When she looked down the stairs and saw him in the hall her body froze with shock, and when he looked up and saw her the dread that enveloped her was similar to the moment of realisation that an approaching car really isn’t going to slow down and it’s too late for you to move out of the way.
The collision was averted for a while by the host hurrying him and the people he’d arrived with out of the hall and into the living room. She should have left then, quickly rushing down the stairs and out without a word to anyone, but before she could act the host – a colleague from her new job – came back out into the hall, laden with coats and scarfs, and saw her loitering there halfway down the stairs. Escape foiled by other dreads: of impoliteness; of making a scene, of explaining the past.
From there the evening became a dance of avoidance, keeping her distance, clinging to other groups, never allowing herself to be caught alone, moving from room to room whenever it looked like her conversational grouping might merge with his, never letting him see her staring at her, see her shaking, see her fear.
She wondered how come he was here. These were new friends, new acquaintances at least, a different town, a different life. From the other guests indifferent reactions she assumed it was just bad luck rather than organised maliciousness. No one knew anything at all about her past, nor surely about his.
It had ended messily, as always. Sometimes she wished she could, just once, attain that tedious middle-class ideal of the amicable breakup. Instead, each time it was worse, and this time it had turned unpleasant. Leaving work unpleasant. Moving away unpleasant.
Was it that men became worse, she wondered, the older they got. Worse at handling rejection, worse at letting go, worse at controlling their emotions. Or was it her judgement that was in decline. She didn’t like to think about that. If everything was tinged with desperation now, what would it be like in ten years, in twenty, when she retired. Would there still be this ceaseless fury during the inevitable dissolutions even then? Would they – whoever the other half of that they was, if there even was a they – stay bound together by the fear, not of loneliness, but of the hatred and anger a split would unleash?
The longer she stayed the more impossible it became to leave. He was watching her now, any attempts at subtlety washed away by drink. If she left she knew he would follow. Waiting him out had then become the hope, that he would leave with his friends if she stayed late enough. But no one seemed to have any inclination to go, and he kept his guard near the door to the hall, blocking off the only route of escape.
A couple moved towards the kitchen and she followed them, rifling through the cutlery drawers as if searching for a bottle opener while they got themselves some drinks from the fridge. She lingered there alone for a bit when they returned to the front room, before slipping quietly out the back door.
She knew there was no exit from the garden – it was lined by rows of conifers on all three sides, and behind them stood eight-foot high fences that failed to keep the neighbours’ cats out – but she hoped perhaps if she hid herself out here he might think he had somehow let her evade his watch and sneak out of the party and leave.
The garden was long and dark and empty. She backed herself into the conifers at the far corner, dampness from the soil seeping coldly through her socks, branches pressing awkwardly against her sides, pushing uncomfortably against her face.
Shame and doubt creeped in with the cold, horror at the absurdity of it all as the minutes dragged in and she shivered out here in a bush. And then the dread again, as he appeared at the back door and looked out blankly into the gloom.
“Jeanette?”
He skipped down the steps and onto the concrete, walking forward a few steps and stopping just before the patio turned to lawn. Just before it turned to darkness, the light from the kitchen dying by the verge.
“Jeanette? I know you’re there.”
An undercurrent of the old malevolence.
“Jeanette!”
He stepped out onto the lawn. She put her hand in her pocket and tightened her grip on the handle of the kitchen knife. He moved towards her, looming large, a silhouette outlined by a dying glow. She held her breath. A moment of stillness stretched out before her.
__________
Notes:
1. Another old unpublished thing.
2. From 2013, again