Part ThreeReconnect
And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in
Jane Austen
Chapter37Rocks
Wednesday, 4 December
After carefully following my Lazarus-like spouse in his wheelchair back to his sad little flat yesterday, I returned home. I wasn’t much company and even failed to read the children their bedtime story. Quite unforgivable, but it’s hard to focus when you’ve been visited by a ghost.
Today, I think about Hollis, my former husband, as I untangle gym socks, vests and various pants. I was quite sure he was dead. I pushed him off a high ledge in the Alps myself. I watched him fall, heard his sad, plaintive cry and the thud of his body against the ice.
I then staged my own fall, smashing my climbing hat with a rock and throwing my backpack into the ravine. I made my way down the mountain feeling the wonderful freedom of a super-fast divorce.
I manage to get through the washing before Nathan is due home, and shut myself away in my office. I do not, as a rule, look backwards. I like the past to be past, I like the dead to be dead. Only the future interests me – what I want, and what I need to do to get it.
If, for instance, Stephen were to tell me that his mother diedtoday, I would think how wonderful for him to be free of that shrinking and costly organism, whose sole role seems to be ruining other people’s happiness by digging up what should be buried. I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but we all think things that would cause alarm if we said them in company. More than half our world is left unsaid.
And that’s how Hollis and I got into difficulty. Too much left unsaid, hiding beneath the surface, lowering my boiling point. I see him now on my laptop screen. Matthew Hollis. I always just called him Hollis. Who’d want to be called Matt? It’s either a colour without sheen or a place to wipe your feet.
He’s smiling out from my screen in an old article with a photograph provided by his family, I imagine. There were no such photographs of me. I’ve always been careful about that. The Google translation reads ‘Couple Missing on Mont Blanc’.
There are three more articles: ‘Storm Hampers Rescue Attempt’; ‘Married Couple Feared Dead’; and finally, ‘Rescue Called Off After Three Days’. And that was it. A simple story in four acts. The story ends there. No curiosity, no investigation. The French authorities simply put it down to yet more inexperienced tourists climbing without knowledge or skills. After all, we were on the Goûter Pass which is known rather helpfully as the ‘corridor of death’.
I stare down at his photo and imagine him crawling his way to safety in unbelievable pain, and I feel something. What is it? Regret? Guilt? No, I know what it is. It’s disappointment at a job half done.
So, let’s recap – my first husband is not frozen to a rockface at four thousand metres above sea level, in a deep, inaccessible ravine covered in thick snow. He somehow found it within his optimistic antipodean nature to transform into one of those survivors worthy of a Netflix documentary, which is surprising for a man who couldn’t wash his own socks. Three days he survived on a flapjack, his own tears and his passionate love for his wife, slowly climbing out of the ravine, inch by inch, carrying his shattered legs behind him, until he made it back to the path, when he realized that his wife must’ve fallen, too, and was probably dead.
And yet, here he is, which means that at some point later, Hollis must’ve come to the belief that I was miraculously alive and dedicated his life to finding me. I am almost moved. But that’s not the story. This is the story of a botched capricious murder attempt. He was annoying me. He’d eaten all the Kendal Mint Cake. He was explaining how I could improve my climbing technique, while repeating his dismal utterance of ‘love you’ at irritating moments.
I was homeless when I met Hollis, running away from a life of rampant drug and alcohol abuse. He took me in, and I found myself married to this random Australian who didn’t ask questions, had a job, a home, money, and never judged me. The thing is, I found his mindless optimism and endless emotional support a little too much in the end. It’s not reality that kills you, it’s the lack of it.
After Hollis fell, I ran away again. I was presumed dead, and I liked being dead. I returned to London, assumed a new name, and returned to poverty and homelessness for a time, secure in a world that didn’t love me because I couldn’t love it back.
And I thought that was it, but Hollis survived and that presents several rather knotty problems. Not least, that I’m currently married to two different men, which is not only excessive, it’s illegal.
I consider my options vis-à-vis Hollis.
Option 1: I meet him. I explain that I thought he was dead and I’ve sadly moved on. We recall old times, share a memory or two, and then agree to let sleeping dogs lie, get a quick divorce, and I help him find another woman to simper over.
Option 2: I ignore him. I bury my head and hope he will go away. I engage in some light risk-taking to get it out of my system and pretend he doesn’t exist.
Option 3: I get rid of him. I appear at his door, declare that he has found me, wrap my arms around him and weep with joy. We celebrate, drink a bottle of wine together, and I garrote him in his half-drunken state and leave.
My preferred option is Option 3, and I find myself playing this scene out as it has aroused something within me. However,self-gratification aside, this option does present a potential problem. There is a link between me, Jason Mercer and Hollis. The police don’t know that yet, but if I kill Hollis and the police connect me to Hollis, and Hollis to Mercer, I will become the common denominator in the disappearance and death of two missing men, which makes getting away with either murder a more significant challenge.
After some reflection, I go for Option 2. The past is a hindrance and I fear that if I engage with it at all it will entangle me. I like the unclouded vistas of the future, not the disappointments of life through a rear-view mirror.
To-do list:
Book additional tutoring for Nelly
Pay for a bereavement therapist for Cait
Book the floor sander for living room
Secure Hampstead
