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You learn with every goodbye, with every heartbreak, with every first kiss and every last breath.
They never teach you this at school, oddly enough.
Emily has but vague recollections of infant school. Sometimes she remembers dusty, shadowy cupboards full of broken games, children bigger than her skulking en masse by the bike sheds, rain relentlessly hammering at the windows and completely failing to drown out the chaos of screaming children and furious teachers. The memories still wake her in the night sometimes; she will awake and fall hard back into herself at some ungodly hour of the morning, a child once more, lost and overwhelmed amid a sea of faces and voices and putrid, sticky hands.
She hated being a child. She's always been unable to stop herself rolling her eyes when she hears people talking about how they want to go back to being four, five, six years old, just so they can lose all their responsibilities and be innocent again. Emily has always found that ridiculous. It's called a selective memory; you only ever remember the good, once a thing has come to pass. Her blessing is that her own selective memory works the other way. She knows how stupid it is to want to regress. Now she is in control; now she is her own person, her own agent. She would never want to go back.
Of course Dave got the poster paints and hopscotch and smiling, comfortably-plump teachers with sensible shoes and cardigans. He told her this while he was supposed to be writing a song, sitting at his keyboard on a sweltering day in July when he was too hot and lethargic to work. The sky was feverishly bright, the sun garish and the heat haze rising from the windowsill; Emily remembers it well. For some reason it was different with Dave, with Dave's memories - she doesn't think he's stupid at all. She could never think badly of him, hard as she tried.
Instead, she remembers feeling slightly resentful of the things he has been allowed to remember - resentful and more than a little cheated.
They discovered one another slowly at first, two animals circling one another warily, neither entirely willing to make the first move. Within a few weeks, however, they fell almost accidentally into a tentative sort of routine. It was, if nothing else, a start.
Dave, Emily has learned, likes a cup of black coffee as soon as he gets out of bed, as well as a bowl of hot porridge sprinkled liberally with sugar (she thinks this is to compensate for the coffee). Then he goes and gets dressed, provided it's a weekday and he can actually be bothered to find an outfit, and then he goes straight to his keyboard - which is apparently called Laura - or his guitar - Lovecat, though Emily can't fathom why - and get on with the business of songwriting. For lunch he makes himself tomato soup. If he's particularly hungry he makes a cheese sandwich to go with it, and if it's been a bad day, he slips in a bit of sherry when he thinks she isn't looking.
Sometimes he stays up until after midnight, playing the guitar into the silence. Emily likes to lie awake and listen when he does this, fighting to keep her eyes open so she doesn't miss a moment.
Once, she crept into the front room and stood just out of sight in the doorway, watching him lose himself in the music. That was how she learned - watching him pale and soft in the moonlight, holding his guitar like another man might hold a lover - that he was actually rather beautiful.
There was a time when Emily didn't go to school at all.
She won't ever say it was a bad thing, hard as anyone tries to make her.
During that time she learned how to cook for at least three men, how to live on barely anything for days at a time, how to keep herself awake for as long as she could, how to run for her life, how to run for someone else's, how to watch as many as five open doors at any one time, how to get what she wanted, how to get away with pretty much anything, how to argue her point, how to hold her own in a fight, how to talk to grown-ups, how to look after money; how to survive.
Going back to school, when she eventually did, was a shock to the system.
She was behind academically, obviously, but she'd expected that and she was fully prepared to work to catch up. Indeed, she did so, and passed her exams with surprisingly good results. What she hadn't expected was that, in the first year or so after she returned, she learned absolutely nothing that seemed to be of any use. It was, contrary to what her teachers told her, possible to survive without any understanding of algebraic fractions, the transpiration stream or the relative merits of Tennyson and Owen. She knew this because, for nearly two years, she had.
It really didn't surprise her that, when she said this to Dave, he looked at her like she'd lost her mind. She doesn't tend to discuss that time any more. She just sits there while he talks about major thirds and tonality and accidentals, and feels a little smug at the idea that if they get lost in the wilderness at any stage, she will be the one to save them.
She didn't realise that Dave was only renting the little bungalow until it was very nearly too late. She was all set to paint the living-room wall; she'd gone out to the shops and brought every shade of paint she could carry, along with a couple of good-sized paintbrushes, and she'd pulled on one of her older shirts in preparation for making a marvellous colourful mess all around the room.
Just as she had her biggest brush to the wall, dripping with red paint, Dave came through, half-dressed and sleepy-eyed, from the kitchen. He took in the scene in an instant and practically threw himself at her, pulling her raised arm painfully back and away from the wallpaper.
The child in Emily was a little offended until he calmed down, tidied away her paints and explained everything.
"You can paint the walls when we move house," he told her firmly, when he caught her looking sorrowfully at the big pile of paint tins. "We'll actually own that. You can go wild."
She frowned. "Move house?"
"Yeah." He said it like she was stupid, like she'd been living under a rock for a thousand years. "Didn't I tell you? I'm not going to keep paying for this place. I don't even own it. I'm moving out... what's wrong?"
For Emily wasn't smiling, nor was she betraying any kind of hint that she even knew what happiness was.
"Nothing," she answered. "I just wish you'd tell me these things, that's all."
The last year of Emily's Education (the teachers always capitalised it; they even managed to do it when they were only speaking) was spent in the art studio, surrounded by blank canvases and half-formed ideas sketched out onto paper. The art teacher loved her. He was the only one; the others dismissed her as Wasted Potential and stopped paying attention to her in lessons.
On those rare occasions when she stopped painting and turned to something else, the something else was always reading; she would drift down to the library like a paint-splashed ghost, curling up with a good book. Most often it was Dracula; sometimes it was something by Anne Rice. The librarian would get angry with her for getting paint on the seats. She didn't really mind, or, for that matter, notice.
She never went to university, or to art school. The art teacher pretended to forgive her for that.
When Dave moved house it was never in question that she was going to go with him. He never asked if she wanted to come, never dropped any hints that maybe she ought to start looking for her own place now. It was never an option for either of them. Emily found it hard, at the time, to put her finger on why.
The idea of living in a house with a staircase was a curiously exciting one to Emily. Within a few hours of learning that they were moving on, the staircase had become a symbol of domesticity and safety and something like security. She knew it was stupid to attach such importance to a staircase, of all things, but she hadn't lived in a house with one since she was very young indeed, and the idea of it evoked memories of a faraway time that, despite all evidence to the contrary, had been painted in perfect pastel colours in her mind.
They arrived at the house early one morning in early November, when the sky was grey and watery and the sun was just waking up, smiling tremulously overhead. Dave had borrowed his friend's little Mini, and they'd been driving at a snail's pace for well over an hour, so as not to damage the keyboard in the boot. Emily had spent the journey cramped in the back seat, because the guitar had usurped the one next to Dave, with her suitcase and all her painting apparatus. To make up for it, she'd managed to sneak a Rachmaninov CD into the car radio, instead of whatever populist rubbish Dave had wanted to listen to. Mostly because the aforementioned populist rubbish had been buried in the boot with the vast majority of their luggage, Dave was forced to grit his teeth and put up with it. Emily thought this delightfully funny.
"This is it," said Dave as they got out of the car; he was carrying the guitar, she her own suitcase. It did look very pretty, it had to be said; it was all whitewashed and neat, with a little chimney stack on the roof. "Home."
Emily wondered how long it would take for the place to earn the title.
Dave pushed open the door with his free hand, and his face fell. Peering around the doorframe, Emily saw a hallway, wallpaper peeling away from the walls and the carpets greying with dust. There was a staircase, but that was the high point of the room. Other than that, it gave the strong impression of being somewhat suicidal.
They stepped across the threshold, and Dave put down his guitar, rubbing his neck awkwardly with one hand. "Emily," he began slowly, "I'm really sorry. It looked different in the photos."
Emily looked around, taking in all the little details that got lost beneath the shock of everything obvious. The wallpaper was peeling; it would be perfect, she thought, to just rip it all off and start again - this time with lots of bright-coloured paints. The carpet was dusty; nobody would care, then, if she knocked over a paint can and made a mess. In fact, that would probably improve it. And the staircase was old, yes, and it echoed with the footfalls of people who had traversed it in years past. It was perfect in its flaws, like a broken mirror that created rainbows on the opposite wall. She loved it.
"It's wonderful," she murmured, putting down her suitcase and running a hand along the banister of the staircase. "I never want to leave."
She met a boy when she turned nineteen - not a boy, she has to tell herself even now, not a boy but a man, a grown man. He was called Rob and he was in a rock band; not a terribly successful rock band, but they were certainly doing all right out of it. It was for this reason that Emily took up with him in the first place. Anything else was irrelevant.
To this day she tries to convince herself otherwise. She will tell herself, remembering him in the lonely hours of the morning, that they were in love because she was drawn to his musical talents (which would explain Dave, come to think of it) or that they were in love because he was a good and wholesome person and she wasn't and they fit, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, because of this. But the truth of the matter is that her intentions were entirely mercenary and, even to Emily, rather unpleasant. She didn't love him; she was mostly penniless and he was perfectly willing to help her out. That was why she didn't cry even once when she caught him cheating on her with a groupie from London; that was why she just let him crawl away with his new flame at the end of it all. She never cared for him. He was only a means to an end.
One day, Emily hopes she will learn how to be in love.
It occurred to her one night - or was it morning? - after she came in from work that, while she had mapped out everything about Dave in her head quite perfectly over the months, he knew barely anything about her.
He knew some of it, of course. It would have been impossible to live with someone for so long and know absolutely nothing about them. But she has never told him anything that came before him, anything she does outside the little bubble that is their life together. He doesn't know what she does for a living. He doesn't know where she grew up, where she went to school, what her parents are like or even whether they're still alive - although, to be fair, she's not entirely sure of that either.
What struck her, lying half-asleep on the sofa with her cardigan buttoned up all wrong and the pain from the wound stabbing at her abdomen, is that she would never tell him. She would never tell him any of it, and she had never known that until now.
He asked, of course. She was late home and she pretty much collapsed onto the sofa as soon as she got in, the bandage almost entirely visible through the thin cotton of her t-shirt. Of course he asked where she'd been. She lied, as she so often did, and said she'd been beaten up on the way home from work.
She was tired, though, and not at her best. She didn't think he believed a word of it this time.
She lied to herself, frantically and hopelessly, and made herself believe that this was the only way to keep him safe, to keep the two of them together. She couldn't bear to be apart from him any more; he was her addiction, an anaesthetic and a sugar high that cured nothing but numbed reality just enough to make her feel like she was always only a few steps away from being better.
Emily's last thought before she fell away into sleep was that if this was what happened when she came down, she was never going to risk it again.
She vaguely remembers, from far away in the darkest corners of her earliest years of life, her Grandpa dying.
Grandpa, not Grandfather; Mother's father, not Father's. Nobody ever told her what he was dying of. She was too young, and the only things she knew of it were sorrowful, carefully-sympathetic whispers in corridors and Mother's secret, barely-audible sobs alone in the night. And then one day she had to put on a black dress and go to church and listen to everyone crying and talking about Grandpa like he wasn't there any more, and that was it, really. Emily May's first brush with death.
The first of too many.
Nobody explained to her exactly what had happened at the time. It seemed to Emily to be terribly unfair that she spent years wondering when Grandpa was going to visit her next. Eventually she learned about death in a year three RE class, from a teacher who never quite understood why her quietest pupil dissolved into floods of tears as soon as the lesson was over and didn't stop until the end of the day.
Now the sun is warm and the sky is blue and the barley fields at the back of the house are shimmering gold in the summer light. The pictures she has painted on the new wallpaper are nearly complete; a few more weeks, she thinks, maybe another month, and the whole room will be a work of art. There are children playing in the road at the front of the house. She can hear them laughing, as though from somewhere very far away.
In a minute Dave will come in from the rehearsal, laughing and telling her stories of how the drummer tripped over his pedal and knocked the whole drum kit over with his flailing. They'll go out then, out into the fields like they did only once before, and walk beneath the sun, two happy people, together and perfect on this most perfect of summer days. They'll walk and walk until they reach the very edges of the fields without even knowing how they got there, so absorbed will they be in one another. And then they'll walk back - no, they'll race back, running and laughing until one of them falls over. Even then, they'll only laugh harder. And he'll help her up and their eyes will meet and maybe, just maybe...
It's no good.
It was never going to end like that. They weren't made for a happy ending; maybe if she'd left him alone, he might have managed one, but she was never going to leave this chapter of her life with everything the fairytales promised her she would. She learned that a long time ago. It is one of the few lessons she has never forgotten.
She should have known better than to drag him down with her. If she had truly loved him, she would have let him go his own way, forced herself to come down from the high and struggle on alone. But she was never that brave. She was never that good.
Emily knows that one day, maybe far in the future, she will learn how to carry on without him. But for now he is dead and he will never come back and that's all she knows, that's all there will ever be. She can never see him again.
For the first time, the wish to abandon responsibility and flee back into childhood doesn't seem an entirely stupid one at all.
Sarah Garland
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