Night & Day

She’s running. She’s running so fast that her lungs are burning, but she isn’t running fast at all. She’s running through gardens, over hedges and fences, along streets that are lit eerily by street light that penetrates the dull grey of the morning. She can see her feet moving, she can see her chest heaving, she can hear someone behind her, breathing deeply. It feels as though the person is close, as though he (or she, but she knows it’s a he) is breathing down her neck. But at the same time, it feels as though he is lagging far behind her.

She can’t afford to slow her pace. She runs into a display outside a greengrocer’s. For some reason the crates of fruit and vegetables are penned in behind that orange netting you find on building sites. Her feet become tangled in the netting and the crates. The teenage girl who is setting out the crates smiles at her encouragingly, her shalwar kameez rippling in the night breeze.

Is it night, or is it dawn? The sky makes her think that it’s night. She tries to speak to the girl, but her chest is still heaving from having to run, and she can’t get any words out. The girl continues to smile encouragingly. She doesn’t speak either. She merely pushes a crate out of the way and holds back the netting.

Free of the display, she runs on, her breath raw and ragged in her throat, burning and hurting with the coldness of the air she tries to gasp into her lungs.

She hears him drawing closer behind her, but he is still far away. Urgency spurs her on. People appear on the doorsteps of houses, to watch her running along their street. The women stand with arms folded, the men holding steaming mugs of tea. They all look the same.

She longs to stop running, longs to sit down somewhere. She longs for the sun to rise, but time doesn’t seem to be passing, no matter how fast she runs or how far she goes. The sky stays the same, and he is always the same distance behind her.

She wakes up. The room is dark. She feels hot. She puts a hand to her own forehead. It is cold and clammy.

She sits up slightly and takes a drink from the glass of water beside the bed. He stirs in his sleep.

A dream, then. She wonders what it is about. She hasn’t dreamt of being chased in a long time. Her last dream was about choosing beans in a supermarket and having her legs stroked by Niall. She tries not to think about Niall. It isn’t fair to Ray, who sleeps heavily beside her, his dark curls against the pillow, his strong body an arm-stretch away.

She looks at the clock. It’s 3.38 in the morning. She thinks of Niall. It’s inevitable. You tell yourself not to think of something, and it’s all you can think of.

Niall will be up, drinking, trying to write, trying to be the person he is, not knowing fully what that might be. Her laptop is on the floor beside the bed. She could switch it on. Ray sleeps so deeply that, these kinds of nights, when she is Insomnia’s bitch, she can read, she can surf, she can do a fucking dance on top of the wardrobe, and he sleeps through it all.

She loves Niall, but not in a way that anyone else understands. It isn’t a heart-pounding, palm-sweating, voice-trembling love. It isn’t giggles, and coy looks, and birds flying off into sunsets. She loves him, and she hates him.

She pulls the pillows up against the headboard, so that her shoulders are supported, and she thinks about that other dream. She remembers the way it felt, in dreamland, to have him stroke the length of her legs. The way he had smiled his usual smile, his eyes narrowed, and told her that he liked how smooth they were.

She closes her eyes. ‘Just zizzing’ her mother calls it. But suddenly it is morning and she is awoken by the smoke alarm’s shriek.

He is in the kitchen, cooking sausages. The grill pan is a deadly vat of animal fat that smokes and threatens to burn each time he uses it. He never cleans it, and she refuses to wash away his pig grease. The price she pays for this is wafting a towel underneath the smoke alarm, while he cooks on oblivious.

The benefits of being deaf. She knows he feels the vibrations of sound, because when she plays the piano at her parents’ house, he likes to stand with one hand on it, smiling at her. Night & Day is his favourite.

“Go on, mum,” he says with his grin. “Go on.”

Her boy, her man, her eight-year-old hero. Abandoned, along with her, by his dad the instant he realised his son wasn’t perfect. Abandoned to a one bedroomed flat and a shared bed. Soon she’ll have to think about making him a room of his own, sacrificing a share of the living room, perhaps.

They could live with her parents. The invitation is there. His parents feel so guilty about their son’s behaviour that they have offered to pay for a larger place for them. But she wants to be independent. She doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone. Having Ray, knowing Jimmy was unreliable, knowing he would have scarpered anyway eventually, Ray’s deafness just a convenient excuse, was her choice.

She has let the alarm shriek this morning. She doesn’t want to move from the bed.

Ray comes up the stairs with a fully laden tray. Breakfast. It must be Saturday, then. He grins at her as he comes into the room.

She pulls herself up enough to sign to him, “You set the smoke alarm off, Ray.”

“Sorry,” he says. Beautiful sound when he speaks. She is so proud of him that he can do that. Form the words with his mouth and make his voice work to fill the shapes with sound. She knows it makes other people uncomfortable, so that they laugh or they look away, but she thinks his voice is the most beautiful sound on the planet.

He puts the tray onto the bed, and she sits up properly. He gives her the cup of tea he has made for her, and the plate of toast with silver shred marmalade. They smile at each other. He sits on the edge of the bed, eating his sausage butty, drinking his glass of milk, looking at her and grinning every now and then.

Sure that he is looking at her properly, she says, “Come here.”

He grins and shakes his head. He knows what mum is up to. He wants to finish his breakfast and get ready. In half an hour, Paul and his son will ring the doorbell, and she’ll nod to Ray. Off he’ll go for a morning of playing football, leaving the house to her. Perhaps this morning she’ll clean out that filthy grill pan. Even though he claims that it makes the sausages and the bacon taste better, having all that molten fat spitting up at it from beneath.

She says again, "Come here.”

He grins again; shakes his head again. He doesn’t want to be hugged or have his curly mop untangled by her fingers. He doesn’t want to be groomed like he’s a monkey.

She gives in and drinks her tea.

“Mum,” he says.

“What?” she answers.

“This afternoon. Is it okay if I stay out and go back to Jaden’s after football?”

“Yeah,” she says. “What new playstation game has he got now?”

Ray grins, and names the latest game. It means nothing to her. He explains its rules and the tricks for bypassing them to her in intricate detail, half speaking, half signing when he can’t get the words out. She loves her boy, her man.

She looks at the clock. He needs to be getting ready to go.

“Are you ready?” she asks him.

He isn’t looking, so she hits the flat of her hand against the bed. The breakfast tray jumps slightly. He looks at her.

“Ready? It’s time to get ready,” she says.

He wolfs the last of his sandwich and drinks up his milk, then goes into the bathroom. She listens to him wash his face, clean his teeth. She wishes he would let her untangle his hair.

He reappears in the bedroom doorway. The doorbell rings, and she nods in its direction.

“Go on,” she says. “Have a good day. Tell Jaden’s dad to ring me if he wants me to pick you up.”

“See you, mum,” he says, and is off.

She closes her eyes again and waits for the flat door to open and bang closed again. She thinks about ringing Niall. She has the day to herself, after all. But 8 a.m. is an uncivilised hour to be ringing people on a Saturday.

She wishes that Ray liked Niall. She doesn’t think to wonder why he doesn’t. She doesn’t want to know why he doesn’t. Acknowledging his dislike will mean acknowledging why Niall isn’t right for her. It will mean telling herself why she hates him as much as loves him.

Ray has only met Niall once.

“He’s a prick, mum,” was what he’d said. She hadn’t even thought to ask him where he learned the word prick.

Ray liked Paul. He talked about him all the time. How cool he was. How he got Jaden all the stuff he wanted. How he treated Ray to stuff as well. Nothing major, nothing for her to feel she had to break Ray’s heart over by giving it back. Just enough for her to feel grateful that there was some man in the world who cared for her son.

She thought about Niall, and she picked up the phone. She rang his number. The answering service clicked in. She left him a message.

“Hi, it’s me. Ring me when you get up. I’ve got the day to myself.”

He knew what that meant. She knew that he probably wouldn’t call back, that he would tell her later that he’d been too busy. But she’d remembered the dream now, and she wanted to feel his hand against her skin.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006

Beetles

The sun comes out, but it is still cold enough to be February. They have turned the heating off because it’s summer now. It reminds her of childhood, and revising for exams wrapped in coat, gloves, scarf and blankets, sitting as close as possible, without burning, to the electric heater her mother would sneak into the room.

She walks across the site from her office block to the main building. The hallucinations are becoming more commonplace, and it is reality that seems increasingly strange these days.

Every morning she can’t believe that he is still sitting there at the breakfast table, as monosyllabic as ever; as small-eyed and indigestible.

Pass the butter and spread it thinly on the toast. No small talk, nothing but the rustle of newspaper pages being turned, and her army of helpers whispering in the background, plotting what tonight’s mode of operation would be.

She had enjoyed their manifestation two nights ago. An army of shiny black beetles, their legs ticking against the laminate flooring of the living room and hallway, translated to a susurration as they climbed the carpeted stairs and made their way to the bedroom.

All that was required of her was absolute stillness in the half dark of the night. The sulphur yellow of the street light shining through the curtains turning the darkness of the room an amber-brown, instead of the blackness she wanted. She would lie still and silent, trying not to laugh, as they came into the room and carried out their end.

That night, they had swarmed into the room and up onto the bed. She had been forced to place her hand over her mouth in order not to giggle. Her toes had curled with anticipation, and she felt adrenalin’s wriggle in her belly. The laugh brewed and threatened to erupt, but her hand kept it back.

Front after front of shiny black warrior had surged over the bed, their hard as nails legs digging into his face, leaving it pocked and shredded in places. Then they had disappeared over the pillow and past the bedhead, through the wall. She had listened to the chatter of their mandibles as they proceeded; excited by their march, by the knowledge that they were engaged in important work, their jaws working ceaselessly.

After they had disappeared (she calculated that it had taken fifteen minutes at most for the operation to be completed), he had been left with a face like a sponge, riddled with holes. No gasp of breath remained in his lungs. The passage of the beetles had smothered the life out of him. She had let him lie there, a carcass, a nothing, and had fallen asleep.

And in the morning, there he was, seated at the breakfast table as she stumbled blearily downstairs, stuffy with the last dregs of sleep not yet shaken out of her system. It was a disappointment and a frustration.

The turn of the pages of the newspaper. Whisper of wood pulp edge against the table. Crackle of paper as he straightened out the next page of news.

She poured herself some tea, filled up the mug with milk so that the liquid mixture resembled the colour of the American Tan tights her mother used to make her wear to school. She had always wanted to wear Mink. She stared at the yellow paint on the wall and thought about the difference between liquid and fluid. Was mercury a fluid, not a liquid? She couldn’t remember. Could only recall the molten appearance of the cold metal flowing across a Petri dish. Wondering what it would feel like in her mouth.

Mercury led to thoughts of those metallic sugar balls her dad would put on top of the trifle at Christmas, and the year she and her brother had climbed up onto stools so that they towered over the freshly applied whipped cream, and flung those metallic balls, and jellied diamonds, and every other conceivable cake decoration they could find that would make an impact. Flung them down so that they were buried down in the jelly layer at the bottom of the trifle, small cream explosions erupting at their entry points.

Not so long ago that. Nothing said, just silent reproof. A thing that made them giggle like naughty children all the more.

She has reached her destination in this sprawling building that houses the engine of the organisation. She seats herself at her desk and stares at the computer screen, flexing her fingers, ready to commence work.

It’s warmer here, though it shouldn’t be. It will be a quiet day, she thinks, as she takes up her pile of email printouts. All the enquiries of the past three weeks. Still catching up. One of her helpers whispers behind her, and she smiles at its suggestion. But really, she can’t do what it suggests. It wouldn’t be right.

She thinks of the papers burning, though. The yellow, red and orange of the flames. The faces of the others looking through the flames from the opposite side; looking at her, mouths moving, asking questions. Why, why, why? Asking her the impossible.

“What are you smiling at?” Karl asks, coming unexpectedly into the room.

“Oh, just an idea I had to burn everything,” she replies, smiling sweetly.

He laughs, and “Good plan!” he says. He is American.

She sees a group of her helpers behind him. They are clothed in the shells of beetles again. She shakes her head at them. Karl is okay. Better with a beard than without. They scuttle into a corner, because Karl is turning round to look at the place where she is looking, shaking her head, mouthing no. There is nothing there that he can see, and he turns his head back to face her. He is frowning slightly.

“Who were you saying no to, just then?” he asks, looking puzzled.

“Oh, some kids were looking in through the door,” she says. “I was telling them they couldn’t come in.”

He looks at her as though she is mad. Maybe she is.

Under the table in the corner, she can hear them whispering together. Their mandibles are clicking slightly again. They can’t help it, but it adds to the irritation of the whispers. She’d like to open her head and tip their voices out.

Karl has gone, and she has no idea whether he said anything more to her, or whether she replied. She has been too busy trying to overhear what her beetle friends are saying in the corner under the table. They are big for beetles, but still small. They have hung around in this guise for a couple of days now. She doesn’t know whether that’s because she likes them looking like that, or because they are more comfortable like that. Perhaps they actually are beetles.

She tries to ignore them, and gets on with her work.

People come and go throughout the day. It isn’t as quiet as she was expecting. The beetles are still under the table, but they have stopped whispering. Every so often she has to get up and walk halfway across the room to peer under the table, making sure they are still there.

She wonders what to make for dinner. He will eat whatever is put in front of him. They will talk about nothing, or maybe they will just say nothing; be silent. Maybe the beetles will pick him up in his chair and carry him away from the table, out of the house, and away from her. Talking, or not talking, to her the whole time. She closes her eyes and imagines how he would look; sitting on a dining chair, being carried by a mass of shiny black beetles, talking to her as if nothing was going on.

She is sleepy. She leaves her eyes closed, and when she opens them again, she realises that she has been asleep, and that the day has ended. She packs up her things, and walks up the stairs and out into the sunshine.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006

The Knife

One minute, an action of exquisite tenderness that he can see reduces her to essence. And in that reduction, he realises that he has taken a step too far. He has crossed a boundary, taken ground to which he has no right. So the next minute (it really is that fast), he withdraws and enjoys the confusion; the exquisite pain he sees her feel. Ecstasy of either kind is beautiful to witness. Pain is the thing he likes best, though. There’s something about it. The way it flashes in the eyes, across the face. The wince, the frown, ever so slight as the brain tries to understand.

Filling her head with nonsense; Lewis Carroll inventing Alice for Alice’s own amusement. He sends this Alice down another rabbit hole. He doesn’t want her the way she thinks she likes. Not now. Perhaps not ever. And yet, it seems that he can’t quite leave this scene. There are things about it that draw him, even after the regret of involvement. There are things about it that he likes. Good things. Not just watching the effects, the almost sadistic pleasure of witnessing how a word can be taken the wrong way. How withdrawal into the banal minutiae of life can flummox and even cause anger.

She floats above it, unable to stop herself. She regrets and wishes she had never – Never what, though? Beguiled herself with the sense of falling? She has been here before and knows how the play unfolds, how each scene leads into the next. A different director, but the sense of the story, the nonsense of its plot, remains the same. She regrets and wishes, and at the same time she is glad. Glad to have felt. Not the things she felt for him. Gauche infatuation is her most comfortable role, the one she believes the most. She is glad to have felt the reflection of what he seemed to feel, against her skin, upon her face; the errant thud of its arrival inside her mind. A novelty. She knows. She understands the machinations of it. The trick of disguising disinterest as acceptance. And now the point where the flood of need and neglect makes disinterest put down its mask; too bored with the predictability to carry on the charade. Never accepted, merely tolerated, for a purpose she cannot hope to understand. Still. The novelty of that feeling of being interesting, of being accepted. She is glad that she experienced that, however false its source.

When still caught in the crucible of obsession; when still dancing with the notion of loving and being loved; when all that her head knew was wrong was suddenly revealed, she had thought that her heart was breaking. Silly child, wrapped up in the notions of romance, and girls cast out of towers ending blindness with their tears. No rational being feels gratitude for such a feeling. No sane person wants to be smothered by the self-indulgent reveal. “What’s my line?” Miming her essence for him to guess, and he is fascinated briefly by the pantomime.

Words that sound right in the moment, in the role he is performing. Words that have consequences; action and reaction. And maybe there is some feeling there, some sense that this game might hurt and isn’t just entertainment.

Maybe she hopes for too much, in thinking that his withdrawal is out of concern for her and the damage his play might be causing. No maybe about it. She hopes for too much. This retreat, this arms’ length farewell is self-interest in action. No desire to feel bad about the results of his actions. No wish to play any more. So he stops, and she sees. Every word that he said was simply what he thought was appropriate at the time. A lie, then? Or just a string of pearls without lustre? Fakes, when examined closely. Synthetic.

She feels ashamed that she let herself believe her own lies again. That she listened to that schoolgirl voice again. And all the while she was telling herself that this was no different to the last time. That here was another one who didn’t engage, but who feigned engagement through a flattery of questions and ambiguities that she felt free to interpret to her own enchantment.

The spell is hers, the ingredients brought by him. The breaking of the spell is hers also. She knows what she must do.

And so she takes the knife and plunges it deep into the chest, into the heart. She pushes the blade as far and as deep as it will go. The seep of life from all of this will become a fatal flow, a death rattle, the moment she removes the blade.

His hand is over hers, on the handle of the knife, helping her to push it in. They both smile in the grimace of death, mirrors of each other as always.

Remove the knife. Let blackness follow.

There are colours that inspire her; colours that frighten. She feels the press of his hand over hers and all the colours that bloom in her mind are like a thousand thousand pin pricks of hope and fear. His hand has given tenderness, has gripped her own in a different way to this. It could again, if it weren’t gripping now in the moment of death.

Remove the knife. Hear the gurgle of life leaving what this has become.

She is transported in the moments that follow; carried away to a place where all her thoughts are of how it could have been. They say that your life flashes before your eyes in the fractions of time it takes to die. All those electrical impulses charging simultaneously over synapses long neglected. All those infinite recordings of the minutes and seconds that make up a life. The imperceptible unfolding of a bud on a tree. The million beats of a fly’s wings in each second it is airborne. The size of your dad’s hand holding yours when you are small. The size of your beloved’s hand over yours, promising safety, promising freedom from all harm. The downy blonde hairs at the tops of your arms, bleached by the summer sun. The structure of a snowflake the first time you see it.

Things locked in memory that die at the moment you die.

He removes the knife. Her hand goes with his. No more moments to record. The passage of time has ended.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006

Indolence and Inertia

Rain trickles down steadily from the sky. It doesn’t fall, not today, not like it has done lately. None of your big, fat, satisfying drops that are somehow warm and comforting with their plumpness against your skin. This is a steady, trickling, drizzling sort of rain. It leaves you damp and makes you want to hide away inside the house. At least fat rain you can catch on your tongue and know that you’ve captured something substantial.

The morning has already drifted by. Something about Sundays when you don’t have a church to go to. Something that says drift, have no structure, fritter away those hours, because you can think of nothing better to do with them. A day of rest? A day of lethargy, more like.

She can’t find anything to focus on. It has been days since she turned on the tv, but she does so now, this lunchtime, after a morning spent moving along in some kind of trance. She has tidied the house, in readiness for the cleaning onslaught that ought, by rights, to follow. She has put a load of laundry on to wash, and has three more piles and a full laundry basket still waiting.

It hasn’t been just Sundays where she has been drifting. Her entire existence for the past few weeks has been one big drift. No housework, no laundry, no washing up done. No care for her appearance. No gardening. Her neighbours are probably talking behind their closed doors about how the neighbourhood is going down. Have you seen her garden? Her lawns, choked with weeds.

Looking out of the window, though, the growing forest of long grass and dandelion clocks, scattered with bluebells and stray grape hyacinth, has a strangely alien beauty to it. The ghostly feathers of the dandelion clocks, waiting to spread their invasion among the neighbours’ crisply trimmed lawns. The delicate bent to the heads of the bluebells. It’s not exactly a wildflower garden, though. She can’t claim that for it. It’s a wreck of a garden, and speaks volumes about the lack of care for appearance that goes on inside her head, inside her house.

The tv burbles at her. Two 20-somethings trying their hardest to be cynical, but too beautiful, their skin too perfect for them to have ever experienced anything that could make them cynical. They introduce pop band after pop band. Each trying to outdo the other on how disengaged they can be; how bored of the process. It’s something that only ever worked for John Lydon, and only then because you somehow knew that behind that disaffected boredom was a brain that wanted more of a challenge. The people in bands these days are bored because everything is on a plate for them, and they’re not stimulated. It comes out in their music. There’s no passion there, only insufferable angst.

She shakes her head at herself. She has become a git. She has become bored herself.

The world outside her window is a wintry one. It’s almost the end of May, already, so soon. The month only began a few hours ago, it seems to her, she’s been so lost in her drifting.

The tv begins to stir murderous feelings in her breast, so she turns it off and puts Stevie Wonder on the stereo. She stands in the middle of the living room, casting around for something to do. She can’t do the dishes, because she forgot to buy washing up liquid the last time she was in the supermarket. She doesn’t want to leave the house because of the incessant dampness beyond the door.

She sits down on the sofa, hands on knees, feet planted on the floor, knees together. It seems as though she is ready to spring into action at any moment. Appearance are oh, so deceptive. Looking around the room, she can see that she really needs to clean. New cds and books are piling up on any available surface, because all the bookshelves and cd storage units are full. Under the stairs, in the hallway, shoes spill out from shoe racks, tumbling over each other, the length of boots embracing each other, entwining like some weird nest of serpents. Trainers and plimsolls threaten to bubble and boil over the top of the box she keeps them in.

She is the ideal candidate for one of those lifestyle makeover shows, she realises. They could probably do a combined three or four in one thing. Life Laundry, How Clean Is Your House, You Are What You Eat, and Homefront In The Garden. She thinks she could probably handle that. Although Diarmuid Gavin is going to seed these days. Too much nectar of the gods, she suspects.

She makes a cup of tea and returns to the living room and her sofa spot. Here she picks up the book she dips into every now and then. Labyrinthine and simultaneously concise. Irreducibly small snapshots taken of lives and moments that stretch and open and enfold the entire universe in their truth. They do not bear too much reading. It’s only possible, for her at least, to absorb one or two at a time; and then she needs to leave the book alone for a while.

Her cup of tea tastes as though it has been poured from a flask. That strange, musty, metallic taste that confined hot beverages get when left unattended for too long. It makes her think of other rainy days, sitting in childhood cars with her parents and her brother (her sister off carving out her own life, away from the rest of them). The desperate agony of waiting for a break in the clouds, having to listen to her dad whistling along to Glenn Miller. Whistling that comes complete with vibrato and reverb. Whistling that takes up the harmonies, fills in the missing parts that Glenn Miller never wrote. The desperate agony of being cooped up in such a confined space, and then on top of that, the horrible taste of the tea that is being drunk only because there is nothing else to do.

There is a vague recollection at the back of her mind that she used to have fun. Once. At some point in her life. She remembers the feeling, so it must have happened. It can’t be an atavistic thing. It would be too unfair for her to be remembering the fun some ancient unknown ancestor experienced and left a trace element of in her DNA.

She is wearing a top today that she can’t decide about. In the shop, in the changing room, with the magic mirror that could have been the one Mr Benn used to look in, it looked good. Now she has seen it in her own mirror, the one that tells her she hasn’t lost any weight in a long time and, in fact, isn’t that a new roll of fat you’ve developed there, love? She wonders whether it makes her look pregnant. That would be an irony, if it did. She decides to call her imaginary baby Inertia when it is born, because that is what it was born of. Inertia and Indolence. She could be having twins. All things are possible in the world of imagination.

She has put the top on because she is going to her parents’ house for tea later. Her mother will give her an honest opinion. Except ‘pregnant’ won’t be the first thought that springs to mummy dearest’s mind. ‘Fat’ will be the bon mot.

She drinks more tea. She wonders whether it’s the milk. It wasn’t only washing up liquid that was forgotten on the last trip to the supermarket. Milk was also left off the list, and she had had to defrost a bottle overnight. Defrosted milk is always a little suspect. Almost as though the molecules have been jiggled about, stripped of their essence, and then reformed in an almost accurate representation of the concept ‘milk’.

Next door, she can hear the telephone ringing. It sounds as though it is ringing in another time, another era altogether. It is muffled and ghostly, a distant reminder that people do sometimes make contact with each other, and use their voices to communicate.

Stevie Wonder finishes. Her eyelids are growing heavy, and she rests them for a moment. Indolence and Inertia, her precious daughters. She is drowsy through lack of activity. Her eyelids grow heavy, and she sleeps.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006

Beautiful

The fundamentals of the situation are: he doesn’t know what the situation is; he doesn’t know if she even exists, let alone has a name.

Antonio Andolini (an assumed name, changed to upset his mother, confuse his father, prevent his erroneous ex-wife tracking him down) placed his distinctly un-Italian, clearly Irish head in his hands and sighed. You could sustain an entire colony of mosquitoes in the heated vapour he had emitted from his mouth that day. His small, dank office was tropical with it.

His fingers traced backwards into the velvet pelt of his buzzcut and gently kneaded his scalp. He dropped his hands to the back of his neck and rolled his head backwards, eyes closed, aching and stiff and longing to go home. But a private investigator has no home but the street, no bed but the front seat of a car, no life but the observed lives of the people he follows.

Andolini groaned inwardly at how much his internal monologue began to sound like a cheap Philip Marlowe impersonation.

The woman in the photograph was the obsession of a client. The man had come, furtive and paranoid, two months ago, brandishing the picture and urgently, conspiratorially, demanding to know whether Andolini could help him find her.

Andolini had looked at the picture. She was a brunette. Nothing special. Average build, average features, pretty in an abstract way. He had checked that the photograph was genuine; not some clipping from a magazine, not some faked publicity shot glossed up to look like a personal snap. It was important to be sure you weren’t taking on the work of an out and out crank. Out and outers never paid up.

This one was genuine. He caught sight of the subtle elegance of his wristwatch as he stretched his hand out from the cuff of his well-tailored jacket. He had peeled off a couple of hundred from a roll of cash as a first instalment, without even asking what the rate was, or whether he needed to pay anything up front.

“To cover your expenses,” was all he’d said.

Andolini could barely believe his luck. His daily grind only ever involved shadowing salesmen with bad skin whose wives were convinced they were having affairs with lacquered secretaries the length and breadth of the city. Salesmen whose only reason for not getting it up for the wife was that they were ground down by the desolation of their existence, driving their samples around in Vectras, jollying up potential clients, flirting with the lacquered and hard-faced secretaries their wives didn’t understand would never yield.

He took their money, though. It was theirs to do with as they wished. They had earned it, the same way he earned it from them by taking on their jobs.

Two months, though, and he had got nowhere. His client had no extra information beyond the photograph for him, other than that he had spent the day with her looking at art in a private gallery, but when he went back (to find her, not to buy any of the paintings), the owner denied all knowledge of her. The photograph, he claimed, had appeared in the inside pocket of his jacket. Just appeared. He had no idea how it had arrived there. The only reason he had found it was because he had been looking for an old receipt from a business lunch to satisfy the tax man.

Andolini hadn’t dared to think how much that business lunch had cost, if the tax man was interested in the receipt. A far cry from his £3.98 sandwich from Greggs, accompanied by a polystyrene cup of their best brown sludge coffee.

His whole existence was tumbling further into cliché with each and every day.

So, the task that was set him was to find this woman. Because now his client was obsessed with her. He couldn’t accept that it was a brief encounter, that he was only ever supposed to see her that once. He had looked at that photograph every day for three months, and now Andolini had looked at it every day for a further two months, and he could feel the obsession starting to creep around his own gills. She was nothing, but she was everything. Beautiful, but was she? She was standard dark hair, green eyes, pale skin. Welsh, he thought. Somewhere along the line. Not Irish. Not Scots. We’re all Celtic mongrels, he thought. He was third generation Irish if you traced the route from Kerry to Levenshulme. English if you took a more Jewish slant on inheritance and looked at his mum.

The photograph is sitting flat on the desk in front of him. In spite of all the handling, all the pulling in and out of his pocket, showing it to people, letting them handle it, it looks as pristine as it must have done the day it was developed.

If it was developed.

Andolini was getting one of those hair prickling on back of neck feelings about this picture. It just appeared in his client’s pocket. It never deteriorated in appearance. The woman, to all intents and purposes, never even existed.

Stupid. He’d watched too many episodes of Dr Who, with his notepad of intelligent paper, or whatever it was he carried round with him. There was nothing supernatural or alien about this photograph. It was just printed on really high quality paper. And of course the woman pictured in it existed. She just didn’t want to be found, was all.

Strange, though, how it seemed to always be at body temperature; how, sometimes, he could swear that he felt a second heart beat if the picture was in his inner coat pocket, near his own heart.

His eyes were gritty and stinging with tiredness, gone small with fatigue, bloodshot round the rims. An attractive look.

He switched off the light and left the office, locking the door behind him. He left the photograph sitting on his desk. If he’d glanced at it even once, even quickly, before he’d shut the door behind him, he might have seen that it seemed to be glowing slightly.

The woman fumbled slightly with the lock. Although it locked with a key from the outside, it had a thumb turn lock on the inside. Someone was paranoid about getting locked in, she thought. She managed to release the lock, but had to leave the door unsecured when she left the office. She didn’t have a key. She had never been there before.

She walked down the corridor to the stairs. She wondered where she was this time. Her clothes felt slightly damp. That office had been slightly damp. Dark, too.

She took the stairs quickly, her descent to street level rapid. She hoped that there wasn’t any sort of alarm system protecting the building. She hadn’t picked up on one. She hated it when she had to dismantle the electronics. It gave her a headache.

The main exit was a doddle, after the mechanical technicalities of that lock upstairs. This was a simple paddle release. A swipe card mechanism. Secured against entry only, not against exit.

She emerged onto the street. It had been raining. The light was strange. Sort of pink and grey at the same time. It was too early for sunset, though. She wondered whether her visual cortex was playing up again. She would have to get that seen to if it was.

She walked quickly away from the office block, hoping that she was heading in the right direction.

Antonio Andolini just missed seeing her turn the corner at the opposite end of the street. It had felt wrong, leaving the photograph on the desk like that. Callous, somehow. He climbed the stairs back up to his office and frowned when the door opened as he pushed the key into the lock. He pushed it a bit more, cautiously, peering round the edge of the frame to see if he could sense any movement inside the room.

“Hello?” he said. “Is anyone in there?”

Stupid of him. Of course a burglar would tell him if he or she were in there.

He pushed the door open more fully, at arm’s length, not wanting to be in the line of fire, should it come down to that.

With the door open, he could see practically all the office. There was nobody in there. He relaxed slightly. He mustn’t have locked the door properly. That would be it.

He walked into the room, towards the desk. He could see already that the photograph wasn’t there. He patted his coat pockets, although he knows that he didn’t pick it up, didn’t stow it away in any one of his many pockets. Not even the trouser pockets he was checking at that moment.

He stood, looking down at the empty surface of the desk, puzzled and rubbing his chin with his right hand. No photograph.

He didn’t know what to do. It had definitely been there as he left. And now it had simply disappeared.

He took his phone from his pocket and dialled his client’s number.

“Bad news,” he launched straight in. There was silence on the other end of the line. “I’ve lost the photograph.”

“I’m sorry,” his client said, in his educated, clipped tones. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Antonio Andolini,” Andolini replied. “The private investigator you hired to track down the woman in the photograph?” He made the statement into a question, in the hope that it would trigger his client’s memory.

“I’m sorry,” the voice said, a little impatiently. “I’m afraid I know nobody by that name.”

Andolini’s phone beeped. His client had hung up on him. He dialled back.

“Andolini,” he said. “Antonio Andolini. You came to my office two months ago and paid me in cash to track down a woman you met in a private art gallery three months prior to that.”

There was silence in response.

“You found a photograph of her in your jacket pocket?” he cajoled.

More silence.

Give me a break, Andolini thought. He tried one last time.

“When you showed the photograph to the gallery owner, he denied all knowledge of the woman having worked there.”

His client cleared his throat.

“Mr… Andolini?”

“Andolini, yes.”

“Mr Andolini, I really have no idea who you are, or how you obtained my number. I purchased art from a private gallery five months ago, yes. Although how you could know that is beyond me. But I was assisted by a young man, who is still employed there. I know this because we have an… arrangement…”

It was Andolini’s turn to be silent. Then he spoke up again.

“I’m very sorry to have troubled you,” was all he said, and hung the phone up.

He stood looking down at the desk, at the place where the photograph had been. Something caught his eye. A piece of paper, something white and faintly glowing, had fallen just under the desk, and he could see the corner of it now.

He bent down to pick it up. It was a photograph, lying face down. He took it in his hand and turned it over. It was a photograph of a woman. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Tall, slim, blonde. She was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. Summer, sometime. Perhaps on holiday.

He felt like he knew her. The paper that the photograph was printed on was warm to the touch. He stroked a finger along its surface. The woman’s smile seemed to broaden slightly. His finger left no mark on the image’s surface.

He sat down at the desk and stared at the picture. At the woman. She was so beautiful, and he knew that he would not be able to rest until he had found her.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006

An Eternity of Nothing

She tries to chase away the butterflies that are flitting around her restless stomach. Nervous anticipation for no reason. Listening to the traffic surf its way along the rainwashed road outside her office, she tries to work out what it is she is nervous about.

Adrenalin is pumping through her veins for some reason; her body’s response to some need or other. Today is a day where it is difficult to concentrate. Her mind wanders easily from her work. She’s hardly done any work for her mind to wander from, though. A more accurate description of the status of her mental faculties would be Not On The Job.

Even her daydreams are about nothing today. They’re just a vague lack of focus, her eyes blurring the foreground, her mind aware of the butterflies still fluttering in her stomach, but not really thinking about anything.

Everything is floating, loose, ambiguous. The excel spreadsheet in front of her is making her frown, forcing her to concentrate and tie up the suppliers they have used over the past twelve months so that the finance department can credit check them in future. Some of the names are only vaguely familiar and it takes her a while to remember whether she has placed an order or not. She frowns. Finance has all the paperwork; they know who the signatories are. She doesn’t think it entirely unreasonable of her to wonder why they can’t link these suppliers to the right department themselves.

Work is increasingly an intrusion on her daydream life. Reality too. She searches for a highlighter pen in her desk drawers. She emerges from the time wasting rummage empty handed.

It reminds her of another time wasting rummage not that long ago. More pleasurable, but still a waste of time. His, and hers, and that of all the people in between.

She looks at the calendar hanging on the office wall. The day hasn’t moved on any. She looks at her watch. It seems that only the seconds are moving, but they don’t seem to be driving the minutes or the hours very quickly.

It is June. The pale gold of her summer skin is already fading. Only a month old, but there has been no more sun since that first week in May, when she drove as fast and as hard as she could through sunshine and narrow winding lanes to the sea. Nothing to fix that pale gold to her skin. Soon she will be as white as the dial on her watch again. Soon, if this never ending day will ever release her to discover what it is she’s so nervous about.

Across town, at the other end of an email, is someone she doesn’t want to think about. If she goes out tonight, she is likely to see him. Perhaps that’s what all this adrenalin is about. She can’t work out if she wants to see him or not. Channels of communication have been reopened. She thinks of him, dark haired and louche, wasting time in an airless office with a window too high to see out of. She visited him there, once. He was full of ideas about escape, but none of them were achievable. Effort was required to make them real, and he was too busy strolling down Sunny Street, deliberately oblivious to the trail of destruction he left behind him, permanently high, or drunk, or stoned, or any combination of the three.

But, no. She knows it isn’t him the butterflies are fluttering for. It’s something else, and she doesn’t want to admit it.

At last the hands on her watch say that it’s time to go. She walks out into the rain and down the street towards the car park. Her hair flies around her head in the wind. The hole in her boot makes her foot as soggy as November. She fights with the umbrella, performing a kind of modern dance as she moves down the street away from work, towards whatever it is that makes her feel so nervous.

She unlocks the car, trying to hang onto the umbrella, trying to believe that it is still June and not that same November as inhabits the sock inside her left boot, around her right foot. Her phone beeps somewhere in the depths of her bag. She flings everything into the car; bag, umbrella, herself.

Paused with hands on lap and head slightly bowed, she sits for a moment and tries to recover some semblance of equilibrium. The butterflies have stilled themselves now. So perhaps it was just escape she was preparing for. That long day, longer than a year in many ways. Long for no reason other than boredom and lack of dedication.

She sits and wonders how infinite are the ways of saying absolutely nothing. Could she fill an A4 page in a notebook, for example? Or is the description of nothing a life’s work, filling pages and books and hours and years? And where are all those books, with all those pages of nothing? In whose library do they sit, waiting to be read?

And people ask what it is she’s thinking. They ask if there’s nothing she has to say. How can you tell people what you’re thinking, when your thoughts are thinking about nothing and the infinity of its expression? How can you have anything to say, when you know there are books of that nothing walking the earth in human form.

The butterflies have flown, now that she’s outside those walls, that place. She peels back her head from its pose of reverie and forces her eyes to focus. Her hands unfold from her lap, like a marionette being brought back to life, and one hand grips the key in the ignition, while the other grips the steering wheel.

She will not go out tonight. She has an eternity of nothing to observe and filter and describe.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006