Chapter 12: Dramatics In A Public Setting
Parliament Hill was Clara's favourite place to view the city in which she lived. A skyline of landmarks and speckled cranes, and a vista worthy enough to watch the effects of gunpowder and treason.
Four hundred years later however—Parliament was still standing, King James was dead, but from other, more disease related causes, Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby were long decapitated—and so it had fallen to Clara, who was alive and well, to take their place and admire the view. Always to her slight amusement, the Houses of Parliament were now mostly obscured by the rise of an ever growing city.
Amidst a happy relationship, it was routine that would bring her to watch light spread over the sprawling city skyline in the earlier hours of Saturday mornings. It wasn't a ritual, or a set-in-stone tradition when she came here with Danny, it was just a thing they would do together, a repetitive event that became a habit when London was free of excessive wind, storm, or F-5 tornado, and they were free of the lasting effects from a Friday evening.
Ascending grassy paths, the two of them spoke mostly of normal and inconsequential moments of their respective weeks, gossip of their two very sensible friends and two very unsensible friends, plan for the following days—etcetera, etcetera, etcetera—perhaps she would laugh as he tried to explain why West Brom weren't signing the right players this year and what he would have done instead, listen with feigned interest and a crooked grin while he listed all the cars he would one day buy on his teacher's wage, offer support as he worried about the students that he had cause to worry over, or the sister in Birmingham who might be in a concerning relationship. Anything and everything of his life.
Other days it was different. Other days, she was expected to give big answers to small questions.
Do you think your mum would have liked me? Why doesn't your dad talk about her? Maybe we should move in together?
Eventually and quietly, their habitual trips had declined and she couldn't really remember why or who had initiated the change. An excuse from him at first perhaps, a busy weekend or a late Friday, and then it was only every other week until they had stopped altogether in the last few months before the event, and she had barely even noticed. Consequential now, but trivial at the time, and maybe that was telling in itself, that she hadn't really cared enough to observe the shift and the change between them.
Instead of being able to recall the last time they had gone together, she had only the final time, because of course the final time she'd gone, she had been by herself, alone and sedate because Danny couldn't come anymore, he was buried in the ground. She had walked away from his funeral and driven there; and of course it had started fucking raining as she walked up the hill, and of course it was cold and miserable and London was obscured in the mist. And she was still reasonably certain she hadn't cried, just felt numb and sick and couldn't remember a single thing of importance she had told him on this hill. Not an answer or a reason or an explanation, not one thing about herself that felt honest and substantial, that was beyond the simple surface level of—
"I'm being awfully mean to you, aren't I," John said without expression, cutting into her drifting thoughts. He was close, leg almost touching hers, hand still placed around the back of her chair.
"Yes," she agreed slowly, dragging her gaze in the direction required to meet his eyes.
Still slightly lost, Clara noted quietly that the man in front of her was the polar opposite of her deceased boyfriend. In speech and action and personality, in appearance, interests and hobbies. John wouldn't have liked Danny, and without the added stature of fame, she was pretty sure Danny would have been completely indifferent about him.
She regarded him carefully and then glanced to the car keys placed purposely beside them on the table. "What would you do if I left?"
"Nothing."
"You'd just let me leave? Just like that?"
"Just like that."
"After everything we went through over the last month?" she queried, raising her eyebrows with a hinting touch of skepticism.
The answer was firm and resolute, as if his response had already been chosen. "Yes."
Closing her eyes, Clara sighed and pressed fingers into them, debating what her next move was supposed to be. For the sake of the appearance, being that they were in a public location, she removed the hands trying to press her eyeballs back into her skull and lowered them into her lap, gingerly blinking away the dark spots obscuring her vision. John filled her sight, inexpressive and apparently heedless of his former words. Relaxed in his chair, he tapped his fingers on the back of hers, waiting for her to form some sort of reply.
She leant back into his hand, expecting him to remove the inadvertent touch on her spine. He was purposely slow, dragging his fingers away like it required a great effort of strength and perseverance.
"You're playing a dangerous game with me, John."
"It's not a game." The words were slow from his mouth, each attentively pronounced and inflected meticulously in his Scottish rhotic.
"No? Then explain what the fuck that was."
"I've got a fetish about dramatics in a public setting."
She didn't laugh. It might have been funny in another circumstance, but nothing in his tone suggested any sort of humour. He didn't seem to be interested in finding it funny either. Resisting the temptation to press again at her eyes, Clara's gaze drifted over his shoulder. There were people at the bar near the far end of the room laughing at something. A joke perhaps. A man passed a pint to his friend and pointed to the ceiling. Another chorus of laughter filtered into her ears.
"I don't like dramatics," she murmured absently, a tiny crease appearing on her brows.
John didn't reply. Or if he did, she didn't notice. She was missing something. She dragged her eyes away from the bar, blinking him into focus. A nagging sensation lurked in the back of her head. She fixed her gaze on him properly. Really, insistently giving him a brazen stare. In all honesty, he looked like he had just shot himself in the chest.
Dramatic, Oswald.
A self-inflicted, on-purpose wound. Her eyes ran over his expression. A muscle in his jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth. The steady gaze faltered, flickering away. It was a quick change. An almost instant shift into another state, the confidence and authority he had just shown reshaping into something else in the silence.
Something was wrong. She felt strange. There was a complete absence of anger in her system. She should have been angry. Furious. Everything he had just done was completely out of line. It was intrusive, cruel and decisively arrogant. At first, she thought she was just finding herself in a position where she couldn't be bothered to be angry. Danny would have laughed at that. Clara Oswald: couldn't be bothered to get angry. A statement contradictory in itself. But the longer she stared at him, the more certain her reaction was not of apathy, but a complete lack of concern for his analysis. The peripherals of alarm and the gripping nervous edge began dispersing as if they had never entered her system in the first place, replaced instead with an insidious type of unease that crept into her chest. His words had felt too premeditated to be some spur of the moment outburst. Like he had been running over the transcript, choosing exactly how to insert a knife to hurt the most.
A burst of laughter at the bar distracted her from the train of disjointed thought.
"What—What's going on?" she said slowly, turning slightly so she was facing him in a more direct manner.
"I just asked you a question."
"No," she frowned, screwing up her eyes for a moment, trying to pinpoint the cause of the hovering disconcertment. "No—not what you said. Why did you do that?"
His eyes were fixed and unblinking to a point somewhere behind her head.
"John?"
"Do you… want me to keep going?" he asked, impassive. "I can say more things."
"No, thank you. That was enough." She gritted her teeth slightly and took a few breaths before continuing. "Are you aware of this thing where instead of you telling me what's wrong with me, I tell you what's wrong with me?"
"No."
He offered nothing further.
"Do you like dramatic metaphors because you're a songwriter or because you're just a dick?"
The second attempt at achieving a sufficiently more useful outcome received, not unexpectedly, no reply or response, and her third was just counterproductive pettiness. "Have you had an actual conversation with a human being in the last twenty years? Or has it just been the neighbourhood cats and whatever trees you might've come across?"
This wasn't helping. Clara reached for her glass and took a sip of water, letting the cool liquid ease a dry throat. She closed her eyes to block him from her vision and tried not to sigh. Pointless cynicism wasn't the right approach.
"You're supposed to leave now," John announced quietly, interrupting her small moment of reflection.
She turned to look at him, frowning. "What? Why would I leave?"
"Because I've made you angry."
"But I'm—I'm not angry."
"I've made you angry, so now you're supposed to leave."
"John, I'm not angry."
"Yes, you are," he replied, slowly insistent. "Because I was mean to you."
Clara blinked at him, a little startled. The assertiveness had gone entirely from his voice. He was beginning to mumble in a way that was making it hard for her to hear.
"It's easier. It's easier for you, if you leave."
"What are you talking about? You want me to drive off right now? And go where?"
"You could go back to the house, and then leave in the morning."
"Sorry, John. I'm not getting this at all. You want me to physically leave you here, in this pub, and drive myself back to London?"
He nodded in accordance to her clarification. "Yes."
"Because of that fucking performance you did just now?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was mean to you."
A circular conversation. Great. Again, he didn't offer anything further, only cast his eyes away from her to stare vacantly at nothing as if purposely avoiding her gaze.
"You're overreacting. John, whatever this is, it's… absurd. I don't understand what's going on. You're being unbelievably erratic. And you're acting like… like a child, actually. Talk to me. Communicate. As an adult."
Somewhere in her confusion—the source unexplained and not quite identifiable—she had a feeling he wasn't really overreacting. That he was reacting exactly as he should be in the circumstances. Further hints of trepidation filtered through her.
"Can you talk to me properly, please? Why did you do that?"
"I want you to leave."
"Why? I haven't done anything. John, you brought me here. Claiming, by the way, that this is a date. Why would you want me to just go?"
"I wanted to show you we could be on a date," he murmured, swallowing and then running his tongue along his bottom lip.
"Well, it's not," Clara sighed, pushing fingers into her temples. "We're supposed to be friends, remember? You know that. We agreed. Just claiming you can't and giving me some fucking ultimatum isn't going to help anything. Saying you would rather have me leave than fix whatever this is, isn't the right way to go about it."
"This is fixing the problem," he stressed quietly. "You have to go. Go away from me."
"John, we were fine until last night," she reasoned, disoriented and shaking her head. "We had… an angry moment. We put ourselves in a stupid situation and it got out of hand. That doesn't mean it's unrecoverable. We just need to talk about it."
"I can't be around you."
No, she was really missing something now. Absolutely. Undoubtedly. The implication was clear. The accusation was directed at her.
"Why do you think I'm the problem? I haven't… done anything."
In another circumstance, she would have already long backed out of this conversation. It felt absolutely futile and unproductive. On the other hand, she didn't often feel like she was the one that was supposed to be offering the reparation on an undetermined issue.
"Okay, well… I'm not leaving. So, now what? Your plan hasn't worked."
Silence.
Fucking hell.
"Are we just going to sit here not talking until they start locking the doors?"
More silence. A large part of her was beginning to become utterly bored. Absurd nihilism versus complete rational, she thought wryly to herself before taking a deep breath and releasing it slowly into her hand. Problems were boring. He was definitely right about that. She didn't want to spend the evening sliding around some incoherent fight she had no idea how to approach. The feeling of monotony, however, was held back from fully forming in the face of the edging disconcertment. That there was a problem here she was missing. She was pretty sure he'd just thrown the entire jigsaw in her direction. She just had to piece it together. Which was fucking annoying, actually, because she hated jigsaw puzzles. She had better things to do with her time.
Clara pressed her fingers into her eyes. "Fucksake," she breathed, not capable of keeping her frustration entirely internal. "I don't know how to do this."
She looked at him straight and spoke in a clear and direct manner. "John, if I've done something, I'm oblivious. You'll need to tell me.
"Is this trust?" she guessed, frowning with confusion. "Because I trust you. I've trusted you since day one. I've known you thirty two days and I think I trust you with my entire life. Which sounds insane. But I just do. An illogical phenomena. I'd known you for what—two hours? And I was sleeping on your shoulder. You were a stranger."
John was unaffected by her words, staring only to a distant point in front of him. His fingers rested against the edge of the table, thumb tapping intermittently on the underside.
"I made a mistake with Dan," Clara swallowed, attempting something else. "I know that. I didn't… talk to him. Or didn't want to. I'm not going to do the same thing with you. Everything you just said, it's… I can tell you."
It was a serious, genuine offer, and if she wasn't so distracted she would have been wholly startled by just how easy that was to say. "I can go through everything you said and tell you anything you want."
Any reasoning through speech was beginning to feel completely hopeless. He was basically unresponsive. If he was listening, he showed no sign of hearing what she was saying.
"Fuck," she breathed to herself before recognising she was probably a little defeated. "Why is this happening? We're good. Good together. This was always going to be difficult, yeah? But I don't… John. We've had a weird twenty four hours. But we were fine this morning. We've been fine all week. This is getting out of control. You can't just shut down on me like this. I don't know what to do. I need you to help me. Please."
His following expression of emotion took her completely by surprise and was the last thing she wanted to see. She pressed her hand into his forearm automatically, feeling a sinking rush of helplessness. He brushed quickly at the evidence on his cheeks but couldn't clear the glaze in his eyes.
Clara didn't feel equipped or prepared for a situation like this. She had no experience in whatever this was. She didn't know him. Not really. Thirty two days was nothing. She didn't believe in his self-proclaimed poetically pathetic descriptor that you could know a person by looking at them, understand who they were without talking and connecting in a more substantial way. And although she had once told him something of the same, she hadn't really mean it in a literal sense. A first impression always felt like a projection of her own wishes and expectations. She couldn't figure him out instantly, recognise what he was thinking from a glance or a sentence. She disagreed again that they were similar; he was different to her, responded to or interpreted emotion in a way she didn't understand or had no qualifications in, and she had no real comprehension of his state of mind. It felt like trying to read a book in a language she hadn't yet learned.
Her eyes darted over his abject and raw expression and she struggled to drag herself away from what she was witnessing. "Can you explain?" she said gently, brushing at his arm. "Tell me something?"
"I don't want to do this anymore," he whispered, his rough tone barely audible as he stared hard at the table. "Okay? I just don't want to."
The thought of a serious implication like that was making her feel ill. She crushed it down.
"Okay," she blinked, conceding, powerless and out of any reasonable ideas. "I'll do what you want. But I can't leave you here. Come—come with me. Let me just take you home."
She pushed her chair out and stood up, reaching for her coat and then the keys beside them. "I can… go afterwards, I guess."
Other than his eyes, he remained stoically uncompromising. His back was turned away from the other people at the bar and for his sake, she was glad of the small reprieve.
"I'm not leaving you crying in a fucking pub," she muttered conclusively, resolute and quietly insistent.
Thankfully, he seemed to find some sort of reasonable sense after hearing that, and Clara watched him repeat her movements. Chair, coat, exit.
The air was ruthless on her skin as they left the comfortable warmth of the building. She'd forgotten, almost, how sharp the temperature would be. She gritted her teeth and fought against it entering her lungs. There wasn't much point wearing a coat. Simply the necessity to breathe was the only thing required for the cold to infiltrate her body. But it cleared her head and she found herself relaxing slightly.
The car was a street away. She followed behind him, giving a bit of space rather than walking immediately beside his taller frame, not wanting to exacerbate whatever was going on. He was functioning in what felt like autopilot, one foot in front of the other, expressionless and impervious to the cold.
Reaching the car, she tried a completely different tactic. The doors shut out the cold and relieved the onset cryopathy this country was intent to force upon her.
"You forgot to mention how funny I am in your assumption speech."
No response. Clara gave him a moment to comprehend the sentence and then pressed play on her phone. Oasis transmitted through the car speakers, the familiar, Mancunian tones of his former chart rivalry entering the small space.
Bad. It was bad, then. Because that had been funny. Reasonably funny. Enough so that there should have at least been a tiny hint of a smile on his lips. He had been like this before, straight after the radio show. A despondent, vulnerable state. Uncommunicative, barely responsive and unreceptive as if he were simply shutting down to everything around him. She gazed at him for a few moments before starting the engine and pulling away from the curb. She wanted to smile. In some helpless sense, she wondered what he would've had to actually do to make her leave and abandon him while he was like this. It would have had to be much worse. Surely he understood that. Perhaps not. Slight irony filtered through her as she thought about her initial response to participating in Disaster Thursday.
She left Liam and Noel to fill the silence between them as she drove north, eyes fixed on the white centre line, the repeating flash of road markers and constant rush of grey tarmac.
Her thoughts drifted to Danny. She sighed slightly. A Sunday night in London. He would probably have been at her place. Or maybe, he would have been preoccupied. With someone else. Distant, two month old anger made a languid pass through her system, but it dispersed without staying long enough to cause any lingering effects. She was tired, she supposed. Tired of crisis and eight weeks of a continual plight that she was required to have some sort of involvement in. It felt selfish, but the effort to sustain this type of energy was both exhausting and tedious. She reminded herself, again wanting to smile, that this week had been pitched as a relaxing, restful holiday. Apparently, as it turned out, she wasn't capable of putting herself in a position where that was immediately possible. Or, perhaps, that had never been a realistic option. If she'd wanted boredom and peace, she could have stayed at home, exchanging glares with the cat and trying to figure out how to sleep without needing to spend half the night with her hands in the sink.
Danny's fault. Her fault. Industrialism and automobile creation's fault.
She risked a glance at John. A quick and fleeting brush of focus. His eyes were closed, head tilted against the window, hands on his lap. He seemed very young all of sudden. As if he were experiencing a particular emotion for the first time, or had been given too many things at once and was yet to understand the concept of why he had them. He wasn't that much older than her, yet he seemed much younger in some respects; his child-like fascination with his surroundings, like he had grown up but never quite lost the enchantment and captivation with the things that she, now, brushed over with dismissive, blasé eyes. Full of information and knowledge he was desperate to share, but had stored away because he had no one to tell, or no one had ever really wanted to listen. Ironic, perhaps, for an acclaimed songwriter.
For a moment she struggled trying to separate the human person from a celebrity image. The aleatory moment of their original meeting struck her again; the strangely surreal sensation that she was in this position, participating within a scene she was never have supposed to have been apart of. She was meant to be in London with Danny, and the man beside her was supposed to have been a passing, insignificant moment from a previous week—three hours in a studio on a Thursday and that would have been the end of their short afternoon relationship. She would have greeted him in the foyer, showered him with profuse apologies for their incompetent door staff, considered for a moment how beautiful he was as she watched him across the studio desk while pretending she knew his music better than she did. Perhaps asked him minor questions to deflect Jack's barraging intrusiveness, and then organised his driver to meet him at an alternative entrance of the building, away from the swarming mob of photographers and reporters.
She might have thought about him later, how he looked and how he moved, the subtle grace and calm composure he seemed to inhibit. Perhaps that would have varied somewhere into what it might have been like to kiss him and what he would be like as a lover, wondered why his wife had cheated on him and what his body would have felt like on her own, because really, he was unbelievably beautiful, and she would have been just as captivated by his dark eyes and low voice then as she was now. She might have wondered what she would have done if he'd pulled her into an empty room and pressed her hard against the door—if she would have stopped him or just let him break her relationship before she found out that had already been done in a different way, that it wasn't because she was shutting Danny out, but because she had never really let him in in the first place.
And yet, she might have still hated John Smith later, not for their future jokes of assault on her friend for his indecent questioning, but for his own obvious arrogance and audacious, disparaging front. Or maybe she would have considered the reputation he sustained wasn't quite right or didn't ring true, because maybe he would have looked at her across the desk like he looked at her when she caught him staring sometimes, with all the confidence in the world, and with all the endless warmth he seemed to inhibit.
She experienced a sudden and desperate rush of dismay. It was sharp and biting in her chest, a visceral sensation that didn't entirely disperse as the previous pass of anger had. The very, very, last thing on her list of things she wanted to do was to hurt him. In fact, it wasn't on her list. She didn't even have a fucking list. If she did have a list, something to do with solving this situation would be the only thing on it, in capital letters, highlighted and underlined. Written on a Post It. Maybe written on a Post It. A normal sheet of paper would be just as sufficient. He wasn't right about everything.
