Mr Lynch’s Holiday

20

With the pain of separation came the relentless mental churning — the grinding business of processing, interpreting and conjecturing. Their final conversation played somewhere in Eamonn’s head all day, every day. Each line, paused, analysed, redrafted, erased. It was like an illness, his brain infected, his thoughts overheated and circular. He tried, without success, to drown out the playback. He did not want to recall the things she had said. Remembering the words led to the same awful conclusion: he had driven her away; he had broken everything.

‘You’re leaving me?’

‘I have to think. I have things to work out and I need to be away from you to do it.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Eamonn, things haven’t been good between us. I need some clear space to think.’

‘Things have been fine.’

‘You’re self-deceiving. You can see exactly what I see, but you won’t admit it.’

‘What can you see?’

‘You’re not yourself. You’re lost. You’re so unhappy here.’

‘So you’re leaving? That’s going to make me happier?’

‘I’m not leaving you. I’m going to …’

‘… Think. Yes I know. You said. About what? About leaving me?’

‘About everything. There are things I need to work out.’

‘What? Sums? Crossword clues?’

‘No.’

They were both crying now.

‘So you’re going? Leaving me behind? Laura …’

‘I just need time to think.’

‘You don’t love me any more.’

‘You know I do.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

He exercised some restraint in his texts, though this in truth had more to do with his contempt for SMS as a means of communication than any real self-control. Texting seemed a retrograde step to him, like trying to have a conversation using Dymo Tape. Since she’d left, he’d texted her just once, every day.

His emails were more expressive and expansive, often disastrously so. He had not been able to resist occasional late-night outpourings. Regrettable lapses into florid self-pity, woundedness, the odd, empty accusation to try to even the score. The next day he would send an even longer apology, retracting certain points, reiterating others. Laura, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, was being bombarded with upwards of a thousand words a day, one half of them at least apologizing for the other half. Among that latter half were his first, tentative steps into poetry. Not verse, he was horrified to see in the cold light of day, so much as broken prose and half-remembered Joy Division lyrics, probably no better and possibly considerably worse than the solipsistic ramblings of American Web developers that Laura had once had to edit.

If she waded through the almost fifteen thousand words he had rained down on her in just over a week and a half, she would by now be aware of the general gist. He loved her, he was sorry if it hadn’t always shown. He was sorry he had been so miserable. He would change. He would make a go of their life there. He vowed to make her feel loved again. He had over the course of the one-sided correspondence listed every single episode in the last fifteen months where he considered he had behaved shabbily. He wanted her to know that he understood. He insisted that he didn’t want to pressure her. He said he wanted her to take as long as she needed to think. This was the only thing he wrote that lacked any sincerity at all.

He’d discovered that deep uncertainty opened the door to all kinds of forgotten playground voodoo. A childhood superstition had resurfaced: if you stopped expecting something to happen, then it would. The fact that a mail or a message had yet to arrive only indicated that he had not been thorough enough in exorcizing expectation. Each morning he sat before his closed laptop attempting to empty his mind of all hope, his eyes squeezed shut in a state of non-prayer. She would not have emailed, he told himself over and over. She was not yet ready. He could not hurry her.