Free The Promise by Tony Birch Page A

with a backpack stuffed with clothes and a cardboard box full of paperback novels under my arm. Before moving in with Rachel I’d lived in a share house in Richmond. The furniture in that house had belonged to other tenants, not that we had much between us. I’d been a literature student and had dropped out of university in the home stretch, before the end of third year. Others in the house were dropouts too, from one failed venture or another. We didn’t have a dollar between us, the house was a crumbling mess, we drank cheap wine out of jam jars and watched TV sitting on upturned stolen milk crates.
    Rachel had rescued me from the chaos. We’d met at a seminar organised by the local Job Centre, where Rachel worked as a motivational trainer. While I didn’t get much out of the seminar itself, for reasons that are unexplainable now, Rachel and I hit it off. She told me that she had a strong feeling about me; that I had potential I was yet to fulfil. I didn’t doubt a word she said. I was also desperate to sleep with her, which we did within days of that conversation.
    I thought about that first meeting, the great sex we’d started out with – and then the note on the fridge door. As I walked through the house, in tears, I did a quick inventory of what was left. Although the double bed had belonged to her, she left it behind for me, along with a clean fitted sheet, two blankets and a single pillow. Later that night I sat on the bed and hugged the pillow to my chest and pathetically thought how generous she’d been leaving it behind.
    In the depths of loneliness over the following weeks, and on the back of my beer-fuelled chat in the bar with Swooper, I would wake in the middle of the night tortured by the thought that since Rachel had left her bed with me, logically she must have moved into a house where a bed was waiting for her. A bed she was most likely sharing with another man and, as Swooper had prophesied, a bed she was rooting in.
    She’d also left the kitchen table, two wooden chairs, the fridge she’d stuck the note to, and enough pots and pans and knives and forks to get by on. Not that I’d done any cooking since she’d left, living on black coffee, cigarettes and toast.
    There were a few pre-made meals in the freezer, casseroles and soups that had been lovingly prepared by Rachel before being labelled and neatly stacked away. She had explained to me that they’d come in handy on wintry evenings, after we’d got in late from a romantic walk through the park or along the river. We would warm one of the meals on the stove, cuddle up on the couch in front of the TV and watch a romantic movie.
    Well, winter was on the doorstep, and the couch and the TV and my girlfriend were gone.
    I did pull a frozen block of pea-and-ham soup out of the freezer one night, but couldn’t bring myself to defrost it, let alone eat it. I forgot to put it away and found the container on the bench the next morning sitting in a pool of murky water. I threw the meal in the bin, made myself a cup of coffee and lit another dart. Rachel had weaned me off cigarettes. I hadn’t been tempted at all until she left. Conning myself that I hadn’t returned to being a serious smoker, I fed my habit by buying the cigarettes loose, in twos and threes, from Ali, at the local milk bar. I’d usually smoke the first of three as we talked out the front of his shop, a second on the walk home, and the precious third and final cigarette sitting with a cup of coffee on the back porch as I looked over the ragged garden. Like the rest of my life, the garden had gone to the pack since Rachel’s departure. With the exception of an old olive tree that seemed to thrive on neglect, most of the plants had died.
    I was on my way to the milk bar for more cigarettes one Sunday morning when I spotted a rickety wooden ladder leaning against the trunk of an olive tree that grew on the nature strip