Beauty

The boy did strange things to her.

He had made her his sister-confessor. The trouble was she did not know what she believed. So she heard his confession and didn't know what to say. And all the while, the boy did strange things to her.

He was in her dreams. She had only known him 6 weeks, and she could picture what he looked like - a picture image in her mind. All the people that she knew and loved, the man she'd lived with for 3 years, she could not picture what they looked like. They were just names, descriptions framed in words, and he was a bloody picture.

Because the boy did strange things to her.

He lay there now, asleep on his stomach, his dark hair curling into his neck, his fist curling into the pillow. She sat cross-legged, staring at the curtained window with its halo of late-morning light. He lay, the covers turned back, his naked body slender and long, his dark hair curly like a shock against the whiteness of the pillow. She sat, cross-legged like Buddha, looking round the edges of his body, unsettled by the strange things he did to her.

This room was not hers. She was glad about that. When she left it she would be able to leave the images of that night with it. She would not have to see them every day in his absence. Because, unless she made an effort to put herself in the places where she knew he would be, she was unlikely to see him again.

He had made her sore. Different size, different shape. She could feel the ghost of him still as she sat there cross-legged. The ghost of him and the hollowness simultaneous and symbiotic, the one feeding the other.

Where had this begun? How had she been cast in this rôle? Her skin smelled of cigarettes, though neither of them smoked. Her clothes lay crumpled in the middle of the floor. How far across the room and would he wake if she moved? She broke off a fingernail and stared at the ragged edges left behind. In the street beyond the window were sounds of people going about their lives. She was here in this Dublin bedroom with a boy she barely knew who moved her ways she had never been moved, who looked in her eyes and let her see the depths of the ocean. She shook her head. That was bullshit. She had to believe that that was bullshit otherwise she would end up as mad as him.

She reached for her bag. He stirred.

"I broke a nail," she said, but he was not awake.

An alarm was going off in the street. A car, she thought. She filed the nail she had broken, smoothed the ragged edges. He uncurled his fisted hand and laid it flat against her back, the thumb lying in the hollow of her spine. She did not look at him but continued filing her nails. She did not want to see the glint of his half opened eye; did not want to want him as she had wanted him last night. Because he had made her sore and the boy did strange things to her.

He turned onto his side and ran the back of his hand across her back. His index finger stroked the curve of her waist, the curve of her hip, the curve of her waist, up and down. The car alarm went silent and she could hear the sound of skin against skin. He leaned forward and kissed her on the hip, his hand gently lifting her arm away. His lips barely touched her skin, and he did strange things to her.

She put down the nail file and slowly lay down, letting him brush her body with his lips. Where he had made her sore he soothed her now with soundless words. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the strange things that happened with this boy.

"I am dying," he said, later, as they lay alongside each other staring at the ceiling and not smoking.

She did not reply. She tried to tell herself it made no difference to her.

She stared at the ceiling and a fat round tear trickled from the corner of her eye.

© J R Hargreaves 2002

Haiku

The cold clung to her as she walked along the frost-sparkled pavement, up to the post box. She and her friend were going through a phase of writing to each other every day in haiku. She had just completed a postcard that she needed to post before the day was out.

She had bundled herself up in coat, scarf, hat and gloves and let herself out of the house. It was only mid-afternoon and already the street lights were glowing. She walked up the street, peeping through the gap between the edge of her woolly hat and the top of her scarf, the postcard clutched in one gloved-hand, the other hand clenched inside her coat pocket. Her jaw ached from trying to stop her teeth chattering. It was so cold, she half wished that global warming would hurry up and happen.

Her thigh muscles ached from the way she was walking, trying not to slip on the frosty ground. She needed some new boots, the soles on these were losing their tread. Cleated soles. She smiled to herself. Why did she like that word so much? She said it three or four times in her head. Cleated, cleated, cleated, cleated. It made her want to laugh.

She and her friend used to play a game where they would choose a word and say it over and over until all the meaning fell out of it and it just became a sound they were making with their mouths.

She was halfway to the post box now. The top of her scarf was beginning to feel damp against her mouth and nose from the condensation of her breathing. She looked down at the two-line haiku she had written on the card. They had begun by sticking rigidly to the 5-7-5 formation, but now she was beginning to free herself from that constraint, trying to condense the essence of a moment into the least number of words and still retain its wholeness.

She had seen the sunset earlier and written:

pink sunkissed sky

hovers over ice-tipped trees

She felt satisfied with that description and hoped that her friend would like it too. She was almost at the post box now. She checked that she had fixed a stamp to the card. That would be no fun, trying to peel a stamp from its backing without taking her gloves off. She did not like the self-adhesive stamps. She felt cheated by them somehow.

She climbed the step up to the frontage of the Post Office and stopped in front of the post box. She held the postcard in her two gloved hands for a moment, wishing it luck on its journey over the hills to her friend. Then she raised her two hands to the mouth of the box and pushed the postcard in. She tipped her head back slightly, closing her eyes, and breathed in the frosty air. Then she started on her way back to the house.

It was harder to keep her balance on the icy pavement because of the slight downhill slope on the way back. She almost slipped a couple of times, and held onto the hedges and walls of the houses she was passing.

It was quiet, there was hardly any traffic. She supposed everyone was safely tucked up in their nice warm houses. Not like her, out in the cold, posting a haiku to a friend because of some silly challenge they had set themselves.

She stopped on the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the road to make sure there were no cars coming before she crossed.

The blow struck her on the back of her head and she fell forward into the road. She felt hands rummaging in her coat pockets, trying to find a purse or something valuable like a mobile phone, she supposed. Her face was cushioned by the wool of her hat and her scarf. She was glad she had them on. She felt a little frightened but she tried not to move, not to panic. Then a hand grabbed the top of her hat and yanked it off her head. The cold began pounding on her skull and then the hand (the same hand?) began pounding her skull against the ground. She thought she cried out, but she could not be sure, then her head smashed one last time to the ground as her attacker let go his grip (her grip?) and ran off.

The world was muffled and black and finally silent. The blood ran darkly from the broken skin against her skull. She lay at the edge of the road as though she were asleep, as though she had been overtaken by a sudden bout of narcolepsy.

She was in the newspapers and on the local tv bulletins for two days afterwards. The motorist who had eventually stopped and found her became a minor celebrity for less than his Warholian 15 minutes. Later, she was only remembered by those who had known her.

The postcard bearing the haiku to her friend went astray. She had somehow smudged the ink so that the postcode could not be read clearly. When it eventually reached her friend’s house, the postmarks (5 of them) ranged from Swansea to Glasgow.

© J R Hargreaves 2002