End Call

I wave at the faces on the screen.

‘Bye everyone,’ I say.

Four hands wave back. There are 10 of us on the call but Microsoft Teams only shows four faces at once.

I click the red square with the white icon of a phone. A menu appears and I select ‘End call’.

A pop-up wants to double check: ‘End call?’

Yes - ‘End.’

The faces all vanish.

And that’s it. That’s the end of my MA at Goldsmiths. No chats with my course mates as we walk down busy New Cross Road. No trip to Sainsbury’s to buy sandwiches to eat in the sunshine. No catching up that evening in the beer garden of The Fat Walrus, reflecting on the past seven months: what we’ve learned, how it’s affected our lives, how we feel about it coming to an end.

I would have hugged people - hard - goodbye. I might have been tearful. I would certainly have felt the ache of loss as I walked to New Cross station and began my long journey home: a train to London Bridge, one to Waterloo, then finally the train back to Putney. A walk up the hill to my flat in the Braemar block. Folding into my husband’s arms, perhaps telling him, with a shaking heart, ‘I feel so sad.’

It’s like grief is stuck in my body. I feel contracted. An old mechanism kicks in to protect me from a deep sadness in my belly - and I feel pissed off.

‘This is unfair!’ I think.

Though my heart knows that this is neither fair nor unfair. All this, just is.

In truth, this isn’t the end of my Creative and Life Writing MA – a course I had longed to do for 10 years until finally applying in January 2019, three months after my father died. There is another term of mostly independent study ahead. But if things were different, I would still be travelling to New Cross for meetings with my tutors, extra workshops, a panel discussion with agents. I would have written and read in the library and gone for lunch with my new friends. Instead, in these coming months it will be just me sitting on the sofa, body tensed at my computer, my husband working in the room next door.

I’m writing about my life: how my parents’ traumas affected how they treated me as a child. My mother’s death when I was 14. How I tried to cope by using alcohol and harmful relationships with men. It’s tough to write alone.

There are video calls, of course. But video calls are strange and draining things. We experience the uncanny when we see the faces of those we know on screen. They are slightly fuzzy and we can’t quite make out the nuances of facial expressions; the subtle movements of their body. We lean forward, we squint, trying to make sense of what we’re seeing. They are there but they are not there. They are them but they are not them.

I miss the physical presence of another person. The way the air moves when they lift their hand to brush a strand of hair behind their ear. How suddenly intimate it is for someone to turn to me and smile. The momentary stillness when I look into another person’s eyes and see them – truly see them.

I am, yes, still grateful for the video calls. They are a kind of bridge to other beings. Different from a phone call. Better than only surviving on letters sent in the post. I feel grateful for them, yes, and I also feel angry at them. I don’t want these pixelated faces: I want my friends and family back.

We can feel grateful and sad.

We can feel grateful and angry.

We can feel grateful and still feel a grief weigh us down heavier each day, because the longing, the longing, doesn’t go away.

*

After the workshop ends, after the ‘end call’, my phone vibrates. Miles calling. My eyes half- focus on the horse chesnut tree outside the window as I put the phone to my ear and say: ‘Hey.’

His voice reaches me from a village in Somerset, 140 miles away. He’s called, he says, because if things were normal we would be talking together and walking down New Cross Road. He would be lighting a cigarette, I would be remarking on what a beautiful day it was, and the cars would be rumbling past.

So we talk - he in his parent’s house among fields, me in my first floor flat. I feel the air that blows in through the window. I listen, with one ear to the glass screen of my phone.

After we say goodbye, I rest the phone down on the arm of the sofa. My body feels a little lighter. Outside, the sky is bright blue. They say it really is bluer – the haze of pollution has cleared so we can see the sky more clearly.

And I think, “Yes, I will see you all again.”