Faraz Sarwat is a former Montrealer, now living in Toronto. Faraz has finished writing his first novel and is looking for a publisher. He is also an avid cricket correspondent for the Toronto area.

I know death well. I know the cold that it brings, the stillness and the vacuum. I was barely three years old when my father died. My mother a hippy turned housewife, was unable to cope. She dropped me off at her own father’s home and left never to return. I have a faint memory of my grandfather holding me and pointing to the horizon, telling me that’s how far away my mother was, way, way out there. I held this memory dear until Clara said that I couldn’t possibly remember something like that; that it was a textbook case of sheer construction. She shook her head and rolled her eyes at me, to drive the point home. I didn’t tell her then that I also remember my mother saying goodbye to me the night she left with her friends. It is something too precious to lose, even to Clara, the only person left to love. Truly a sad state of affairs, to be twenty-nine and having no one to love, but someone who doesn’t love you.

Memory is an important thing. Often it is the only record of the past, and I wonder then why people don’t take better care of their memories, why they let them fray, fade and ultimately vanish. People, events, words, sentiments, the here and now, all of it utterly meaningless and of no consequence if no one remembers in time. A bad memory should be cause for shame, and yet people with bad memories look with great scepticism at those who remember things, when it should be the other way around. After all, if you can remember what happened yesterday, why can’t you remember what happened the day before that. And if you can remember the day before yesterday, why not the day before that. Perhaps it has to do with whether a particular moment has significance for an individual or not. Clara, for instance when she was eleven years old, told me what her favourite songs were. I brought it up some weeks ago at coffee and she had no recollection. Could that mean then that the life Clara has lived is more precious to me than it is to her. Yes, that’s exactly what it means. Be that as it may, the universe has to balance somehow, doesn’t it (and no, these are not questions, but facts, phrasing be damned). And so while Clara remembers her life as a patchwork with many (what I would consider) important facts missing, so does my present, as it quickly becomes the past, unfold in the same way. I can be selective too. It is almost a necessity. I remember too much and if I were to relate it all – if I were even to go into why Clara means what she does to me, well it would take the good part of twenty years.

***

After my grandfather died this winter, I took an apartment on Parthenon Drive in the north end of the city. It was far from work, but it was close to Clara. My Clara. I say it was close to Clara, but it was only close to her for about three weeks and then it was a good half hour’s drive away. I say she is my Clara, but she is not mine in the sense that one would think she would be mine, based on the foregoing.

Clara came from a typical Canadian family. Every conversation had a mention of the weather. Everything was rosy. The sun was shining somewhere on even the darkest day. Summer time meant barbecues and cottages; winter meant skiing and all of it was done with a smile. I can only imagine what went through their minds to learn of an old widower raising his grandson alone.

Clara’s father and mine had worked for the same insurance company. Clara’s father described himself to me as a great friend of my father’s, but when I was younger, I was always startled to find that he didn’t know the kinds of things about my father that a best friend should have known; his favourite colour for instance. But whatever he felt for my father, or me or maybe it was even for my grandfather, it was enough for him and his wife to take me on their family vacation, when I was old enough to go with them alone.

Clara was a year younger than me and her sister Kim was four years older. At the age of nine, the combination of age gap and gender were insurmountable obstacles to a good time. Clara didn’t like me then. In the car, seated between her sister and me, she pinched my arm all the way to the cottage. I looked over at Kim, trying to catch her eye to register silent protest. Once or twice Kim swatted Clara’s hand away, but that was all. I suffered in silence, too embarrassed to alert her parents and too scared to hit a girl younger than me, particularly while surrounded by her family. She twisted the skin on my arm between her fingernails for the duration of the car ride. I remember feeling desperately unhappy. I was far from home and there was nowhere to turn to feel any better.

That afternoon Clara’s father took me fishing in a little boat. We rowed out to the middle of the quiet lake. He showed me how to bait a hook and then told me to do one myself. I looked at the can of worms and revulsion prevented me from slipping my hand in. I hadn’t even been paying attention to the demonstration on how to bait a hook and Clara’s father kept saying “go on, pick it up, well, pick it up now”. I cracked under the pressure and started to cry. He moved to get closer to me, and the boat rocked. I was afraid it would tip and he would be angry and I remember hoping that I would drown. But the boat did not tip and Clara’s father, who had been bossing me all day, surprised me by not getting angry. He said he understood how I felt. He knew I missed my father. I replied that it was my grandfather that I lived with and not my father. He said he knew that, but he also knew I missed my father and my mother and that’s why I was crying. I remember getting annoyed, but nodding even though I was not crying because I missed anybody. I was crying because I was miserable sitting in a boat with a gruff man telling me to pick out worms from a can. I hated the man then, but I needed something from him. I asked him to not tell Clara that I cried. Without even a second’s hesitation, he promised that he wouldn’t. Then he said that I was like a son to him and that I shouldn’t ever worry about anything, that I should tell him whenever I had a problem in life. That made things better.

I don’t remember the rest of the stay or the car ride home. All else that remains etched in my memory is when we got back from the water, Clara walked over to me, pushed on gently by her mother who stood back and watched. “I’m sorry I was mean to you. I’ll always be your friend from now on,” she said her eyes lowered, her shame palpable. She was true to her word and I saw her a few times a year, and as we got older, phone calls and then e-mails made our communication more frequent. Indeed things were good from that pivotal day at the lake, until the day I told her I loved her.

***

Moving to Parthenon Drive was a big deal for me. It was the kind of big, ultimately foolish step that only a man suffering from unrequited love would take. Clara lived in the Parthenon area and had always done so. She was born there and she was raised there and she never moved. But three weeks after I was in the neighbourhood, she was gone and shacked up with a big brute of a man, my age, but twice my size, this fellow. I wondered what his mother had fed him. I regretted that I never ate my veggies or drank milk. The ramifications were felt now, fifteen, twenty years later, when he carted off my Clara to live with him and all I could do was figuratively wave goodbye from the confines of my new apartment, which I suddenly hated.

My new home was old and fragile. The floor gasped under the strain of anyone walking on it. The radiator was moody about giving any heat and looked as if it was just left and forgotten in the tiny living room, by the wall. It was painted a sad white, that looked like it was trying too hard to be a good colour. The bedroom window overlooked a putrid alley. I had to live here now for at least a year, in this place, far again from my Clara. My lease had no ‘Void-if-Clara-leaves-the-neighbourhood’ clause. I climbed the walls.

***

There is nothing queerer that a woman can do to her new lover than to remain friends with her old one. It is equally nonsensical to claim to be friends with a man and to love him and yet be in a romantic relationship with someone else or no one at all. Clara for all her virtues had a long list of male friends, some of whom had tasted glory and some like me, who had not. I can muster no positive words for the brute, but even he had sense enough to be put off by Clara’s many male friends. She was going to break up with him. Who was he to tell her who she could and could not be friends with. Did he not trust her, and so forth. No, she had no more time for the brute. They could go back to simply being friends again, but any thoughts of a wedding were dead.

She told me all this some two weeks after the funeral, over coffee on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in a dank and cold café that seemed less dank and cold to me, with her growing conviction that it was over between them. Seeing her sporadically would no longer work. I resolved that I had to be closer if I was going to mount a worthy challenge. This was an opportunity that could not be squandered. There were too many suitors and I wasn’t exactly the most promising one. I was sure that Clara was a smidgen taller than me, even without her ever-present heels.

I told Clara that I had been thinking of moving and she told me that she had seen some for rent signs on the buildings near Parthenon Drive. I told her I was desperate to find a new place and that this was as good as any neighbourhood to move to. She asked me how so when it would be far from work. I didn’t have a good answer so I told her the truth. “What does that matter. I’ll be near you” and she thought that was sweet, the silly thing.

While I was finding and then settling into the new place, Clara was busy patching up with the brute. The adhesive material used was of such quality, that not only were they back together, but she was going to move in with him. The three weeks that we had in the same neighbourhood, I saw her once when she came to check out the place and leave an invitation for her father’s birthday party. I had cooked a lamb curry and with a hint of beg, asked her to stay for dinner. She declined, saying she was going out with friends and the brute. I couldn’t bear to ask what caused the pendulum to swing so decisively back in his favour. She looked around the charmless apartment and gave faux approval. I doubt she knew that it was all for her.

***

It would be painful to see Clara with The Boyfriend, but living near Parthenon Drive, there would be no good excuse to not walk over to the house. Clara’s parents had continued to be kind to me over the years and her mother called often after I lost my grandfather. No one ever came to visit me though. This occurred to me as I got ready for the party that evening and set off, nauseous with trepidation.

The Boyfriend then, a brute of a man-boy. A solid pack of muscle condensed in a frame just shy of six feet. If he ever meant business, business would get done. The confidence of money and an ego nurtured by the kind of parents who find their son’s drunken antics amusing; this Boyfriend, the brute, the man-boy, would not have second thoughts about flattening me if he thought I had looked at his woman funny. And I had. I had looked at her funny; there was no doubting that. I caught her eye, held it, then looked over at him, rolled my eyes in her exaggerated fashion and then looked back at her and made a face. She made a quizzical face back, as if to query why I would roll my eyes about The Boyfriend. She didn’t realize that I was finally giving expression to what I had wondered about since I learned of his existence, namely why she would have any interest in him. He would get her into good clubs and he would have friends who did inane things like travel around the world to find themselves, when these silly, baseball cap wearing beer-swillers could just ask themselves one or two pointed questions (that’s all it would take) and then reflect on the sad answers, at home, in bed. So he could give her these people and he could show her a good time. I had nothing like that to offer, only books and music. I could only show her my means of escape. I could not show her a good time.

My eyes were still locked forlornly with Clara’s, when he walked over and pushed me and though I tried to stand my ground, I took a few steps backwards. I was quite prepared for my first real beating since grade school, when she intervened and told him that was enough. She took his arm with one small hand, unable to get it around his bicep, and put her other hand on his chest. He stopped in his tracks and she led him away. I had hoped he would have beaten me up. It was too humiliating for it all to end this way. And it ended, for how could any woman want to be with a man whom she had to protect from physical danger.

That night when I went home from the party, I wrote Clara a long e-mail, which essentially had two points. The first was that she had already seen what the brute was capable of offering her and that it wasn’t anything of much value (I didn’t know this for sure, but how could it be otherwise in a man who had to resort to violence, rather than strategic eye-rolling to express himself). The second point was that I loved her and had done so for years, even though her best years were behind her and her once pretty face now showed the ragged effects of years of hedonism. Not being stupid and wanting her to ultimately choose me, I phrased it better than that of course, with the entirely honest coup de grace, that having no one else in the world, she would be my focus, my priority, my life and I would always do my best to make her happy. Clara did not reply. I waited three days.

I could not call Clara’s home for the brute would be there. I decided to call her parents’ home and leave a message for her there to call me back. Her father answered and although he was pleasant as usual, I could sense some tension. After chitchatting he told me that he would pass on my message but that he knew Clara was angry with me. And then he said, “Haven’t you always thought of Clara as your sister?”

No, frankly I hadn’t. Not having any sisters, the concept was alien to me. I listened to him in silence. Then he told me to not say anything to Clara about our conversation. The old man confused the daylights out of me, but out of respect, I agreed. In return he said he would make sure Clara called me back. I waited for two long days and my phone never rang once. I knew then that the jig, the gig, all of it - was irrevocably, up.

In desperation I phoned her office, even though long ago she had told me never to call there, as she had no privacy. She greeted me with a surprised voice and then cooled considerably, causing the inverse in me. I could feel my skin burning.

The long and the short of it was that it wasn’t even a tight race. The man-boy won by a country mile. Clara told me that this should have been obvious to me and that I shouldn’t have embarrassed the both of us by professing love when we both knew it wasn’t true. While I let the profound obliviousness settle in, she went on:

“I have to ask myself, after all these years is there anyone, let me ask you – is there anyone who knows what goes on in your head?”

I suppose there isn’t, but if you were mine, I would tell you everything worth knowing about me.

She went on about The Boyfriend then. “He actually loves me. He cried when we broke up. A guy like that, you’ve seen him - he cried.”

I cry all the time. I think about you all the time and I cry.

“He doesn’t want me to see you. What can I say? You’re immature and if you don’t respect my choices, then we can’t be friends.”

How am I the immature one, when he’s always wearing a baseball cap, like he’s ten years old. And he calls people ‘bro’. And how can you be friends with the rest of the world and not with me. Does our time together count for nothing?

Clara said goodbye. It seemed harshly firm and final. I had not said a word the whole time and let her rant. If this was to be the last time we spoke I wanted to hear as much of her voice as I could. My Clara’s voice. If she didn’t believe that I loved her, then I knew that nothing else I could say to her would matter. I began to wonder whether The Boyfriend had managed to purge Clara’s former lovers from her life too. If he had done that, and if I ever wore a baseball cap, I would tip it to him.

***

I walked without ease on the streets where I was, until my mother packed our lives and took us to my grandfather’s home, raised. The surroundings were dimly familiar but only because the old man had brought me here a couple of times when I was still a boy. We were usually coming back from somewhere else and he’d take a detour to show me the house where I was born. I had always found it oddly exciting, but now, some fifteen, twenty years later on my own, I felt disconnected from reality. I felt the intensity of my environment, but in disjoined patches. There would be nothing and then everything. It was as if I was walking in a dream. And it was not happy or illuminating or anything close to exciting. I circled the block and the old house, with its windowsills lined with potted plants and I felt the soil falling over my head.

Things that bring me peace: sunsets, open natural spaces, preferably with water, a mix-tape that Clara made for me on a long forgotten birthday, full of songs that I had never heard before. But I knew the thought she had put into choosing each song and the effort made it special to me. I often turned to it for comfort. I would substitute the great outdoors for a chair, a belt and a door, but I had Clara’s old tape playing in my Walkman, knowing that the sun had well and truly set. I felt the soil falling over my head and I felt something within me fighting a losing battle, struggling to stay.

My mother had kissed me on the tip of my nose and I remember her hands were cold. It was a light blue car that she left in. It was full of people with hair, moustaches, beards, sunglasses and beads. She waved as the car sped off. “Everything will be all right”, my grandfather said as he held me close to the cigarette smoke embedded in his shirt. No scent could be sweeter.

© Faraz Sarwat