Nothing

There’s blood on your hands and you don’t know why. You stare at it for a heartbeat and then you realise. The blood is from his pocket. You put your hand back inside and find something sharp and slightly sticky, something you hadn’t wanted to acknowledge was there before. Your heart is pounding, the pulse in your neck throbbing, and you pull out the knife.

This isn’t what you had been looking for. You hold it in your hand as though it’s a fish, or a piece of spaceship, something alien, foreign, unrecognisable. Then you bend at the knees, your back straight, your eyes still on the knife, and you place it gently down on the floor at your feet. Straightening up again, you look at his jacket hanging on its coat hook in the hall. Thick brushed cotton, almost velvet but more dense. You move your hand towards it, as if to stroke its pelt, then remember the blood. Instead, you put your hand back into the pocket a third time and begin to pull out pieces of paper. A tube ticket. You haven’t been to London since last summer, can he really not have emptied his pockets since then? You check the date. Two months ago. He was there two months ago, but when? A cinema ticket. A cloakroom ticket. A Glasgow underground ticket with a phone number scrawled in turquoise ink on the back. None of these pieces of paper make any sense, and none of them is the thing you are looking for. Although, you don’t really know what it is you are looking for. Some sort of evidence.

As if the blood isn’t enough.

You put the tickets back and turn your attention to the other pocket. The knife sits on the floor at your feet. Your feet are encased in kitten-heeled, round-toed black leather, shoes with a scarlet lining that clip as you walk, shoes with pink orchids painted across the front.

His other pocket turns up nothing.

You stare down at the knife at your feet, then look at the blood that is still clinging in smears to your hand, in spite of having rubbed against the linings of both pockets.

You hadn’t realised that you were the going-through-pockets, snooping type. You wonder whether, if it turned out he had a secret diary, you’d sit down on the bed to read that. You wonder whether it would be you that you would be looking for, or evidence of whoever the other one is.

You’ve never been this curious before. You’ve never thought it mattered.

What did you think you would find, when you first walked into the hall from the kitchen and saw his jacket on the coat hook? What impulse sent you to rummage through his pockets, knowing he wasn’t in the house? You look down at the knife. It certainly wasn’t that.

You walk back along the hall, into the kitchen, and you wash your hands at the sink, removing every last trace of that blood that isn’t yours and surely isn’t his. You won’t allow your mind to question whose it might be. You turn, and take a piece of kitchen towel from the roll, then a couple more, and go back into the hall.

You pick up the knife and wrap it in the kitchen towel. Your black linen pencil skirt has no pockets, but you feel as though you want to put the knife into a pocket. Keep it with you. Away from him. Instead, you open the drawer of your grandmother’s oak telephone table that sits under a mirror to the right of the coat hooks, and you push the knife in its swaddling clothes inside, as far back as you can make it go.

A wisp of hair falls down from your French pleat and brushes your cheek. You look up and into the mirror to brush it back into place and you do not recognise the woman who is looking back at you. There is a blankness to her expression, as though she is waiting for understanding to tell her face what to do. Her face is a pale oval beneath dark hair, above the black of her cotton blouse. It seems as though she should be you. You leave the stray hair where it is.

You are still staring into the mirror when he opens the front door and steps into the hall.

“Hello,” he says. “Your hair looks nice like that. Been to have it done?”

“No,” you say, and touch your cheek gently where the fallen hair is lying.

He hangs his heavy overcoat up, covering the jacket, and he drops his keys onto the telephone table, giving you a squeeze round the waist in passing. He walks on past you, into the kitchen, and you hear him open the fridge.

So normal. So innocent. So unknown.

You hear him pop open a beer and he walks through the dining room into the living room. Directly behind you, through the wall against which the stairs climb, he is sitting on the sofa.

You look at the woman in the mirror. She looks back at you.

He calls through to you, “What are you doing standing there, anyway?”

You and the woman break eye contact. “Nothing,” you say, smoothing your skirt. “Just fixing my hair.”

© J R Hargreaves 2006