The image of her face as the light hits it through the window of the street-facing front room of their small apartment would be enough to make someone pack their life up in a suitcase and give it to her in an instant. The glint in her eye when she talks about her family back in France would be enough to defibrillate a writer struggling with writer’s block, giving them a reason to put pen to paper again.

Gabrielle likes to suck her cheeks and lips in and imitate a fish when she thinks no-one’s watching. Instead of laughing out loud in the cinema, she audibly murmurs in approval, perhaps accidentally. She dances like no-one’s watching when everyone is, deliberately.

Gabrielle selectively throws her arms around her partner Brendan, who has lived with her in England’s capital city for three years and been spending time with her there for six. It gives her touch a rare and special quality that, at the risk of hyperbole, could probably nudge off their axes any of the six planets in the solar system whose rotations depend on one. Gabrielle’s physical communications of her love for him are calculated and unparalleled, their spell on him continuing to strengthen rather than wane as might otherwise be inevitable for a romantic relationship long enough to warrant a second hand when counting the years it spans.

Gabrielle’s smile can be described as infectious, her presence as calming, her conversations as positively challenging, and her ability to pick up a person when they’re in a thousand pieces on the ground as uniquely restorative. Her importance to Brendan’s life is unfortunately locked in competition with her importance to the lives of others, and it’s difficult to share someone equally when the English Channel separates those competing factions.

 

* * *

The First was three weeks into the relationship, when they were only privately, individually getting ahead of themselves and calling it a “relationship.” Brendan was terrified that saying a temporary goodbye at Gatwick Airport would turn into a permanent one. The groundwork had only just begun, really. Gabrielle was going home for a week with her family in Paris and they had only been on three dates, which all seemed to go well, but only on the terms of “well” that customarily come with hints of uncertainty, with degrees of ambiguity. Brendan suggested they go on a second date before the first had finished and Gabrielle hastily agreed, and the second had played out with the seemingly unspoken agreement that a third was on the cards, which then happened, carrying fewer agendas and being an altogether more relaxed affair, but after that successful third there was still something preventing the necessary amount of confidence from turning into optimism, as far as Brendan was concerned. He had no idea, but Gabrielle shared this exact thinking.

Brendan is often paralysed by the sudden uncontrollable urge to burst into tears in public, but he is particularly required to combat this shortcoming (his own conceptualisation) today.
‘Imagine a world where no-one is really resident or visitor, native or foreign, because we’re all just constantly on the move. Home becomes something portable, you know?’

In just a short time of knowing Brendan, Gabrielle is already used to his ambitious, reaching outbursts. Rather than swatting them away like his friends and family instinctively do, she enjoys entertaining them.

‘Try telling that to your government.’

‘Wouldn’t go down well.’

‘It should’ve been a bonus option on the referendum ballot paper.’

‘It should’ve. God, to be able to wear a sign that reminds people that “I DID NOT VOTE FOR THIS” without it being socially repulsive…’

‘If you ever actually leave the EU…’

‘Here’s hoping.’

‘Just gonna run to the toilet,’ Gabrielle offers, changing lanes before she has time to indicate.

‘Me too actually. Meet back here in ten?’

Brendan swerves straight into oncoming traffic and begins to hyperventilate, or at least thinks he does. His visit to the toilet is a stark contrast to Gabrielle’s. Unlike hers, his doesn’t involve going to the toilet. Keeping his eyes down as a defence mechanism, Brendan walks briskly to an unoccupied cubicle in the men’s room. Even if Brendan did need the toilet, urinals always make him uncomfortable. He envies others’ abilities to suppress their self-consciousness and concentrate on producing a jet of urine, because he can never do this. He hides in cubicles, whether he needs the toilet or not. Our evolutionary functions, after all: to eat, mate, and escape from predators.

When he moved away from home and went to university for the “best years of his life”, Brendan’s first adult experiences of anxiety begun as sitting down with the abstract idea of it, letting it mediate a conversation between Brendan and Brendan. Then the experiences developed into pangs of physical discomfort. Then they became unbearable pain – in his chest and stomach, on his forehead and temples. Lying down to sleep and putting head on pillow may be the most productive solution for some, but this had rarely worked for Brendan over the years. There’s always too much in his head, even at the end of the day. His head is too heavy, too susceptible to sink like an anchor in a bottomless ocean.

Brendan thinks that it wouldn’t be right to unload his struggles onto Gabrielle when she barely knows him. It’s too soon. The balance of feeling excited and overwhelmed since meeting Gabrielle adds to his difficulties, but that’s not her fault.

‘You look pale. You okay?’

‘Fine.’ [Terrible.]

‘You sure?’

‘Yep.’ [No.]

‘We’ve got a bit of time. Shall we go for coffee?’

‘Sounds good.’ [Maybe not. I’m advised to stay off caffeine.]

‘Cool. It’ll probably be empty.’

‘Probably.’ [Hopefully. Crowds and caffeine would be a terrible mix until this feeling passes.]

Gatwick Airport feels airless. The confluence of departures and arrivals and comings and goings and individuals and groups and sights and sounds feels like a lot. Gatwick’s circus of frenetic activity feels hermetically sealed, an ironic negotiation between the possibility of transit and suffocating in stasis as you wait to be able to go anywhere.

Brendan’s nerves are starting to make Gabrielle nervous. She wonders if she’s doing anything wrong, wonders if she’s approaching this goodbye correctly. She doesn’t want Brendan to think that it’s anything more than what she keeps telling him it is: seeing her family briefly, then coming back to London, at which point they can pick their relationship up where they’re leaving off.

Amongst other things, the fact that they haven’t had sex yet is playing on Gabrielle’s mind, because she can tell that Brendan wants to, has repeatedly wanted to, so she has had to compromise between waiting until she feels ready to and anticipating the time frame for when her hesitance will be the source of Brendan’s admiration, then respect, then uncertainty, then frustration. Relationships are predicated on timing.

In the three months since they both coincidentally moved to London at the same time, Brendan had barely had to compete with the need to get used to living in this city (having lived elsewhere in the south of England, and being used to British cities), whereas Gabrielle had been locked in a grapple with this comfort the whole time. This distinction comes despite their journeys home taking a similarly approximate three hours – Brendan’s north of the capital by train, Gabrielle’s over the Channel by train or plane or a combination of coach and boat. The myth of Paris’ interchangeability with other European capitals had already been debunked, in Gabrielle’s eyes. The atmosphere in Paris is just different to her new home, which had brought a more difficult process of assimilation than she had expected.

Brendan’s adjustment when moving to London had been defined by a different obstacle: the increasing need to familiarise himself with his own mental health, to accept and learn to work with the specific machinery of his head, to understand his unique coding. In his experience of adulthood up to this hopefully liberating point, he’d always defined himself in relation to the people around him. Now he couldn’t possibly. In this, both the loneliest and most exhilarating part of the country, the people around him form a collective blur.

Brendan squints to pick out the only sharp focus within the blur, the only splash of colour in the sea of black and white, then makes a beeline for the anomaly with a latte in his left hand and a decaf latte in his right. After the most mentally exhausting morning he’d had for some time, an unexpected but welcome wave of calm sweeps into the airport coffee shop and gently presses itself onto Brendan’s face, becoming a mask. As he gets closer to the seats Gabrielle has picked out for them – close to the exit, with an empty table either side of them, suggesting she already knows him better than she has any right to – Brendan can’t help but smile. It’s going to be fine.

Something is growing inside him that offers these moments of respite, a feeling attached to the girl soon to relieve both his left hand of its cup and his head of its heaviness while they talk and drink the minutes away before she flies away to another country for what will only really feel like a few seconds. Brendan’s excitement to pick up where they’re leaving off and allow the feeling growing inside of him to transform into love will defy the laws of time. He’s certain of it.

 

* * *

The Second was just over two years into the relationship, just as everything was changing. Gabrielle and Brendan’s temporary separation, this time, came with vagaries and uncertainties. Like the rest of the world, London was being put to a test. By briefly disconnecting from London, Gabrielle was inviting in a bonus test for her relationship with Brendan.

‘I have to go.’

‘I know. You –’

‘– No, you don’t. You don’t know what it feels like to be in a different country to your family right now. You don’t know what it feels like to have not seen them for over a year. You don’t, Brendan.’

‘Let me rephrase. And finish. I know that you have to go, but before you do, I need you to give me some confidence that you’re gonna come back. Soon.’

‘You know I can’t give you that. No-one can at the moment.’

‘You can give me some. Just say it – say that if it’s legally allowed, no matter the isolation period, no matter how much you have to pay for a test, you’ll come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘Promise me you’ll come back in weeks, not months.’

‘I’ll come back.’

Later that day, after leaving Brendan, Gabrielle is having a million conversations in her own head before the one with her family that she hasn’t been able to have for over a year – the one that is with three dimensions rather than through the various communication portals opened up thanks to the possibilities of technology: the disembodiment of a phone call, the precarity of a video call, the malleability of a text message.

Her studies will cope with the additional disruption to her lifestyle that will come with this geographical shift. The demands of a part-time master’s degree offer Gabrielle a certain amount of freedom and flexibility. She’s her own boss, which is often a daunting responsibility but is today a relief. she’ll be able to stop and drop everything and spend time with her mum and dad and brother and sister, that tight nuclear unit that has been confined to a small area of an individual country during the Covid-19 pandemic thus far.

Gabrielle’s ability to function in her daily life will be limited without Brendan, who she relies on emotionally, socially, and sexually. Her dependence on him is entirely voluntary; it doesn’t make her any less independent. She who chose to leave behind a career in publishing despite making headway in it at a young age and an early stage, to be able to go back to university. She who was earning more than both of her parents before coming to that decision. She who has moved between social groups all over London and Paris for years, constantly lighting up the lives of those she comes into contact with, forming the kinds of friendships on a regular basis that most wait their whole lives for.

She loves Brendan. She loves the way he sneaks into bed after her most nights but must always kiss her on the back of the neck before he tries to close his eyes, a process of eye closing which she knows is always such an unfair difficulty for him. Loves how he picks the hairs off her jumper when she’s lost in a book. Loves that she loves the specific peculiarities and nuances of their relationship even more than the big, obvious aspects of it that are loveable.

Later that day, Gabrielle is sat across the dining table from her mum, twirling melted cheese with her fork rather than putting it in her mouth, Celestine and Luc to her right and her dad to her left. Mum has made raclette, her favourite dish.
‘Gabrielle, tu dois manger.’ Celestine, her older sister and guiding light.
‘Ouais.’ Gabrielle, doing everything in her power to neutralise the magnetic pulls of two polar opposites: her unrivalled joy at finally having her family back and her fear for how her vulnerable partner is coping in London without her.

Meanwhile, in London: Brendan is locked in intense concentration on the current source of his anxiety. It’s a faint ticking sound that is either distant but real or imagined and inside of him. This source is a popular one for Brendan, frequently giving his Habitually Irrational Brain an excuse to collect the rational knowledge it does have about living in a capital city: the possibility of being caught in a terror incident is higher than living anywhere else in the country.

A new source of anxiety collides with the current one, obnoxiously imposing itself on Brendan’s concentration. It’s an anonymous schoolboy’s phone camera, which flashes somewhere on the bus in front of Brendan. His H. I. B. convinces him that everyone’s taking photographs of him, because why wouldn’t they be. One big collective operation bringing together all the smartphones in the city. A networked conspiracy.

The schoolboy presses the button and soon gets off the bus. He takes the imaginary horde of paparazzi photographers with him. The ticking noise silences itself, too. Brendan reads something scrawled on the back of the bus seat in front, something cinematically profound: you mean the world to someone. The “world” is circled for emphasis.

Brendan checks his watch and opens the notepad app on his phone, which is where he keeps a record of these things. Sustained panic attack, 14.00-15.00. Ticking sound, 14.36. Horde of photographers, 14.40. You mean the world to someone, 14.42.

Brendan can’t make eye contact with anyone – the bus driver as Brendan got on, the schoolboy as he noticed Brendan wince after the camera flash, and now a polite, smiling mother figure with a bag of shopping next to her.

Gabrielle is good in these situations. Like a sponge, she absorbs social attention when Brendan can’t, with strangers but also when they’re out with friends or seeing Brendan’s family. Brendan loves his family, but he’s convinced they don’t understand him.

This is just one of the many strings on Gabrielle’s bow, which is itself one of many bows representing the different roles she adapts to in their relationship. On this bow, which might be described as the one for “carer” if that didn’t bring connotations of service (hers) and incapability (his), there’s also the string for how she stops texting and instantly phones Brendan when the messages become monosyllabic. There’s another string for the way she hugs him, then runs him a bath, lights him a candle, and makes him a cup of tea when he’s so distressed he’s exhausting himself.

The pandemic has exacerbated Brendan’s struggle, as it has for so many. One health crisis to drip feed a big list of crises. The only advantage of the pandemic for Brendan has been the push to finally quit the office job he hated. Three months later, he’s getting by with other economic ventures – side gigs here, freelance bits and pieces there – and is discovering new avenues for procuring work that the chokehold of accountancy likes to pretend don’t exist. But the career shift is one positive in a sea of negatives, unfortunately.

Brendan’s thoughts are interrupted by the return of the ticking noise, now not so faint. His bus is about to go over London Bridge, so he must take in a lungful of air before he holds his breath from one side of the bridge to the other, as is his routine. Brendan’s intake of breath heightens his other senses, transforming the growing noise into a cacophony of different rhythms, timbres, and durations of ticks.

Brendan’s imaginary ticking orchestra is a far cry from the silence at the dinner table as Gabrielle, Celestine, Luc, and their parents move to dessert. St. Pancras International, the dramatic space responsible for Gabrielle and Brendan’s division, is comparatively inconsistent. Sounds bounce off the building’s glass ceiling and turn into something else, before raining down onto the mass of people hysterically piling onto separate trains home before the clock strikes midnight and the UK’s latest restrictions come into effect. These restrictions will ban travel in or out of the capital for an indefinite period of time. It’s six days before Christmas and there’s not a white fur trimmed red hat in sight.

 

* * *

The Last is shortly after Brendan’s final look at Gabrielle’s face as the light hits it through their apartment window. The Last is four years on from the Second and six on from the First – or seventy-five months from the First, or two thousand and something days, however the time is best quantified.

Gabrielle and Brendan are packing bags for a one-week trip to France, which begins in Paris with Gabrielle’s family but moves south without them for the wedding of one of Gabrielle’s friends. Gabrielle is ready to leave early, so kills time flicking through TV channels from the sofa; Brendan occupies the bedroom’s ensuite bathroom, ostensibly getting ready.

It’s not long until enough time has passed for Gabrielle to worry about the lack of leeway in their travel schedule.
‘Brendan? How are you still in the shower? We need to leave! BRENDAN!’
Brendan showers with the door unlocked, unlike her, so she opens the door and goes in when the possibility of a reply has leaked away and found refuge in the apartment’s drainpipe.

BRENDAN! Are you okay?

‘I – erm. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.’

‘Is it the flying?’

‘You know I don’t like flying.’

‘There wasn’t a choice, Brendan. Who knows if they’ll ever bring the Eurostar back.’

‘“I did not vote for this.”’

Brendan whispers the in-joke with the help of air quotes, the water from the shower head above him running cold and pummelling into his shaking naked body.

‘The water’s cold, Brendan! Come on, let’s get you up.’

‘Oh,’ Gabrielle’s partner croaks, having not noticed.

‘You need to be strong, honey. Remember what the doctor told you.’

Gabrielle turns away from Brendan’s slumped frame, which is now draped in the towel she provided but is still barely upright on the shower floor – barely animate, a thousand miles away from functional, and many minutes from being ready to leave for the underground train to Heathrow Airport. Gabrielle turns away to pull off some toilet roll to wipe away Brendan’s tears, but she also turns away to conceal from Brendan the fact that fresh ones have appeared in her own eyes. It repeatedly breaks her heart clean in two to see the person she loves like this.

The familiar sight of Brendan in pieces reminds Gabrielle of a second-hand memory of eight-year-old Brendan crying at the stairs when his parents had gone to bed after an especially long day of naughtiness (his) and exhaustion (theirs). Brendan weeping at the bottom of the stairs, swinging from the banister, wailing the refrain “I don’t deserve to live” until his parents have woken up and have their arms around him. Brendan claims that the moment was his first realisation that something was wrong with him (his own formulation).

Another of Brendan’s formative realisations was when he found his childhood best friend’s dad unconscious in the broom cupboard, lying comically underneath a heap of sticks and handles as if an extension of the plastic swordfight roleplaying game being staged in the house that afternoon, but having had a horrifyingly real stroke. His best friend’s dad was lucky to survive the weeks in hospital that followed, ten-year-old Brendan was told at the time. Brendan claims that it was the first time he knew that there was something wrong with the world, a place that could allow those designed to protect us to be so unprotected themselves.

Brendan has carried unjustified guilt his whole life as a result of his naughtiness as a child. But he does feel that, in adulthood, he has his guard up for this double bind of being unprotected/unable to protect.

He has carried guilt because of the later, adult realisation that his dad has never been completely well, which Brendan assumes he has inherited from him. The key difference between people who are functional and those who aren’t: being able to leave the house, enter the outside world, and breathe out rather than in. Brendan’s adulthood thus far has been defined by breathing in. When retrospectively editing his own memories, he notices that this was often the case with his dad too. As an unaware child, he would test his dad, despite being sat down and told by mum about dad’s issues with stress and blood pressure, about his meetings with a therapist, about his time off work “even though he doesn’t look sick.”

On the Piccadilly Line tube to Heathrow, Brendan rubs his eyes while his nose runs independently, wondering whether this pairing constitutes crying. Life, he thinks, is just using things up. Tears, tissues, products (as the adverts for new! and replacement! above the seats opposite remind him), and energy (which he senses is dwindling in Gabrielle, thanks to him). Growing up, he thinks, is just a process of learning how, when, and where to shit.

Brendan’s brain jokes but is totally serious. Jokes, seriously, about how what actually happens is always just a dress rehearsal for what you will report later. Jokes that are soon interrupted by an attempt to sneeze, a by-product of the runny nose. A sneeze that falters, so Brendan looks up at the glaring tube carriage light to no avail, as if the urban myth ever had the potential of becoming a reality. An incomplete sneeze is the worst nagging feeling in the world.

Gabrielle’s face smiled in the mirror earlier that day and she had to smile back, at least until Brendan told the ears attached to that face that he needed to shower quickly before packing his last few things for the trip to France. Gabrielle chooses to edit the sad parts, for the subsequent tube ride to Heathrow, just as she has been doing for weeks, months, years in this relationship. Gabrielle had successfully turned Brendan from stranger into family, as she had wanted to, as her heart had ordered her to do, but the truth had been hiding in plain sight. But she doesn’t care. She knows the assignment. She can’t throw away how much this man means to her on account of his demands and difficulty, his undesired infliction of pain on her mental and emotional faculties. She loves him, which are the only three words she needs to be able to say.

At Heathrow, Brendan does start to unquestionably cry. It happens just as Gabrielle is taking him to the nearest departure board to find out which check-in gate they need to go to with their bags. It’s the kind of cry that Gabrielle witnesses often from her partner, contradicting the inaccurate, erroneous rulebook of “masculinity”… whatever that even means.

Brendan cries and cries and turns away from the departures board but also from Heathrow Airport generally. His back turned but his despair entirely noticeable, Brendan walks away from the woman he loves and towards solitude’s white light of comparative comfort: a self-sacrifice promising increasingly tough days in his own head with no-one there to throw a rope in, abseil down, and pull him out. But a self-sacrifice which will at least spare Gabrielle any more second-hand suffering. She’ll have to contend with her own, but he knows that she’s stronger than him and will be able to withstand it.

As Brendan walks away from the airport terminal, a black dog materialises by his side and mechanically steers its own leash, minimising Brendan’s effort in this first step of such a long, winding road.

‘Woof,’ the dog confirms to its new owner.

‘Where now? What now?’ Brendan responds.

‘Woof.’

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  • George Oliver has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature from King’s College London, where he also taught American literature for three years.

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