The Button

So, it was suicide. We all knew it was suicide. To say John had been miserable this past month since Suzanne left him would be an understatement – he had become a wretched human being. He had lost his strut, that confident swagger; in its place the stooped gait of a geriatric. With this in mind, it’s a wonder he ever managed to climb to the top of the tower block in the first place.

I visited him last week, hoping to raise his spirits with a comedy DVD I knew we both liked. It took three knocks on the door and a rap at the window, before he materialised. He peered uneasily through heavy eyelids like battered roller blinds, and, after a couple of second’s thought, grunted and motioned me inside.

You could never have described John’s house as stately or opulent, but Suzanne’s Bohemian nature and near-obsession with mirrors and beads had always lent it great character. Robbed of haphazard flair, his living room seemed cold and austere: a stockade for melancholy. I had never realised, but I should have guessed, that nearly all the furniture displayed in their house had originally been Suzanne’s. Those wonderful, heavy oak cabinets and dressers that had dominated each room were now gone leaving only tell-tale indentations in the carpet where John’s hastily re-assembled flat-pack monstrosities could not cover them up.

John simply sat. Where once he would erupt with uproarious laughter, bent double and shaking with convulsive mirth when we watched comedy together, today not one smile could crack his inscrutable expression or one chuckle break his sorrowful trance. Paradoxically, our silence became one of comfort. The pressure to offer questions or pleasantries which neither involved his immediate break-up nor my own steady relationship became too great within minutes of my arrival. Besides, John was responding in grunts, sighs and only the odd syllable of clarity.

Presently he began to tell me, slowly, of his attempts to reconcile the relationship. I nodded in sympathy, simultaneously recalling the fervent manner in which, five years previously, he had first related this budding romance to me. We had arranged to meet, as we did every Thursday night, in the Pig & Whistle for a drink and perhaps to enter the weekly pub quiz. John was uncommonly late - my pint of bitter being nearly drained - and blundered over to my table carrying a carrier bag brimming, almost choking, with a variety of used buttons. He explained that he'd picked them up from the market that afternoon for his new lady who was "creative" and "liked making weird things". It mattered not as I had never seen John more effervescent: the pile of buttons reflecting vivaciously in his sparkling eyes, his broad grin never wavering even when his enthusiastic hand gestures knocked the bag over forcing a tide of buttons across the floor.

We hugged briefly before I left. Just outside his front door I stooped to pick up a solitary, cheerless button - washed colourless by unseasonal rain.