Weeping in the Middle of a Roundabout

When they were a couple, Sam and Pam constantly disagreed with each other. Drinks vessels rim up or down? Windows open or closed. Monogamy or affairs? Sam, a lecturer in aesthetics (notable articles on Stravinsky’s ambivalence to radio) would argue cups go up and down with so-called monogamy. Pam – an abstract painter (compared to John Hoyland) thought the opposite. Sam believed in the ‘art of forgetting’. Odd for an historian. Only when you’ve drawn a line under an experience can you rebuild a new life. He was adamant. He also believed, like Stravinsky, that listening to mechanically reproduced music spoils the ear – impairing enjoyment of natural musical sounds. Pam raged that everything she did was based on her past and what she found there. The idea that love must fade or for the dwindle to be other than beauty itself, or so-called apple music a crime was, for Pam, ridiculous.

At the end of their relationship she demanded one good reason why she shouldn’t live in the past, present, future concurrently. When this request was ignored, Pam protested Sam’s cruel indifference by streaming versions of Stravinsky’s so-called Rite of Spring, at high volume, while she painted. Energetic daubs of yellow, pink, blue. Maul the canvas with thick green. At the point at which Pam felt the tension in the work and the balance in her had been struck, she sought the opinions of visitors to her studio to immediately disregard.

After a pleasant day of library research, six months since Pam fled after walking in on his tryst with a capable PhD candidate, he took a cab home. Journal in hand. Seat belt cinched. Gaze fixed on the page; a healthy mop of hair flopped atop his head.

He tweezed memories with a lepidopterist’s skill. Picks apart a person. Always wins. Each recollection preserved, forgotten, past tense. What was so great about Pam anyway? Squirms.  If she was perfect, what went wrong? Skews.

“Why don’t we make love anymore? I want to love you so much that’s like I want to love everyone. My cup, runneth over…But we have sex and I don’t feel love. It’s a transaction.”

“I get it. Transaction. I understand.”

“Do you? I feel more sans action. Should it feel sacred? Is it my hormones? I used to feel scared by sex and its power trip. I was wild. Remember when we thought we’d tripped the mains? Radio 4 pips would chime with us, the postman would deliver his letters in concert, remember? But now - the ultimate let down. To be vanilla - raspberry ripple at best. OK, rum and raisin. But, even so, my oestrogen must be running on fumes by now. Reproductive function flickers. How’s that for a turn on?”

“Actually, it is. My shadows are deep.”

“Of course, Sam, you’re so vile.”

“Pardon?”

“Virile, that is. Everything turns you on.”

“Not exactly everything, but OK, I’ll take virile.”

“Is it possible to have too much sex?”

“I must be nearing my quota by now.”

“How many times have you had sex? So many times. I bet. People have sex so many times, they get bored of it.”

“Bored? Are you sure?”

“Maybe not bored of sex, the inevitability of it. “\*/ \*/”

“A void. The ending whilst also striving for it.”

“An orgasm. Un petit mort. That coming is a form of going?” “Right. I prefer frustration, it is closer to life.”

“Stick with me, Pam. I blame Madonna.”

“Which one?”

Scribbles a list (tugs at beard). ‘Funny’ crossed out, replaced by ‘crass’. Words underlined for emphasis. Notebooktucked into blazer pocket, intrusive rumination successfully driven out.

At home at his bleak house and behind closed doors, Sam set to work. He warped Pam’s frankness. Pam could make a joke out of anything. Was her suggestion to go tantric a joke? He had taken offence at the time. Routing through the tin chest – ephemera, gifts, cards, tickets, tapes, photographs – for triggers. Sam swat away negatives as they occurred – a swarm of bloodsucking betrayal transmuted into a higher octave of love.

Nothing. No evidence squirrelled away. This perfect love – the one – left no trace. He rubbed his forehead at the notion of the one. But what of Plato and all those circular bodies and jealous gods? Sam searched frantically, though he didn’t know why. Where is the photograph a friend took of us outside Le Cabanon de la Butte, the café at the foot of the so-called Sacre Coeur? He’s a hostage to fiction. Perhaps it’s in a book – marking an important page on love? Which book?

Hooks? Proust? Lessing? Nelson? Stendhal? Many books, many shelves. Precarious stacks, hundreds in storage.  Overturn boxes – toss out the papers! Arms deep in accumulated stuff and panic – a frenzied Sam cuts his finger on the catch of a silver ring box. Roughly opens the velvet lined box insensate to cut and warm blood. Ring box. Proof! Timber! Sam felled to the floor. Winces the cold floorboards, Sammy clammy with dread. Ring box. Ultimate proof. Roll onto the Persian rug, writhe it to pleats. Soothe it back to flatten the maroon weave. Jerky recoil at hidden moth larvae. Examines jumper. Groans at holes, his nipple, plentiful armpit hair. Forces a maniacal laugh. Pam – you fool. Only a lunatic would present a seed in a ring box.  Hauls up to record player, begins Beethoven’s so-called Ninth Symphony. The scene was set for enchanting a bright winter.

Recalls a walk in Chiltern Hills. Cairn terrier Ben nipping ankles. Foraged truffles. October cheeks. Frosty gusts. “Sam, the wind wants your hair to be different”. Indoors. Damp warmth.  Steamy windows. Arms, waists, a circle of eight. The smell of her hair. Turns to tickle. Boiling pasta. Beef broiling. Pam’s hand in pocket. Flash of metal. Gesture of love on hand. Adoration in her eyes (horror in Sam’s). A simple prank on Pam’s part – she wasn’t thinking of marriage. They could plant it in their garden, chew bark as pain relief in dotage. As pain - aspirin is almost an anagram. Not quite. Didn’t an overdose of salicin kill Beethoven before he rolled over?

The times he cut her off mid-sentence now made him cringe. He opined on everything. Sam’s gravitas required a willing body to orbit and Pam would do until he couldn’t differentiate himself from her. Sam contorted Pam’s unconditional love into so-called unrequited. Safe. A triumph. But why did he plant the willow seed, in the middle of a busy roundabout at the edge of his own town? A fit of hysteria? Pitiful thing showed so few signs of life. But oh! Should it grow – he would surely read a sign of that.

Curious if the spiky willow seed would grow, he passed by the spot each month, then each season, but nothing. Sam took a fixed term lecturing post overseas and only decades later did he return home. Circling the roundabout in his cloud grey Audi – surely not – but yes. There it was, a weeping willow amongst the pansies and cyclamen. Lime green leaves, full of grace. Crouching low at the steering wheel. How could it be? Red eyed – quivered nose – wrinkled chin. It was miraculous. At home that night he drank and paced, stomped and stumbled to his desk, to his address book. P for Pam. Dialled – no answer – message left. Number saved onto his mobile. Twitching eye. Intrusive feelings on the rise. Lists about milk, eggs, celery. Last minute holidays. Being and Time. Candy Crush. All thoughts return to Pam. Conflicted. Vulnerable. So be it. The tree must go. But how? Heavy axe? Too brutal. Instead he built a trailer to transport the tree once excavated from the roots. Soon the trailer was ready, and Sam set out for the dig.

Sweating profusely and satisfied at his creativity, Sam stood beneath the tree like a child. He understood at last with shallow breath. Pen knife blade fretting loose bark – gouge ST and PB inside a love-heart like a child. Hollowed cheeks. Dark circling eyes.

Oozing resin from the cut. Trailing branches skim grass. The wind bundles the branches eastward, held hopeful to the sky. Parallel venation lines on each leaf anticipates light. Nerve dendrites exchanging messages with the breeze that blew through him. Tree, did you speak? Oh, then speak again! Sam rubbed the bark, so firm and fixed but all that life, those fearful mycorrhizal messages conveyed to nothing but roundabout florals. Tree, I mean you no harm! It was furry with moss and he inspected all the life depending on it and he hugged and loved it as though his life depended on it and all life all love ALL LIFE called-so. He couldn’t do it. Wait for autumn or later, birds south, leaves fallen. 

He certainly did his research, and located a perfect place to take the tree. All he wished was for the willow to be out of sight. A deep salt quarry three miles outside of town where he could abandon the tree, just as he had been abandoned and the salt mine itself had been abandoned. A circular tale of wild abandon! And so he waited. He set up the woodwork bench in the garage to build a machine from fine materials, a trailer with a rope-pulley system to excavate from its roots and transport the living tree quietly and gently. At last the trailer was ready. In November to the roundabout with all his kit he returned. Excavation in progress.

Sam dug the heavy spade into hardened grass. Excess soil shovelled into a mound beside. Rich brown earth. The roots were revealed as a complex system the same length as the tree. Weight lifted off his shoulders. Spilling out the back doors of the van dragging along the road mycelia sparkled white on the bumpy asphalt. Headlights dipped. Dark lane. Disused quarry. Neglected tip. He pulled into the overgrown lane. Down the van’s ramp the trailer was pushed, the bare tree swaddled in thick white cotton, pushed over the ledge. Heaved into the wasteful abyss.

Sam blinked his myopic eyes in disbelief at the resilient tree leaned oblique between a battered upright piano and a fridge. Supported by the piano, its bulbous root system gouged in and splayed out on barren ground. Spits and spots of rain. Sprint to car. Camel overcoat trapped in the slammed car door. Wheels screeched. Windscreen wiped. Sam’s imagination raced. Heavens opened. Pitter pattered a saline solution of cloudy puddles filling the pitted patterns of the surrounding ground.

Several years later, just before he neared early retirement after a particularly charged seminar titled co-called Sublime in Truth, his best student, Clio pontificates – the most beautiful thing she had ever seen – both vegetable and mineral – a guessing game ensued. As usual when Sam suggested coffee at his favourite campus cafe, Clio was thrilled to join him. “Where might I find this beauty?”

“Do you know the old Stendhal quarry three miles out of...?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” said Sam, bravado ebbing.

“We go there. It’s a bit of a secret. Do you like secrets?”

“Always.”

“We hang out, play music, drink, smoke, make out. Want to go sometime?”

Sam’s heart thumped and his inner vision fizzed – hand on heart, how on earth did he not know it was the so-called Stendhal Quarry? Continuing the conversation courteously though thoughts of nothing but his tree flooded his mind. He dashed off excuses and immediately drove to the quarry, ambling the stony spiral path.  There it was, his majestic tree, crystalline and dazzling. Rising though it had ascended the quarry. Broken down and preserved by the salt, the piano fused with the trunk – branches and roots staved its total collapse. Enantiomorphous formations on the branches. Encrusted white leaf tips scintillating glisten. He imagines a bronze interpretation panel speculating its scientific and mythical origins. Forever to mineralize. Destined to thrive. He imagined his story told with illustrations and narrated with his own, unmistakably infernal, internal monologue. Yes, a so-called first-person narrative would work best, he thought.

Sam stayed on the quarry rim all until the earth absorbed the sun’s last warmth. Slid to the quarry bottom on his haunches. Fell into intrusive thought. Trudge down the steps of the Sacre Coeur, cold and white and how walking amongst falling snow is like love. Slow, but soft, and silent. Soft fall.

Silent kiss. Those sentimental thoughts of Pam’s he speaks aloud, with swish and swill like mouthwash, and a simple text message that reads – it’s snowing. i love you.

Warm sigh. Salty vapour twinkles to a cold mist descending to the crystal saplings pushing their way through cracks in the ground. The tree is incandescent in the gloaming. The brilliance of it. Icicle buds, twisted prisms, selenite strands. Crunching underfoot and to smithereens.

A single note rings out at intervals. Tongue the bark, crackling flakes, powder fingers and scatter. Small helmeted fungi gather in tender pilgrimage at the foot of the tree. Overcome, yielding to this place, Sam settled into the cleft between trunk and piano – ongoing intermittent chime. Curious he peeks into the gaped hessian where nature has set up a home. Green and teeming life. Red squirrel nibbles the piano string. Diminutive bell ringer. Heralding Sam’s phone ring? He wills it to ring, will Pam ring? For all intents and purposes the only umbrage he could take was his own. Rolled eye generated thunder internal, tensed tensor tympani in his ear, down his back blooms a tingle. How he longed to submit oblivious to oblivion and coalesce again into music and nature and Pam.

‘Weeping in the Middle of a Roundabout’ is an excerpt from How Pam Felt Before Pam Fled.