Knots

Instinct said to let go. Sitting there in the light from the desk lamp, wrapped in the thick black cardigan that always meant “Leave me alone, I’m thinking,” the veins on her hands standing out from the skin like knotted cords, her instinct told her to untie the bindings, let loose the triple strand of raffia that held this thing together.

Instinct told her. Her head told her. Somewhere in her stubborn will she heard the voice say no. Not yet. Not defeat just yet.

The fear that came to grip her with “What if?” curled its fingers round the resolution of her mind. Lifting up her hair, twisting it into a thick rope at the back of her head, the fear breathed a long and gentle “No” against her neck and she longed to stretch her arms out wide and answer “Alright, then. No.”

She liked to sit and look out on the night-time street, lit poorly by street lights. Quiet enough by day, in these long slow hours between midnight and the dawn, the street was paralysed in rest. The only sounds would be the whirr of the fan in her laptop and the drip of the cistern in the bathroom. On odd occasions, she would have music playing to keep her company while she could not sleep. Piano pieces. Scales, chords, harmonies. Counterpoint. Howard Goodall at the back of her mind telling her things she already knew instinctively, and him not that good a pianist or even musician.

These times in the silence, with her hair falling forward, and the veins in her hands standing up proud and swollen with the blood that carried too much sugar, too much alcohol to sleep, she emptied out her mind, typing words on the keypad as though she were wringing notes out of a keyboard.

A street light directly opposite, across the road, between twin windows in the terrace that faced her; the blackness of the sky, not even stars visible; the pool of light from the desk lamp falling onto the white surface of her desk; she submerged herself in this aquatic night existence like a fish that lurks at the bottom of the ocean. Blind and prehistoric, surviving on instinct, unknown.

Knots that pulled things after her, like the tail of a kite, were slowly coming undone beneath the movement of her fingers. Deftly, she was working out the snags and loops, freeing coils of string or rope, not looking behind her to see the trail she left. Working along, she still had no idea if this was an ordinary knot or if, one day, she would reach the point at which she began; whether this was a series of flukes with no connection, or whether the braid was infinite, a loop embedded in her DNA.

At times like this, with silence in the night sky and no interruptions from beyond the enclosure of her cardigan, she would cease the unknotting for a moment and stare into space. The anaglypta on the wall in front of her, left behind by a previous occupant, painted cream and, within the small patch visible to her, apparently random in its pattern of splodges and swirls embossed onto the paper, would draw her eyes to lose their focus. Stepping back as far as she could go and still be able to see the definition on the wall, she knew that this pattern would occur too regularly to be random; put there by a machine programmed to repeat in carefully measured segments. Edge to edge, separate pieces cut from the same roll could even be lined up to match; to keep the pattern endlessly repeating.

Staring at the wall, her instinct told her to close her eyes, to leave behind the patterns and the knots, to keep tight hold of the rope of her life and not unravel the braid too much.

Instinct told her to let it go.

The tangled web of deceit and inaccuracy; the sliding truths that served to hide the absolute truth of her life; the desire to maintain privacy; all were easier to manage in daylight, with the world as an audience, an army of detectives prying into her business. An excess of knots, stretching behind her, circling around her, camouflaged reality. She did not want the unknot of herself to be seen. Not until she was ready.

If a person took the loop of their life, if they took that double helix twist of their DNA, it could seem that every time they tried to unravel the snags, they would come in at some new beginning. Every new beginning, as the saying goes, is some other beginning’s end. Each new beginning was where you came in; every other beginning’s end could only be the place you left.

Wrapped in her cardigan in the silence of the middle of the night, listening to her instinct telling her to let it go, she picked up pen and paper again; she opened up a long-neglected file of words strung together into sentences, paragraphs and chapters; the rope of her life stabbed through each page in the middle, holding them all together. She understood that she had unknotted enough to continue, for a while at least. She could shuffle the pages, make a new story from the old.

Her hands still smelled of garlic, from making the lasagne for dinner. She had rubbed lemon juice onto them, she had washed them in antibacterial hand wash, but the smell of garlic was still there.

Downstairs, in the dining room and in the kitchen, were the traces of that meal. The plates with tomato sauce and cheese sauce slowly congealing, growing hard; the dish with the last remains of the lasagne waiting to be heated up for lunch, but destined now to be thrown away; the wine glasses with the pool of red at the bottom, the last dregs that couldn’t be drained.

In the bedroom to the back of her, in the silence, he slept.

In the morning came daylight and she was curled, still in the black cardigan, resting from the untying of knots, on the small sofa in the corner of the office. Car doors slammed and ignitions sparked in the street beyond her window. People leaving for work while she sat on in this house.

In the kitchen, he had cleared away last night’s debris and stacked dishes in the dishwasher. He had left a note on the whiteboard by the back door.

“Please write something today.”

Knots tightening in her stomach, she stood at the fridge, holding the door open, waiting for inspiration. Knots tightening in her knuckles, she held the door in a fist too tight for the job. Knots of resentment building in her throat, she fought the urge to scream.

Presumption. Instruction. The unknot of herself curling and entwining, looping and strangling as it crossed over and around itself to build a knot of such complexity that she might never work it loose.

She closed the door to the refrigerator and went upstairs.

She undressed and stepped into the shower. Water flowed in rivulets down her skin. She watched it as it flowed over the backs of her hands and down her fingers. The same fingers untangled her hair, rinsing out shampoo, working conditioner through the strands. The jets of water from the shower head pounded her shoulders and her back and washed away the soap.

Cleansed and purified, dressed in the trappings of daytime, she sat back down at the desk. Sunlight streamed through the window and her fingers danced across the keypad.

Presumption. Instruction. Writing to order. “Please write something today.” The knots pulled tighter; the moments of her life on the quantum loop of time crossing and recrossing to bring up memories and actions; fodder for the something she would write.

Boredom sat flat across the top of her head. The words spilled out of her mind, through her dancing fingers, to lie across the electronic page.

Tall tales and rumours; molestations of fact; these were the tools of her trade, while he walked out into the world and regenerated urban decay.

She hated the knots of herself. She envied her own talent. She resented his calm acceptance of what she was, what she had to do. It hid behind the knots while she poured out words through the sieve-like web the knots created. Macramé of the mind.

Regenerating the decay of her life, she populated her stories with 30-something couples at endless dinner parties, worrying about their children’s schooling, enjoying the benefits of their high-powered careers. Mocking his colleagues, who were too flattered to find themselves in there to risk acknowledging what lay behind the words.

He wanted her to be famous. He wanted to be the one who had encouraged her. His investment had been to support her, to be the one who made the money in the traditional rat race way. He wanted some return in the imagined glamour of a literary soiree, an award ceremony, a book signing. He wanted the cachet of having his wife’s work discussed on the Newsnight Review. Maybe even for his wife to be on the panel discussing someone else’s work. Unpicking the knots of somebody else’s psyche.

The knots of his own web had her entombed, like a fly he was waiting to devour.

She wrote. She was already a month behind deadline. Writing to order, to reach the post beyond which she could dictate her own terms and conditions. Five novels in, and then she would be able to write.

The detail of petty lives; the everyman quality to her novels; five novels in and she would be able to do away with all that clutter. The unknot of her was waiting to be reformed into a different pattern of loops and crossings.

Piles of papers surrounded the laptop, filling the desk with notes and timelines. The deconstructed lives of each of the people she was manipulating on the page. The build-up of detritus to create a civilisation. She loathed and resented every moment of this creativity.

The unknot of her was the risk. The mania that denied the fear of baring all and failing.

He would never understand that, with his “Please write something today.” As though that was all there was to it. Write something, anything, satisfy my vicarious need for fame and glory. Live the life I never had the guts to.

She stopped. All the time she wrote, she barely thought of what she was doing, her mind filled with rants and screeds of vitriol against the life he had ordained for her; the life she had complied with. She stopped at the words “Live the life I never had the guts to.” She stopped because she was living his idea of a dangerous life, full of the risk of failure, beyond his understanding of stability and responsibility.

Behind all the knots, between the loops and crossings of her life’s eternal cord, there was a life she wanted to live but didn’t have the guts to. She heard it, there in those words directed at her from him; directed at herself by herself.

It was safer for her to live someone else’s idea of a life of danger. It was safer to play this game of writer from behind the tangle of frustration and rage that kept her from living her own idea of risk.

She was tired of knots. She was tired of knot theory. She was tired of the mathematics of life and the rage of not living.

She deleted everything she had written; the manuscript that was a month behind deadline, that was almost at the point of completion, disappeared. She picked up the sheets of paper with character sketches, biographies, timelines; she neatened their edges and fed them into the shredder. She destroyed the fake world she had been creating; the one which resembled all the others she had ever written. There was nothing she could do now about them. They were on bookshelves and in people’s minds; it was too late to erase them.

The naked page before her, its cursor blinking in the top left corner, waited to be clothed in different words. Sick to the stomach with the poison of her life, she began to construct another reality.

She would write something today, and the words would create a different kind of knot. Packed fibres from earlier branches that she would now cover over with other material. Imperfections and weaknesses that might splinter under stress, but that also might give her life a veneer closer to the truth.

The naked page was before her. Its cursor was blinking in the top left corner. Without the structure of acceptable fiction, she didn’t know what to write.

Her hands still smelled of garlic.

She listened to her instinct and let go.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006

The End (2)

How do you put together the pieces of a story?

He used to watch her, every morning, putting on her make-up. Every night, he would watch her take it off again. He even watched her going through the motions in the hours in between.

He did this without ever setting foot inside her house. He never leaned in the bathroom doorway. He never sat on a chair at the table in her kitchen. All the same, he watched her.

The evidence, the episodes in her life played out for his viewing pleasure, was laid out in words and characters that only existed electronically.

Words. Dishonest representations of a life, framed by the lives of others who fell fresh from her imagination. Words intended to paint a particular picture. Words that could be read in any number of ways.

To take it beyond writer and observed, out into the surreality of drunken encounters in bars and public houses across the city was a mistake. He knew that. Coming into public view, making contact beyond the words written on a page; he knew it was a mistake.

How do you run together the lines and phrases that say one thing but mean another? How do you make sense of the pieces in between, the ones that never get shown?

He saw enough to think that he knew her.

Every morning she would shower, do her hair, clean her teeth, apply her make-up. She would leave the house and do the things that kept her life going. She would work. She would drive. She would shop and read and eat and socialise, documenting the activities in stories about fake people, male and female, who were all her, who were all nobody.

She had hair that was long, dyed brown, made straight by application of extreme heat. Her eyes were grey, her skin was white. She had a freckle in the small of her back. She had a scar under her chin, another along her right wrist, a third and fourth on her left thumb, a fifth on her left index finger. Her second left incisor was chipped; its twin on the right set back from the rest because the milk tooth had refused to budge.

Each thing about her body that had not been born that way, the dyed hair, the scars, the chipped incisor, had a story behind it that she did not tell. Each thing remarkable about her body, the freckle, the crooked tooth, was made so because its existence drew comment.

In watching from a distance, in reading words, these were things he could not possibly have known about her; things that made it impossible for him to really know her. And the words that she chose were the ones that she wanted him to read. The make-up applied each morning wiped clean from her face each night.

That her mind was crumbling in public was a diversion for him, but still the kind of freak show that only entertains for as long as it takes that kind of shit to become tiresome.

Writing about it became tiresome too.

There was more to the story than that and she knew that, as intently as he read her words, the day would come when he was impotent to move her story along and she would cease to write for him.

The day came, and as she wrote she knew. This was a story about him. He took the bait. He sent her word.

“Good story today. Your best one in a while, if I’m to be the judge of anything.”

She didn’t care. Although the story was about him, she had not written it for him. His approval of its existence didn’t matter. She didn’t care and she realised that she had reached the end of this particular story.

She thought he knew that from her laughter. She thought he must have finally realised.

The pieces in between were now the things she cared about. What had started out as therapy had become a self-perpetuating mythology; of herself, of him, of people in the middle.

She put away her pens and paper. She switched off the laptop and unplugged it. She erased him from every memory bank, address book and phone book.

She smiled as she did it, tidying everything away. He had seen what he wanted to see. Somewhere along the way, she had become the thing he needed her to be for the amount of time it took her mind to stop crumbling.

So this was it. She had reached the end. He was redundant. No longer a friend; no longer her focus; no longer significant or a catalyst for her progress.

The woman smiled, knowing that he was still watching, hoping it would still be about him. Her life wasn’t based on any of the books he read and recommended to the people he wanted to impress. She wasn’t a librarian living in Brooklyn. She wasn’t any of the people he had cast her as in his mind.

She was herself. Somebody he would never know.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006

For The Mess He Made

“You should always brush your teeth after you’ve vomited,” she tells me. “The acid from your stomach rots the enamel.” She pauses and somehow I know she’s inspecting a fingernail. “That’s why bulimics have such bad teeth.”

I want to say, “Shut up you stupid cow, I’m dying here,” but instead I just spew some more beer and spirits over the wall. I watch it falling in part-coagulated slow motion from the top of the bridge we’re standing on down to the river that flows under us.

She is leaning against the wall, her back to the action. If this were her disgorging the contents of her stomach after one drink too many, one toke too far, I’d be holding her hair away from her face. I’d be rubbing her back and shushing her, telling her everything will be okay, she’s not going to die.

She’s harder than me, though. Less concerned. Her opinion at times like these is that I get myself into these states, I can deal with them myself.

She hangs around, though. I suppose she doesn’t want to be responsible for me choking on my own vomit.

“Do you still think eatin’s cheatin’?” she asks me.

I groan. It’s the only form of communication I’m capable of at the moment.

“I’ll take that as a no,” she says.

Her hair has been gorgeous tonight. I don’t know why I’m thinking this, as I bring back every single drink I’ve had over the course of the evening, but it’s true. Her hair has been long and dark and shiny and straight and soft to the touch. It frames her face; the layers and the fringe. All night I have indulged my need to touch it, and she has indulged my need to indulge.

“I think I’m done,” I say, still leaning. My stomach muscles ache from all the retching. My forehead is cold with sweat and I can feel myself shaking. I burp and taste the acid reflux of too many drinks and too much vomit.

She gives my back a token rub. The pressure from her hand turns my sweat-dampened shirt to ice against my skin.

“Where’s my jacket?” I ask.

“It’s here. I brought it with me, don’t worry. Everything’s here.”

From the sound of her voice, the direction it travels, she must be looking at me. I still can’t quite manage to look up or to leave my half crouching position against the wall.

“You might need to clean up a bit, though, if we’re going to get a cab home.”

“Can we walk for a bit?” I say. “I think I could do with the fresh air.”

I try to push myself back from the wall, to stand up straight, but I fail. She gets up from where she’s leaning and pulls me upright, moves me round, so that I’m half-sitting, half-leaning against the wall, facing the other way. She sits next to me and rubs my hand.

“Let’s sit here for a bit, eh? Plenty fresh air around us. Get your breath, then we’ll get a cab.”

She rubs her hand across my forehead and it feels good. She does it with the same brutish tenderness my mum always used on me as a child, when she was administering the spit-wash. A mixture of love and annoyance; love for the grubby-faced child of her loins, annoyance that he can’t keep his face clean. That’s how Sandra rubs my forehead now.

I haven’t done this since I was at University. I’m old enough to know better. I’m not even in my early thirties any more, let alone my twenties.

“I’m sorry, love,” I say.

“It’s alright, you daft bugger,” she replies, and I almost believe her.

“Your hair looks lovely,” I tell her.

“Oh, you. Shush.”

“Well, it does. And I am sorry.”

She looks at me and sighs. She looks tired. Too old for this game. I made her come out with me. Work Christmas party, nobody she really knows, nobody she’s really interested in. She’s not your typical corporate wife. She doesn’t dress like them; doesn’t talk like them; doesn’t think like them. She doesn’t suffer them easily.

She looks away from me again. I wonder if she’s storing all this up somewhere. Not to use against me, you understand. Material. Something to draw on.

We’re a long way out of town, in one of the villages that dot the Saddleworth Moors. At this time of night, this close to Christmas, it’s going to cost us a lot to get back to town in a taxi. Most of the partners live out this way, though; and it has made a change from the usual.

“Thanks for coming,” I say.

She doesn’t respond. We sit in silence for a while.

“Make sure you clean your teeth when we get in,” she says, when sufficient time has passed for responding to my gratitude to be ridiculous.

“I will. I promise.”

She looks at me and laughs. She squeezes my hand. “You won’t,” she says. “You’ll forget. We both will.”

We both look at the pub across the village square, where my colleagues are still attempting to raise the roof in the function room upstairs.

She has a pale hardness to her. She’s off at an edge somewhere, I used to think as an observer, but she’s not even that. She’s detached. She doesn’t really care. There was someone she cared about, I know that. I also know that he’s still around, at the other side of that edge. Present without intruding.

I observe her sometimes, usually when she’s washing up. She stands at the kitchen sink and her focus is apparently on the dishes in the water, in the methodical nature of washing and rinsing away the suds. She knows that I’m observing, but she doesn’t care. Her universe is her own, and I’m only in it because I’m a relief from that hardness that used to tell her she was on her own until the end. I’m that warm body, that voice on the other end of a phone, that face that greets her each night when I come home.

Her hardness is pale like the shell of an egg.

No children. We neither of us wanted children and besides we met each other too late. Careers and ambitions had taken us over. This was only ever about comfort in the face of life’s wide reality. Take it while it’s there. Her body carries with it the surprise of still being tight enough, of not having fallen by the wayside of parenthood. Her mind thinks she is still young because she doesn’t have the stark contrast of permanent responsibility for another’s life. Worrying about your husband’s vomit-induced death one night out of a million doesn’t count.

“You stink,” she says. “I can smell it on your breath.”

“It might be on my shirt,” I reply, looking down, trying to see in the half-light from the street lamps. I have to close my eyes to stop myself from falling.

She stands up and steps out into the road, one arm raised. She’s seen a cab drop someone off up the street. He drives towards her. She leans in through the open window to have the conversation about ringing the number, booking the call, before he’s allowed to pick her up. She does, and he circles the block, waiting for the job to come through over the radio.

“Come on,” she says. “On your feet. I’d better get you home.”

“Sorry, love,” I say again, and this time she doesn’t reply. The taxi returns and she opens the door.

“He’s alright now,” she says, bundling me in. “He’s done.”

She walks round the back of the cab and gets in next to me. She gives the driver our address.

“You sure you’re alright, mate?” the driver says to me through the mirror.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just had a bit too much.”

“And nothing to eat,” she adds.

The driver laughs and leaves us in silence.

At the house, she pays the fare and helps me up the path to the front door.

“I’ll sleep in the spare room,” I say.

“Too right, you will,” she laughs, ushering me into the house.

“Teeth,” she reminds me, having forced me to drink some water and eat some toast. “Clean all that acid off.”

The mint makes me retch again, but I persevere. There’s nothing left to come up anyway. These are just dry heaves. She has gone straight to bed. I shuffle pathetically, full of self pity, into the spare room where she has left a bucket at the side of the bed, for just in case.

I take the spinning world to bed with me and we whirl there in the darkness for a while. I leave the door open and the stairs light on. It’s something I’ve carried from childhood, that feeling that if I wake in the night feeling ill and the light is there, it means I can’t be dead.

She is asleep in our room, wrapped in her dreams. I’m grateful to him for not loving her enough, for encouraging this pale blue hardness to develop. It keeps her alive, gives her something to hold onto, a fixed point on the horizon. I’ve never met him, and she has never spoken of him, but I know that he’s there. I feel the hatred and the anger and the love. I see it in the straightness of her spine and the way she looks out on the world. I know it in the detached, hard way we fuck; in her closed eyes that stare at something inside her head that has nothing to do with me or what we are at.

The room spins and I close my eyes, waiting for it to slow, to stop, to let me fall asleep.

I am grateful to him for the mess he made that brought her to my bed.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006

Mouse Head

You are standing at the edge of a cliff. He is just behind you, waiting to see if you will jump. He subscribes to the notion that, if you were to jump, he would encourage it; and if you were to be found clinging to the edge of the cliff by your fingertips, then he would be the first to stand on them.

He subscribes to that notion. Quite possibly he would go through with it as well.

You look behind you. He is standing with hands in pockets, smirking at you.

“You haven’t got the guts,” he says.

“There’s something very wrong with you, you know that don’t you?”

“Why do you have to talk so much? Why can’t you just get on with it?”

“You’re going to have to push me,” you say.

He doesn’t move. You knew that he wouldn’t. You predict that his reasoning will be that it has to be your choice. He won’t make that choice for you. All he is there to do is help you to reach a decision; gain some clearer understanding of your own mind and desire to live.

You turn away from him again, and look out at the horizon. You are standing far enough from the edge that you couldn’t stumble and fall; far enough away, also, to not see the sea beneath you, or feel its pull.

“I expect you think this is some sort of metaphor,” you say.

“Do I?”

“I expect so.”

“I’m glad I’ve got you to tell me what I think. I wouldn’t know my own mind otherwise.”

“You don’t know your own mind. You only know the opposite of whatever anyone else is thinking.”

“Again, thank you for your insight. Are you ready to jump yet?”

“Like I said, you’re going to have to push me.”

“I thought that was why we were here,” he replies. “I thought that was the point.”

You put your hand in your pocket and pull out the head of a dead mouse, wrapped in cellophane, its eye still shiny. You look at it.

“Mouse head,” you say. You glance over your shoulder, barely moving your head, but needing to see the shadow of his presence behind you still. He is silent. He doesn’t move.

You weigh the mouse head in your hand. You consider pulling back your arm and hurling the skull still wrapped in flesh and fur out in an arc across the sky, to fall and land at the bottom of the cliff. You weigh it in your hand, tossing it up and down in your palm. If you throw it, it will be gone, and you will never have another one like it. If you don’t throw it, you will have to return it to your pocket, where it will begin to rot and to stink. So you pull back your arm and you throw. The mouse head in its cellophane wrapper sails out across the sky and disappears from view.

“And what was that symbolic of?” he asks you.

“My secret hatred of Steinbeck,” you reply.

Steinbeck, Steinbeck, who sat in his attic room to write, neglecting his wife, cocooned in sanctuary from the world he was trying to describe. Steinbeck who wrote the stories you loved the most, until you found Faulkner, until you found Bukowski, until you fell in love with Vonnegut.

“Well that was gratifyingly pretentious. I’m glad I witnessed it,” he says.

“You ought to know about pretension.”

“Are you going to jump yet? I’m becoming bored with the floorshow.”

“You can always leave.”

Boredom sits at the heart of everything that binds the two of you together. The need for distraction, diversion. The need to be noticed and recognised. The need to pile misery on top of misery until neither of you can bear the weight and you have to break. For a day, an hour, a month, a year. As long as it takes, and always the return to picking at the scab.

You push your hands into the pockets of your coat and turn away from the cliff edge.

“You’re not going to jump, then?”

You walk past him.

“Oh perfect! You’re not even going to speak. After dragging me all the way out here with the promise of something good, all that I get is some teenage staring at the horizon and a lame attempt at symbolism.”

You keep walking, across the sedge to where your car is parked. Perhaps, if you had a shovel in the boot, you would take it and bash him over the head, then dig him a grave. In full view of anyone who chose to walk along this coastal path, to pull up for a cup of coffee, steaming from a thermos.

But nobody has chosen to walk this way or park round here, except for you and him.

He is still talking to himself, following you back to where his car sits next to yours. You have successfully learned to tune out his minor rants, to pay them no attention. They are too distracting if allowed to invade your conscious thoughts.

You unlock the door to your car and get into the driver’s seat. You belt up and turn the key in the ignition. He stands in front of you, still talking, still ranting, arms flung wide. You could take him out, here and now. You could floor the accelerator pedal and drive him out of your life. You imagine it; him sprawled across your bonnet, still ranting, and then the sudden brake just before the nose of the car pulls your front wheels over the cliff, and his body catapulting out over the void.

It makes you smile, and you put the car into reverse to turn and drive away.

He is still ranting in your rear-view mirror, and you begin to laugh.

Another day, you tell yourself, and you might have done it. But you know that you are just saying that. Just like he knows you will never jump and that he will never push you. There’s too much there that must be kept raw, prevented from healing. Like the dogs cut open and sent out to sea so that powder of sympathy applied to the knife that cut them and plunged into an open flame would make them wince at set times of the day. So that astrologers and astronomers and captains and governments would know where they stood on the planet and in time.

Twisting the knife to remind yourself that you still exist.

You park in the street outside your house. You remember to lock the doors, remove all valuables that were on view. You run up the short flight of steps that lift you up from path to front doorstep. You don’t know why, but as you slip the key into the lock, you look over your shoulder. The street is empty. No pedestrians, no drivers, nobody to witness your return. Unless neighbours with nothing to do are watching you through their net curtains.

The shiny blue-painted door opens onto your cream-painted hallway. You close it behind you and lean against it. Sun shining through the half-light above the door casts multicoloured patterns on the hardwood floor. They shiver slightly, because of the effect of the heat from the radiators on the air.

You remove your coat, glad of the warmth of the house after the coldness of outside. You take off your scarf and gloves as well. You kick off your boots and walk in stockinged feet through the house.

There is no sound of a car pulling up outside. No door slam. No knock on the door or ring of the bell.

There is not even a phone call.

Your head is hurting from the cold, so you take two paracetamol. Cold juice from the fridge sends pain along your nose and into your forehead and the frown lines between your eyebrows reappear.

Your telephone rings, but it is not him. You answer it and hear the voice of the other. He talks and knows you are distracted but doesn’t comment. He just talks, glad of the conduit for his voice to be heard, glad of your ears being there to receive the self-centred nothingness he speaks. The trick is to murmur the right things at the right times. You stand at the window, behind your own net curtains, and watch the nothingness that happens every day on your street.

He stops speaking, and for some reason you say the first thing that comes into your head.

“People on this street could be killing each other, and we would never know it.”

He is silent on his end of the phone. You non-sequitur doesn’t fit into the story he was telling you. He doesn’t know how to respond; how to bring it back to him.

“Grady,” you say, “I have to go. I need to turn all the lights on in the house.”

When you have hung up, you do just that. You go from room to room for no reason and turn on all the lights. You leave them blazing. You don’t close any of the curtains. You want your house to be a beacon against the gathering gloom of the winter afternoon.

You leave the house and drive to his. No thought has gone into this next move. You’ve picked certain things up and put them into your coat pockets as you left the house, but you have no idea what they are or why you have them. They feel comfortingly heavy in your pockets.

You ring the doorbell and she answers.

“Hi,” you say. “I’m Jenna.”

“Hello,” she says, trying to place you.

“Is Michael in?”

“Yes,” she says, her face showing relief that she hasn’t forgotten a face; that this visitor is for her husband. “Michael,” she calls over her shoulder. “Won’t you come in?” she says to you, and opens the door a little wider.

“What is it?” you hear him say from somewhere in the back of the house.

“A visitor for you. Jenna.”

There’s a silence, and you imagine him trying to work out how he’s going to get out of this one. Then there’s the scrape of a chair’s legs against a tiled floor, and you guess that he’s in the kitchen.

“You weren’t eating, were you?” you say, covering your face with faux concern.

“Oh, no! He works in the kitchen. It drives me mad, his stuff all over the place when I’m trying to prepare dinner!” She laughs, and you manage to smile in return.

He appears at last in the hallway behind his wife.

“Jenna,” he says. “Is anything wrong?”

“I forgot to bring this with me earlier; I thought you might need it.”

You take his phone from your pocket; the one that fell out of his coat pocket in your car weeks ago. You hold it out to him.

“Oh, thanks! I wondered what had happened to that.”

He looks at you, trying to work out what you are here for. You look back at him and smile. ‘Boredom,’ is what your look tells him.

“I think it must have fallen from your coat pocket the other week, when I gave you a lift.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Grady’s away, and I’ve been busy, otherwise I would have brought it back before. And like I say, I clean forgot to bring it with me earlier today.”

“No problem. How is Grady?”

His silent wife has been listening to your exchange stiffly. The mention of Grady relaxes her. A colleague of sorts, that’s how she’s placing you now. A colleague, rather than a direct threat.

“Oh, Grady’s Grady,” you say. You are still holding the phone; still holding it out to him. He hasn’t moved from where he came to a standstill in the hallway behind his wife.

You take a step forward and bring him within your reach. You lift one hand from his side with tenderness and place the phone into it.

“Have a good evening,” you say to his wife as you open the door and leave the house.

He gives you enough time to return home to your beacon of light blazing in the middle of your street. You’re surprised at how much of the interior can be seen through the net curtains when all the lights are on. Your phone rings before you have even had chance to leave the car.

“What was all that about?”

“I wanted to return your phone.”

“You could have done it somewhere else. Some other time, even. You didn’t have to come here while she was here.”

“I was bored. Besides, you should see what I had in my other pocket.”

He hangs up.

You go back inside your own house. After you have hung your coat up in the hallway, you take the gun from your other pocket and weigh it in your hand. Heavier than the mouse head. Heavier than his phone. It smells of metal and it makes you smile. You return it to the drawer in the telephone table.

The gun will do another time.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006

Oestrogen

A small, perfectly formed “Fuck” falls from her mouth and into the twin microphones fixed above the laptop that she is trying to disconnect.

The room is as silent as she is still. She knows that the word hasn’t gone unnoticed, but if she doesn’t acknowledge it she might get away with it. She unfastens the two screws holding the connection from laptop to projector in place and avoids looking out on her audience.

The retired and well-educated have a habit of not appreciating the type of Anglo-Saxon word with which her vocabulary is peppered these days. Her boss stands patiently beside her, too far within the deadzone of the mics not to know what she has said so audibly to their audience. Her part of the floorshow is over. He is only bothered about her disconnecting the hardware in time to allow him to connect up his own.

She escapes unscathed. She flees the scene, leaving her boss to face the flak after the event. Only scheduled for half an hour, she is under no obligation to sit out the rest of the presentation. She has things to do. Like go home and get drunk.

She has started to notice that her clothes are growing tighter. She stood in the Ladies’ lavatory before tonight’s performance and saw in the mirror how her belly swelled, pushing against the fabric of her skirt. For too many weeks now she has been putting it down to fluid retention; to being due on; to putting on weight because of overeating and lack of exercise.

She needs to go home and get drunk because, if she is pregnant, she wants to pump her body as full of alcohol as she can before she officially knows the truth.

Of course, it could just be because she is addicted to McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes.

She walks quickly down the darkened street in the damp night air to the car park. She holds her umbrella above her head. It is pink and yellow and white and blue, circles interlocking to form flowers and tessellations in waterproofed fabric protection against the rain. Her hair, washed that morning, smoothed down with various products and ironed flat between ceramic plates that seal in moisture and counteract the ions floating in the ether, stays smooth and soft in spite of the humidity that surrounds it.

She thinks about holograms. The hologram on her debit card, on her credit card, on the verification sticker on her straighteners, on the lid of the scanner attached to her laptop, on the paper she used to create wings and a halo for the angel now missing, intended for the top of the Christmas tree in the office.

She thinks of the man she loved, followed so rapidly by the one she fell for, followed so abstractly by the one who might now be the father of her suspected child. He assembled the tree today; decorated it with tinsel; discovered that the homemade angel was now missing. The one that she loved and now hates. Not the one that followed or the one who might be an unsuspecting father.

Like Matthew before her, she would spin the globe backwards to turn back time if she could. Even if the globe were only tin and a tiny scale model of the real thing, carrying a pencil sharpener inside. Even if she didn’t get to wear the cape and the underpants outside her tights.

She cries more than she sleeps these days. She drinks more than she cries. The ratio of diuretics and weeping to intake of fluid is a negative one. Her skin suffers as a result.

She drives home, thinking of the next drink she can take.

She sits at the desk in the office that fills the room too small to be a bedroom but advertised as such on the estate agent’s sheet. She sits and looks at the computer screen in front of her as the central heating clicks off and the seconds convert to minutes convert to hours convert to daylight.

She stares at the screen and thinks of the people who sit inside her head, waiting to become characters on a page. She thinks, with sickness at the pit of her stomach, of the way she still can’t resist the one she fell for, the one between the man she loved and the one who could be the father of her putative child.

The world outside is silent. The house next door is silent. The hours tick by and she wishes for something more than this.

“Nothing to be done,” says Estragon.

“I’m beginning to come round to that opinion,” Vladimir replies.

Be reasonable. You haven’t yet tried everything. She tells herself this, much as Beckett’s Vladimir does. She doesn’t know, though, if she has the strength to resume the struggle. Nothing, she tells herself. There’s nothing to show. Even less to struggle for.

That simple “fuck”, dropped into the pond of politeness, sending out its ripples.

“People are bloody ignorant apes,” says Estragon.

“There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part,” says Estragon.

“Let’s hang ourselves immediately!” says Estragon.

“Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer,” says Estragon.

“No use struggling,” says Estragon.

Estragon, she thinks. Estragon. Estragon. It sounds like oestrogen. Everything comes back to that nagging suspicion; back to that simple fuck, dropped into the pond of her tranquil life, sending out its ripples.

Why she’s thinking of Godot now, she doesn’t know. Strange things flit across her mind. She drives and thinks about the drink, about the drinks, she will have when she gets home.

She will drown her suspected child in alcohol; pickle it before it has chance to thrive.

No use struggling. Nothing to do. Doing nothing is safer. The world can go hang.

“It’s a disgrace. But there you are,” says Pozzo.

She parks the car and gets out. She locks the door and walks up the path to the house. She unlocks a different door and goes in. She closes this second door, this other door, and locks it again. She locks herself inside the house and locks the rest of the world out.

She drops her bags onto the smaller of the two sofas. She removes her coat and drops it over the arm of that same sofa. She walks through the living room and into the kitchen.

Her feet carry her to the fridge. She takes out cola. She opens the door to the cupboard that sits on the wall, above the work surface, to the right of the fridge. She takes out rum. She crosses to the cupboard that sits across the room, at ninety degrees to the first, at ninety degrees to the fridge, and opens its door. She takes out a glass.

She carries the glass to where the bottle of rum is sitting on the work surface beside the fridge. She opens the bottle of rum and pours a double measure into the glass. She fills the glass with cola from the cold bottle taken from the fridge.

Her drink sits on the work surface waiting for her to pick up the glass and raise it to her lips. She thinks about the potential child that might be growing in her belly, nestled safe in the layer of extra flesh and blood that she is eager to rid her body of. The tiny egg, fertilised by the rogue sperm that found its way through the prophylactic barrier of rubber and spermicide, dividing minute by minute into a ball of ever expanding cells.

She drinks the rum and cola, thinking, ‘Let it drown, let it drown, let it drown…’ The rhythm of the words matches the movement of her throat as she gulps down the drink. The fizz of the cola makes her eyes water; the bite of the rum makes her cough.

She fixes herself another. She drinks down half of it and feels the sweet sensation of alcohol rushing through her blood stream and her bloodstream rushing to her head.

“I wish you menses,” she says to her belly, right hand gripping the glass of rum and cola so tightly that her knuckles whiten. “I wish you cramps so mean they make you want to vomit.”

She finishes the drink with two more attempts, then fixes herself a third. She carries it through to the living room and curls up on the sofa.

“Happy days!” says Pozzo.

“Happy days!” she replies, raising her glass to the imaginary character, towards the place he stands, across the room from her.

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” says Pozzo.

“Oh, shut up you oaf,” she snaps and takes another drink of rum and cola. Her belly twinges. She curls further around herself. She knew she wasn’t really. She simply wanted to trick her body into proving her wrong. Belief in the ghost of a pregnancy not yet conceived brings about its certain death more rapidly.

“For each one who begins to weep – “ begins Pozzo.

“Pozzo, shut it,” she says, raising her glass again but this time pointing with a finger. Accusation, not salute.

“Somewherelseanotherstops,” mutters Pozzo, unwilling to let a mere girl tell him what to do.

She chases him from the room with imaginary stones and cushions thrown at him to hasten his retreat. She hears the door bang shut behind him. She hears his footsteps echoing as he runs down an alleyway paved with cobbles.

Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. Her house is silent now that imaginary Pozzo has fled the scene.

She drinks some more and thinks about turning the tv on, but the effort of getting up from the sofa, of putting her drink down onto the coffee table, of crossing the living room floor to press the button on the front of the tv, and then all that effort in reverse to get herself comfortable again on the sofa and to press the standby button on the remote control, she doesn’t think it worth while.

Curled up on sofa, drink to hand, she begins to push down. Bearing down eight months too early, pushing down on the imagined head, the soft skull forming, breathing ripple of the fontanelle. Drink to hand, her hand moves out and pulls the drink in close. An intimate gesture, it succumbs to the softness of her lips. Cold glass against warm flesh, she closes her eyes and drinks.

Staggering and blind, without moving from the sofa, she tumbles down corridors, seeing only the dome of her unborn child’s head rising above her like a cathedral ceiling.

She bears down and feels the cramps begin. Relief floods through her body; pressure of waiting and tension dissipates. She has borne down and won.

There are things now that need to be done. Like doing the dishes she has had no interest in washing for days. First she thinks she will make a pot of tea.

In the kitchen she opens the cupboard from which earlier she took down a glass. She takes out the orange teapot and checks the inside for dust or mould or build up of tannins. It has been a while since she made a pot of tea. In the more than two years she has lived in this house, she has no recollection of a real brew being made.

The orange teapot sits in front of the white plastic kettle. The white plastic kettle, shaped (so the manufacturer would have her believe) like a jug, contains water enough to warm the pot and then fill it again when the leaves have been scooped from tea caddy to teapot. She watches the jumble of air bubbles through the clear plastic window, waiting for the kettle to decide that the water it holds is hot enough to scald tealeaves and release flavour.

She has no milk jug any more. She threw it across another kitchen when her hair was longer or shorter or browner or blonder; she can’t remember the circumstance, just the passion and the shattering pieces of pottery, bouncing back off the tiled wall and falling onto the work surface and down onto the floor. She remembers the crunch under his feet as, wordless, he walked from the house and her life forever.

“A dog came in the kitchen / and stole a crust of bread. / Then cook up with a ladle / and beat him till he was dead,” sings Vladimir.

She takes the teapot full of gently brewing tea and carries it with the china mug, painted with a Lowry figure (Gentleman Looking At Something, 1960) and holding a thin layer of milk at the bottom, from the kitchen where Vladimir sings to himself, now high, now low, up to the room where she sits at the computer staring at the screen, waiting for the people sitting inside her head to fall out onto the page.

She puts down the china mug. She puts down the orange teapot. She switches on the computer. She remembers that she has borne down and won, and that there are other things to attend to, which she does while the machine whirrs slowly into life.

She pours a darkening stream of liquid from the teapot to the mug. It streams clear and golden brown from the spout of the pot, but rises opaque and the colour of vanilla fudge to the top of the mug.

She opens Word. The white page appears on the screen before her, shaded at one edge to give the appearance of three dimensions. A white sheet sitting on a mid-grey background. Margins marked out, rulers positioned. A glance from the screen to the other ruler, the stick of wood with the names of real rulers etched onto its face, standing to attention in the desk tidy beside the computer.

Willie, Willie, Harry, Ste. Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three. One, two, three Neds, Richard Two, Harry Four, Five, Six, then who?

Then who? Who next in the line of succession? Who next to invade her head and send her restless nights and words to tangle on a page?

The one she loved and now she hates. The one whose half-formed offspring she bore down on and conquered. The one between, the one she fell for.

She has finished that first pure china hugged mug of tea and now regrets the milk jug launched across that kitchen long ago. The one three, or is it four, before the one she loved. The one who pegged her. She carries the mug back down to the kitchen, splashes more milk into its bottom, and carries it back again to the small room where the computer whirrs and the words sit stagnant on the page.

Borne down and conquered. Hung for a beggar. No wish to be a thief. The current bookend far away and blissful in his ignorance of anything outside his immediate world.

The second cup is never as good as the first. Too much milk; too little tea; cooled down too far; stewed too strong.

Then who? Who next? Or what, or how, or why?

“What a day!” says Estragon.

“Who beat you?” says Vladimir. “Tell me.”

“I beat him,” she says. “I bore down and I won. Oestrogen and me. We won.”

She looks at the words on the white electronic page in front of her and smiles.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006