Missed a beat

"Hello, is Laura there?" I was thrilled, thrilled that you would call me, thrilled that I did not sound like myself. Towel around my head, sick to my stomach, I laid down on my bed with phone in hand. I had seen your number flash up on the phone and I was so scared to answer it, but never for a second would I not have. Nothing as wonderful as this had ever happened to me before. 

"This is Laura." 

"You sound different on the phone." 

"It’s my telephone voice." 

I loved you, I loved you, I loved you. I wanted to tell everyone. He is ringing me on the phone! This is the beginning of it. The beginning of my life. It took seventeen years to get started, but here it is, from Technicolor to monochrome, the opposite to The Wizard of Oz. My life, from now on, I thought, will be in black and white. Black and white with French subtitles and French cigarettes held rakishly between finger and thumb. Pressing problems: where would I buy condoms? Not from the chemist down the end of the road. Someone might tell my mum. And I would have to learn to smoke. 

I knew your life as if I had lived it myself, from your registration in that big book in Somerset House, your name tucked between a Catherine and a Beth, dusty and beautiful, your serial number of birth written down in my diary, to right here and now on the phone to me. I knew the dates and the times, the places, the black and the white and I knew you needed saving. I was the girl who was going to do it, I knew that much. This phone call was the start of all of it, of the drama and the passion, of the marriage and the marriage bed. I had barely had sex and I was terrified and aroused in equal measure when I imagined sex with you. In fact, I couldn’t imagine sex with you, it seemed as mystical an idea as to be otherworldly. You had been elevated to a God-like status in my mind and therefore I couldn’t imagine you as copulation, procreation. And yet to me you were sex, you were the very essence of the word. It oozed from you like it was your blood and my desire was the knife cutting you open. You made me shudder with desire and with bound-up longing. The first time that you touched me, I thought that I would die from it, short fingers along my spine and against my cold skin you burnt me and yet I would have paid every penny I was ever owed for you to scorch me again. When we fucked- and we fucked, we never made love or had sex, we fucked- you killed me a little more each time but I signed my own death warrant a thousand times over. 

We kissed for the first time on a Tuesday, we fucked for the first time on a Wednesday, you told me you loved me for the first time on a Friday and then all those years later you left me on a Sunday. Solomon Grundy, born on Monday said the rhyme in my head. Taken ill on Thursday, worse on Friday, died on Saturday, buried on Sunday, that was the life of Solomon Grundy. Your heart beat in tune with the rhyme as I lay on your chest, ear to the hollow chamber inside. “I can hear your heart” I whispered into the dark and stroking my hair you whispered back, 

“It’s beating for you.” Badoom, badoom, badoom. 

Your heart is still beating inside your chest, still beating for me, and I am not there to hear it.