Chasing Tigers

1

I noticed his head first, then his eyes, then his body.

I was rushing to my office at the start of the September teaching semester. A messy mass of students were crowding the corridor trying to find their classes, and I was avoiding eye contact. Metres from my room, I glanced up and saw a face I recognised walking toward me. The person belonging to it looked at me and we shared a moment of recognition, blue eyes to blue eyes. He seemed so familiar. I turned my head and glimpsed a slim body in jeans and a blazer as he rushed past. No, I thought, I definitely don’t know this man.

Holding my plastic staff ID card up to the scanner, the small light went green, and I pushed open the door to my shared office. I sat at my desk waiting for the computer to load, stunned. Workmates started filling the room around me, empty beige cubicles transforming into dynamic, alive spaces, but I was remarkably still. He was lingering in my awareness as if he’d entered my cells, changing the subtle imprint of my DNA. Someone switched on the fluorescent strip lighting above me and an unwelcome thought landed in my brain. Those eyes. They can’t be good for my marriage.

*

In the days that followed, I started seeing the familiar guy everywhere. During the day I would spot him in the corridor and one afternoon he appeared at the campus bus stop, recognisable despite the hefty bulk of students waiting for the red buses heading into town.

The U5 bus was forty minutes late and when it arrived, everyone standing by was irritable. Students were using their bodies to push on board, desperate to get on before the driver announced it was full. A brown leather satchel pressed to his side, the familiar guy was holding his ground, unwilling to be shoved to the back. I subtly pushed my way in behind him, feeling justified because I was a member of staff and–at thirty–older than most of the people waiting. He found a seat near the front, but I kept moving to my preferred spot, where the seats rose over the engine and offered a good view out the window.

When we took off, I watched the back of the guy’s head–his hair light brown and short, neater than I liked in men. It rocked in tune with the stop-start motion of the bus as we sneaked through peak hour traffic, and I couldn’t understand why he seemed so familiar. I’d felt this once before, also from a man with blue eyes. Although nothing had happened with that guy, the feeling had stayed with me as if it were a song playing on repeat in my mind, wanting to be sung out loud.

Inching our way forward through the other vehicles headed home, we eventually reached Clifton, where the city began sloping down to the harbour. As the grand Georgian buildings of the BBC with their pillars of golden stone came into sight, I stood up and stretched my arm over so I could press the big red button. Before I did, the familiar guy pushed the one close to him.

As the bell rang, I stayed standing. When the driver hit the brakes hard, I stumbled, nearly tripping on student backpacks left in the aisle. He got off before me and ran across the street, boldly darting between cars. I held back and waited.

The bus pulled away, and I watched in utter amazement as he turned off at St Paul’s Road, heading the same way I walk. When there was a break in the traffic, I crossed the road, trying to make sense of it. No one I knew from work caught the same bus as me, and hardly anyone–students included–used this stop. And now he was walking home on my exact route.

Ahead of me, only a few minutes from the rental where my husband Jeremy and I lived, he left the footpath and walked through a waist-high black wrought-iron fence toward a townhouse with a matching black door.

I didn’t believe in coincidences. Everything that happened had a meaning. I just needed to figure out what this one meant.

*

Several months later, my interactions with the familiar guy had not progressed. I resigned myself to the idea that I would perhaps never speak to him or find out his identity. It was probably for the best. I was happily married, wasn’t I? Even though I’d been seeing the signs of it disintegrating, I couldn’t yet admit that my relationship was stretching slowly out of shape like an over-worn t-shirt. Eleven years together. It was all I knew.

But one morning in December, just when I imagined my life would stay the same, something changed.

I was getting ready for work when an unusual voice spoke directly into my brain.

Leave now.

I set the hair straightener down on the edge of the bathroom sink, wondering whether it was a thought or my intuition or something else entirely.

Leave now. The voice was more insistent.

I checked the time on my phone, but it made little sense. Even if I rushed and left immediately, I’d be between buses and would have to wait for the eight o’clock bus I took every morning.

Leave now. Now it sounded like a command.

I yelled a quick goodbye to Jeremy, grabbed my bag, and stepped into the frigid air. The sky was still dark, streetlights shining on the wet pavement.

When I turned the corner onto Whiteladies Road, the familiar guy was sitting underneath the bus shelter, earphones in and a book open on his lap. He looked up briefly when I reached him–just long enough to make me dizzy and discombobulated–and then returned to his reading.

I tried to hide my shock by checking the electronic timetable which hung from the roof. How strange, I thought. I hadn’t missed the seven-thirty bus because it was running fifteen minutes late and was due in one minute.

It was as if the voice had known.

***

2

One Saturday afternoon in March three months later, Jeremy hovered at the doorway of our living room, poised close to the front door in case he needed to run.

“Can we talk for a minute?” he asked. His eyes underneath his glasses were shiny with hidden emotion, the subtle clue of bad news only a partner would recognise.

I closed my laptop and set it down next to me, resting my hands on my jeans.

Jeremy perched on the armrest of the other couch; his torso crumpled into an apology before the verdict even came. My body knew what was coming, but my brain wasn’t ready for it. He was about to say something that would change the trajectory of both our lives.

“I think we need to break up,” he whispered, staring off to one side, unable to look me in the eye.

The words flowed into the void between us, not knowing where to land. They hovered, confused, in the middle of the room until they located their rightful owner and settled with a sharp pinch in my gut.

He said nothing more, but his body relaxed, as if holding onto those words had hurt. I could feel my heart racing. From the gut-punch of that one sentence, but also because I’d been unhappy too, constrained as I watched myself shrink into the version he wanted me to be.

I heard myself mumble two small words. “I know.”

Somehow I had known this was going to happen, known we both needed it to. But I’d hidden from that truth, seeking in refuge in the idea that he wouldn’t be brave enough to do it.

Taking my response as permission to go on, the one thing he’d promised never to say leapt from his mouth, loud and certain.

“I don’t love you anymore.” Then he spoke quieter. “Not in the way I should.”

He doesn’t love me. The words spiralled deeper, jabbing at my insides. A thousand questions rose inside of me, but my body didn’t want to find out why, when, how. It had surpassed my mind’s need for answers and was already going into shock.

Jeremy’s lips parted again, delivering their final blow. “I still care about you.”

The small room where we’d made a life together grew larger, the inexpensive build-yourself furniture expanding out of my reach. Cushions. Couches. Coffee tables. Now they floated between us–no one to belong to.

After a few minutes of silence, Jeremy’s voice turned apologetic, looking for me to release him. “Diane, can you say something, please?”

But I wasn’t there anymore. I was drifting above my body, witnessing this from a safer place. Jeremy kept talking, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. ‘I don’t love you’ was still circling inside me; a poison I couldn’t stop drinking. I felt myself falling over a dark edge, my self-esteem lying in small pieces between our DIY couches.

I ran to the bedroom, collapsed on the floor, and sunk my face against the mattress. Jeremy followed, watching over me like a protective parent.

“Leave me alone,” I said. My voice echoed in my head, tinny and distant.

But I couldn’t hate him like this. Not when he felt so bad.

He reached an arm over to comfort me, but I refused him, shaking it off.

“I just want to be alone. Please leave me alone.”

My ears whooshed as if a storm was brewing inside my brain, and then the room ran away from me, the ceiling disappearing into the distance. Carpet swirled underneath my fingernails. I couldn’t find a breath.

Jeremy left, and a minute later he was back, thrusting a paper bag into my hands. “Here, take this.”

I placed it over my mouth and sucked inward. The bag caved and then popped as I pushed more air into it. By the time my breathing slowed, he was gone, our self-closing front door clicking behind him.

A few hours after, he returned and blew up the inflatable mattress we only used when visitors stayed over, moving the coffee table to set it up in the gap between the couches.

“I’m going to sleep out here,” he said.

“You don’t have to.” I was back in my body and could see things more clearly. Yeah, we needed to break up, but we didn’t have to do it like this, separately, with so much space between us.

He pulled a blanket off of the couch, spreading it over the mattress, not looking at me. “I have to.”

Alone in our bedroom, I wasn’t sure how to go to sleep without him. Our bed was a king, bought only to fill up space in what had been the original living room of a grand house before they split it into flats. Sleeping in it by myself, it felt too big, my body too small, too child-like.

I tried to think about what breaking up meant. In the past months, I’d entertained thoughts of doing it, briefly fantasising about a new life, but not wanting to pull the trigger for fear of how it would hurt him. Now it was happening and out of my control, the other reason I hadn’t loomed large over me. Would I cope without him?

When Jeremy turned the lights out, I crept back into the living room.

“Can we cuddle?” I asked. It was a strange request. Never a fan of cuddling, I always preferring my space in bed, and he knew it.

“We shouldn’t. We just agreed…”

“Just for tonight.” He wanted to cut the cord quickly, but I needed to slow it down.

“Okay.”

I walked over and wriggled in, but his arm was limp. It had no life force, as if I were hugging a toy and not the man who loved me for the past decade. We stayed like that for a few minutes, both pretending we were okay.

“I’m sorry. I can’t,” he whispered and rolled away.

Without a word, I left him alone and returned to our empty bed, staring at the rose cornice on the ceiling, hundreds of years old.

***

3

Over the next week, the shock of the breakup receded and settled into a simple story, leaning heavily on my belief that everything happened for a reason.

“Our relationship was what we both needed back then,” I told Jeremy when we met, proud of myself for being so mature, so positive. “And now it’s time to go our separate ways.” I used my arms to show us moving in different directions.

He recoiled as if I’d stung him. “Don’t say that,” he said, eyes looking wounded. “You never know. We might get back together in a few years.”

That’s a weird thing to say, I thought, given he’d been the one to initiate this.

“Well, theoretically yes, I guess you never know,” I said, shrugging, although I was certain that now we’d done the hard part there would be no going back.

*

The familiar guy who lived minutes away at the shiny black door was walking ahead of me. His timing was remarkably predictable. Not only did he catch the seven-thirty bus every morning, he left his house at exactly the same time each day. It was easy to coordinate it so I would see him leave his gate in front of me and I could follow without it looking weird.

But today he was a touch late, and I was having to walk slower than usual to keep my distance. By now, I had convinced myself he wasn’t an undergrad. He was too punctual and dressed too smartly. But I hadn’t figured out if he worked at the university or was a Master’s student. I’d scrolled through the staff directory of my department, clicking on unfamiliar male names, waiting for his picture to pop up, to no success. He was still a mystery to me.

When he came to a sudden stop on the pavement, veering off toward the curb and peering into a car parked on the street, I didn’t know what to do. I slowed to a student’s pace, shuffling my feet forward. I couldn’t pass and risk him seeing me. For now, I wanted to remain invisible.

At first, I figured the car must be his, and that he was searching for something he’d left in the passenger seat. But then I realised what he was actually doing and chuckled to myself. How vain! I thought.

His hands slid up without the slightest trace of self-consciousness and fiddled with his hair. If I kept walking, even this slowly, I’d be right on top of him.

In the middle of the footpath, I stopped and squatted, pretending to look for something in my bag. My hands shifted the contents around. I crinkled my forehead in concentration, just in case someone was watching, as if I were furious I couldn’t find the invisible item.

While I was doing my performance, out of the corner of my vision, I watched him. Still staring into the car window, he’d moved on from his hair to his outfit, now adjusting the shoulders of his blazer. Then, finally, he continued walking.

With an exaggerated expression of relief etched on my face, even though I had no audience, I acted as if I’d found the item I was hunting for. I stood up and kept following safely behind him as if nothing had happened.

I noticed his spine was extremely upright, unlike mine, which rounded forward at the shoulders. His posture fascinated me, and I was enthralled by the way he walked like his head was a top hat.

Whiteladies Road was just ahead of us when a large flash of red whipped past. As hardly anyone caught the seven-thirty U5 from this stop, if we weren’t there to hail it, the bus would keep going.

His hand pinning his brown leather satchel to his side, he took off in a sprint, attempting to chase it down. What else could I do? I secured my bag and started running after him.

As I rounded the corner, he had already stopped the bus and was talking to the driver. He glanced down the road at me. I ran faster, my breath choppy as he stood on the front platform, watching me approach. When I was only a few metres away, breathless and frazzled, he disappeared inside.

A scary thought struck. This whole time, he knew I was following him.

*