Free Signs of Life by Anna Raverat

far.
    But it was clear that I wasn’t going to stop and that I wasn’t going to tell. Delilah and Shirin told me later that after this talk they were even more concerned. They didn’t
know what else to do so they called in the big guns – they told my sister.
    Something else made the first sex with Carl awful, although it didn’t happen until two days afterwards. Other colleagues were attending the event we were driving to,
including three friends of Carl who knew about our affair. We arrived late at the hotel and Carl’s friends had already gone; we wouldn’t see them until the next day. Carl pinned a note
to the door of their room. He didn’t fold the note or put it in an envelope, so I read it. At the end, he wrote, ‘P.S. The Good Life.’ When I asked, he said this was just a joke
with the lads.
    The next day I had breakfast with these work mates while Carl stayed in bed. One of Carl’s friends alluded to the fact that Carl and I had finally had sex. I was surprised he knew because
Carl hadn’t seen his friends since we arrived. It turned out that Carl’s P.S. was code and they all knew what it meant.
    I returned immediately to our room to tackle Carl. I was angry at his laddish trumpeting, angry that he’d speculated and discussed it with them all beforehand, and angry with myself for
getting mixed up with this idiot. I told him it was over between us. He cried and begged me to forgive him. I remember him sitting in bed, propped up by lots of pillows like an old lady, his lank
hair and red eyes, and wanting to kick him. Hard.

Ten
    The flat opposite is to be saved after all: the plastic sheeting has been taken down, most of the scaffolding is gone, and the place is swarming with builders. I don’t
mind all the noise and activity because they are signs of life and anyway, I am prone to daydreaming and the sudden bangs bring me back with a jolt.
    Every choice involves a loss. By following Carl, I lost Johnny. Or I gave him up. I knew about choices such as which assistant to hire, which car to buy, whether or not to
ignore the comments of builders shouted from the scaffolding (not the builders opposite; they are part of the ‘Considerate Builders Scheme’, there’s a sign up that says so)
– these were decisions made at the top of the head. What I didn’t acknowledge was that some choices are made at other levels and it can take the conscious mind a while to catch on. Like
when I tried to jump from the waterfall: the top of my head was saying I could but my feet had already said no. I don’t know whether my body made the choice or whether the choice was made
deep in my mind and my body simply informed me of it.
    After Carl’s ‘Good Life’ note, I didn’t want to travel back with him and I certainly didn’t want to be alone with him. There were three vanloads
of people leaving that event in convoy. I made sure Carl was in a different van to me. An hour or so into the journey, Carl’s van – he was driving – made an unscheduled stop.
Seeing him pull off at a garage, I felt abandoned, which took me by surprise. Twenty minutes later, someone in my van said: Look, here they are! Carl’s van came up very fast behind us and
overtook. I was annoyed; yet more foolish antics, but also slightly relieved that he was back. I was sitting in the front passenger seat and I noticed that up ahead, Carl was dropping one white
flower after another from the van window making a trail of flowers on the road that our van gobbled up. This went on for a few minutes. Everyone in the vehicle had something to say about it, but I
knew this was his apology – or rather, because I was so pissed off, the beginning of one. On a long straight stretch of dual-carriageway, Carl slowed his van to parallel ours so that he was
alongside me, with only a metre of fast moving tarmac between us. Carl held out the last white flower. Take it! Take it! yelled everyone in my van. I rolled my window down and took the