Mother Mary, Take Me Home

She is captured by the memory of past transgression. She walks the last hundred yards in a daze. Her right ear catches the words her friend is speaking, but they are just noise, and above them she can hear his voice, as loud and as meaningless as it ever was. Suffused with that stoner’s giggle. Swirling and half cultured, half lost in a welter of rounded vowels that don’t stick plummily enough in his throat to be the real thing.

Was he bullied once, did he get in a fight and not know what to do with his arms, his fists, his feet? Did he decide to laugh, to act gauche, because that’s what the girls like, and that’s not fighting talk?

We learn our personalities. We memorise our roles. We carry them from adolescence into adulthood, adding in new quirks, new gimmicks, new reasons to say, “I can’t help it, it’s the way I am.”

That line. His line. Her line. Yours?

She walks in a daze and does not look, but in the corner of her eye she sees him, brown jacket, brown hair, brown eyes, looking at her, noticing her walking past in her red and her black and her hair long and dark and glossy.

Would he want it back, she wondered? Would she?

The hundred yards is done, as short as the daze she inhabited was long, and she is pulled into the pub by the undertow of her friend’s desire. Desire not just for alcohol, but desire to pull her out of that trance she has fallen into.

She swears, she profanes, she doesn’t understand, and her friend buys her vodka, quick, with just enough coke, and it sits cold in her hand, warm in her throat, steadying her nerves.

Everything she does is self-defence. Even when it’s self-sabotage.

She could punch holes in the sky right now, but instead she pulls a Crème Saver from her pocket, opens the wrapper and puts the sweet disc of pink and white sugar into her mouth. Sugar is what her blood needs now. Sugar and the ability to pretend he isn’t there.

Outside in the warm spring evening, she leans against the wall and watches the parading of boys wishing they were men, of men hoping they’re still boys, of girls always women, and girls like her. To and fro, for the benefit of Mr Right, Mr Wrong, Mr Kite, Ms Whodoyouthinkyouare?

Miss Scarlet, she thinks. In the library, with the dagger.

He still has her book, the one that is the best translation, the one that has the chronology at the front that places that story of crime and punishment in context. It’s one lost, and replaced by another, but still there is a hole. She feels it. If she had an axe now into her sleeve, she could crush that beetle black head, spill blood on the tarmac, dark and thick and glossy. She tastes bitterness and fear and blood. No longer love. But he couldn’t help it. And that makes it alright, then.

The weave of conversation is passing her by. The one who wanted to rescue her, to be liked, is standing in front of her in all his pointlessness and he is like a shriek, an affront, so she stares at his shoes and waits for the madness to pass.

An age of beauty in the way her hand would twine fingers into the dark brown curls, and her eyes would swirl into looking into his, and the shyness of his smile, and the kiss of his lips. All this was fucking loveliness (all this was fucking) before she found out that she was just a hole. A hole in a bed, at least. Not like the poor cow who was just a hole under a bridge, a disused canal tunnel in the warehouse district.

The tube of her fist was a hole. Her mouth and eyes were holes in the afterwards staring howling disbelief of realisation.

He slipped out of knowing, and reappeared one night when she was stronger and in command. She believed that it was over, that she was sealed and no light would reach that wound to bring it to full bloom. Sealed and in command.

An age of beauty, and that hundred yard walk in a daze to come to rest here. A chink in her armour, opened by another, to let the light in and the shock that he could just be standing there in the street, in the road, on a warm spring evening outside a pub on her turf. Standing there without warning.

Her main conscious thought is that she is alone. Her awareness of herself boils down to that. She has felt it since she was small. As he would have it, everything falls back into when she was six. So she says to herself that she has felt this way since she was six. Which is when she became different. When she was made aware of it. Too clever for the standard readers, the rainbow books the others laboured through. Too clever for the standard maths problems, for the different coloured units, in ones and fives and tens (yellows, blues and reds) that acted like an abacus to help the others learn. Separated out with her own books and her own set of problems to solve. Alone.

And here is her self-defence, her retreat, her sabotage. Solitude, and an act of normality. And the moments when she is most alone are the moments like this one, when she is made aware again of how she is different and completely the same.

She leans against the wall and counts how many breaths she takes, and sees that she is still alive.

© J R Hargreaves 2006