Ruby

by R.V. Jones

I suspect you will not like this, but, frankly, I couldn't care less. What is, is, what isn't is not, and I have the right to speak my heart. You are not forced to read on.

I have been reading about a wife, a husband, and the pure hatred of one for the other, the agony one suffers. She says she does not love him. She says it like a soldier slowly pushing in a bayonet into the screaming face of a bound prisoner. She does it with a slow, deliberate, drawn-out sadistic pleasure. She dwells on the feeling of power, the way she can titrate just the right amount of pain.

I have a theory. If you do not love someone, you never loved them. It wasn't love. It was something else, accident, convenience, lust, social-climbing. Perhaps it was what someone once called the bloody armistice, but it was not love.

It's a game, I think, a not very pleasant delusion, sometimes mutual, sometimes not. But love, love, when did it start? When will it finish? Do you really believe that love is finite, that it has a use-by date, that it goes stale or fades away?

Sometimes I go out at night and try to look between the stars. Why only look at the light? What is there between those lives? What echoes? When a man suffers drought he persuades himself it will rain, it cannot be dry forever. Something in him knows he is lying, knows he deceives himself, but to not self-deceive would be to admit the end, and everything gone, dried to dust, blown on the filthy wind.

Yes, I was lied to, I was deluded. I did not hide my cards. I fell for the bluff. She was "from a nicer part of the Cotswolds." I've just found out she came from Gillingham. Does it matter? Should it? Does a contract depend on the truth of a back-story or is it merely whatever it is going forward? To honour, to share, to keep the faith. Does it matter that she wears a plastic ring with a Perspex stone, that there is more ice in her heart than on her finger? Does it matter that she pawned away my life? In truth, no. I don't think it does. Let the buyer beware. Let the lover take his chance.

We grow old, we grow old, and yes, given half the chance, I would paddle with my trousers rolled and think of cruel months and things that might have been. Eighty-three years ago, give or take a few mortal sins and some incredible stupidity, I was a red, slapped-rump screaming animal. All that mattered then was tit, and that only for milk.

It is no-one's fault that I became more stupid.

I would like to say as the woman sang, "First time, ever I saw your face," and twist it at the last second, spit spite at you, hurt you. But you would like that, you would love that. I would prove you right. I would be the worthless man you keep telling me that I am.

Sunset is coming. Why do we not let go? Why do we mumble in front of "Strictly," sleep in our deserted beds. Why do you look at smart men and lust in your old dry way, your furtive, futile cerebral masturbations?

Long ago, was there a fatal error? Was the data corrupted? Was something lost? Or was it garbage-in, garbage out and we were both far too stupid, far too stupid, too blurred of vision to ever see?

Sixty aching, hopeless dried-up years and now we are lining up for death. We imagine the men of the valley singing over our corrupt, wasteful, wasted bodies. Oh, how they sing, how they sing, and worse, they sing of our love, and of hope, and of an amazing faithfulness and loyalty. What other couples can only dream of, we achieved?

But before then, we will visit our own dead and apologise for previous absences. The sons and grandsons, the daughter who died for not-love, who took her life bravely because she knew the falseness of it all, our sweet Mary.

I don't need to do this, of course. But then you do not need to have read this far. Even now you could stop, you should stop. But you won't. So you outlived me, and you see me rot or burn. Hah, I got out early! Not early enough, I grant you, for I was never brave like Mary, but I am gone now, and in the space between the stars.

If there was goodness in me I would not say this. I would not finish this on my highest note. But you should know (I only write this for me, and this is a very small arrow back to you when compared to the barrage I have suffered) but I did find love, or at least my temporary illusion of love, not once, not twice, but enough times to want to write to you. I would have preferred the love of one woman, but if it was ever there it hid itself well. I was never as dried up as you imagined, nor was I quite as hopeless.

And no, I do not need or ask for your forgiveness.

© 2011 Night Train and respective authors/email support AT nighttrainmagazine.com