If You Need Me, Just Whistle

This roll of words carries her away, like some ship lost at sea, with just the merest wind to push out the sail.

We speak the unspeakable, and then we close. Our mouths, our minds, our eyes, our hearts. Deconstructing the words, analysing the feeling, kicking the fucking life out of it, and then sweeping it up, putting it neatly in the bin.

She’s kept a piece, though. Hidden in her hand. She’s kept back a sweeping, a memento, because she had the feeling that it wouldn’t last. Sewn into her pocket, like a ribbon sewn on by a soldier’s wife, a promise of return.

An idiot’s cause, to believe what’s put in front of you, the evidence of your eyes. Listen closer, listen well. When we speak the unspeakable, it contains the truth and carries with it destruction.

If there’s to be any discussion, she will not bring any hope. It’s cut away now, dead tissue gouged from healthy flesh, to stop the disease eating her away. You never would have thought that hope could be a disease, but it holds you up with false pretences, like waterwings on a child learning to swim, stabbed and pricked with a compass point, so the air seeps out and you slowly, slowly sink.

There’s a tumbling madness before her eyes, she sees it unfolding like a film on a screen. She has no idea what she’s doing. No idea what this is, where it’s taking her, or why. Tumbling down into stillness, her body rests in resignation.

“Where can I go? Where can I hide? If I go up into the heavens, you’ll be there. If I make my bed in the very depths, you’ll find me. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, or settle on the far side of this rolling sea, you will be there. If I make the darkness hide me, if I make the very light become night around me, that night will shine like the day, for darkness is the light to you.”

There’s always God, you see. Always waiting. A handy verse lurking at the back of the mind, ready to leap out at your lowest ebb.

Defend me, O my God.

Her soul is shattered. Her heart aches. She is full of inanities, trivialities, the things she despises, the things she never asked for.

She tumbles down into stillness. Her body rests.

She remembers learning how to whistle. “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” Teaching her how to whistle, like a boy. Two fingers beneath the tongue, tongue curled, and blow. She couldn’t do it. So she had to whistle like a girl, which is like kissing. He laughed, and she vowed, she’d never whistle again.

He’s working his way out, like a splinter. It hurts, and stings, and is tender where that tiny filament lies under her skin. She knows, as she wheedles it out with the prick of a pin, that a piece of it will get left behind. A piece of him within her forever. Like the ribbon sewn, the sweeping kept back. The memory of what she never realised.

She wears the jeans that she hasn’t been able to wear in months, and the starving pays off, the loathing gains its reward. She is flat again, narrow again. Or she feels it. Hold up the mirror to her, let her see.

This rolling sea, the words, the tumult and tumble. The fractions of belief, halving towards infinity; a figure eight, a loop that doubles back, a Moebius strip. She’ll be back here again before she knows it. On the other side of the loop, maybe.

And she knows that she’s cut off a limb, got rid of something good. The flesh wasn’t unhealthy, it was just tender. She knows that she’s pushed too soon, too quickly. The horse baulking at the jump. The child crying before she’s been stung. The idiot savant who can add up all the numbers in the telephone book, but still makes two plus two equal five.

She gave him his out. She gave him the point he was striving for. The breach in the fence. You do that, though, don’t you? Instead of whistling to bring them back, you open the gate that little bit wider.

And every time, you die a little bit more.


© J R Hargreaves 2006