Being There

A Story by Charlotte

A short story about love and loss inspired by the theme 'Being There' (hence the title).

Being There

There’s a bench in the park with your name on it. Did you know that? I don’t mean our bench, the one you carved our names into in a clichéd declaration of your not so apparent affection after I caught you snogging Naomi Barnes, behind the bike sheds of all places. Not that one. You know about that one, obviously. Another one, on the posh side of the park by the fountain and the swings, away from the trees we all used to use as an illicit meeting point, away from our bench.

It’s a nice bench, as benches go. It’s a dark wood, treated, stained, weather proofed, brass plaque adhering firmly to the back, your name picked out in block capitals, some meaningless platitude printed below. I think your mum picked it. Much loved, much missed. Forever in our hearts. Something like that. You would have laughed at how painfully saccharine it is, I know that much. I imagine you reading it, shaking your head as your fingers trace the letters, rolling your eyes to the point where it begins to look almost painful. But like I said, I think your mum picked it.

They wanted you to have something permanent, something fixed, a marker of your continued presence or absence. One of the two. Though who knows why the f**k they thought you’d want a bench. A memorial bench, like you were some senile, old biddy who liked to sit and feed the ducks. Or some lonely dosser who sat and stared sadly at the pigeons until the gangs of sticky, screaming children scattered them as they hurtled past, not looking. No one ever really looks at a bench.

Your mum told them that you liked to be outside, that you were fond of nature. I had to laugh though I did my best to stifle it lest your mum thought I wasn’t taking this nonsense seriously. After all, she never did like me very much did she? Fond of the outdoors, the sky, the grass, the rolling hillsides, like you were Julie bloody Andrews in The Sound of Music, spinning your carefree way down a mountain side. It wasn’t the great outdoors that you liked, it was the freedom. It was the not being tied down, it was the escapism. That’s what it always was. An insatiable hunger to keep moving, your feet perpetually marching even when you didn’t know in which direction you wanted to go. Even when there wasn’t anywhere to go. You ached for pastures new but they were never new enough, never green enough. Never enough.

Escapism. That was the reason for the drugs too" though we mustn’t talk about that now, or if we do, if we must, we have to whisper and bend our heads together and we must mention how kind and sweet you were underneath it all and how you were led astray. We don’t talk about how you sold them, how you held my hand and told me it was alright as you placed a pill on my tongue. You told me to trust you. You told me it would be brilliant. Magical. It wasn’t brilliant, it was the opposite of brilliant. I was sick all night. And you left me, in the dark on my own, by the swings. I had to practically crawl home on my hands and knees, not able to trust the ground beneath me or any of the things my eyes were showing me because nothing would stay still and the colours were all wrong. My mum thought I had a fever. You just laughed and told me it would be better next time. You were always laughing.

I wanted a tree, not a bench. It seemed a more fitting symbol of your life, of you. A tree isn’t static you see. It’s always moving, growing, pushing upward toward the sky, reaching for freedom, for air, for space even though it knows its futile, that it’s rooted firmly into the earth. It travels in one direction; up, towards the sun, towards something brighter. And it’s alive. A bench? What’s a bench but a lump of dead wood? A tree is vital. There’s a vibrancy in its colours, both the greens that burst from the tips of its branches in the spring and the reds and oranges that erupt in the autumn. There’s something else too, something in the way that it thrums with life, the way it twists and curls, the way the leaves spread and fall. There’s a silent, unassuming grace, a simple beauty, a joy at simply being. Can the same be said about a bench?

I was outnumbered. A tree needs watering, pruning, caring for. A bench is just a bench. You don’t need to water it. It will just sit there, being perfectly perfunctory and uncaring. It doesn’t matter to a bench if the sun shines or the rain falls. It will be there until it isn’t. And that’s the problem isn’t it? It isn’t much of anything. It’s just a piece of wood with your name on it, squatting idly in a quiet section of a park you only ever visited when you wanted to get drunk or high and stare at the stars.

There was a committee and you would have laughed at that too, travelling round the circle of chairs, pointing at each person in turn and asking them what exactly they thought they were doing, biting your lip in a pathetic attempt at seriousness. Your mum would have told you to behave and your sister would have ducked her head and mumbled something venomous but inaudible, her cheeks flushed red and her eyes averted but you wouldn’t have cared. Still, it seemed a necessary evil. Your mum was there, obviously, and your sister, Mrs Hallsworthy " remember her? " Reverend Collins " still as monotonous as always " your old piano teacher, that gossipy neighbour your mum hated, teachers, friends and me. We gathered in the village hall, perched on those uncomfortable plastic chairs that every municipal and community building appears to have bulk bought decades ago and never replaced. We talked and nodded and drank weak tea from plastic cups. There was a platter, dutifully passed from person to person, of sorry looking sandwiches, bread refusing to adhere to the fillings, as though it was as repulsed as everyone else was by the value ham, but no one ate very much. Not just because they were terrible sandwiches, but because you’re not supposed to. Not at things like that.

It was all good, if you must know, the things people said. They talked about your humour, your lust for life, your adventurous spirit. But you can’t talk about the bad things can you? Everyone is good once they’re gone. No one mentioned the cigarettes you used to steal, sweeping them nimbly into the pockets of your school blazer before bolting swiftly out and away. Or how you would copy my homework, too lazy to do your own, knowing I was too frightened of losing you to ever say no. No one talked about those birds you killed. Remember that? You and the boy from next door " Eric something - the one we weren’t supposed to play with, threw stones at that nest. It wasn’t high enough up and it was balanced too precariously. It fell swiftly, thudding mutedly against the pavement. The nest was fine, the twigs twisted too tightly together to be broken apart by spite, boredom and well-aimed rocks. The birds though, they were much more fragile. Tiny, hapless, featherless creatures who were spat out and who spilt over the hard ground, their prostrate bodies broken and overly pink. They were ugly. They looked malformed and unnatural and utterly wrong. You kicked them with the toe of your boot, rolling them into the road one by one. I cried and you laughed and sent me home, made me promise not to tell. I never did. I don’t think this counts.

Do you remember their mother though? She circled the tree where they should have been, chirping and calling though they couldn’t hear her. They didn’t know she was there. They had no comfort in those last seconds. They didn’t know that anyone was looking for them. Those chicks couldn’t hear her sorrowful song or the helpless beat of her wings as she frantically searched. That sound stayed with me for a while, resonated somewhere within me in a place I didn’t even know existed. I wanted to help her, that lost mother. You just laughed at me and skipped away, on to another distraction, another game.

It was always a game wasn’t it? Everything. Nothing was ever serious, nothing mattered. I was surprised though when I saw the photographs from your trip; beaches, forests, mountains, caves, rivers, lakes. I thought, when you left, that my Facebook newsfeed would be inundated with pictures of you laughing, colourful drink in hand, one arm snaked around a bikini clad blonde with flowers in her hair. And she’d be laughing too but out of sync and never quite with you. But that wasn’t how it was. Maybe it would have been better if it had been? If you hadn’t tried to find yourself in the wilderness and had stuck to booze and bars, perhaps, then we’d still have you. But pastures new were a calling and you, inevitably, answered. You never could turn down a challenge could you? Sometimes I wonder, less now than before and a little less with each year that passes, where it was that called to you, where it was that claimed you.

I asked about the bench you know. I asked why because I knew you’d want to know. Your Mum said it was about keeping a part of you here and she said it with such solemnity that it was as though she had decided that the bench was an extension of your soul as opposed to well-meaning keepsake.

Nothing could have kept you here, desperate as you were to escape, lord knows I tried hard enough. You told me you loved me but that wasn’t enough to keep you here or anywhere. It’s funny though, in a way, if you think about it. If it wasn’t for here then you wouldn’t be there, wherever there is, because it was being here that shaped you, that made you. This place emptied you and you ran, needing more than it could give to fill the gaping void, rushing into the jaws of fate, though its teeth were gnashing and snarling. You left here to be there and you never came back though, if I’m honest, I think I always knew you wouldn’t.

That’s why I let you carve my name on that bench, the old one, the greening one on the rough side of the park, our one. The one where we got drunk for the first time, stumbling home, holding hands more tightly then I had previously thought possible, mine tingling in yours. The one where you kissed me for the first time and told me that I was more beautiful than I knew. That one. You see, I let you carve my name beside yours because it was permanent, they would be there, two words, joined, for longer than we would be. I couldn’t keep you with me but I could keep my name beside yours. A reminder of all the things we were and all the things we weren’t.

I sit there sometimes still. I walk the baby through the park - a boy if you must know, Caleb (don’t laugh) - and I sit with him on our bench and wonder if, in another life, an alternate universe, there’s a version of you that settled down, got married, had kids, bought slippers, sipped tea. And then I laugh and I know that, wherever else you might be, that’s where you really are, cradled tightly in that single, simple sound.