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