All The Days Of My Life

I saw her as I was standing at the luggage carousel, waiting for my bag. She was at the next conveyor belt, just picking up a small suitcase. In a moment she would be gone.

I walked over and touched her arm. “Hi,” I said.

“Oh. Hello.” She lowered her sunglasses enough to be able to peer over the top of them. “You’re surprised to see me here.”

“Well,” I said, “it is a bit out of your usual haunts. I thought your work kept you busy all the time these days.”

“I decided I needed a break,” she said, swinging her suitcase in one hand. Just then, from the corner of my eye, I saw my bag passing on the other conveyor. I turned back to grab at it.

When I turned round, she was gone.


That evening I was walking around the old places when I saw her again. She was standing at the railings at the foot of the building where she used to work once, before she found fame and fortune. She was looking up at it. From where I was, her face looked as though it had two black holes where her eyes should have been; she was still wearing sunglasses. I was about to cross the street to get to her but was cut off by a stream of traffic. When I finally managed to cross, she had vanished.

“You’re still carrying a torch for her?” asked my brother, that night. We were sitting over a beer and I’d just told him what had happened. “It’s been a long time. I’m surprised she remembered you at all.”

“I’m not,” I replied. “It’s just that it’s been so many years since I saw her last, and the way it ended – there are questions.”

“She’s famous now,” said my brother, yawning. “Supermodel, actress, brand ambassador for just about everything under the sun. Why should she even bother to answer your questions?”

I did not know. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’m hoping that she still has a tiny bit of feeling for me, inside somewhere. I mean,” I continued, “it’s not as though I love her anymore or anything like that, but the past never really goes away, does it?”

“That sort never does have any feeling, brother mine. What makes you think she even remembers you?”

“She said hello at the airport.” It sounded stupid and childish to me. “Maybe I’m reading too much into it.”

“Maybe you are. Let’s go to bed now, shall we?”


The next day I saw her again. This time I was certain she was avoiding me. I saw her sitting outside an open-air restaurant. She saw me at the same time. She looked gorgeous – almost as good as she looked on her ads, but there she was made up by professionals, of course – but still had her sunglasses on. Those sunglasses had begun to bother me seriously.

I began to work my way between the tables to get to her. It was tourist season and the place was full of chattering people of all shapes and sizes. She watched me come, expressionlessly, and then , while I was still only half-way to her, she calmly stood up and walked away.

By now I was becoming seriously puzzled by her. What was she doing here? Obviously she wasn’t in hiding or anything; she was walking around for all to see. Yet she was avoiding me; not anyone, me specifically. It was as though I knew something about her that would make it impossible for her to hide some terrible secret.

Yet I had not met her for a long time; it had been five years since we’d last met, and two or three more, at least, since we’d last been, as the saying goes, “intimate”. We’d broken up long before she had become a face known throughout the country; it used to be said that it was only a matter of time before she became known throughout the world.

Yet here she was, back in our old hometown, avoiding me.

I wondered where she might be staying. Her family had long since sold and moved. Maybe she was at one of the hotels, but in the middle of tourist season, it wouldn’t be that easy for her – even her – to get a room. It was interesting to say the least – but so also was the fact that she hadn’t collected a crowd of autograph-hunters and fans. I was aware that her career hadn’t got where the media had predicted it would go, but all the same, she was hardly a has-been.

I had a week’s holiday to go, so from the next day I began actively looking for her. It wasn’t that easy, because for some reason I couldn’t really explain I didn’t want to ask around. I had a strong feeling I wouldn’t get anywhere that way anyway.

Oh, I saw her a few times. It was always from a distance, just fleeting glimpses, and once or twice I wasn’t even so sure it was she. Each time she was gone before I got to her. It was disheartening.

“Why are you even bothering?” my brother asked. “I mean, it’s not as if she’s going to let you sleep with her again or anything like that, right? She’s right out of your league now. So, exactly, why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” I told him again. And I didn’t. It had become something beyond reasoning for me. I just had to know what she was doing back here. “It’s just...interesting’s the word, I suppose.”


It finally happened two days before I would have to leave. I was by then more or less going through the motions, both of a vacation and of looking for her, because the time was so short. I had convinced myself that I wouldn’t find her this time, and I was planning to try and find out through mutual acquaintances what was going on in her life. So – just for a change – I decided to go for a walk up the old hiking trail through the woods behind the golf course.

The day was a raw one, very cold for this season, and the top of the hill behind the course was shrouded in light grey mist. But over the city and the golf course the skies were only lightly overcast. There was a brisk breeze, and most of the tourists seemed to have decided to remain indoors.

Halfway up the slope of the hill behind the course, there used to be a huge rock, like a shelf, on which one could sit and admire the view. I’d heard that the rock had broken free of the hill some time ago, and decided that I’d go up to where it used to be and then come back down again. But when I got up to it, the rock was still there. I looked at it, just as it always had been. Then I climbed up to the top of it.

She was there.

She sat on top of the rock, in a light jacket, slacks and sneakers, the sunglasses still over her eyes. She was looking out over the trees, and beyond them, the city, but at the sound of my climbing onto the rock, she turned.

“Hi,” I said.

I looked at her, and she looked back at me. Then she got to her feet.

“Don’t run away now,” I told her. “We need to talk.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she sat down again. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Nothing much,” I said. “Just to talk, that’s all.”

“To talk? What about?” She turned away and looked back over the city. I wanted to touch her, and reached out my hand, but she had already tensed her shoulder all ready to shake my hand off, so i didn’t.

“A lot of things,” I said. “But, basically, why you’re back here and why you’re avoiding me.”

“What makes you think I’m avoiding you?”

“It’s obvious,” I said. “You run away whenever I show up. Of course you’re avoiding me.”

“Believe it or not,” she said, “it’s not you really. I was trying to avoid a lot of things. I suppose I made you a symbol of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know,” she said, waving her hand at the town below us, “from here I can just about see every place that meant anything to me, when I used to live out here. There – I used to live over that side. That’s where I grew up, and you know, yesterday I went along there and the house has gone. There’s only a stationary shop there and I went in and bought a packet of envelopes. I needed a packet of envelopes.”

“What has this got to do with what I asked?”

“Please,” she said, still not looking at me, “since you want to know, let me tell this my own way. I grew up in this town, as you did, and we went to school here and we found our first jobs here, and so on. I suppose we might have spent the whole of our lives here, if things had been different. Your brother’s still here, isn’t he?

“Do you remember how we used to come up here? We never had any money, so we’d make the best of a bad job and go for walks and climb hills instead of heading off to the movies and restaurants, and we’d talk about how we were living healthy lifestyles. If we’d only known...” She laughed shortly, and it didn’t sound like a laugh.

“You know, I can say in a way that from here I can see all the days of my life. I can see where I used to live, where I used to go to school, where I worked. I can even see that exact spot where I lost my virginity. I can see the bus station from where I left, the first time, and thought I’d never be coming back. Yes, because I wouldn’t have had what came after if I hadn’t left then – I suppose the afterwards counts as well.

“Looking back, I can say that those were the happiest days of my life. From where I’m now standing, at least I haven’t had anything better. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; I’ve had money, as much as I could spend, and fame, as much as I’d ever wanted, and lovers, as many as I could sleep with. You thought all that when you thought of me, didn’t you? She’s got all she could ever want?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I did.”

“And all that’s true for all that. I won’t pretend that what I got afterwards wasn’t worth it, or that it was hollow, or any of that garbage. I worked hard, very hard. You can’t imagine how hard. And i enjoyed the attention and the money and the lovers, while I had them. It was great. And because I’d left town specifically to get them...do you remember what I told you when we parted?”

I swallowed. The memory still rankled. “You said that I couldn’t give you any more. You said this town couldn’t give you anything more. You said you needed a fresh beginning and you’d stop at nothing short of what you knew you deserved.”

“I see you remember every word,” she said without irony. “Anyway, since I was looking for all that and I got it, it was all the sweeter for me. Success by my own hard work. But it’s the kind of success where you have to keep succeeding.”

“I used to see your face everywhere,” I said. “Magazine ads, TV ads, billboards, everywhere, even without the films. The films were never really very good, were they?”

“No, they weren’t, and I never got to be a catwalk model, which is what I wanted. But that doesn’t matter, really. It’s all in the past. It would’ve been in the past even if I’d got an Oscar and a Victoria’s Secret contract for the spring lingerie collection.

“I started noticing the change about a year ago. Somehow things didn’t seem the same anymore. I began getting anxious at odd times. Suddenly my heart would be racing and I’d start sweating with fear. I began to wonder if someone was out to get me.

“At first I put it down to drinks and cigarettes. I was smoking like a chimney in those days; everyone does, to kill appetite and stay thin. But it didn’t work, even though I managed to catch hold of the tobacco habit, stamp on it, kill it, and bury it. Can you even begin to imagine how much willpower that took? Of course you can’t.

“It didn’t work. I began to forget things. Little things, and it was always in my short-term memory. I’d come into a room and forget what I was coming in there to do. I began to write little notes to myself, saying I’d do this next, that I’d have to do that afterwards, because if I didn’t I’d forget. I’m still doing it.

“Then I visited a psychiatrist. It was all very discreet. He thought I was tense and gave me a course of medication. It didn’t help at all.

“Next, my eyesight began to act strange. I couldn’t bear bright lights. The lights photographers use, the studio floodlights, all of them grew unbearably bright to me, and painful. That’s why I’m wearing these sunglasses, incidentally, if you want to know. It’s the only way I can bear the daylight. My eyes are getting worse all the time.

“All this time my original problem was getting worse. I began to think everyone was trying to get at me. I’d quite literally check under the bed and inside the cupboards before sleeping. I’d only touch food when I had made it myself or seen it being made. I began to wake up in the small hours of the morning, and I’d hear mad laughter.

“Of course by this time the industry had got to know that something was wrong with me, and job offers began to dry up fast. You may have noticed I’m not seen much in ads these days. In this job you’re only as good as your last piece of work, as I’m sure you’re aware. Finally a good friend...you don’t need to know who he is...forced me to go to a neurologist. And he, the neurologist, did some tests.

“They found something then. A tumour in my brain.”

We sat for a long time without speaking. It began to drizzle, very lightly.

“I’ve been passed around from one set of doctors to another these last few weeks,” she said at last. “What they’ve done is confirm that there is, indeed, something inside my head, and that something is doing all these things to me. They’ve decided that it needs to come out.

“They’re giving me a fifty percent chance of recovery,” she said. “No more. And even so, there’s a fifty-percent chance that I’ll lose part or all of my vision. Now you realise why I came here?”

The drizzle began coming down heavier, but neither of us made any move to get up.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said. “The operation is scheduled for Monday. I could have had it done before, but I wanted the week here. I wanted to see it all again, and I wanted to fix it in my memory so I wouldn’t forget it. I don’t know when or if I’ll ever see any of it again.”

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“With a former neighbour. I used to be close to her back then. She’s old now, and she’s alone and glad of the company, if only for a little while.” She shook her head. “I didn’t tell her about the tumour.”

“We’d better be going back to town now,” I said. “It’s going to be raining hard soon.”

We walked back in silence. She kept her face averted a little. We walked right to the old school we’d both attended, without speaking. Then we turned to face each other.

“You’d do better to remember me as I used to be,” she said with a smile.

“You’re still looking good,” I told her.

“No, I’m not. That’s why nobody knows me anymore. But it doesn’t matter. If I recover and I keep my eyesight, I’ll look good again and I’ll make my way to the top again. You’ll be happy for me then, won’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will.” And I meant it. “Will you give me your phone number?”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said. “In case things don’t go well.” She smiled again, more warmly. “Ciao,” she said.

That night my brother and I talked of other things. And now, sitting here at this computer, I surf the net for news of her, good or bad, and I wonder when I’ll see her in the ads again.