specially designed to make middle-aged ladies invisible.

She called you “Darlinks”. “Come in, Darlinks,” she said, very seriously, and showed you to what one might call an office. You smelled cigarette butts and dirty carpet. You saw a lot of badly framed letters and cards and photographs on the wall, some straight, some skew. You assumed it’s thank you letters and photos from happy clients. You sat down on a straight wooden chair. She went to sit on a chair on the other side of the desk. You clenched your hands together under the desk.

“No, Darlinks, there’s not a big axe coming down to chop off your head,” she said in a voice scoured by many cigarettes. Oh God, you thought, she’s reading my thoughts. She’s picking up on my strict Calvinist upbringing. Consulting mediums is on a par with consorting with the devil. I am on the wide, easy road to hell.

“No, Darlinks, this is not the end of the road for you.” She closed her eyes. You dared to look at her. Her skin looks rough. “No, don’t pester her!” she said, loudly, looking at you over the frames of her glasses. You jumped with fright. Oh God, you thought, she’s seeing demons coming for me. Then her cat jumped onto your lap and started kneading your stomach.

“When the arms of the windmill start turning, you life will turn. But it must not fall over and break. It is delicate. Remember. When the book with many pages fall to the floor, the pages of your story will be turned over. Remember. When you knit something warm and drop stitches, you will pick them up. The holes will be repaired. Remember.”

She closed her eyes again. You stroked the cat. She laughed, opened her eyes. “They showed me something, Darlinks. You must not take it the wrong way. They showed me pigs rolling in shit. You will be as happy as a pig rolling in shit. It will happen. Remember.”

She closed her eyes. “Now, Darlinks,” she said, still with closed eyes, “they don’t say you’re not clever in the head department. But you have a talent in your hands. You make things with your hands. Colourful things. You have a talent with colour. Your life will be colourful again. Remember.”

She talked some more, but this is all you could remember. Maybe you forgot to tell me something, darling?

You paid and left, not knowing what to feel. Ah well, you thought, even if nothing worked out like she said, at least it was a positive input.

And, so … we met, a few years later. You forgot all about the medium and her “prophesies”, in quotation marks. I entered your shop one windy day. Not really your shop, but where you worked then. A book shop I normally would have avoided because I tried to fight my obsession with books. When even your toilet and bathroom are overflowing with books, you have to stop. Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more! My head tune when I spot a book shop.

But, but, but … for your colourful curtains in the windows, you witch! The colours reeled me in, the dork, always walking around in a half-daze, thinking about plots and characters. I opened the door and the wind came in with me. I saw you grab something on the counter. When I came closer, I saw it was a porcelain Delft windmill.

“The wind nearly blew it off the counter,” you said.

I picked it off the counter, turned the sails with my finger. “Not made in China,” I said. “Quality. They turn so smoothly. It would have been a pity if it broke.”

You looked at me strangely. “Remember,” you whispered.

I looked at you strangely. “Pardon me?”

“Would you like help looking for a book?” you asked.

 “Not buying,” I said, “just looking.”

I browsed the shelves, picked up a weighty tome, started paging in it. It was a dictionary of quotations and proverbs. Somehow my eye caught the quotation, “I saw that you were perfect, and so I loved you. Then I saw that you were not perfect and I loved you even more. – Angelita Lim.”

Why did the book fell out of my hands? And just then someone opened the door and the wind turned over the pages of the dictionary on the floor.

When I went to pay for the dictionary, you still looked at me strangely.

“Something wrong?” I asked, stroking my socially inept hair.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

“The lady doth protest too much?” I said wittily.

“It’s just that you look familiar,” you said with what I spied a faint blush.

“Oh,” I said modestly, “I have published a book or two. Nothing terribly successful. My new book is coming out in a few weeks. Maybe you have seen my photograph?”

You looked intently at me. “No, I don’t think so. But …” here you definitely blushed “… maybe we can invite you to introduce your book to our customers. We would like to have more interaction between authors and readers in the shop.”

“Of course,” I said, maybe too hastily. I had already decided that you would be the main character in my next story. She would have long brown hair and questioning brown eyes with a tinge of gold. I wrote down my name (Jack Not Higgins Also-Tried) and phone number for you. Then I asked your name and phone number, seeing that I had to contact you about my book. We said goodbye. I actually said “God be with you” because I really wanted God to keep you. For me, forever. Selfish, I know.

And I loved you more and more because you were perfect and not perfect. And we married. And we had two children. And dogs. And cats. And lately the young one, Sunday. And we were happy, so happy. I swear we were two piggies rolling in the shit.

And my love, we went to the pizza place to get a take-away last Saturday. And we sat on the benches outside the shop, waiting and drinking beer. Suddenly, four loud bangs, one, two, three, four! And Jack hit the road and don’t come back no more, no more, no more, no more!

That’s what you think, darling.

Never mind who the guy on the motorbike was, darling. Never mind why he shot me, darling. I have no enemies. Do I have enemies, darling?

And now you walk to the bedroom. You open my closet and take out my favourite jeans and the colourful jersey that you knitted for me just after we were married. The jersey started out a bit of a mess because you dropped a lot of stitches. You were still learning. But you picked them up and finished my jersey. I wore the jersey and jeans the day you thought I was no more, no more, no more, no more. You washed them. Now you hang them over the cane-backed chair with my belt over them, just so, like I always did. And you put my black shoes under the chair, neatly together, left to right, like I always did. They had no blood on them.

You take your phone out of your pocket and move a few steps away. Now you take a photograph of the chair with my clothes on it, just so. As if I’m just in the shower. As if you can hear me singing “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!”

You look at the photograph on the phone. You frown and fall onto the bed. I think you fainted. Because darling, see, I sit on the chair and I smile at you.

Now, do you understand, my love? I came back from the pizza place. I am so more, so more, so more, so more …