Signs of Life Read Online Free Page A

kind of disorientation – a sense of discovery that didn’t lead anywhere; with him, I was never really sure whether I was more myself or less
myself.
    I was nervous about living high up but in fact I like it better than being on the ground floor. I fantasize about growing strawberries and lettuce on the roof terrace, though
in reality I almost never go out there (I have my desk almost flat against the doors and so it’s tricky to open them). But I am trying other new things, like wearing my hair down instead of
always scrunched back and buying luscious shower cream instead of unscented blocks of soap and making tea in a pot with actual tea leaves. Living up here just suits me.
    It is very nice to have feet on the ground if you are a feet-on-the-ground person. I have nothing against feet-on-the-ground people at all. And it is very nice to have feet
     off the ground if you are a feet-off-the-ground person. I have nothing against feet-off-the-ground people. They are all aspects of the truth, or motes in the coloured rays that come from the
     coloured glass that stains the white radiance of eternity.
    Stevie Smith
    Johnny and I went camping in Corsica. We found a perfect place to stay; a little patch of flat, mossy ground for the tent, a river, shade. The day after we arrived there, I sat by the river,
reading. Johnny said he wanted to go for a walk and set off up the steep side of the valley. Whenever I looked up from my book, I could see him getting smaller as he climbed. Later he returned with
a small yellow flower. He’d seen the flowers high on the hillside through binoculars and decided to go and pick one for me.
    During that holiday, my birthday came around making me feel low, as birthdays sometimes do. That evening, as it grew dark, Johnny crawled into the tent carrying a fruitcake with candles on it,
something he’d planned before we left England. I remember his face in the candlelight, especially his warm, wide smile.
    Sometimes I would dearly love to see Johnny again, to talk with him, hear his sense of things. I don’t even have his phone number.
    If I couldn’t make the kiss unhappen then I wanted it to have been a simple mistake, something that happened because I was drunk. But I had been drunk before, many times.
I didn’t have to decide whether or not to tell Johnny, I simply knew that I would not. Telling him would make the act bigger than it needed to be, and as I made myself see it, not telling
Johnny the truth was an extension of the mistake, not a separate act, and so I had only done one wrong thing. One wrong thing in five years of a good relationship didn’t seem so bad. If you
took the mistake and divided it between all the days and nights we’d had together the mistake became so small that it almost disappeared.
    Because of what happened later, I destroyed or threw away everything Carl had given me. When it turned nasty I wrote down as exactly as I could, with dates and times, the
threats he made to me in case I ever needed them to use as evidence against him. But when it was all over I tore these pages out of my notebook. Now I wish I hadn’t. I am not a particularly
well-ordered person, and I wonder whether well-ordered people have accurate recollections and people like me have to put up with a jumble. I can never be bothered to put my washing away – I
just take what I need from the pile of clean laundry on a chair in my bedroom. This lack of order used to nag at me, and I would berate myself for not being a better person. Even though I now
believe that order is over-rated, my doubt over what happened, and when, presents a problem in writing things down. Sometimes this doesn’t seem to matter, but other times it does. For
example, the conversation with Johnny about new work-friends: I can’t remember when this took place so I can’t tell whether Johnny was looking for reassurance early on, before anything
had happened, or whether it was later. Although I have said I was