She was off to one side, divorced from what was going on, and she could not bring herself to care anymore. She sat to one side and watched them. She wondered more and more what she had in common with them. What she had ever had in common with them.
They were all back together for another of those weekend reunions that involved sleeping on floors. She could not put a name to the feeling she had. Not exactly boredom, not exactly frustration, but something akin to both.
She looked at her friends now, seated around the pub table. One thing never altered, they still spent so much time deciding what to do that they ran out of time to do anything, and ended up going to a pub. There they were, ranged before her, couples talking couple-speak. House decoration for the women and mortgages for the men. They were nothing if not predictable. Even though she had bought a house, and had a mortgage, she somehow couldn't wring the same enjoyment from the topic as they seemed able to do. Then again, she no longer knew what else she might talk about with them, she had become apparently so off-beam. She chose instead to slide out sideways, leaving her body in position to nod and smile and say something appropriate every now and then, while her true self transferred itself to a solitary place. Her friends never seemed to notice any difference.
This evening, she was already out of her body, slipping to the side almost as soon as they had all sat down. She was ever hopeful that she would be caught at it one time. She wondered what she would do. But her friends were too absorbed in the minutiae of their lives to manage it.
The idea came from a book she had read once. The heroine had physically hidden herself beneath the bed on which her boyfriend and her friends were sitting. Her enjoyment of the joke was delicious, so delicious you could almost taste her amusement yourself. So she had devised her own method of hiding under the bed and listening in on conversations that did not require her.
Sometimes, she slid out of her body and ran off into the distance, far away, across time and space. Sometimes she managed to get so far away that she was a completely different person, capable of anything. And all the while mundanity reigned around her stationary body without anyone noticing a difference.
On the rare occasions that she became desperate with boredom (although these days such occurrences were growing less rare) she killed herself. Right there, in front of her friends. Sometimes she did it quickly, other times she drew it out, making the most of the opportunity to bleed profusely, even decoratively, onto the pub carpet. Even though she was nothing more than a corpse beside them, they seemed unable to see it. It was a wasted effort. She had to bring herself back to life every time.
Tonight she was simply drifting, half-heartedly investigating little pockets of anger she had been discovering within herself over the past 18 months as she wandered the room. There was anger at him, for loving her and waking her up to know what that meant - waking her enough for her to enjoy it and want more of it, but removing her in the process from the cotton wool she had been wrapped up in, so that she felt every tiny splintering piece of herself when she fell through his opened fingers and shattered on the ground. Anger, too, at her friends who had not asked her how she was in over a year, and when they did it was not in a way that made her feel she could tell them. And anger at the fact that she had been left to deal with this by herself, she who was so unprepared. She had brought to her friends' attention all the things that they had chosen to ignore, and still they could not give her their support. They could not give her, without being asked, the one thing she would unreservedly give to them without a second thought.
Before it had even seemed to begin, her life now felt as though it was over. She drifted back through her past. Her childhood. Her adolescence. Her years at university. She saw herself at 10 - a fat child with glasses, but not without friends. Self-confident, a tom-boy, happy. She saw herself at 15 - quiet and studious, shy of boys, feeling the beginnings of rejection - not pretty enough for boys to hang around her regardless, not sure enough of what to talk about to make them interested in her, not thin enough to be anything but a source of embarrassment for any boy seen talking to her. She saw herself at 20 - slimmer at last, but so buried beneath a fatness of mind, and so hidden behind defences of cynicism, self-deprecation and sarcasm that no man could get close enough to know her. Those that tried soon smelled the scent of desperation to be liked that she gave off. Like aniseed to hunting dogs, it was enough to put anyone off the chase.
And now she was an invisible woman. Invisible even to her friends, who claimed to know her but still could not see her. Invisible to the people in the place she now lived, the place to which she had moved to escape seeing him every day without being able to touch him. The place where it seemed she was incapable of making new friends.
She was depressing herself. She could stay tuned into the reality around her if she wanted to feel depressed. She slipped further off to the side and grew in stature. She became magnificent. Stunning. Awe-inspiring. She strutted through the pub, no longer invisible, causing people to fall off their bar-stools, their heads exploding at the magnificence of her. It was carnage in there. She looked at her friends to see if they had noticed, but they were still seated at their table, unaffected by the display. There too was her stationary body, towards which they threw the odd comment. She shrank a bit, like a balloon with a slow puncture, and began helping the others in the pub put themselves back together, apologising as she went.
As she could not grab the attention of her friends, she drifted further out to the side, through the pub walls, across the river, back through time, across continents, out into space, floating among the stars. The world was very small beneath her, and she was very small against the white-flecked expanse of the universe. If she concentrated very hard, she knew she could make herself disappear. The temptation was almost overwhelming. She would know then what it was to cease to exist. She drifted there for a while, listening to the echos of conversations crossing time and crossing each other. She began to wonder what it all mattered. If the answer was, as she suspected, nothing, who would care if she actually ceased to exist?
She sat back down next to her body.
"Listen to me," she said to her friends. "Please listen to me. I'm dying inside and I don't know what to do about it. I'm like a mummy somebody dug up, with nothing inside my shell but dust and dry bones."
Her friends continued their conversation, oblivious to her plea. She pointed at her stationary self.
"Look at me sitting there. Can't you see there's something wrong? Do I look normal to you? Why won't you listen? Why don't you care?"
She gave up in exasperation at their unwillingness to listen and went out into the pub car-park. She stood for a moment in the darkness, looking up at the stars. She was so small and the universe was so big. She opened her hand. It had been closed around a small, pearl-handled pistol. The sort that could be found in any number of 1920s murder mystery novels. She looked at it gleaming in the starlight. People come and people go, what was one more going to matter? The gun with its pearly handle blinked at her in the starlight. She shot herself.
Moments later, her friends left the pub. Her stationary self was with them. But she was no longer there.
© 2000 J R Hargreaves
