This Thing

An old man plays piano, his white hair pulled back in a ponytail on top, and his equally ancient mate plays guitar. Suddenly, the sound of trumpet appears and the ponytailed man is playing piano and accompanying himself on the horn, and just as suddenly you are plunged, down into memory, and the face of a boy full of mischief on whose bed you used to teenage lie while he played records he’d bought from the record shop in the arcade, so desperate to share, to educate, to bring you to life and show you the things that have meaning. You’re plunged and you don’t care that the room is full of people. You’re miles away, in another time, and the music isn’t the thing that’s carried you. Not really. It’s that trumpet and that piano and that face that tells you to Listen, just listen, Bird. Really fucking listen.

So you sit, and you listen, and you’re lost, and you suppose it is the music that has pulled you, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like something else. Something that won’t be named, won’t be caught, won’t belong.

And later, not that much later, you’re out and carrying Georgia On My Mind into the street, away from the music that has no hold on you now. You think of Ella singing Georgia. And you’re swinging through the streets, high on a mix of sadness, love, and booze and pizza.

This thing, this feeling, this memory of someone you don’t yet know and yet you know so well, walking there beside you, laughing there beside you, almost invisible, but perfectly there. This thing, this feeling, this memory you have will explode one day. It’s going to explode, just like you’re going to die. He told you that tonight. He told you, half laughing, half not, and you felt your eyes widen at the truth. Not the truth that you will die. That’s an old truth. Your eyes, they widened at that feeling of sadness and love and not enough booze then and definitely no pizza then. So the sadness and the love, then. Your eyes widened at that truth.

Three hundred and eighteen days older than you for almost thirty four years, and now no more. Now you’re older than him, swinging down the street, high on this feeling of sadness and love, and isn’t that the funny thing?

You remember the love and no sadness. A song of you, sweet and clear as moonlight. And then the cloud that came and covered it over and left the sadness and not the love, like a hard thing in your belly.

There are too many street lights, and how high the moon? You don’t even bother to look, you’re so sure it isn’t there. Because he’s the moonlight now. This one. He’s the sadness and the love. He’s the booze and the pizza by now as well, and you’re swinging through the streets, slipping through them so fast, on your way somewhere new. And you’re high, and feeling alive. Pushed and squeezed and challenged and alive. And even if he isn’t the sadness and the love after all, even if it’s just the trumpet singing with the piano and the memory of that bedroom and those records all that long long time ago that have tricked you into this feeling, even if he isn’t the thing you think he is, this is going to explode, like a sudden trumpet burst. And you’re going to feel even more glad that you’re alive. Living and so fucking alive.

And you swing through the streets and you find another bar, and he’s almost invisible, almost inconsequential. Except he’s there and you know it. He is the moonlight. He is the sadness and the love. And you are fucking alive.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

A Better Answer Than That

She was tired from yet another restless night. She had spent the day trying her best to avoid her colleagues, scared that the slightest hint of kindness would set off the tears again. She needn’t have worried.

She hadn’t really wanted to come out with them for a drink after work, but she didn’t want to go home yet, either.

So she sat there and listened to them laughing at how seriously she took things, how easy she was to wind up, how her sense of humour was more often off than on these days. She didn’t say what she was thinking. She just sat and looked down at her knees, stroking her skirt smooth, enjoying the feeling of the fabric. Cord. It had always been her favourite.

The days were growing longer, and that should have been a good thing. More daylight was supposed to make you feel better. The knot at her centre and the feeling that everything was falling away from her stopped that happening, though. That was the thing they didn’t understand.

She didn’t want to be this serious about everything. She remembered a time when she was flippant and sarcastic and ripped the piss out of others, too. Her skin had been less thin back then. She also remembered a time when getting up and leaving the house and working through the day wasn’t such a chore. It didn’t help that she got home at night and he was either slobbing on the sofa or out.

Last night, for example. She had trudged up the road to the house, feeling dull and grey. ’Frowdy,’ she had thought, possibly inventing a word. ‘Frowdy like a brown nylon dress.’

She had seen the flicker of the television through the living room window. He was home.

She had let herself into the house.

“I’m home,” she called out.

“’Lo, love,” he had shouted back through the living room door.

The cat had come stretching from the kitchen, stopping just in front of her and falling into the dog stretch. She had bent down and picked her up, then carried her through to the kitchen with her.

He had risen from the settee and shuffled into the kitchen behind her.

“Shall we get take-away tonight? I just fancy a curry,” he had said.

“Sure. Whatever,” she had replied, feeling weighed down by his presence.

He had taken the menu for the Indian take-away off the fridge and gone back through to the living room.

She had gone upstairs to change out of her work clothes. Hanging her suit up in the wardrobe, she had caught sight of the outfit she was wearing to the wedding. It was a beautiful skirt in dip-dyed silk that she had bought on impulse one miserable Saturday while he had been at the football. She had bought the top later, when she knew they were going to this wedding. She wondered when she would ever wear it again after this weekend. She had sighed, then, and hung it back up, then pulled on her jeans and a t-shirt.

He had looked up at her from the TV as she went into the living room.

“All right, love?”

“Yes, just a bit tired. You?”

“Great. Work okay?”

“Not bad.”

They had lapsed into silence.

‘All over Manchester,’ she had thought, ‘couples just like me and him will be having equally scintillating conversations.’ The thought of her monotonous life echoing the monotonous lives around her depressed her.

“Is your suit ready for tomorrow?” she had asked him, nagging, like a mother.

“Yeah. It’s hung up in the wardrobe as usual.” he had paused at that point to take in the antics of the American couple on the TV screen, laughing inordinately. “I could do with a shirt ironing, though,” he had continued.

She had got up and gone back upstairs, pulled a shirt from the pile of clean laundry and taken it downstairs. She had set up the ironing board, filled the iron with water and plugged it in, then decided that she might as well make an evening of it, so went back upstairs to bring the rest of the clean laundry down.

He had lolled there on the sofa, snorting at the American couple’s zany antics. She had pulled his shirt onto the ironing board and begun ironing the back.

Then the doorbell rang.

“That’ll be the curry,” he had said, showing no signs of movement.

She had moved towards the door, pausing in the hall by her bag to pull out her purse. She had opened the door. The delivery man had grinned at her.

“Chicken mirchi, chicken moglai, saag aloo, Bombay aloo, Keema naan, Peshwari naan and two onion bhaji, love?” he’d said, reading from a piece of paper.

“That’s right,” she’d said, reaching out a £20-note with one hand and taking the bag with the other.

“It’s £20.55, love.”

Apologising, she had opened her purse again and extracted the change.

“Here you go.”

The delivery man had taken and pocketed the cash.

“Thanks, love! Enjoy your meal,” he called over his shoulder as he made his way back down the path.

She had served up all of his chicken mirchi. She did not know how he could stomach his curries that hot. She had placed his Keema naan on one side plate, the onion bhajis on another and loaded them all onto a tray. Then she had taken a spoon and a fork from the cutlery drawer, added them to the tray and carried it through to the living room.

He was channel flicking. He heaved himself up from his semi-prone position on the settee and took the tray from her.

“Ah, cheers, love. That looks magnificent.” He had begun eating straight away, looking at the TV all the time.

She had gone back into the kitchen and served up half of her chicken moglai and tore off half of the Peshwari naan. She put her plates onto a tray and poured herself a glass of water. Then she had gone back into the living room to join him.

When they had both finished eating, she had gone back to the ironing and he had returned to his semi-prone lolling on the sofa.

She had finished ironing his shirt and taken it upstairs, holding it carefully to avoid creasing it again. She had found a hanger and put it in the wardrobe next to his suit. Then she had sat on the edge of the bed. Sometimes she just wanted to cry until she could not breathe.

She had gone back downstairs and had looked at the laundry still to be ironed.

“I can’t face doing this tonight,” she’d said. “I think I might just go to bed.”

Silence from him.

“Night, then.”

She had climbed the stairs for the fifth time that evening and got ready for bed.

Now, her glass went up and down from table to mouth and back again too many times to count. Small sips, and she was still drinking faster than the rest of them.

She finished the drink and stood up. She picked up her coat and shrugged it on. She picked up her bag and put it over her shoulder. She squeezed past the person she had been sitting next to and walked out of the bar. She didn’t even bother to say goodbye. She doubted they would have noticed if she had.

She caught the train home and walked the twenty minutes from the station to her house trying not to think about the evening she had ahead of her. She didn’t want to think about what came after it, either. He wouldn’t be in, she knew that for a fact. Not on a Friday night.

She let herself into the house. She was right. He was out and there was a message on the answering machine.

"It’s me. I’m stopping out for a few beers with the lads. See you later."

The cat was weaving around her legs. Her bowl was empty. She picked her up, and she nuzzled into her neck, purring. Then she looked up at her and licked her nose.

She put the cat down and put some food into her bowl. The cat wolfed the food, purring all the time. She stooped to stroke her. She had to get out of this existence.

She opened a cupboard door, seeking inspiration. She was too tired to cook properly. She pulled out a tin of tuna and took the salad cream out of the fridge. As she opened the tin the cat went mad.

She took a saucer from another cupboard and forked some of the tuna onto it. She put it down on the floor and the cat almost fell into it.

She mixed some salad cream into the rest of the tuna in a bowl and boiled the kettle. That was a tip she'd taken ages ago from Ready Steady Cook - the one that had married the show's presenter had said he always boiled his pasta water in a kettle first to save time. It was probably untrue. It probably took just as long to boil a full kettle of water as it did to boil water in a pan.

She took the packet of pasta from the cupboard and, filling the saucepan with the water from the kettle, added a couple of handfuls to the pan. The cat had licked the saucer clean and was now busily washing her face.

The kitchen was filthy. She couldn't remember when it had last been cleaned properly. She was conducting a secret war of attrition which she knew was doomed to failure. He never did any cleaning up. Most of the stains and congealed blobs of food were his. She had decided that she wasn't cleaning either. Except every so often, while she was washing up, she would give the surfaces a quick wipe so that at least the build up of decaying matter was slowed down. They’d been together since sharing a house at University, and their attitude to each other had barely changed. She sighed and wondered when maturity was going to enter into their relationship.

She took her pasta into the living room and turned the TV on. She had missed the first half of Coronation Street. The adverts were on and she was just in time to be regaled with scenes of Ireland. It looked lovely. Shame they had that woman from the Cranberries wailing all over it. It would be nice to go to Ireland, she thought. Maybe Dublin. Even for a weekend. Or forever. She stopped eating, struck by a sudden thought. She could leave. Just pack up and go. She could book a flight tomorrow, check into a hotel and never come back. She carried on eating. It was a thought.

She was in bed when he got back from the pub. She was not asleep but she pretended to be asleep. He shuffled around the room, stinking of beer, trying to undress in the dark. Finally he dumped himself onto the bed and fell asleep almost instantly, snores rumbling deeply. She curled herself away from him and tried to bury her head in the pillow. She stared at the darkness around her, bang awake now and plotting her escape. Tomorrow she would go to the travel agents in town and she would book herself a flight to Dublin. She would worry about what to do next when she got there.

Decision made, she settled back into her duvet cocoon and fell into sleep.

At 2.30 a.m. she woke up. She would not be able to go into town and book a flight tomorrow. She was going with him to his cousin’s wedding tomorrow. There was no way she could get out of that, especially not as she had forced him to come with her to the out of town shopping centre on the hunt for a jacket for her wedding outfit. A jacket that had cost her £65 and was more of a cardigan really. She chewed the inside of her lip. On Monday she would go to the travel agents and book a flight to Dublin.

There would be the usual hints and questions at the wedding about when she and Gareth were going to be tying the knot. She was not sure that she could cope.

She knew that she wasn’t going to sleep for the rest of the night. She knew that she would be tired and uncivil at the wedding as a result. She thought about the medicine cabinet and the stash of migraine tablets and other headache tablets and painkillers galore that she could chop up and swig down with a good shot of cooking sherry. She thought about it, and then she got up.

She went downstairs. She walked past the bathroom on the way. She didn’t want to kill herself. That wasn’t the solution. There was a better answer than that.

She went downstairs and she opened the top drawer of the sideboard in the living room. She took her grandfather’s war pistol from the drawer, the one he had left to her in his will, because she had been interested in it when she was a little girl. Interested in it, and in him, and his stories of the war. She took the pistol, and she took the small stash of bullets, that he had always told her he shouldn’t have kept.

It was simple enough to load the pistol. It was even more simple to go back up the stairs and fire two shots (to be certain) into the back of his sleeping head.

She didn’t need to go to the wedding now. She thought she might drive to Anglesey and catch the ferry over the Ireland. Ireland seemed like a place where a girl could disappear.

© J R Hargreaves, 2006

Time Is A Construct

The movement of the sun across the sky (the movement of the earth around the sun). The change of the seasons. The measurement of time from a fixed point of longitude chosen by the greatest astronomers of their day (a construct in itself: 24 hours in two 12 hour segments; a.m., p.m.; night and day) for their own geographical convenience.

None of that mattered when her body was telling her to be awake while everyone else was sleeping. Well, not everyone, obviously. The people in Australia probably weren’t sleeping. It was still too early for them to sleep. Like it was too late for her to be awake.

The time on the clock kept moving forward, faster than she wanted it to go. Hours were whizzing by in a matter of seconds. Or so it seemed.

She tried different tricks to get to sleep: hot milk and honey; a slug of rum; playing gentle music; lying in the dark thinking about waterfalls and meadows. None of it worked.

Sleep was the best part of the day for her. It always had been. He had laughed at her for her ability to sleep. She had tried to explain that it was delicious. The gentle decline from consciousness to repose, like a movement in a concerto – drawing you from one moment to another without being aware of it.

He hadn’t got it.

That’s why this insomnia was so cruel. Her body was physically tired, but her mind kept racing on. And now, it was almost as though she was afraid to go to sleep, because then the night would be upon her and the morning would follow soon after. Too soon. Especially at the rate the hands on the clock were carving out their passage through the seconds, minutes and hours.

She kept the lamp on by the bed. There was no-one else here to disturb. No-one to sigh, or tut, or pull the covers over his head in mock annoyance (was it mock annoyance?) while she sat reading.

She sat and let her thoughts chase each other, round and round in circles. She listened to the planes drifting over, on their way to the airport, coming in to land. Circles and circles, round and round. That’s what life was all about. Circles. Non-linear. Like you find a job that you're good at, but it doesn't pay the bills, so you take a job that you could do hog-tied and watch your ambitions shrivel, like a virgin spinster who has never been touched and no longer expects it, becoming instead a prune where once she was a cherry. Circles and circles, round and round, on and on. Like you find the person you were meant to be with, that you fit with like spoons in a drawer, and then he has to go and die.

Men had lain in that bed beside her, since he’d upped and died and she’d upped and left. They had lain rigid and still, listening to the planes going overhead, but listening also to her near silent crying. Not knowing if they were supposed to put their arms around her, ask her what was wrong, or if that would be an invasion of her privacy. They probably didn't even want to put their arms around her and ask her what was wrong. That wasn’t what they were there for. Neither she nor they pretended that.

She sat there and remembered, drifting deeper along that channel of grief that was the central river of her existence now, that was submerged deep below her surface and whose source was in a different city. Though she had not known that at the time, when she was there. The knowledge of its source came later, when sorrow and weeping had begun to swell the stream that was the beginning of grief.

She sat in that bed – not their bed. This bed had never been their bed. Once he was gone, there had been no point in staying there. She had left and come home. She didn’t want to stay in a place that was all about him.

In her mind, though, it was their bed. She was sitting on the edge of her side of the bed and looking at the pillow where his head used to lie. The place where he had laid his head and slept and where she knew he would never lay his head again. She sat and stared, inwardly grieving as the Dublin traffic pounded the street below their bedroom window, and he was not yet dead. But nor was he there, living, breathing, sleeping in their bed.

She had not been able to move or think, she had only been able to gaze blankly at that hollow in the pillow. He was gone already and she had to keep on living.

That night, she had not been able to sleep. She could not bear to lie down in that bed on her own. It had been dawn when, dreamlike, she had moved into the spare room and lain fully clothed on the single bed, sleeping with her eyes open. She had stared at the white wall, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, thinking of nothing but how he was not there. Numb and simultaneously raging, her grief a secret molten layer waiting to erupt. She had lain there, curled on her side, keeping her eyes wide open. The double bed in the room next door had seemed miles away from her, on a different planet. His narrow body, plumbed with tubes and pipes and wired to bleeping beeping machines in a narrow hospital bed, had been a monochrome image in her mind's eye. His narrow body would never lie warm and relaxed beside her again and she had to go on living.

The shrillness of the telephone's ring had woken her later that morning. The hospital might just as well have told her she was a widow already. Instead the voice told her that a bed had been put into the side ward her husband was on - she could stay with him until the end.

Instinct had told her she should thank the stranger on the other end of the phone, even though she was far off feeling gratitude. She had wanted to scream, "My husband is dying" but she knew there would be no-one to hear her. No-one would listen or want to hear that news.

She had been told once, by her mother, that love was all you needed. But love hadn’t kept her safe, hadn’t protected her from harm. Love of a country had ripped him away from her. Love of a cause had taken him out that night, and with his nimble slender fingers he had put wires together, bedding them in explosive, setting the bomb, setting the trap.

She had gone that day from their Dublin flat up north to the hospital in the border town where he had been taken. She had sat with him until the end, while yet another bed she could not sleep in had stood useless on that side ward. Time had stretched on but, at the same time, it had foreshortened – giving the correct impression of form and proportion.

And when it was over, when he was finally gone, and that unholy war had claimed another victim and made her a widow, she had come home.

So long ago now, and yet only like yesterday.

Just like the start of this night that was now turning back into day.

The measurement of time meant nothing to her now.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Be Careful What You Wish For

He had the wrong hands. Murderer’s thumbs, flat at the ends. He had the wrong hands and she could not forgive him that fact.

She looked at them every opportunity she could. Big, meaty chunks with short fat fingers and thumbs that looked as though they’d been caught in a vice for days.

She longed for elegance, pined for grace, yearned for fingers long and slender and gentle.

His hands had none of those qualities.

It was the only thing about him that was wrong. Unforgivably so, she meant. There were other things, but they were all things she could find it within herself to gloss over, to forget, to let go of. Not his hands, though. It wasn’t even as though they were craftsman’s hands. Not sturdy and manly and full of strength. Not possessed of a beauty of their own. They were just big. And wrong. Even a boxer’s hands could be said to be prettier than his.

She did not know what to do about it. When he touched her, she tried to think of a different pair of hands, with more elegant fingers, and less brutal thumbs. And then she felt disloyal. It wasn’t his hands that she loved him for. It was the other things about him that she loved. His wit, his eyes, his smile, the things he came out with that both infuriated and delighted her. But somehow it was always his hands that she thought about.

The more she tried not to, the harder it became to stop. The more she pretended that it did not matter, the more often she thought about them. Such big hands. Such big thumbs.

She would be talking to him, about the most inconsequential thing, or about the most important thing. They would be having a conversation. Then suddenly she would think about them. Or he would make a gesture that brought them into view. From that point on she would be trying to see them again, thinking about them. His big meaty hands with the murderer’s thumbs.

You’ve heard the phrase “a thumbnail sketch”? You could fit Constable’s painting of the haywain onto one of his thumbnails.

She berated herself daily, hourly, minute by minute by second by tiny increments of time for thoughts like that one. Was she really so shallow? Really such a body fascist? It would appear that she was.

There were times when she wanted to cut his hands off. She really thought that looking at his severed wrists would be preferable to seeing those hands every day.

She wondered about whether it was possible to pay some unscrupulous surgeon to carry out a hand transplant. Maybe, if he had a hand transplant, his own hands would come back, and those murderer’s thumbs would press into her throat and choke the life out of her. Like in The Beast With Five Fingers. Or maybe, if the surgeon was unscrupulous enough, he would attach those hands to the arms of some injured innocent, and the hands would track her down that way.

She watched too many bad horror films.

Those hands. And those thumbs. She wondered why. She played with the bread knife for a moment, then put it down and picked up the plate with her sandwich on it. She took it over to the table and opened up the paper. She began to read. All the horror in the world, and she wanted to cut off his hands with a bread knife.

She was glad that the children hadn’t inherited his hands. Mainly because they were girls, but also because she didn’t know how she would have coped with three pairs of murderer’s thumbs to avoid looking at. But the girls’ hands were normal. It was just his that weren’t.

The phone rang, and she put down her half-eaten sandwich. She walked through to the hall and answered the phone.

“Mrs Main?” said the voice on the line.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s the foreman at the factory. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible accident. Your husband was cleaning one of the big machines, and the safety switch wasn’t properly engaged. I’m afraid his arm got caught in the mechanism and he’s lost one of his hands at the wrist.”

“Goodness,” she said. “Which hand?”

There was silence for a moment as the foreman tried to think of a response.

“I’m not sure, Mrs Main,” he said, “but he’s been taken to the Infirmary. They’re going to try to reattach it.”

“Goodness,” she said again. “Technology’s marvellous, isn’t it? Thanks for letting me know.”

She hung up, and returned to her sandwich and the paper.

Before she resumed reading, she looked out of the window at the sunlit garden and the birds flitting from branch to branch of next door’s tree.

She must be more careful in future. More careful of what she wished for.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

So Far Untitled

Sound waves bounce and wiggle. A certain pitch, a certain frequency, a certain ratio of noises, and she can’t hear properly what is being said. She smiles and nods and hopes it is the right thing. Blank looks every now and then, and conversation stuttering to a close, tell her she has missed the point.

But the music is everything, with its depth and its range, and so what if this is the thing that has brought her to this point? What is making conversation, in comparison with hearing notes on a page, or inside someone’s mind, make the leap to reality?

If she thinks of the things that might have been said, the things she might have missed, she could go mad with not knowing which opportunities have been lost. If she thinks like that, it’s only one step to thinking about all the conversations she’s never had, all the memories she won’t ever gather or remember, all the paths she’ll never walk down.

She walks down a path now, the same path she walks down every day, from the front of her house to the street. There are moments in her life, she knows, when it is convenient to not hear, or to mishear, or to otherwise twist the truth of the sounds falling against her eardrum.

The sky is high today, and there are smells in the air saying spring is on its way. There are buds of vibrant vivid green on the trees and on some bushes, and the grass on her lawn is beginning to look like it might need a haircut.

Halfway along the street, she remembers. But she carries on walking.

Halfway across the city, he remembers too.

Is this a love story? She no longer knows. She no longer believes in love, or the emotions that masquerade as love. This feeling she has is so far untitled, and most definitely unrequited. There is nothing between them but smoke and mirrors, suppositions and game play. A lot is at stake, and at the same time nothing. A shabby pretence at hoping.

She has the feeling that she needs to leave. The feeling that a moment has ended and it is time to move on. But she does not want that moment to end, and she does not want to move on. She wants, more than anything she has ever wanted, more than career, and security, and stability, and control, the feeling that she is pinned.

The tears fall uncalled as she walks along the street. She keeps her head bowed. That way, should she encounter anyone walking in the opposite direction, her tears won’t be so apparent. She is ashamed of them. Ashamed of the weakness they represent. She is the strong one, the resilient one, the one who has carved out a life for herself without recourse to the strength of others, without the need for anyone’s support but her own steely will.

And that, she knows, is bollocks of the highest order.

Her gut is hollow from the lack of food and the excess of alcohol. Her skin is waxen from the lack of sleep and nutrition. She stops the tears and wipes away the remains of lacrymosity that stain her face.

Lacrymosity. There’s a word. She mocks her own thoughts as she walks and tries not to think the other thoughts that are playing on her mind.

So many clichés today in her head. So much emptiness.

Halfway across the city, she knows he is not thinking of her.

Halfway to the station, she is thinking about last night. That space filled with noise, and chatter, and music, and all her ears can really hear is the music. Everything else is lost, especially if it’s at the wrong pitch. Too low, too soft, too abstract. She can’t hear anything these days, not if there is something bigger demanding to be heard from a PA system that she sits or stands too close to. You’re not alive, though, unless the bass threatens to replace your heartbeat and send you crashing.

She knows that there were moments last night when she appeared bored, or rude, or vaguely stupid. But there are only so many times you can say “Excuse me?”, and usually it’s not even worth trying. It’s better just to avoid conversation.

So she nodded and smiled, and she knows that it wasn’t the right thing. But last night there was never going to be a right thing.

Her thoughts today are not right. They are not straight. She is thrown, off balance, off trajectory. There’s a richness to this feeling that she loves, and yet she knows it is not right. To feel so alive, and yet to feel nothing.

There is so much about this that is not right.

The paths and conversations that she did not cross, did not have. The times in the past that their paths must have crossed, and the conversations, what of them? When you are in the same room as another person, someone you do not yet know you will know, how can you imagine that there are conversations that you are not having?

She ties herself up in knots. All these thoughts about nothing that will never exist. She sighs, and realises that sleep would be a good thing.

She reaches the station. She isn’t sure how, but she is there, and there are people waiting for the train. She stands close to the edge of the platform, and wonders whether, if she were to fall onto the tracks, people would be angry, or shocked, or just confused by her action.

She would never know, in all likelihood, and the thought of that oblivion makes her smile.

She hears the muffled voice through the tannoy make an announcement. Indistinct because of the poor quality of the equipment, not because of any damage she has done to her eardrums. Still, she guesses that a train will be arriving soon. There’s a whistle-hum in the rails that tells her that another, faster train is coming. One that will not stop.

Ultimately, she did not know that the people on the platform were both angry and shocked, and that some were even confused by her action. She did not know, because she did not hear them. She had already left.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Unless

Sound waves bounce and wiggle. A certain pitch, a certain frequency, a certain ratio of noises, and she can’t hear properly what is being said. She smiles and nods and hopes it is the right thing. Blank looks every now and then, and conversation stuttering to a close, tell her she has missed the point.

But the music is everything, with its depth and its range, and so what if this is the thing that has brought her to this point? What is making conversation in comparison with hearing notes on a page or inside someone’s mind make the leap to reality?

If she thinks of the things that might have been said, the things she might have missed, she could go mad with not knowing which opportunities have been lost. If she thinks like that, it’s only one step to thinking about all the conversations she’s never had, all the memories she won’t ever gather or remember, all the paths she’ll never walk down.

She walks down a path now, the same path she walks down every day, from the front of her house to the street. There are moments in her life, she knows, when it is convenient to not hear, or to mishear, or to otherwise twist the truth of the sounds falling against her eardrum.

The sky is high today, and there are smells in the air saying spring is on its way. There are buds of vibrant vivid green on the trees and on some bushes, and the grass on her lawn is beginning to look like it might need a haircut.

Halfway along the street, she remembers. But she carries on walking.

Halfway across the city, he remembers too.

She carries on walking, but her mind is on something else, something other than walking to the train station. She has left it behind in the house. The thing she is supposed to bring with her. Accidentally or deliberately, she’s not entirely sure. She carries on walking and doesn’t know what she should do. She should turn round and go back for it, carry out her side of the bargain, meet him as planned and get this finished once and for all. But she carries on walking. Her legs won’t let her stop.

She’s warm now, and she wishes she had fewer layers on. She walks along the main road as far as the next street on the left, then she turns back on herself, walks the triangle round, and goes back to her front door.

She stands there, like an idiot, for some reason unable to put her key in the lock. She doesn’t want to get it. She doesn’t want to go. She’s being stupid, and she knows it. It isn’t as though she can just ring him up and make an alternative arrangement. He needs it today. Yesterday would have been too early, tomorrow will be too late.

If she doesn’t take it to him, there will be a different end, and one that she will have no control over. At least with this end, she knows what to expect.

She hears a voice, suddenly, to her left, and she turns to see her neighbour leaning around the side of her porch.

“Are you okay, love?” she asks. “You’ve been standing there for a while. Have you lost your key?”

She smiles and tells her that she hasn’t lost her key. She waves the bunch of keys at her as evidence of their continued safe-keeping in her possession. She says that she’s fine, she’d just forgotten something. She lets herself into the house.

Her neighbour continues leaning around the side of her porch for a few minutes more, in case there are further developments. Then, disappointed, she goes back inside her own house.

She stands in her hall for a minute or two, to give her neighbour the chance to get bored of hanging around, waiting for something to gossip about. She makes a decision, and she starts to leave the house again. Then she stops. Again. She didn’t used to be like this. She used to be firm in her decisions, and precise in her actions. Somewhere she lost that precision, along with her direction.

He would be on his way now. She had already missed one train, and would probably manage to miss another, and consequence would follow consequence, but at least she would be there eventually.

She goes to the cupboard and she pulls it out, heavy in its wrapper. This isn’t the first time she has done this. She hopes each time that it will be the last, but this has been going on now for 19 years, and she can’t see it ending any time soon.

Unless. Unless. Unless...

She puts it into her bag, and for the second time today she leaves the house. She knows as she opens the front gate, steps through to the street, and closes it behind her, that her neighbour is watching from behind her living room curtains. She knows that her life is alien to her. Why would anyone who wasn’t born round here choose to live on this suburban street?

Because it was far away from the places she could be found, was why. Far away and still under their noses.

She walked at a normal pace towards the station. Twenty minutes it would take to get there, and now she didn’t know what time a train would arrive, or whether she would get there in the backwash of a departure. She does not hurry, there is no point. She is already late, and if he needs it so badly, then he will still be there. If he doesn’t, he will be gone, and this might well be over. One way or another.

It feels heavy. They always do, but today this one feels heavier than the others. She walks up the main road, past houses she thought about living in until she found her perfectly nondescript bolt hole. She cuts across to the A6 down one of the side streets cut in half by bollards to stop people using it as a rat run shortcut. She walks and walks and reaches the station. The ticket office is closed, and she goes onto the platform via the side path, under the bridge. A man is standing at the edge of the platform. She wonders whether, if she pushed him, he would fall easily onto the tracks, and if he would be angry or just confused by her action. She doesn’t push him, though, and he speaks to her.

“Just missed one, love.”

She smiles and carries her heavy load to the shelter. No Metro News left at this time of the day. She sits on one of the cold metal benches and tries to work out how long it will be until the next train.

Her phone rings in the depths of her bag. She knows which number will be showing on screen. She doesn’t have to take the phone from her bag to discover that fact. She sits, knees together, huddled in her coat, her bag now resting against her belly. Her phone rings on.

Of course, there is a simple way to end all this. She tucks her chin into her scarf and leans forward slightly, curling her body around her bag that is resting against her belly as though she is carrying an unborn child. Her hands are in her pockets. She feels no maternal instinct for the bag or its contents. Just as she feels none for the thing inside her.

She didn’t used to be like this.

She thinks of the way she might end all this. Domino effect, the cascade of events that would follow, one toppling into the other, and her above it all, beyond its grasp. She smiles. It would be good to be the first domino to fall, the one to cause the clatter.

She looks at the man on the platform, still standing close to the edge. He is looking down the tracks, down towards the south, as though doing this will make the train arrive sooner. She knows that looking down the tracks doesn’t make anything happen sooner. It just makes your eyes ache.

She looks away from him, and across to the other platform. The rails are whistle-humming, meaning a train is about to come through. There’s a man standing on the other platform. He is looking at her. She looks at him. They are too far away to make real eye contact, but they are both, without a doubt, looking. She cocks her head to the right. He does the same. She cocks hers to the left. The same. She sits head forward and stares at him. He turns away and walks further down his platform. The train that was threatening its arrival through the rails hurtles through the station, and when it is gone, so is the man on the other platform.

She looks up towards Manchester, along the platform, to see where he can be. The train went through too quickly for him to just disappear like that. He is no longer there, though.

An announcement is made over the tannoy. This time she can’t hear it properly, not because her ears have lost their accuracy, but because the tannoy is useless. She takes it to mean that there will be a train for her to get on soon. Or there will be a train for the other platform. Or there is a delay. Something. She does not move from where she is sitting. She just sits on, knees together, hands in pockets, chin tucked into scarf, her body bowed over the bag that rests against her belly.

She doesn’t hear him coming. She doesn’t hear the whisper as he pulls the gun from his jacket pocket. She doesn’t hear, see, think or feel anything.

There was more than one way that this could end, you see. More than one way for the first domino to fall.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

The Last Time

She hummed as she cleared away dishes and cups and glasses from the table. He started to sing along, the wrong words, and she changed her tune to accommodate him.

He sat at the head of the kitchen table, watching her float about the room, starting on the washing up. Their golden-haired daughter sat close to him, apparently enraptured by her parents. She sat there and looked at him, the man who had helped bring her into being, and nobody could say what it was she was thinking, but the look on her face was love.

She paused in her labours to look at them, her husband, her child, and she absentmindedly twisted the wedding ring round on her finger until she had moved it up past the knuckle and off.

She walked over to her daughter, crouched down, and held out the ring.

"Will you keep this safe for mum, sweetheart, while she does the washing up?" she said.

Her daughter nodded solemnly, taking the ring with her five-year-old fingers and wrapping it inside her tiny fist.

She stood up and he was smiling at her. She smiled back and thought how wonderful it had been, knowing him.

"I'm becoming a little obsessed with your bottom lip," he said. "I have this strange desire to kiss it."

She kissed the top of her daughter's curly head. "Your daddy's a funny man," she told her, and ran her fingers through the child's golden curls.

"Is there a cure, do you think?" he asked, as she went to the sink and plunged her hands into the hot, sudsy water.

"A cure for what?" she answered, out through the kitchen window, out away from this house and into the world outside.

"A cure for obsession with someone's bottom lip," he said.

"I don't think so," she replied, taking a plate from the water, washing it clean, then rinsing it. "I think it's probably hopeless to try."

"Hopeless? You mean there's nothing that can be done?" he said.

She washed and rinsed another plate.

"I think the best thing for you to do is to not look at the lip in question," she said.

"I can't see it now," he replied, "but I'm afraid I can still picture it."

The third plate from lunch was washed and rinsed, and the three plates sat together, stacked on the dish drainer, gleaming under the fluorescent light. The cups and glasses joined them, then the cutlery. She started to put the pans into the water. Her hands were scorched pink and she looked at her wedding finger, the way it was slightly waisted where the ring usually sat.

She looked over her shoulder at her daughter.

"Are you keeping mummy's ring safe?" she said.

The child nodded and showed her the fist, which would be hot and sweaty by now, her ring tightly clenched within it. Her daughter's other hand was on the table, her fingers tapping close to her father's arm, but not touching it. Her tongue was pushed firmly into her left cheek.

"You're a good girl," she told her daughter, and turned her face back to the window.

"Do you want me to dry up? Make a bit of space?" he asked.

"If you come over here, you'll only look at the lip again, and then where will we be?" she said.

"True," he said, "you caught me. I only wanted to see your bottom lip again. To check if it's the same as I remember it."

"It is," she said. "There's really no need to check."

She rinsed the last of the pans clear of suds and balanced it on the drainer.

"There," she said. "Done."

She dried her hands and turned around. Her daughter's right hand was still tapping its fingers next to her father's arm. Her tongue had left its refuge in her cheek, and she was examining the wedding ring as though it were rare treasure.

"Time to give mummy her ring back," he said, not looking at the child.

The girl looked up at her.

"Oh, let her look after it a little longer," she said to him. She didn't want to put it back on just yet. She was allowing her finger to enjoy its nakedness.

He stood up and came over to where she was standing, and took her in his arms. He kissed her on the bottom lip, and she let him.

"O fabulous bottom lip," he sighed, "I am so besotted with you."

They stood there together. Her arms had gone up automatically to return his embrace, and they maintained the pose beyond his kiss. There was a sound like a coin being spun on a wooden surface, and their curly blonde daughter wriggled her way into the centre of the embrace, wrapping her arms around her mother's legs. So now they both had hold of her, and now she knew.

The ring sat on the kitchen table, and she knew.

This was the last time that this would happen.

© J R Hargreaves 2006