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How to Disappear Completely,
by Stefan Demetriou

PROLOGUE



I have no idea why my wife left me. I wasn’t unfaithful, I've never been violent and I’m fairly sure that I wasn’t that bad in bed. That sex wasn’t always in bed reassures me of this; it suggests spontaneity and passion. Ruth and I definitely had passion. We fucked on a train once.

Of course sex wasn’t always so memorable – or rhythmic. Ruth and I had routine and disappointment too; the usual suspects “I’m tired” or even that clichéd line – “Sorry, I have a headache”. We never slept apart though and, overall, things were more than okay.

No, sex wasn’t a factor in our separation. I’m certain that Ruth didn’t want to see what it could be like with someone else. This was partly due to her character but mostly because, partner-wise, I was her number twelve. I don’t mind admitting here that she was (only) my second. And with this bit of information it’s immediately apparent that our early sexual careers weren’t similar. Not better and not worse, you understand, just different. Not that Ruth was promiscuous and not that I was shy, as such. Purely that she went out, saw opportunities and took them. I stayed in, read books, listened to music and wrote, mostly. I met Ruth long before we actually got together. We went to the same university though we didn’t know each other back then. That would all come much later. At that time our paths rarely crossed. I was English Literature while she was Politics. I was from Essex, she wasn’t.

In fact we only spoke once during the whole of my three undergraduate years. I was with some friends in a pub called The Black Griffin, when Ruth, sitting at an adjacent table, leaned over and asked me the time. “8.42” was the uninspired, but accurate, answer I gave. And I shouldn’t have bothered with the detail. Ruth only heard the “8”. By the time I added the minutes, she was already back to her friends, throwing an all-too-brief “thanks” in my direction. And why would she linger? She didn’t know me so there was no need for our conversation to continue. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t even have the chance to remove my glasses, let alone think about what I might have done differently.

Of course, there was space for that later – back in the safety of my room. ‘Ruth Carmichael asking me the time’ became the most significant moment of my romantic career to date. Accordingly I gave it the attention I felt it deserved. Replaying the conversation from every possible angle, endlessly looking for evidence that Ruth was interested in me. It was a welcome distraction from the novels of Charles Dickens.

It was also, to put it simply, a ‘result’, given Ruth’s social standing amongst the first year and her perfect smile. I didn’t harbour unrealistic aims of engineering a relationship out of such separateness. And don’t go thinking our eventual union was a story of one-sided passion finally requited.

If I’m honest, I hadn’t spent the years that had passed infatuated.

If I’m being truthful here – and that’s the whole point isn’t it? – I had kept Ruth in my life. In a photo taken at our first year Ball back at university. She’d been captured inside a shot aimed at a group of my friends. I got the film developed and there was Ruth, standing to the side, staring off into the distance, no doubt at some rugby-playing suitor from Richmond. Even like that – unposed, unplanned – she looked great, her blonde hair up, wearing a long cream dress that revealed little but suggested more.

The picture’s adhesiveness to my life held no great significance, I certainly never allocated it any. That would come much later too. As it contained my friends, the image travelled with me when I graduated, part of a random collection of student memorabilia. One day I realised I’d always loved Ruth, but then, at that time, she wasn’t looking at me. The accidental composition makes it abundantly clear And that was fine. I’d come to terms with it – eventually.

Anyway, during my formative sexual career competing affections lay frequently elsewhere, for example with feelings cultivated for months over a cultivated girl in my Shakespeare class. A girl who said things about Fortinbras that only I agreed with. A girl who almost became my first after a Christmas party, until I threw up in her Santa hat and fled. But she wasn’t Ruth.

Subsequently I had a few similar encounters throughout my student days. Everything of potential but nothing of substance. I remained a virgin until I was 21 and a night spent with a woman of a certain age.

And yet by the time Ruth and I got it together, I didn’t overcompensate. Things were not uneven between us. She didn’t have the emotional or physical upper hand. We were balanced. I need to make that clear.

It sounds unnecessary to say it, but I’m not bad looking. I’m not boring either. I certainly wasn’t nervous. I wanted to be with Ruth for all the right reasons – she made me laugh, I fancied her like mad and I craved her opinion on every subject. Fortunately she liked me too.

So I got the girl and she got me. We got each other.

Imbalance isn’t the reason she left me.

There was nothing monumental when fate dealt us another chance four years after our first contact, after we had both been spat out of university and the pressure was on to carve out a place in the world. Ruth and I met again, each defined by the employment we’d found and each bound by a lifestyle we both wanted to achieve. An underpaid local-paper reporter (me) and a struggling PR assistant (her) with the same thing on their minds. Solvency.

Economic disparity is not the reason she left me.

Our relations, once they began, a year after graduation, were always equal too. Twelve months spent sharing a flat, earning the same amount of money, with a similar number of people to meet for a drink. One mutual happiness. Sex became a shared process too, a learning curve for us both. We were quickly able to talk about what we both liked doing. I told her what I wanted. She said the same. We didn’t want there to be any room for forced lies or withheld desires; we determined that everything would be open.

I knew from the start that she was the one. We both asserted that if we offered everything to each other we’d definitely last the distance. Ruth talked of visiting Australia and making her own curtains. I was free to imagine grandchildren, several photo-albums of holidays and a garden shed filled with tools. In all this the only thing neither us planned for was Ruth not being around. But one day she left me.

But it wasn’t through frustration, or wanting different things, and it wasn’t commitment or lack of. These aren’t the reasons she went. I’m convinced that there has to be something else to blame, if not someone. Definitely not someone.

And it wasn’t claustrophobia in general that led to her departure. Our distant hopes of a long marriage and joint retirement were simply that. Distant. True, I saw a long path that stretched out, leading to a final destination. But it wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t planned. In our present life I’d attempted romance, wasn’t bad at spontaneity and even surprised her with aggression. She’d been thrilled once when I went off at some arsehole who was giving her friends a hard time in the pub. And not that she left me because I was jealous or over-protective or angry or temperamental.

So why?

If Ruth had actually called that evening, that well-remembered final Friday as I waited for her to come home. If she had called and said “Sorry Ben, you’re too close to your brother. I feel shut out. It’s just not working for me” I’d probably be okay by now. I would have got over it. If she had called to say, “I’m really sorry Ben, but I’ve fallen in love with someone else, I’m leaving you” then I almost certainly wouldn’t be over it, but at least I would know.

Only she never called.

I stared at my phone, increasingly worried ink scribbles forming on the Yellow Pages and anything else to hand. Violent jagged lines and elliptical shapes that made no sense. And still she didn’t arrive.

The time dragged. I swore at the neighbour’s cat which had begun to meow constantly. I abused a hapless wrong number. After a while I called all her friends who told me not to worry and then called her parents, who I told not to worry. Knowing that they would and knowing I’d feel better if they were.

Minutes lapsed into hours. But no sign of Ruth. Nothing.

There had been no point getting in the car. I’d already concocted a false-truth that she must have gone with her colleagues from the Pitcher & Piano to some tacky club on Leicester Square. I reasoned that her mobile phone wouldn’t be working wherever they’d stumbled to. I’d assumed she’d call me when she got out, contrite and in tears. It would have been out of character but it was my best guess. She was going to call and explain that she’d got too drunk and had literally gone along with everyone else. I distinctly remember phoning my brother who came over immediately but not before I slated Anita, a woman she worked with that I’d always had down as a bad influence. It never occurred to me that she might not come home. Ever. She never called. She never explained.

And I’d really like to ask Ruth myself but it’s an impossibility. I have no opportunity. There’s a reason for this, the second significant detail of our separation. Namely, and this is pretty decisive, that I have no idea where she is. I have no way of contacting her, not even through a sympathetic third party; a him or her who has pragmatically kept both names active in an address book. This is not because her friends maliciously picked sides or moved away en masse. No. This is because no one – her friends, colleagues or relatives – has any idea where she is. My wife is missing. My Ruth is gone and I don’t understand anything any more. Everything has changed. I felt terrible that Saturday morning after the longest night of my life when normally immaculate, much-criticised by me, Anita turned up at 8am dressed in a tracksuit and looking like Billy Bremner circa 1972 – with a team of gung-ho volunteers ready to help. My torment consists of not knowing if my wife still breathes. And I’ve got to the stage where I feel I would actually welcome any indictment, however damning, however painful it would be to bear. I was a bastard, I was an embarrassment – anything. I cannot convey how much I need some basic information. In fact when it comes down to it, I no longer even need to understand my wife’s decision, but simply require some evidence of the decision itself. A blatant untruth would be fine. She’d feed me some absurd line and it would be enough. Something like “You never took out the rubbish” (I rarely missed a Wednesday night) or “You didn’t eat broccoli” (I love it).

I’m being serious. Even if she came back and cited my inability to perform, on that night before the day that she left. The Thursday night when neither of us had felt like intimacy and had slept isolated as a result, barely touching, only breathing, curled up in opposite sides of the duvet, tussling for supremacy. If she declared – “I was worried about your post-pub impotence, it’s the beginning of the end” – that too would now be enough. But any reason, like the phone call, like Ruth herself, like my fucking dick only 24 hours earlier, never came. And two whole years later, it still hasn’t.

Nothing makes sense. Nothing stands up.

Perpetual uncertainty. That’s what this is. We were in love, we were together – and now, well now we’re not. Not together anyway, I’m not sure whether the love part endures.

And so I pray that she did leave because of something terrible I’d done. I pray that it was my fault. That I was boring. That I was a bastard. That I had a limp, useless dick or fuck it, that I left the rubbish piled up. Anything.

And you have to understand that most of all, I pray that Ruth left because she wanted to. That she had a choice.

And now when I look at that university photo I no longer see any of my old friends – only her, staring off into the distance – in a different direction. Sometimes I see the hair first, sometimes the dress – but always Ruth. At least she’s always there. I lost the girl.

Two years of praying. Nothing makes sense. Only that she isn’t here. Nothing else adds up.
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