BED & BREAKFAST

CHAPTER 9 - "Lawn Bowls, baby."

What follows nothing? Marie does- or did.

"Something else Elise. You must have the same interests, same passions! La passion is everything! Not football for Daniel and, me... je ne sais quoi... what is the game with the white uniforms?"

"Lawn balls baby," Daniel stepped in with an indulgent smile. And then laughed, laughed because I could see him mentally picturing his feisty French (Okay okay! Poetic licence?) female in a staid white uniform: the skirt low, covering legs encased in thick white stockings bottoming out in those ridiculous white shoes.

I think I've mentioned the special 'Barefoot Bowls' nights these clubs have here, I'm sure - what popped into my head - the equally ridiculous notion that somehow playing bowls barefoot was "Oooohhhh... naughty!" The pinnacle of naughtiness equating to exposing one's bare feet- how infinitely, terribly sad! Why not bloody 'Naked Bowls' huh? I mean you're either side of sixty, you've maybe retired, why not go flaunt it, use it, baby! What else have you got really, except some few reasonably healthy years ahead before your partner croaks it (if they haven't already and you're there in bare feet to 'gently go on retiring' with a sturdier model?) What? Your last lustful memory's gonna be someone's pale fucking feet? I digress...

"Ah oui, one at the tennis or the football and the other off with a stupid uniform! Or one likes to write and read la litérature and the other never reads a book?"

Her accent and vocab faltered on the French, much louder side when she was more animated than usual (arms flung here and there, some spittle landing on the azalea branches in the centrepiece).

All I took out of this statement, however, was "book" and "write". What had I stumbled into here? Fair enough "la passion" and "the sex" and even that betraying bitch, Venice. But she was talking literature now? Part of me was more incensed over this than anything else. Literature tied me to my love, it was the 'thing' between us. How dare it be their thing?

"Do you write?" I asked. I had to ask. It begged to be asked. My writer-y side pushed to the front; now, not only maniacally recording every word and every nuance but also it too, intimately involved.

"Oui, we both like to read and write. Daniel... he writes songs."

Oh hell, could this get any worse? I cursed into my napkin, I did! "Fuck" in the napkin, (smoker's cough ever a handy alibi) but in my head, the preface and the epilogue also reverberated: He is sitting under a tree over there, and Coco is chirping nearby and he's reading her the words of a new song he wrote- fuck! And she closes the book in her lap and reaches for him, fingers unbuttoning his shirt...

"But... but Daniel also has the Coaching Academy-"

I began blurting the above because it was irking me, this new direction. How perfect it was- not the superficial social media perfect where lives are tweaked to give illusions. No, this was real, and it was irking and vexing because I had believed it something I didn't know I didn't know- therefore I was excused? Now it was something I knew I didn't know, so I felt kinda dumb. Also a tad pissed off. (At everyone; past, present and, knowing me, throw in future too.)

But that's as far as I got with that blurt. She sat up. Straight. Stared me down as only a feisty French female can. (Okay! I wanna move there maybe!)

"We have our own interests oui, but together! I love going to watch sport. And this... this place, we share it together, the two of us! I run it and do the cleaning and entertaining for the guests mais Daniel- he cooks and he fixes things; he is always improving our little business!"

Woah. It should have sounded defensive. Out of my waffling mouth, it would have. A blatant attempt to prove the philosophy worked by citing (justifying) examples... (He does this, I do this, look how well we work together. Look!) Yet her mouth gave over passion and belief and gratitude and- damn if it wasn't a proclamation; a prideful speech honouring their union instead?

"I got this place as a rundown old house... unlivable, you know? A couple of years before I met Marie." Daniel took over but only after touching her lightly on the arm- a gesture I took as approval-seeking to which she responded with the slightest of nods and a quick smile. "Then I lost my previous business, just before Marie arrived here... and my house." He continued, as I struggled to raise my eyes from her arm and his stroking it, to his eyes. "Long story short, we spent our first six months together living in a tent."

"Oui, we did!" Marie added. "And Daniel asked me one day back then, why I didn't return home. No family here and living in a tent with two very small children... drip drip drip... rain everywhere. But we were too happy, non?"

Daniel nodded. I think I may also have nodded. Seems we had our bobble-head routine down pat now. Oui.

... Followed by an internal "Huh". Because, what happened to maintaining one's identity and interests and personal time and bloody individuality, huh? Isn't that supposed to be a significant part of any relationship? A measure of its success even? But that's not all.

What happened to me?

I'd given up. Drip. Drip. Drip. I'd looked ahead and not seen what I wanted but what I assumed I'd get. Drip. Instance after instance when I'd shut hope up, slammed the door on possibility- me, the one ever-expounding no door should ever be slammed shut. Drip. Like I was some fucking fortune-teller staring into a dim ball and pronouncing doom ahead. Drip. Rain everywhere. I'd turned off the sun and declared the planet of positivity uninhabitable.

My sunflower was a sham. My love-heart with the stars twinkling around it, equally so. I'd given up on the real ever being real and instead lived the real in my head. Devastating every now.

This realisation was closely followed by the catastrophic question: Had I infected him?

Oh! I sat at that table but my mind was there, sitting opposite him, looking for signs. Looking for hope and optimism in his eyes. Hope rising in me- that he still believed, that he'd not destroyed as I'd had, that he'd kept our future safe. From me.

"What say you?" I recall asking him in my head. That's what I'd ask him really, if I could. If I ever sat opposite him. (You see? Read these words again! Even knowing I am destroying, I am still bloody destroying: "If"... Drip. "Ever." Drip.)

"If" plus "ever" equates to "never". There's a "never" in my head!

I'd been staring at the once bright-pink-now-grey and-fraying gift ribbon on my left wrist. Placed there the night a young life was taken. Hugging my wrist for three and a half years now. There was this irrational, insane notion that if the ribbon broke and was lost to me before I saw him, I'd never see him. That the ribbon and he were somehow connected- it's tenure on my wrist twisted with the belief that he should remove it, for it was a token of life.

If it unraveled and fell off... then death was the token.

I'd be left with what I am seeing now: our initials (since tattooed on that same wrist) ever-entwined in the symbol for eternity. Love dead. Me alone.

Writers are freaks. Writers in love are freakishly masochistic. Melodrama anyone?