Out of Colour, Out of Mind
I found Debra’s white tee shirt at the bottom of my laundry basket. It was the day of her funeral. I held the wrinkled white tee shirt in my hand and felt as if I should shed a tear. It was so soft to the touch. I'd actually forgotten about the tee shirt, like a lot of the clothes I've lost track of along the way. The tee shirt had obviously spent some time at the bottom of the basket. I tend not to wear white very often so it's pretty rare for me to do a white wash. The white wash makes its way to the bottom of the laundry basket eventually. Colour takes precedence in my laundry basket hierarchy. Out of colour. Out of mind. It all seemed so sad. It was a nice tee shirt that didn't deserve to be treated so badly at the bottom of the laundry basket. I always loved it for some reason, it's soft thin feel. It seemed to cling to the body in a static electric way. It was actually a designer tee shirt of the highest quality that will remain nameless for Debra's sake and the fact she disliked name dropping products in songs and stories, especially a corporation such as Tesco, something I found out first hand when she critiqued one of my stories. It was her only objection, that I mentioned the name of a product. God forbid it was a corporation such as Tesco. I was just stating a fact in relation to a character. It wasn't that big a deal. All friends have differences.
Whenever I slept on Debra’s sofa she brought the tee shirt down for me with a pair of pajama bottoms and a furry blanket and I slept on her sofa with her Staffordshire bull terrier, Madagascar, sleeping at my feet. She was quite cozy, Madagascar, especially last Easter. It felt odd to hold Debra's tee shirt knowing that she had died. I thought of Madagascar and her two boys. And all her friends... the neighbours on her street who were close to her and found her dead after they heard Madagascar barking and barking for hours on end, or so the story travels sadly. I still had her white tee shirt in my laundry basket because I wore it home from her place by accident after I put my flannel shirt and sweater on over it in the morning. We drank coffee in her garden and she told me her troubles and I told her mine.
I didn't expect Debra to die. I'd only seen her a couple of months earlier and she looked fine. She was fifty three years young. She was walking near the train station during her lunch break near the college where she worked and not far from where I worked at the mental institution. She was with another English lecturer when I passed her. He looked like an English lecturer anyway, or History. He had an ever thinning pony tail and wore a brown corduroy blazer with what looked like matching corduroy trousers. They were deep in conversation when I turned the corner. I knew what they were talking about by the look on Debra's face when our eyes met. We had that connection. We squinted in each other's eyes, like two Lieutenant Columbos. I knew that they were talking about the script Debra and I wrote together some months earlier. I could tell by the look in her eye and by the fact she shifted her glasses in a nervous way and looked away. I wanted to say hello but she didn't allow me the opportunity.
I sent Debra a couple of text messages to sort of open the door to a reconciliation but I wasn't serious enough in my messages to merit a response, which I regret (I should have been more serious). She wanted a proper apology from me and I didn't feel I had done anything wrong. I thought she was being silly really. Childish to be exact. I was only guilty of trying to fix my dear buddy, Pete the Tooth, up with her because he asked me for her number after they met in the Red Lion Pub and got on famously, or so it seemed to me and the Tooth. I told him that I would have to ask Debra if it was okay but I didn't see why not. When I asked her she said she didn't want me to give him her number. I asked her why not and we had a bad argument on the phone over it. I didn't like the reasons why she wasn't interested in the Tooth, that she was judging the Tooth on his nickname. I called her ‘shallow minded and she said that I was a ‘nasty man.’ I thought the whole conversation was a joke but she was serious. She really thought I was a bastard and I was offended she thought so. All I did was try and put two people who wanted love together.
When Pete the Tooth met Debra at the Red Lion pub it was six months before Debra died. Debra knew Pete from a story I had written about him called Pete the Tooth, which I’d asked Debra to read for me. I felt that she formed an opinion of Pete already based on the story, which exaggerated aspects of Pete's personality, like his drinking and irascible nature at times. I tried to explain to her that he wasn't really like that, that it was exaggerated, that she didn't have to call him Pete the Tooth, that I’d invented these things about Pete for the sake of the story, to make the character more interesting, that in fact, Pete the Tooth was a far more interesting character than the story, a much better person, and that I thought they’d make a great couple. Debra was very offended that I thought they'd make a great couple and didn't want to talk about it any more. She hung the phone up on me and that was the last time we spoke in person.
When I told the Tooth that Debra died he had an odd reaction. He looked pleasantly relieved after the initial shock that hits people when they discover someone they knew or met has died. They replay the events of their encounters with the newly departed in an astonished awe and take stock of their own mortality. Even though the Tooth didn't know Debra that well he had strong feelings for her. It was written on his face. He often asked about Debra and talked about her and the time they met. Their meeting didn't obviously hold the same impression for Debra. The Tooth was quite moved when I told him Debra died. His reaction was slightly odd but the Tooth is actually the most sensitive man that I have ever met. He's also probably my best friend. I asked him why the reaction and he explained.
‘I had a crush on her from that night you brought her in the pub. She was my type. So honest, and smart, and interesting. Imagine if she did fancy me and we got together and then she died so suddenly. That would be the fourth time in my life something like that has happened to me, so suddenly, and I don't know if I'd be able to handle it again. You know my first wife went off with the next-door neighbour. That nearly killed me, took me years to get over that. I didn't see it coming. I thought she loved me. I still haven't gotten over that one. And then when I realised that my second wife was a lesbian, which really wasn't a surprise, but it hit me just as hard really as I was having a mid life crisis at the time. Even though I never married the third one we were together the longest. Unfortunately we fought more than the others and at my age I am too old to be fighting so it was a good thing she kicked me out, after the initial shock, but if Debra and I got together and she died six months later, that would have really done me in. I feel very blessed actually, at the moment.'
The Tooth had a strange way of cheering a guy up. He also had strange logic sometimes. I couldn't help but thinking that maybe he could have saved Debra. Who knows? She told me not long before she died that she wanted to find someone to love, that she’d been alone for too long. I told her not to force it, that it’s not a requirement in life to have a lover or a friend. She had her dog and her two boys now grown up. What more could she want without complicating things further. ... She had lots of friends. She had her house. She had a new job, even if she wasn't making as much money as before, she had one.
What she said she really wanted was a lover and to write. I told her I couldn't be her lover but I could be her friend and I could write with her. So we did. We wrote a story about our lives called Parallel Universe. We spent Easter weekend planing and writing it. We had a reading of it at my place and people seemed to like it but like so many projects of this variety they require contacts, money, time, and a will of iron to see it through. Nevertheless, I'm glad we wrote the script together, that in the last year of Debra's life she started to write. I'd like to think she's looking over me now. Well, I can still hear her voice so she must be.
Apparently, I heard through the grapevine that Debra found some interest in Parallel Universe from an English lecturer at her new job who had some connections in the industry. I imagine it was the same lecturer she was walking down the street with the last time I saw her and we didn't say hello to each other. She felt stronger about Parallel Universe than I did, I guess. I'd like to think that we were taking a break from each other more than any kind of permanent falling out. I feel sadness but not guilt.
I put Debra’s white tee shirt in the washing machine with all my other whites. I hung it in the garden near the shed and waited until it dried in the sun. When it dried I put it on and buttoned up my only white button down shirt over it. I put on my only tie, appropriately black, and black trousers. Luckily I had a nice black blazer Pete the Tooth let me borrow for the funeral. I polished my shoes on the way out the door and hopped on the bus to pay my respects to Debra and talk to the English lecturer and others I knew through Debra and put some faces to the names of the others.
On the way to the funeral and throughout those days I sang a song to myself that Debra and I both loved. I sing it to myself whenever I think of her now.
'Fire and soil... well who cares... just take off your underwear.... and kiss the life... into me.... and death will fall.... at my feet.'
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