I am certain now, she would have murdered me. Several tankers of oil in a car park, full. Oil is like stale milk. Sterile baby shampoo – something she mentioned once. She had locked herself in one of those ‘Wicked’ camper vans near Toronto, but slid out. Her hair was briny hair that day. This was a whistle stop tour of the Canadian border. The parking lot was full of tankers. A granddad sky; lively grey hair on his head telling stories. The air filled with water, the tankers drove out, we sat in and out of a coffee cup and her van and mine too. Her man had left her, but he had pre-paid the van and forked out more for his motel fees, or fly home, after his decision. She scooped ice cream into her mouth, tasted it with her tongue and swallowed when it had melted sufficiently. She took a camera and clicked a photo of me waiting outside facing the other way; I was counting oil droplets on the ground. She pushed her meal down her throat and sucked her spoon clean. She counted the coins in her purse. She breathed out. I was hurt because she said I was stupid about my career if I wanted to be rich I was doing the wrong things all in a row. Journalists are not writers. She had a hat and it was blue. Her proud dress hung in the curtained window, wet with condensation, but it was summer. It was flowers and white, with a strap that was part of it so she didn’t have to spend time accessorising. She watched porn. She was crazy telling me within three hours waiting for the mechanic, but I like brunettes and you get an inkling when they say they watch porn. Coffee and skin and sky were monochrome and old style; her photos would not need post processing. She hated the boring stuff, she said. She also hated men. She preferred short clips. She had had troubles in her life, and now under the ancient corner closed hotdog awning she told me I was a mother fucker. She wasn’t being funny, nor was she being accurate. She was pushing at me. She sometimes is like that. I took it in as if she were serious and felt bad because she meant a lot to me immediately.

For a little over a year I felt I had not learned enough about her. She was rarely honest. She was not vulnerable. She wore clothes that made her beautiful, but she could not put an introspective sentence together. She felt evil, she told me. She felt like hitting out, and drunk she starts fights pushing me around in bars and clubs. Topless once, she wanted me jealous of men looking into her bra and when I was placid pushed me over a chair into men taller than me. They were average guys; they didn’t want a fight. She busted a toe on a step, blinked and sweated. From the greasy floor stale beer dissolved into tonight’s beer and soaked that top. With it she moved quickly between all the people that danced and talked. Some had seen her and watched her go, smiling or concerned or flicking between her and me; what I could have done to cause this scene. The bouncer arrived too late. He threw me out because he recognised me because it was her weekly. I couldn’t get into her flat. I knew she would be around, spraying fuckers on the bedroom walls with not enough self-loathing. She was embarrassed now she knew that despite her craziness she was intelligent and sane. I was scared for her. Nothing had happened and it changed her. There was no injury or failure or loss, but she was hurt by her actions. Her style of living made everyone submissive or risen above and in her tenacity were clean and witty ideas, conversations, potential. I had a CV with retail and a paper, and who are my friends? I wear the trousers, I said, but she hated trousers and tried to wear them too.

We talked only once about children. She told me ‘You have a choice between living a fun life and being trapped by baby shampoo’. She wrapped me up in clean tufty fantasies where the little cars with wheels get lost under the sofa and are found there three years later when you’re moving out and 5-year-old Jeremy doesn’t give a shit about cars any more unless they have dinosaur parts, while she started chain smoking in the bathroom during her second pregnancy and it was a stillbirth in the end. She had never wanted children, never played with doll houses.

There was a Wednesday post-cinema when she wanted to kill her mother and see her father raped by convicts in a Hell’s Angels bar because of what he did once when she was seventeen and suddenly attractive. She wanted to work and make money and get the important position. ‘Hold on’, I said, and ‘explain yourself’. I never asked her again. After her violence I always wanted to fuck her and write a poem about it. She was right, I am stupid – a mother fucker. I threw her diary away. I poured ink over her bedside table where she keeps her letters to former lovers. Who owns pots of ink now? I was angry because she had deleted all of my music. She filled the house with gas. She told me she was a witch. She sang melancholy.

I never learned what her father did exactly, because she was talking in a way that explained everything without specifics and I had to nod along. I don’t think she was raped or that there was incest. She may have been seen naked or been asked a question like ‘Hi darling, oh sorry.’ She was getting changed and was at the strange stage where she was completely naked ‘Er. Wow, haven’t you grown up? You’re looking great.’ She stands without shame as her father enters the room with two feet and looks. As his creation she is his property and it is rationally acceptable to examine the creation and ensure the quality of the product and the marks of his genetics in the opposite sex. He admires his production of seventeen years. ‘Gosh, I wish your mother looked that good.’ Then he saw himself from far away, as through a big telescope, just discernable as human, and he said ‘I’m sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry.’ And he left the room. They both felt strange and were bored and perhaps their brain chemistry was at an imbalance. She put her hands on her breasts when he was gone, and turned away from the closed door so he would not see her naked inappropriately. It was a little late for that. She shyly bowed her head and frowned and pushed her eyebrows together. She dressed, trying not to remember immediately or think over what had occurred. She cried about it. He sat downstairs and read words in sequence while thinking about the strange detachment he experienced from sex and fatherhood. That is what I think happened. She never told me what happened. It made some impression on her, but not too much. There must have been a much greater sequence of events and pains from childhood and biology in her life, but all I had to go on was imagination, swearing and her crude doodle style. She never cried with me. It is astonishing now, to realise this. She got angry and hit me instead. There must have been one more of those brain imbalances. She self harmed frequently. I said ‘it’s kinda sexy’, but I was lying. I did not want to hurt her feelings.

Last night I mentioned philosophy. Being a journalist that wants to be a writer I had an opinion. She listened to me for an hour, and said ‘Could the universe be infinitely old?’ because she had not been listening but thinking her own path through the mood of contemplation raised for an insomniac evening wired in her mind on the pillow with conflicting drugs, and I said ‘Probably yes, it could’. Today she took the keys and left. The oven pumped gas out. It is the day of a partial eclipse.

Today she came back an hour later, old mascara trains. She came into the room and looked at me there. I had just woken up fully clothed. She let me wake and realise that I was tied. She sat calmly on the edge of the bed. I didn’t know why. She said “You would have died if I hadn’t come back. I left the gas on and I’ve got a lighter to make it blow up.”
“What?”
“I was out, deciding to do it.”
“What?”
“You about made it,” she said sweetly, “I was going to blow you up like an accident, but I won’t now.”
“How come?”
“I got like all ...” and then she stopped before her voice cracked and she sniffed.
I waited.
She started to cry. She wanted to tell me what she had decided and for some reason that was emotional. That is unique. Then she stopped her line and changed to where she could find a stable lack of emotion. Usually that line is anger, but now she had something else.
“I thought I hated you, and I thought about not living with you any more in my life, and getting rid of you. You don’t understand me, and I know I don’t help you, but I needed to do something ridiculous otherwise you would have just gone away with some stupid girlfriend. I got sad when I was thinking about pulling on the flint, so I went out and came back and turned the oven off.”
“Thanks.” The sleep in my eye was itching, but I couldn’t get my hand to my face to scratch it.
“I love you.”
“I” I was a little struck by her saying she loved me. It was a couple of seconds without either of us in the room. There were no tears. There were facts that had to be considered and passed.
“I fucking love you. I fucking – god dammit.”
“I love you too.” I said. I don’t think she had said ‘love’ to anyone. We had talked about it. She knew it was ridiculous.
“It’s easy for you.”
“You were going to kill me?”
“Yeah. Fuck you. Obviously.” And we did then.
“What changed your mind?”
“You told me that the universe was infinitely old and I thought that was horrible. And you said my dad was a bad guy in a movie. And you said you kinda liked the idea of children. All that stuff you said. I just didn’t like you anymore. But you look good asleep, which reminded me what you said Camus said: it’s impossible to morally kill someone. I figured you were right.”
“Kinda, he kinda said that.”
“I’m sorry” she looked at me when she said that. “I’m going out for breakfast. Do you want to come?”
She would have killed me. She needs help from a professional psychiatrist. She stopped going years ago. She should go every damn week and explain how fucking crazy she is. I am going to dump her. But if I do that now, after she said ‘I love you’ she’ll go batshit and strangle me for six minutes and steal my mother’s cat and cut off its head with a bone saw.