Page 44 of Rhymes with Metaphor

I t was such a gentle , amicable split, Reg was left without even the salve of anger. He stayed in the loft until Christmas Day, in case Joel returned.

He didn’t.

On Boxing Day, Reg threw clothes, his laptop, and his notebook into a bag and booked a flight to India. He travelled for a while before landing at a guest house in Jodhpur, its principle appeal being that nothing there reminded him of Joel.

Tourist season had ended, so he had the place practically to himself, which suited him.

He started smoking again, or tried to, but cigarettes didn’t taste the way he remembered, and they weren’t what he was longing for.

He met a couple of expats—a furniture exporter and a freelance photographer—staying at a nearby hotel, and on some afternoons, he’d sit by the pool with them, drinking and chatting.

Once, they all went together to the Mehrangarh Fort and had dinner on the rooftop.

Afterwards, they looked down from the fort at the rows and rows of blue-painted sandstone houses in shades of indigo, lilac, and ultramarine, and Reg reflected that something about looking at a beautiful landscape while you were grieving made you die inside a little.

In principle, sleeping in a strange bed, Reg didn’t expect to wake and find Joel beside him, but when he was asleep, Joel’s presence was always close by. Reg’s body craved Joel, the muscle memory of holding him when he was half asleep caused him to wake with a bundle of sheets in his arms.

Nothing here reminded Reg of Canada, but it did remind him of Wales.

It was the colour of some of the houses—the same seaside blue as the tiles in his grandmother’s bathroom.

He kept expecting to round a corner or come over a hill and see the ocean.

It was disorienting to keep realizing he was on the edge of a desert.

For a while, he spent most of his time alone in his room getting drunk and wallowing in self-pity.

Eventually, prompted by boredom and loneliness, he started writing.

Not in the short, flame-tipped bursts that Joel’s presence had inspired.

This, this inspiration in Joel’s absence, was a steady, unrelenting drumbeat, a compulsion that pulled him along, word by word, no matter how much it hurt (and it did).

Despite the lack of tangible reminders, Reg thought of Joel often when he’d written himself out and was trying to sleep, trying to stop worrying himself sick about Joel, terrified that something had happened to him.

Once, he was wakened from a nightmare by the sounds of a boisterous wedding procession in the street.

He went downstairs to watch and found himself pulled into the procession with the shouting and blaring music and colours and lights, surrounded by happy people singing, and he felt like a ghost among the living.

Distance from home and social isolation leant him perspective.

He realized that the only two sexual relationships he’d had in his life had been initiated because he was missing Martin.

Although Reg would never say it out loud, Flip had been his second choice.

And perhaps, towards the end of their relationship, after Reg and Martin had re-established contact and Reg’s attentions had shifted, Flip had cottoned on to that.

Martin had been the only constant in Reg’s life.

Losing him to Juliet had laid the groundwork for Reg’s relationship with Joel.

Now, he’d lost both Martin and Joel. A part of him believed that it was inevitable that Martin re-enter his life. After all, the reason for their split was because Reg was seeing Joel, and that was no longer the case.

A few times during his stay in India, Reg had been on the point of contacting Martin, had gone so far as to draft an email, but a splitting headache had come on suddenly.

Knowing that what he needed to write required a clear head, Reg gave up and went to bed.

He’d been drinking heavily, so it wasn’t too surprising.

But the next morning, he felt worse and, by the afternoon, worse still.

He couldn’t keep any food down. The guest house called in a doctor, who diagnosed him with malaria.

He was sick for two weeks, during which time, he had plenty of opportunity to realize that if he died here, no one at home would be the wiser, that he didn’t want to die, and that he missed Joel and Martin both.

As soon as he was well enough to travel, he decided to complete his convalescence at home. In Wales.

He was greeted by comparatively cold and grey weather. The problem was, he’d gone from a place where nothing reminded him of Joel, to a place where everything did. Before Joel, every inch of the place had reminded him of his childhood summers with Martin. Now, everything reminded him of Joel.

He didn’t return to Blackberry Lane, but he did go down to the triangular fountain in the park to look for the black toonie he’d given Joel, thinking maybe he’d find it and know what Joel’s wish had been. But he couldn’t find it.

He visited the places he hadn’t been with Joel, places that shouldn’t remind him of Joel.

But they still did. He went to the site of the old wildlife centre that rehabilitated injured and orphaned wildlife, where one summer, when his grandmother was sick and his father didn’t want to deal with him, he was sent to volunteer.

Volunteering there had been good for Reg, as it had taken his mind off his own troubles.

He had spent his days waking at sunrise and bottle-feeding fox kits, sleeping on the site overnight on a camp bed near the enclosures.

The man who ran the centre was a retired teacher who had drilled into Reg that the purpose of the centre was rehabilitation and release.

He was warned not to get attached to his charges, but he did all the same.

He had no one else to lavish his affections on.

The centre had closed years ago, and it was now an empty field, with only the bones of a few rusty kennels remaining as evidence that anything had lived and healed here.

It reminded him of Joel anyway. He had come to Reg sick and lost, and Reg had nursed him to health and ushered him to self-awareness, and then let him go.

Usually when Reg released an animal, it would dart out of its cage and disappear with a flicker.

But sometimes, rarely, it would stop and look back at him, and there would be a moment of shared understanding.

It only now occurred to Reg that the pause before Joel had bid him goodbye might have been an invitation for Reg to ask him not to leave.

Too late now.

Everything Reg had cared for over all those years was gone. Reg sat in the grass and put his head in his hands. And in that moment, his phone rang. It had been silent for so long, Reg regarded it for a few moments as if it were an alien artifact.

It was a Canadian number, but it wasn’t Martin’s or Joel’s.

“Hello?” said Reg cautiously.

“Reg,” said a vaguely familiar voice.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Ramsay. Listen, our Clock Game poem has won the Rameses Brambletwitcher Prize.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“We’ve got a twelve hundred dollar cheque to split between us and an awards ceremony to go to, day after tomorrow. Have you got anything on?”

“Nothing in particular,” said Reg, staring at the empty field.

“I’ll send the details,” said Ramsay, and she hung up.

“Rameses Brambletwitcher,” said Reg, wondering what surreal situation he’d been dropped into.

Reg had been waiting for something to knock him out of his inertia. Apparently, that something was Rameses Brambletwitcher.

He booked a ticket home.

––––––––

C oming back to Canada felt strange. He’d grown accustomed to the hot, dry Indian weather, followed by the early Welsh spring. The Canadian spring was unwelcoming and aggressively cold, and he was still suffering from the residual aftereffects of a long flight and the tail-end of malaria.

He’d timed it either very badly or rather well, depending on the perspective.

He arrived a few hours before the award ceremony was due to begin, so he popped into the loft just long enough to drop off his luggage.

He knew Joel hadn’t been back in the interim, as he’d set the door alarm to send him a phone notification if anyone used the keypad.

The only person who had done so was his cleaner, who’d come in once while he was away.

He felt disoriented at the awards ceremony.

Quite a lot of people wanted to speak with him, but he’d been wallowing in solitude so long, it took tremendous effort to perform the most basic social graces.

That, and the aftereffects of his journey left him exhausted after a couple of hours, and he made his excuses to leave.

Before he left, he had a brief chat with Ramsay, who introduced him to a literary agent friend who wanted to know whether Reg had anything “book shaped” he could send her.

As what he had started writing in India was becoming more book shaped the longer he worked on it, he offered to send her that.

He left the event with the bemused impression that he had stumbled into possible literary representation.

That, and winning the award were the only good things that had happened to him for the past three months.

He allowed himself to hope that his fortunes were changing.