Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

She came in through the bathroom window. No, she didn’t but she might as well have. I do remember that song was playing in the background when she knocked on the door.
Six months since I’d last seen her. Why now, tonight of all nights?
My dinner guests had arrived and were merry meeting and Blessed Being to their heart’s content in the dining room with its glorious floor to ceiling bay windows overlooking the river. It was a balmy August evening, close to dusk, suffused with that lazy, golden light that makes you smile and smug.
Except smug was the last thing I was feeling and smiling was already hurting. They were here to vet me, size me up, to see if I was a suitable candidate to carry the coveted mantle.
Two bottles of Prosecco were open and for those who didn’t drank beer or herbal tea, I made sure there was plenty for all and all tastes were catered. Madam would want coffee. There was only instant. Fuck it.
The knocking was insistent and the heavy brass knocker resonated in the building’s marble floored hallway. My neighbour was opening his door as I emerged, his look of irritation spoke a million words, none of them happy.
“It’s for me, Jerry,” I said. His name was Jerry and I think I added to his irritation by stating the obvious. He’d already asked me to turn the music down, which was unlike him. I suspected part of his irritation was fuelled by his exclusion from the party.
We were friends and neighbours and Jerry attended my parties as much as I attended his but occasionally there are parties for particular people. This was one of them.
I smiled at Jerry even though I didn’t feel like smiling. I was annoyed. Annoyed at the person banging the door knocker as each apartment had its own doorbell. I knew it was her. I caught a flashing glimpse of her climbing the steps of the redbrick Georgian townhouse where I lived. Then the knocking.
Alright already, I was thinking as I unlatched the heavy door.
“Hey,” I said, smiling, my greeting, I hoped, conveying the correct balance of surprise and confusion with a soupçon of what-the-fuck?
We were apart almost six months, the split sprawling over two months of vicious confrontations, accusations and reprisal raids, the latter involving her gaining access to my apartment and emptying the room of books, paintings and assorted belongings via the window overlooking the river below until she was stopped and ejected by my flatmate, who’d made the mistake of letting her in in the first place.
Things did settle down then, helped by my absence on a foreign assignment and her meeting a former colleague of mine and getting engaged. Good luck to him, I thought, when someone told me. He’ll need it. And I checked myself for thinking, there but for the grace of something went I, because something lingered and rankled.
Now here she was, not exactly mob handed but with two children in tow: one, a thumb-sucking three-year-old with attitude, the other, a recalcitrant and resentful-by-choice teenager with baggy jeans and an oversized NBA sweatshirt, headphones, iPhone, all things that put him anywhere else but in the moment, the whole nine yards.
Relationships never end, do they? There’s no neat cut off point.
We had conversations since, by telephone. They went well, totally lacking in rancour, in as much as I could gather. I wished her well. She told me she was happy.
“Hey,” she said, “great to see you. Are we too late for the ceremony?”
“What?” I said. It wasn’t really a question but it sounded like one. It was just a word I used to pull together the jumble of confused thoughts firing around in my head like bullets ricocheting in a steel drum. I caught one of them, it could’ve been between my teeth.
The ceremony. Lights clicked and clacked in my head, synapses snapped and an image materialised of one of those phone calls when I’d told her I would be ‘ordained’ soon, a High Priest in an obscure branch of Wiccan, our own Order of Knowledge, a collection of artists and academics who wanted to further our collective knowledge to make the world a better place. It required a person of character, decisive and assured.
The irony of it all was almost overwhelming. I was spellbound, enthralled. Panic gripped me.
“I told you I’d always wanted to be there,” she said, in the common hall by now, having pushed by me with her kids, the three-year-old resting sulkily on her hip. The teenager smouldered in a shadow that was bigger than him.
“Sure,” I said, gathering my thoughts to attempt a sentence more meaningful than the mono-syllabic grunts I’d managed so far. “You’ve surprised me,” I blurted, master of stating the glaringly obvious as I was.
“Are we going to stand in the hall?” she asked, waving a hand in front of my face, a dead giveaway I was in a waking coma.
“What? Oh yes…no, I mean,” I stopped, thinking where’s my brain? snap out of it, clown, “No, the ceremony hasn’t happened yet and yes, please,” I gestured with my outstretched hand to my apartment hall door which was open. Jerry, I noticed, still lingered in his doorway.
His face registered surprise and alarm, simultaneously and, as he retreated, the kind of sly, pitying look that told me there was trouble ahead and he’d love to be there just to witness it.
He knew I’d let her in, just as I’d let her in every time before. There was a coven of witches and warlocks in my dining room and I couldn’t make a decision.
I shuffled ahead, redirecting the party to the kitchen where I’d been busy assembling the makings of canapes, salads and other savoury delights for my gathering of ten guests. I’d already extended the dining room table and borrowed four chairs from Jerry. Now I was thinking where was I going to fit my new arrivals or, at a stretch, how I might get rid of them.
“ Oh, you have guests,” she said.
Duh, of course I have guests, I thought, what are you up to?
I knew what she was up to and she knew I wouldn’t and couldn’t stop her.
“Are we in the way?, she asked in that infuriatingly simultaneous fashion of disingenuity and coquettish vamp. Bored teenager found a spicy chicken wing.
The kitchen door burst open.
“Darling, you’re neglecting your guests. Who was at the door?”
Everything froze. I certainly did. Looks flew about the room like daggers in a Yakuza street brawl. Melanie, my latest love interest, could kill with a look at ten paces. The teenager belched. The three-year-old demanded a drink.
I dropped a glass I didn’t know I was holding until it smashed on the ceramic tile floor, a convenient shard of crystal embedding itself in the big toe of my left foot.
“Christ,” I yelled, ostensibly from shock and pain but in truth, from frustration at the hellish bind in which I found myself.
Melanie put her own cut-glass flute of Prosecco down and, grabbing a clean dishcloth from a cupboard with the casual familiarity I admired in her, strangely until now, was on her knees, cradling my foot and staunching the blood.
“What is SHE doing here?” she hissed while deftly extracted a jagged strip from the toe with the pulsing blood stream. She squeezed the toe while I tried to answer. I said something like, “eeeyowaaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhh,” then “sweet fuck” and “motherofjesus.” Angry teenager became engaged enough to take off his headphones and put down a drumstick, a chicken drumstick. The three-year-old started wailing.
“Who the fuck are you, ye cheap tart?” the ex asked in very challenging and contentious terms.
The commotion, by now — the screams, smashing glass, angry voices — had begun to arouse the interest and alarm of my guests, while the sight of a terrified and terrifying three-year-old and scowling teenager, hands full of chicken wings spilling and staining the living room, painted it’s own confusing picture.
Then I emerged, hopping, brandishing bandaged bloody toe and followed by my uninvited guest and Melanie, the pair of them locked in a death grip, hair dishevelled, outfits askew.
I’ve always wanted to be the recipient of an audible gasp, a hushed awe or even a collective groan, not this one. It was an unedifying sight, I was sure and my experience of it was of the out of body kind induced by mortification or a level of embarrassment akin to social death.
Several of them recognised the Ex, an habitue of juicy tabloid stories, the kind they pretended to never read. Melanie, ordinarily a stalwart of social decorum, made a vain attempt to pull herself together. To no avail, the Ex brought her down as they became a whirling blur of spit, teeth and hair and a hysterical three-year-old.
I pulled them apart, blood oozing from my hastily bandaged toe as the guests gathered coats, wands and well wishes and scurried out the door. “I suppose my ordination is out of the question,” I called to their retreating figures, “we could reschedule?”
One, the evening’s M.C. and the person who’d chosen me for this role, stopped and turned by the door in the hallway. He looked at me, a sorry figure with a bloody toe, from the gloom of the corridor and shaking his head, said, “I don’t think you’re ready yet.” Then he turned and left.
But by now I was laughing that kind of rueful chuckle so common when someone reverses over the family cat at a wake. The Ex took her children and Melanie sat and tended to my toe while we polished off the last of the Prosecco. I knew I’d never see her again, either. My reputation as a rogue would be enhanced but people, like Melanie and the learned gathering, would keep their distance.
Roguery and bad omens don’t mix, blessed be.

