The End - Look Bike
On that chilly Sunday Lloyd dreams of Marissa for the first time in years. His penis, not something he factors into his day’s activities beyond strained urination is semi erect when he wakes. He lies in bed and wonders at the incredible capacity for the human brain to produce impossible scenarios. And for what end?
He thinks that it is Marcel’s news that brought the dream. Yesterday during their monthly catch-up phone call, right in the middle of revealing what he had been watching on Netflix, Marcel reports, no blurts, that he has advanced liver cancer and in all likelihood will not be around to celebrate either his or Lloyd’s 65th birthday. Marcel, Marissa and Lloyd with their respective partners had all once been friends. That was before Marissa and Lloyd announced their affair.
Later Lloyd drives his car out from the underground carpark eight floors below his unit and taking some different turns than usual, sets himself towards the eastern side of the bay. Lloyd hasn’t driven down that side of the horseshoe shaped bay in years.
It is still early enough in inner suburbia that the traffic is light, but the footpaths are busy with couples walking their dogs, joggers, and on one block, a tall homeless man pushes a shopping trolly filled with dirty blankets at breakneck speed.
By the time he is on the boulevard that runs down to the top of the bay Lloyd is attempting to sing his way out of his mood with an alt country playlist from Spotify. Marcel hates Alt country. A talented musician himself, Marcel’s guitar’s work in his numerous bands throughout the years has always been thunderous and fast. Black Sabbath, Metallica and Iron Maiden are his lifelong musical heroes.
Lloyd thinks that the drinking and drug taking that comes from being around the live music scene for forty years is the major reason for Marcel’s failing liver. Not that Marcel sees it that way. Bad luck and bad genes more than occupational hazard, is his conclusion. Either way the prognosis sounds grim.
Driving down the slight hill to the bay Lloyd thinks the water looks untouchable, the surface like smooth, blue ice in the still air. Lloyd turns on to the bay shore drive, the joggers and dog walkers increase and now there are groups of cyclists, all clad in a variety of coloured lycra, their legs endlessly pumping and their calves diamond shaped and quivering. They fill the bike lane and spill over uncomfortably close to Lloyd’s car.
Lloyd takes a deep breath and resists a sudden urge to career into the lot of them or even better, bump one of the cyclists so gently that later when in hospital with his twelve or thirteen fellow cyclists, all receiving emergency treatment following the cascading pile up that he started, the cyclist would never be sure whether the dark blue Mercedes had hit him or not. Lloyd’s decision to not act on his homicidal impulse gives him a rare sense of power and control.
Marcel once told him in the months after Lloyd’s marriage breakup, when Lloyd’s self-pity had obviously passed Marcel’s capacity to stomach it, that Lloyd was like a man in a boat floating down a river. The boat had oars but the man did not use them. He just sat in the boat as it turned and meandered on the current. Lloyd thought it harsh at the time, although it was a lovely if obvious comparison.
In a few kilometres there will be a street on the left and if Lloyd takes that turn, and he thinks that he just might, for kicks and old times and because diving into the past clearly suits his mood today, it will put him in the street where a brick house sits three houses in from the corner and that was where he last saw Marissa. He has no idea if Marissa still lives there, he has not seen her for twenty years, but that does not matter, maybe he can still get a sense of something, some residue of the powerful forces that moved and powered him all those years ago. After all, the damage has all been done, everyone has moved on, what harm a little self-indulgent lapse into nostalgia?
Marcel had been with him that night. In fact, as Lloyd now remembers, Marcel had dropped him off with an expletive laden farewell tinged with anger and helplessness. That afternoon Lloyd had told him about the affair, about how he was going to Marissa’s house to tell her it was over and then, then he would tell Anita. They had gone out drinking, Lloyd for courage and Marcel to work his way through disbelief, incredulousness and then anger. Pity and the realisation of the impact of Lloyd’s actions and plans would come later.
The affair had not lasted that long, fourteen months, but it was long enough to destroy everything. Lloyd has never really understood why he had so willingly engaged in the affair with Marissa. His marriage was happy or that’s what he would have said had he been asked, and yet as soon as Marissa offered, well pressed herself on him, Lloyd had not put up a speck of resistance. And if the first time was all Marissa’s idea and initiation, in the months that followed Lloyd was the far more active organiser, picking the suitable times and venues for the total of the ten times they met. By Christ, it felt special too. A feeling of power he has never felt before or since.
Nevertheless, Lloyd also feels that deep down that he had also been used; hunted and caught by a predator. But he has never told anyone that he feels that way, it sounds self-serving, an excuse, and when it all came out he wanted to own the transgression as punishment for the pain caused. Plus for him, there was and still is some perverse dignity that the world thought he was the predator.
When he confessed to his wife, Anita’s reaction was everything that anyone would expect. She promptly packed and moved out with their stunned and bewildered kids, but not before taking Lloyd to her parent’s home where Lloyd told his story to more stunned and angry expressions. At the time he counted his lucky stars than his own parents were dead. Anita’s parents never spoke to him again although Anita’s brother Daniel kept in touch. My enemy’s enemy is my friend is how Daniel saw the world.
The ripple effect of the affair and Lloyd’s confession was in some ways the worst thing about it. The camping trips, where one afternoon the affair had begun, were immediately finished for everyone, not just the guilty parties, their shattered spouses and offspring but their friends too. Somehow Lloyd and Marissa had blown that up as well.
Time passed; friends picked a side or found it all too distressing and tawdry and backed away from both. Assets were liquidated, his kids started to speak to him again and Anita moved enough suburbs away so that the one excruciating exchange at the local Woolworths one Saturday morning, when neither was prepared for the presence of the other, ended up being a horrible one off. After the confession Lloyd never saw Marissa or her husband again. The last he had heard they had also split up.
Lloyd’s heart is beating fast and he wipes the light sweat on his brow. He turns off the car heater. Nostalgic excitement, or is that feeling just some old, lingering shame? He thinks for a second that it might be best not to make the turn.
The street is coming up on the left. McCracken Street, Lloyd remembers, named after some town councillor from early last century. Lloyd flicks up the indicator stalk and slows to make the turn.
Halfway around the corner he hears a yell, feels a big thump, some small ones and a shudder through the car. There is a metallic scream or is that human? Lloyd slams on the brakes, sits and listens for a moment. There is no more screaming so that is good, he thinks. Lloyd knows what has happened, a cyclist must have been on his left, unseen in his blind spot and Lloyd’s turn must have cut them off. Lloyd turns off the engine, puts on his hazard lights and gets out.
A cyclist is sitting on the road on the driver’s side of the car, they must have rolled over the boot on to the road from the collision. Their face is obscured by their helmet and dark glasses, red and black lycra covers the cyclist from ankle to wrist. Hurrying closer Lloyd sees the cyclist is a woman. She moans and clutches her shoulder. Looking at the ground she is not aware of Lloyd till he is beside her and squatting down.
“Don’t move, I’m phoning for an ambulance.” Lloyd starts dialling 000 on his phone. “What’s your name? Can you tell me where it hurts.”
Lloyd can’t see any twisted or broken limbs. Lycra has been abraded through on the hips and the shoulders. Gravel rash is oozing blood but all in all ….
“What the fuck! You turned right in front of me you asshole. Did you even fucking look?’ the cyclist yells at him just as the operator answers.
“Which service?”
“Ambulance please,” Lloyd stammers. There is something pricking at his memory. Lloyd and the cyclist look at each other. The cyclist takes off her glasses.
“Lloyd?”
It is half question, half an acknowledgement.
“Marissa?!” Lloyd blurts back, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you, you must have been in my blind spot. I didn’t, didn’t know it was you.”
Marissa pushes herself off the pavement and stands up. Just then the Ambulance Operator comes back online, “Ambulance, what is the emergency?
Marissa reaches across, grabs his phone and cuts the call.
“I don’t need an ambulance. I’ll go the doctor tomorrow; nothing feels broken and I’ve had worse falls than this.” She gingerly walks the few steps to her bike and picks it up. Lloyd notices quite a bit of blood trickling down from her left shoulder.
“You’ll be bloody paying for this though,” Marissa says, waving the horribly buckled front wheel and forks of the bike in Lloyd’s face. In fact I reckon you are going to be up for a whole new bike. Better take some photos for insurance, Lloyd”.
There is glee in her voice.
“Yeah ok,” Lloyd mutters. “I’ll just find a place to park the car.”
Marissa points at the house. “Put it in the driveway. I still live there. Is that the reason you’re here? Did you come to see the house, to maybe see me?”
Lloyd says nothing and Marissa laughs before she turns and wheels her bike on its back wheel across the road and towards her yard. Lloyd jumps into his car and reflects at how quickly Marissa takes control of situations, at how quickly she takes control of him.
Lloyd parks the car in the drive. He checks the passenger side of the car, sees the dent and scratches where Marissa ran into the back panel near the fuel cap. There are scuffs and scratches along the boot lid. He isn’t annoyed at himself or Marissa, in fact a strong sense of purpose enters him, a sense of a need to do something right, have a real confrontation with Marissa about her effect on him then and now. He enters the open front door.
“Marissa!”
I’m in the bathroom cleaning up. Have you taken photos of your car and my bike? It’s just leaning on the veranda beside the door. I’ve got a brunch I have to get ready for so get it done. Unless you really are wanting to talk to me. Maybe you should. Going to cost you anyway now that you’ve fucked my bike. Oh, and I will need a new cycling outfit too, helmet, suit.”
It sounds like a dare and Lloyd knows that Marissa knows that his car is in her street deliberately. But he only wanted to drive down in the street, see the house, feel a bit of old heat, taste a bit of guilty pleasure mixed with a sense of, wasn’t I a fool, wasn’t I crazy brave, wasn’t I just someone who when presented with something that he did not know he even wanted, had to grab it all of it, forgetting about anything else that mattered, till like a junkie, when the drug rejects you, or something momentous happens, you finally realise that the position you are now in is unsustainable? But it is not you that resolves it, not really, just some force that makes you see, takes the blinkers off, and then and only then, do you blow everything up, saving nothing, ruining everything except of course yourself or at least the part that is happy with the explosion.
He never wanted to talk to her. He just wants to be a voyeur on his own past, looking at the battlefield from a time and a distance removed like a retired General. No, he doesn’t want to talk to her.
There is a pen and pad on her kitchen bench. To the sound of the shower’s running water he leaves a note with his email address and a request to send him the bill with her account details and he will direct debit the money to cover the repair bill or a new bike. He runs from the house, reverses his car out of the driveway and continues down her street, getting lost twice before eventually finding the way back on to the main road. He heads north, back home as fast as the weekend traffic will allow.
So, when over the running water, Marissa yells out his name in a different tone, a tone of invitation and expectation he is not there to answer. When the bathroom door opens and Marissa emerges naked in a cloud of steam, her pale skin abraded bright red on the corners of her shoulders, elbows and knees and strikes a pose, there is no one there to see.
Photo by Ian Valerio on Unsplash
