Pearl earring

I woke today from 14 hours sleep, having dreamed of escaping prison by hiding out in a basement with Tom, the kids and one of the mums from school with whom I was having a lesbian relationship – which is as telling as anything my psyche can remember from unconsciousness – to a message from a childhood ex, asking me if I was okay.

Perhaps he’d seen my black-humoured blogs of the last week, or caught wind of a rant to a mutual friend about a party from which I’d been excluded within our mutual circles. Perhaps he finally realised I’d defriended him from Facebook – a petty gesture of misery pique; or maybe the recent coverage on depression in the wake of Robin Williams’ death struck a chord with a memory he may or not have of me telling him once, years ago, I was suffering, to which he offered an empty platitude and some regurgitated advice. Perhaps he is simply missing me, though I doubt it, or more likely, had noticed at last, the passing of time. He was probably, in fact, just high.

This seemingly concerned gesture has darker connotations. I contacted him last, a year or so ago, to ask about my mother’s earring, worn on my wedding day, lost when I passed out at his high rise flat, drunk, during a period of work trauma. I was being subject to a disciplinary over trivialities – walking out of a meeting to go to the loo, a disagreement over air con – but in reality I was being bullied as well as struggling with stuff at home.

With pseudo drunk consent, we fucked, although to be fair, if I’d had my wits and the will, I could have fought him off, told him where to go, or laughed at him, but I think all I wanted to do, after the day I’d had, was to lie down.
It was relatively comical, all things considered, in a sordid kind of way. But what horrified me most was how he cast me out at first light as having instigated the episode by turning up in that state at all. At the time, I even felt that maybe he had a point. What could I possibly have expected, he asked, turning up drunk, in the middle of the night? I was 97 per cent drunk in any case, he lectured. And by the way, I’d rather you didn’t feel as though you can turn up whenever you want, he texted afterward, slamming the nail in as I hazily waited for the bus the next day, back into the bitchy hellhole that was my previous office.This, regardless of the fact he’d been the one to re-instigate contact, out of the blue on the night of the Olympics opening ceremony. Despite the fact I’d long since married, had kids and moved on.

I, once bitten, initially wrote it off his contact as a joke, the end of our relationship being fairly acrimonious, one away or another. Within nine months I was pregnant, within another year and a half, married, partly, I’ll admit now, out of shock and sadness about how it had all gone.

But curiosity, pique and natural gregarity progressed the exchange to friendly banter over the next few months leading to invitations to drink lemongrass tea over at his austere flat (he told me then, he was colour blind) and later dinner, to chat about old times, how much we’d changed and the circles we both still moved in. It had felt good to get along at last; to know I hadn’t been entirely foolish the first time around.

Our relationship proper, back in its day, could only be described as unbalanced. I, in my early twenties was already at a different life stage to this gauche young man who still lived with his parents, whereas I’d turned up in London after uni having fended for myself since I was 16, to buy my first flat with the ill gotten gains of five years pole dancing.

Thrown together by the crossover of our mutual friends and the fact I was new to the capital and lonely, finding my feet after renewed family turmoil, the routine and structure of years of academia pulled from under me, our drunken New Year snog  turned into an awkward series of dates and parties where often as not I was a stranger in a room of entrenched cliques; where we would awkwardly maneuver around odd and tangential topics of conversation, such as how much out of ten I would rate my lunch, and what was my favourite Marvell movie – to which the obvious answer was none – lurching towards drunken, unfulfilling sex, sometimes in his childhood bedroom of his parents’ home in a leafy North London suburb, sometimes at the two bed apartment I had recently bought for myself on Murder Mile, being the cheapest part of zone two I could find.

It was an unusual relationship at best, but his off-the-wall outlook, and at times caustic personality left their mark. He was, I believe, my first experience of Asperger’s. It was through trying to understand him that I later knew what I was looking at with my son. Naturally, it ended, with me wildly looking for answers as to his often bruising remarks and apparently callous withdrawal, his obsession with music and fashion leading me to believe that I was lacking something, something indefinable coolness that could not be bought in topshop, and which would somehow make me more appealing to someone who was, through no fault of his own, tragically blinkered. The only think I lacked, in fact, was self-confidence.

We were always at the opposite end of the spectrum. But knowing this about him, I was able, much later to re-engage, to enjoy what I had liked – his quirky personality, his perception and incisive myopia that allowed him to be simultaneously more intelligent and more idiotic than anyone I have ever met. I tried to assure myself that he never intended to be cruel, yet his ability to manipulate people, to twist their motives to his own ends removed the final scales from my eyes.

If anything, I who was the naive one. To want reassurance from someone who isn’t able, or willing to give it, to hold two mutually exclusive thoughts at one time, to be able to turn up tipsy and tired and lonely, and not anticipate sex; to kiss someone for old time’s sake, to simultaneously be aroused and repulsed, to both hate and love someone and to know that they care, but not in a way that matters.

He sent me back my earring through the post, months later, with not a line. By then, I’d decided not to trust him again; realised he was simply playing with me, like a cat with a bird that’s already wounded.

Asking me how I am has nothing to do with the fact, which, in any case I found I could not answer, whatever he expected from the question. As I find I cannot ignore the question direct, I simply said, I am fine. But my spontaneous eruption into seemingly unblottable tears, as I tried to put on my makeup, told a different story, and the dissipating knot that has for some time some stranglehold of my chest seemed to ease just a little along with them.