Making Life More Complicated

This year I won’t be so sure of things and so intent on letting people know all about it. Oh, let me qualify that (and perhaps when you start qualifying and quantifying resolutions and putting terms and conditions on them they lose their potency, but I don’t care.) There are things I will always be unashamedly sure of, things that are unreservedly wrong or unreservedly right. Hurting a child or an animal comes into the first category and remembering (well, most of the time) to sort my rubbish properly comes into the second.

But there are huge grey areas and at least fifty thousand shades. And it would be easy to say that these only apply to the little things. They don’t, though. They apply to the bit ones – the biggest ones of all. The life, death, and the universe sort of things. Back further than I care to recall there was a counsellor at university who used the phrase “gappy” for that sort of thing. I think he basically meant things that he could, with a sigh of relief, at least figuratively, refer us to someone else to sort out.

I have always prided myself on being a rationalist. Well, when I say always, take that as meaning from when I was about 17 or 18. I don’t think that as a child I had especially premature doubts about Santa and the Tooth Fairy, and I quite liked going to Sunday School, though I didn’t carry on of my own volition after my parents decided that I was old enough to decide for myself. Mind you, it was about as benign and some, I guess, would say anodyne Sunday School as you could imagine. Mrs Forester the vicar’s wife, a comfortable, motherly lady with a taste for flowery dresses in summer and fair isle sweaters in winter told us all about the Good Samaritan and Noah’s Ark and the Baby in the Bulrushes, all in sanitised forms and complete, at least when we were younger, with pictures to colour in.

It always annoyed me, and I didn’t necessarily hesitate to let it show – though I may as well be honest, more online than in real life, despite my disdain for keyboard warriors – that people jumped to this kind of assumption that because I am a moderately successful author of not entirely dire fantasy novels that I was a wide-eyed and willing believer in all things weird and wonderful and psychic and supernatural. Any query beginning “Dolores, do you believe in?” was sure to meet with an unequivocal NO, often accompanied by a meme to that effect.

I was anything but and had no hesitation about letting them know.

In my own defence let me say that I did have some good – or, I suppose – bad – reasons for this. It wasn’t just a prejudice to prove a point. That isn’t to say that I may have developed a prejudice to prove a point anyway. But what happened to Antonia was a trigger.

Antonia was one of my dearest friends. I hesitate to necessarily say my “best friend”, as I’ve never quite liked the exclusivity of that notion but we were certainly close. It was one of those friendships that transcended the shift from high school to college, and perhaps even more extraordinarily, survived the transition from college to being properly grown up. Or thinking we were! Oh, we didn’t shrivel and wail if we were apart for a while, and we most certainly had our disagreements, but there was, it seemed, something solid and real and durable and yes, sweet, about our friendship. To be frank, she had many qualities I did not. She was patient, and forgave easily, though anyone who thought she was a doormat tended to find out otherwise rather quickly.

I think many of us who knew her, myself certainly included, were surprised and not necessarily approving when she told us she was getting married to her boyfriend Luke when she was only in her early twenties. Oh, we all liked Luke – you’d have to have issues not to like him. He was kind and funny and (yes, I know we like to say such things don’t matter) “scrubbed up nicely” as my Mum put it, and had a good job already as a junior lecturer in the physics department of the university where Antonia had just started teaching history. And we had got past the stage of thinking getting married was a bad thing. Choosing not to was absolutely fine, but going down the aisle, so far as most of us were concerned, was fine, too. But she was still so young. I don’t think any of us actually said she was too young for making a commitment like that, because Antonia was the kind of person who didn’t make commitments she wasn’t prepared to keep. But we still knew (or were sure we knew) that none of us had any intention of getting married so young. Somehow, though in fact I was a few months older than she was, I felt rather young and green as I was technically still a student coming to the end of my MA in Creative Writing.

I still tear up thinking of her on her wedding day. Her soft grey eyes were luminous with love and in her simple ivory shift dress with a dove grey cape around her shoulders she seemed to epitomise sweetness and strength combined, and above all, blissful happiness. And it was plain that Luke was in the happiest of dreams about to become the most wonderful of realities.

At that point I was finishing my collection of contemporary urban takes on popular fairy tales, and though of course I knew better than most that the original so-called fairy tales were strong stuff and very rarely had fairies in them, the cliché about a fairytale wedding still sprang to mind. I was not exactly envious of Antonia – I loved her too dearly for that, and also knew that I had no wish to get married young myself – but had a pang of something missing in my life that was present in hers.

At first they lived in one of the “family apartments” on campus, but within a couple of years, moved out to their own little bungalow. Number 108 Aqua Way. Like most of the townsfolk, I didn’t know why it was called Aqua Way, as we were miles from the sea. Antonia was expecting their first child. “We’ve not really settled on names, yet,” she said, “But I have a fancy for Lillian for a girl and Oliver for a boy. Still, we might change our minds hundreds of times over!”

“What does Luke say?” I asked. I knew that though each had retained their independence, they generally tended to be as one over things that mattered.

She laughed. “You know, he says it genuinely doesn’t matter and he’s leaving it to me. Mind you – and I probably shouldn’t be telling you this! – he did once tell me that he had a weakness for the name Achilles for a boy. I didn’t even know he was that heavily into Greek mythology and worked on the assumption he was joking!”

Two days later, as they were walking home from visiting Luke’s Great Aunt Marion, whom they had taken very much under their wing, they were mugged. Luke was stabbed, but at first it didn’t seem that serious. But that night he went into toxic shock, and he didn’t make it to another day. Antonia lost the baby – and it would have been a boy.

Of course we were all devastated. We’d not had any illusions that our town was a crime free zone, but this was still the kind of thing that happened somewhere else. We rallied round Antonia as best we could, but even I often simply couldn’t find anything to say, and hoped that just holding her in my arms – and helping her out with the practical stuff – helped a bit.

For weeks she was like a whey faced automaton, looking ten years older and yet like a frightened little girl. She tried going back to work, but as she told me, “It’s no good. I can’t concentrate. It’s not fair to the students.”

So when I went round to the bungalow – which she said she was selling – and she greeted me with a smile and even seemed to have made some effort with her hair – I was relieved and dared to hope that though, of course, she would always deeply mourn Luke and the lost little boy, she was beginning to find some tentative purpose and happiness in life again. I didn’t know if anyone had been insensitive enough to say Luke would have wanted her to find joy again, though I didn’t doubt it was true.

She made us coffee and said, “Dolores, I’ve met the most wonderful woman. She’s called Jean, and she doesn’t call herself Madame Jeanette or any of that nonsense …..”

“You’ve lost me rather, there!” I admitted. She went on to say that Jean was a medium – a spirit medium, as she called herself. “And I had an open mind on stuff like that, but never really believed it – now I realise how wrong that was. Dolores, you wouldn’t believe the things she knows! She told me that Luke and our little boy are happy, and how they’re with Luke’s dog Minka! Now isn’t that wonderful!”

I didn’t know what to say. It was hardly a secret that when Luke was a boy they had a family dog called Minka, a Siberian husky. She was still something of a legend in the town – even non dog lovers fell under her spell. She had been just – well, one of those dogs.

But you can’t tell your best friend, who had suffered a terrible bereavement, that she had been taken in – or at the least, that someone who might be well meaning had done her best. If I recall I said something anodyne and non-committal like , “Yes, he really loved Minka.”

It made me uneasy when Antonia spoke about Jean and about her visions and messages. So at first I was glad when she said, “Dolores, I think I’m through with Jean. Oh, she has a good heart, and maybe she does get a glimpse of things here and there, but she’s just an amateur when all’s said and done.”

And that was when she began her obsession with phoning psychic (so-called) helplines as money leeched away on premium phone numbers, and they used every trick in the book to keep her listening and keep her talking.

I had heard of people who lost their life savings clinging to such desperate non-existent comfort. Now my sweet, funny, clever, decent Antonia was turning into one of them. Bit by bit, it was eroding our friendship, too. When I told her they were scammers and that I could show her any amount of literature to prove that, she gave me a look that chilled me. I have lost her, I thought. And the worst of it was, in a way I wasn’t sorry. I would not have to struggle to find things to say or not say, and recalled the words of my Dad about a colleague of his who was a gambling addict, “You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped.” In that instant, though of course nothing is quite that simple, there was a happy ending. He cleared his debts and saved his marriage. But he’d had to want to be helped. And Antonia didn’t.

We ended up getting completely out of touch. She sold up the bungalow – to pay off her debts – and the last I heard she was living in a council flat somewhere in the South West. I never stopped nursing a quiet hope in the small hours that we might get in contact again and that she would be her old self, but, and I know this sounds bad, I had my own life to lead. And it was a good life! I had become quite a famous writer of fantasy novels, oh, not up there with your JK Rowlings or Marion Zimmer Bradleys, but I had a following and my worlds of talking beasts and shapeshifting sold well enough for me to be one of the lucky few who could earn a living writing. Yet part of me was uneasy and I wondered if I had double standards. The trouble was, much as I wished I could write gritty socially realistic novels or shed new light on genuine historical figures, that just wasn’t where my talent lay, and it wasn’t for want of trying.

So I sold fantasy and preached rationality. I never hated anyone or anything as much as I hated so-called psychics. Though of course what happened to Antonia had triggered it, it had (I told myself) gone beyond the personal). But it didn’t stop at that. I vented my spleen at homeopathy, auras, twin flames, spells, haunted houses, and anything that couldn’t be explained by reason and science. Nor did I mellow with “maturity”. The advance of social media gave me far more opportunities to make my views known.

I scorned those who counselled tolerance and flexibility. Would they suggest tolerance and flexibility about murder or arson or whatever?

There is a refuge and strength in being absolutely sure of something. And I had no intention of changing my mind. But a few days back I was in one of my favourite second hand book shops. You know how it is, when sometimes a title jus takes your eye, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be something outlandish. This was one of those books that were in the bargain bin, a decades old hardback without so much as a dust cover. But I could still read the title on the spine. The Arm of Achilles. Well, that’s getting a bit mixed up, I thought. It should be the heel! Yet even as I thought that a memory I had long since pushed to the back of my mind prodded and pulsed. He told me he had a weakness for the name Achilles for a boy.

Oh, Antonia, I thought, what has become of you? I bought the book without even looking what it was about, not even sure if it was fiction or non fiction. That night I started to read it. If you’re expecting me to say it was a wonderful work of literature, then you will be disappointed. It was a dated and somewhat pedestrian trawl through the life of an ordinary man who thought he wasn’t ordinary, but who probably was. The most interesting character was, and it pained me to admit it, a middle aged lady called Joan, who fancied herself as a medium. I wanted to hate her and I couldn’t.

At one point, spinning the homespun advice she gave out along with so-called messages from the beyond, she told the hero (whose name, by the way, was not Achilles, but Ambrose) “It’s never too late to try to build bridges.”

And that was on page 108.

Am I saying it was a message from the beyond? No. That’s, to borrow Joan’s own choice of idiom, a bridge too far.

Will I make an effort to find out what happened to Antonia? It wouldn’t be impossible. But I’m also coward enough to know I might not like what I discovered, and to know that even if she had turned her life around, rekindling decades dormant friendships doesn’t always work. But I’m not ruling it out.

I’m not sure. And that’s not the only thing I’m not sure about. Not anymore. And it is definitely going to make life more complicated.