The Band

Emily put the notepad back as she had found it, the beat of her heart painful against her ribs, seeming to pound in her throat, and her ears filled with a rush of white noise. On automatic pilot she made her way back through the house, erasing any sign that she had been there, and turning out the lights, until she stood on the front porch, locking the door, much as Owen had done over an hour before. She made her way back to her house - the tears dry now as dread began to set in. Was Megan right?

The neighbour across the road was at his letter box. She was certain that he had checked his mail three times already, and Mrs Essen next door was watering very late, standing on her driveway with her hose pointed away from Emily’s house, her back to her, as if determinedly not watching. Snooping, she thought with embarrassed anger. They had obviously seen Owen’s move during the day. She and Owen had become the street’s entertainment, as good as any soap opera, she thought angrily as she let herself into her house.

Owen’s face laughed at her from the pictures on the wall as she entered, his handsome features so well known, but also a mystery now. She felt a flash of anger towards him. How could he do this? To her, to them? Without warning and without even really discussing his reasons for doing it with her?

She would not sit up waiting for him. She would not.

But she joined her cold pot of tea in the lounge room and sat on the couch, clutching a pillow to her chest, watching as the room slipped into full darkness for headlights, until she eventually fell asleep. She dreamed that she chased Owen through the darkness, screaming out his name, and she could not catch him, and he would not stop to answer her cries.

Her phone vibrating woke her. Blearily she sat up in the darkness, wiping drool off her cheek and felt blindly for the phone. Owen’s name illuminated the screen. A message.

“Something amazing happened tonight,” it read. “Are you up?”

It was an echo of their teen years, she thought. They were back to being neighbours and sneaking over to each other’s house after midnight to share secrets, or just to grope. “Yes,” she replied, her heart caught between hope and despair.

He had been waiting for her reply, as it was not even a minute later that he knocked. He had shadows under his eyes and carried with him the smell of alcohol and smoke. His broad shoulders stretched an unfamiliar leather jacket that was either meant to be really form fitting or was a little small for him. He was, she thought, beautiful, with his dark hair falling into his eyes and his stubble shadowing his jaw. And, somehow, unattainable and untouchable. The chasm of his actions of the day yawning between them.

“That was… weird,” he said shoving his hands into his pocket and hunching his shoulders uncomfortably. “Knocking, I mean. I woke you,” he added, apologetic taking in her dishevelment. “I am sorry.”

“It is alright. Do you want a tea?” She turned feeling robotic and returned to the lounge room to collect the cold teapot from the coffee table. She carried the cold pot heavy with the undrunk liquid down the hallway, through the gallery of their laughing faces, to the kitchen.

“Yeah, okay,” he closed the door behind him and followed. “This is… difficult. Em, I am sorry.”

“What is this, Owen?” She emptied the pot into the sink and left it there. She filled the kettle. Keep it together, Emily, she told herself as she set two mugs onto the counter and dropped teabags and sugar into them. “I don’t understand. Yesterday we were planning on laying the floating floors and discussing wedding plans, and today I get back from wedding dress shopping for you to tell me, you don’t want to get married, have moved into the house next door, and don’t want to see me for a few days.”

“I know,” he sighed heavily, leaning his hip against the kitchen bench. It was odd, she thought, how she had seen him do that exact thing hundreds of times, and yet, in the space of the day, he now did it awkwardly, not at home within the house that had, that morning, he had lived in. “It is not going to be easy. I had to do it, though, Em. It has been in my head for weeks now, months even in a way, and I had to just do it, or I knew I would regret it.”

“What have you done, exactly?” She was starting to feel the burn of anger again that the grogginess of sleep and the shock of his message was wearing away. “What exactly is this, Owen? Do you want to put the marriage off? Do you not want to get married at all? Or are we over? I am just… confused.”

“Em,” he stepped forward and put his arms around her. She clung, the leather jacket against her palms unfamiliar, but the leanly muscled body beneath it, the scent of the man, the feel of him against her, still the same. She buried her face into his chest and breathed him in as she cried out the despair of the day, her frustration, her loss, and her anger. He held her until her grief wore down into stillness and then pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I am sorry, Em. So sorry.”

“I feel as if my entire life I have been burying this other person beneath being…” he sighed. “What you wanted me to be. With the wedding coming up, I realised that I had one chance to do the things I wanted to do, and if I didn’t, I would be locked into this life I didn’t want to live.”

“You don’t want our life?” She was appalled, pushing back against his chest, against his arms around her so that she could look up into his face. “Owen, we made these decisions together, built this life together.”

“I know,” he pulled her back against him and pressed his face into her hair, his arms around her as if in comfort but truly, she thought, because he did not want to look at her as he made his confessions. “I know we did, and at the time they were what I thought I should do. The sensible thing to do. But I wanted… wildness, Em. I wanted to pursue music, to go to parties and get wasted, to spend hours with other people who share my passion talking about lyrics and smoking and drinking, and not caring about work in the morning, or whether lawns need to be mowed, or bills paid…”

“Is that what you did tonight?” She could smell the smoke on his clothing. Owen did not smoke - they had never smoked. But he had been somewhere with smokers. Not just cigarettes, too, she thought, inhaling before leaning back to peer into his eyes. They did not look red. “Whose jacket is this?”

“Ah, I swapped it, with James…” He chuckled a little at the memory, his cheeks colouring. “James is in the band, a really good band, Em… and he took a fancy to my jacket… Anyway, they are… you know, it really looks like they are going to make something of themselves, Em. And they want me to join them. They like my music and want me to play guitar and sing.”

“You are joining a band?” She was trying to make sense of what he was saying, trying to line it up with his decision to end their engagement and move out, trying to fit the pieces together of a puzzle she didn’t know the picture of.

“Yes,” he laughed, the sound light-hearted and free. A laugh she had not heard, she realised, in some time. “Yes, I am joining a band. Writing their music and playing guitar for them.”

“Okay.” She did not understand why that had led to him wanting to end their engagement and move into the house next door. “Owen… I am not going to stop you from joining a band if you want to. It is good to have hobbies. If you need more time, we can hire someone to finish the renovations…”

She was bargaining, she realised, trying to compromise, find a way for them to erase the day and return to how things had been. A small part of her hoped it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding between them, and that now that they were finally talking, they would be able to work it out between them, and they would laugh over how silly they had been as they moved his things back in…

“Em,” he said it gently. “It is not a hobby. I am pursuing it as a career.”

“How?” She was baffled by the logistics of it. Everyone knew that music was a hobby and not a viable career, especially at their age. People took that sort of risks when they were in their early twenties and didn’t have the financial responsibilities to maintain whilst their dreams crashed and burnt, not nearly thirty with two mortgages to pay…

“How?” He repeated. “Well, we want to organise a tour and we are going to record a demo, and there is this manager… I am going to sell the house, and use it to finance…”

“Oh my god,” she pulled back. “Owen!”

“See!” He released her and strode away, around the other side of the kitchen bench, bracing his arms against it. “See, this is why, Em. This is why.”

“But Owen. You can’t just quit your job, sell your house, and run away with a band. People just… don’t do that.”

“People in your sensible world, Em, don’t do that. I don’t care about my job. Designing carparks,” he snorted in disgust. “It is bullshit. This isn’t living, Em, it is… beige.”

“Beige?”

He laughed, and it was no longer a happy sound, the opposite in fact. “Yes, beige, Em. It is humdrum. It is just existing. It is doing the sensible and expected because it is responsible. It is smothering.”

She stared at him, her face pale. “You have never said you feel this way.”

“I didn’t want to…” he paused and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to hurt you Em. But I have to, or I’m hurting myself. My life, my job, my clothing… It’s all just bullshit. Not what I want, to do, to wear. This person,” he threw a hand towards the photos of them laughing on the wall, “is not the person I want to be.”

“I love you, Em,” he said. “I love you, but I don’t think I am in love with you. I want to be. But there is no… fire to it. I want more.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if shocked by what he had said, and then sighed it out.

“More than me,” she said, bitterly, the tears beginning again, but with the fire of anger behind them. “You want more than me,” she repeated, tasting the bite of those words on her tongue, and feeling a sting, like indigestion between her breasts. She swallowed back the raw pain of those words.

“It is not like that, Emily. It isn’t you, is it us,” he was sorrowful with it. “I am sorry. I hope we can be friends. You have been my friend for as long as I remember. I think it is why I didn’t do this sooner. I didn’t want to lose you as my friend.”

              

“I don’t want to lose you either.” She sobbed in a breath, the sound ugly and raw, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, shocked by the sound.

“Oh, Em,” he sighed it out and walked back around the kitchen bench to draw her against him. “I am sorry. I wish… I wish I were the person you want me to be, or that we had fire and passion… That would be… great. But it is just not there.”

“Owen,” she did not want to let him go, feared that if she did so, she would never get him back, feeling as if they were saying goodbye but pretending that it was not so.

“Can we be friends? I would like that,” he pulled back and smiled at her, the crooked smile and dimple the same as from their childhood, but there was a lack of light behind the expression, as if he were trying to make something work that he felt wasn’t going to happen, offering a compensation prize to sooth the hurt away. “I had better go. We need to… you know, do this cleanly, Em. It is too easy to go back into old habits because it is comfortable, and that will just make this… drawn out and miserable for us both.”

“Okay,” she released him although it hurt to do so. “Okay, Owen.”

“Okay.” He touched her cheek and then walked to the door. “Message me, hey? We will talk by messages. Give it a few weeks, and then maybe…?”

“Okay.” Maybe what? Maybe they would just be friends? That wasn’t what she wanted, though.

She sank down to the floor as he closed the door behind him and wept into her knees.

“So, what? That is just, it?” Megan stirred sugar into her coffee the next morning. She hadn’t eaten bread since ninth grade declaring it empty calories but loaded sugar into her coffee like it was calorie free.

She had turned up at Emily’s house an hour before, letting herself in through the front door with her spare key. Megan had shaken Emily out of the cocoon she had made in the covers that still smelt of Owen, pushing her into the bathroom, and selecting clothes from the closet, before pushing her reluctant sister into her car. She had whisked Emily away from the misery of the empty house to the rather dubious café tucked in the corner of a dingy and dated building that looked out onto a grimy, shopping street populated by the neon signs of discount carpet and second-hand electrical shops.

Emily didn’t even know what suburb they were in, and wondered if Megan did, or if her sister had just driven aimlessly until she found somewhere that looked as miserable as Emily did and had decided that was an appropriate fit for the situation and so had parked. There was every likelihood, Emily though wryly, that Megan’s slick Audi would not still be there when they returned, or it would be missing its wheels.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand… any of it. How do you just stop loving someone after twenty-two years?” Emily wondered. “How do you just… walk away from your life like that? He is having agents through the house tomorrow. He is actually serious about selling it.” That overly bright early morning message from Owen had sent her into a spiral of self-pitying despair.

“Where are you going to go? He is in your house.”

“I don’t know,” the thought had not occurred to her, she had been too caught up in the misery of not waking up with Owen in bed beside her, not hearing him around the house, in the shower, making coffee in the kitchen… She had missed his clothing in the cupboard, his shoes, his things. It was as if, in one swoop, he had removed himself from her future, the house, and her life, and there was a vacuum left where he had been. “I guess he will move out, and I will move in there.”

“The renovations are mostly done, eh? At least you have that much. The house will be worth more than you bought it. He doesn’t want you to sell that too, so he can reclaim the money you’ve both put into it?”

“Oh my god,” Emily put her face into her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know Megan. I am still at Owen saying he doesn’t want to marry me and moving next door. I am not ready to think that far ahead. Maybe he will come to his senses and change his mind?”

“Maybe he won’t. I mean, Owen is pretty stubborn like that.”

“I feel sick just thinking about it,” Emily moaned into the palms of her hands. “I need a tissue.”

Megan dug into her purse. “I brought a box.” She whacked it onto the table between them. “This Louis bag is great. Stylish and you can fit a bottle of wine, a box of tissues, and half a make-up case inside it without destroying how it hangs. And I got it at an estate sale,” she added with satisfaction. “At a fraction of what it would have cost to buy.”

Only Megan, Emily thought, would be unbothered by carrying around a dead woman’s handbag, bought at discount from grieving kin. She knew what Megan would say if Emily pointed out the macabre side of her purchase – that is the circle of life, honey, and no one can take their Louis bag collection with them when they die.

“It is so embarrassing to be crying in public,” Emily wiped her face, looking around uncomfortably. The café was a dingy little place with scuffed lino on the floor, and grimy paint on the walls, totally in keeping with the street visible beyond it. The chairs and tables they sat at were sticky to the touch, and the service was disinterested – they had ordered a pot of tea ten minutes before, and the waitress was still standing at the register staring at her phone.

Emily wondered if they should remind her, but then discarded the idea. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

At least the café was not crowded, and the other patrons had the air of regulars, bringing out e-readers and newspapers, as if settling in for a long wait… Though, in hindsight, she was not sure if that was a good or a bad thing. More people might mean more people nearby, but with less people, she felt more noticeable, crying in the back booth.

“It is why we have the booth, hon. No one can see. Cry to your hearts’ delight.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” Emily reached for another tissue. “I love him. I don’t want to lose him.”

“It sounds like that is a done deal,” Megan replied. “You have to think self-preservation, now Em.”

Self-preservation was a skill that Megan had honed like a knife. She said her motto was marry up, without the marrying part. Megan always came out ahead after a breakup. She approached it as an opportunity to forever imprint herself in her ex’s life, with a savagery that ranged from petty to chilling and often resulted in the ex in question agreeing to anything just to end the torture. She had lunch with her lawyer, Constance, once a month, they had become such good friends.

“I can’t. I feel like… I just want to curl up in a ball and die.”

“You have never had a break-up before,” Megan was sympathetic. “Most of us have a few practice-runs during our teen years to give us survival techniques for later in life. Here is what you need to do. Call in sick tomorrow. Take annual leave for the week, whatever you need to do, because, believe me, this is going to get messy. These things always do when you have been living together. It is just like a divorce, without the legal proceedings… Unless,” she added with a hint of wickedness. “You want to go that road. I am sure Constance can fit you in.”

“No, no thank you,” Emily shook her head. “And I can’t just call in sick. I can’t just say, sorry, my fiancé has decided to run away with a band, can I have a week off?”

“Why the hell not? Other people do.”

“I am an editor, Megan. I do my job, or I lose it. I am only as relevant as the last book. If I ever hope to become published myself, I have to stay in my bosses’ good graces.”

“The love of your life dumped you on the day you put a deposit onto your wedding dress. That is a pretty big deal,” Megan pointed out.

“Oh my god,” Emily began to cry again. “What am I going to do?”

“Call around and try to get your deposits back?” Megan suggested helpfully.

“What is wrong with me? Why aren’t I enough?”

“Nothing is wrong with you, Emily,” Megan sighed heavily. “Men suck, is all. Take my advice. Call in sick at work. Get your deposits back from the wedding vendors. Ask the agent to sell both houses. Get a new haircut and begin again. It is like they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. Trust me, I have done this enough times to have it refined to an artform.”

“I love Owen.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t love you back, does he?” Megan was gentle about it. Brutal and gentle at the same time. “It sucks, babe, it really does. But maybe you and Owen were always just meant to be friends.”