Signs of Life by Anna Raverat Page A

I was grateful for that.
    Robbie and his girlfriend were sporty, and their house was littered with bikes, helmets, paddles, waterproofs, walking boots. There was a canoe propped on its side in the hall. I had been in
that canoe on one of our weekends away, borne down the river, enjoying the motion until the canoe tipped over and I fell in. Momentarily I was trapped underneath in the water. I kicked myself free
and came to the surface, cold but exhilarated.
    Johnny’s room was small and decorated with faded yellow wallpaper. The door was flimsy, made of something like wood but without its weight. Boxes of Robbie’s papers were stacked
against one wall and I remember feeling cross that they hadn’t cleared the room for him. Johnny’s stuff was piled against the other wall. He couldn’t have needed his toolbox, his
tent or his records while he was staying with Robbie. I didn’t know at that point that the records in the box were mine and that his records were still in the flat. He could have kept
everything there, but I suppose he didn’t want to leave his things around me. Maybe he wanted to remove himself completely, be separate with his place and things elsewhere. But now his place
was a small yellow room stuffed with useless things that belonged to him and still more useless things that didn’t belong to him and I felt I had buried him there.
    Soon after we bought our flat, Johnny brought home a large wooden ‘R’ for Rachel, painted gold. Some months later I saw a large golden ‘J’ and bought it
for him. We stuck the two gold initials, the ‘R’ followed by the ‘J’, above the doors to the garden where they stayed for years, gathering dust. One day, the ‘R’
fell down. I found it while Johnny was out. The wood had split, but not in two; I picked it up off the floor, climbed on a chair and stuck it back in place above the door. You couldn’t see
the crack unless you knew it was there.
    Every morning before the medical training began and every afternoon when the teaching ended I would walk in the Forest of Maibie (that such a place exists!) questioning what to
do. It was not a beautiful place. There was no bird-song. The trees were dense, so not enough daylight came through to the forest floor, and the paths were not very wide, more like animal tracks,
so there was this feeling of being closed in. I thought I should pick a course of action and follow it, but I was stuck. The secret of the affair could not be contained for much longer, in fact I
suspected that Johnny had already guessed. Despite this, I couldn’t formulate a plan about how or when to tell him. Maybe I thought that if I did nothing the problem would somehow disappear,
and I didn’t want to face Johnny’s hurt and fury. I paused every now and then to look up but I couldn’t get far enough away from any of the trees to gain a clear view. The thin
trees towered into the sky and then bent in towards each other and the tops wove themselves into a mesh of leaves and branches. The forest seemed to be holding me, and not in a sheltering way.
    Carl and I crossed the line at work many times and would have been summarily dismissed had any of the bosses found out. Once, we were entrusted with thousands of pounds in cash
to set up a staff development weekend – we were supposed to buy food and drink, pay for accommodation and certain team-building activities such as orienteering and pot-holing. The event was
to take place deep in the countryside. We drove to the nearest big town and spent the night so we would have the whole next day to prepare. Carl brought a deck of cards and we played poker on the
floor of our hotel room – I remember wonderful stacks of cash – and drank whiskey from the bottle, until Carl said, What we need now is some drugs, and he took some of the cash and went
out into the night. He returned with a small amount of cocaine and a lump of hash, and we stayed up most of the night playing cards, doing lines