Any Number Of Moonlit Nights

Through the open window, as you lie, tumbled into sleep and immobile, I can hear a child, crying in the street. An argument with a friend, or with a sister; hard to tell. Their voices are raised in anger; they shout sentences to each other, at each other, as though miles separate them, instead of inches.

You do not stir, but lie curled beside me, lost in the depths of sleep, troubled only by whatever scenes are playing out in your dreaming mind.

I listen as a weary parent calls the children in, her Sunday peace shattered by her children’s inability to get along. All is silent for a while. No voices, raised or otherwise, just the distant rush of traffic swishing along the motorway, and the occasional rasp of the curtain hem as it blows in and out of the open window.

I close my eyes and begin to drift too, only to be woken again by the angry shouting of a man, distant inside a house somewhere.

“Get out!” he shouts. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

They have taken their argument indoors, and the father can’t cope. I’m assuming he’s the father. My mind is conventional on these things, because I only have my own experience to draw upon. Lucky, or not so lucky, but lucky in many ways to have had both my parents, unchanging in their relationship, and colouring my view of how others’ families work.

The children come tumbling back out into the street, yelling at each other still. The crying has stopped. It is just argument now.

One of them runs off. “I just want to get my ball,” he shouts, and the peace descends again. Just the bark of a dog in the distance and a snatch of music as a car drives past the top of the street.

You open your eyes and look at me. You’re thick with it, all sleep and relaxed muscle.

“Aaron!” the man yells. “Aaron!”

“Yeah?” shouts the boy.

“Shut up!” shouts the man, though Aaron has been quiet for a while now.

The boy’s voice is soft and piping, almost like a girl’s, but there is something there that tells you he’s a boy. Not just the name shouted by his father. Something in his voice, the way he speaks, the way he was crying earlier. Something in the edge he puts into his shouts.

The argument between father and son rages off into the distance, moving away from our house, becoming harder to hear. Their voices cease to carry words, and start to sound like short barks.

I look at the clock, and see that it is almost four. We have been in bed all day. You have slept for most of it. Your mind is tired, you need this rest, I know that, but I miss you. Your eyes are closed again, but I know you are not sleeping.

“My head hurts,” you murmur.

I stroke your hair, gently.

“Will you get me some paracetamol?” you ask.

Sitting up and moving out of bed, I leave you curled there, soft and drifting, a world away from where I am. I look back at you, as I leave the room, lying there in your pink pyjamas, and I hope for your survival. This girl I see, with her languid touch and her kisses so soft they are like a pillow, she is not you. You are lost somewhere inside her, and I hope for your return.

The fuchsia in the back garden has died. There has been no green on it, no hint of life. It’s just a stick, dry and hollow, poking up from the ground. Those pink and purple bells that should hang from its branches haven’t appeared this year. The garden is neglected.

I bring you paracetamol and a glass of water. You sit up, swallow the tablets, drink them down. Above the bed, on the wall behind you, is a postcard in a frame with two others. The card I’m looking at is the Lowry picture, the man lying flat on a wall, cigarette burning between his lips, and I wonder where he is, inside his head. Lying there on the wall, his hat resting on his belly, staring up at the sky, I wonder what his thoughts are. Beside it is a photograph of the waves crashing against the pier at Whitby, and at the end a card showing a Frenchman selling oranges, a young couple just behind him, the girl clinched by the man. It has fallen slightly, slipped at one side, this card by a photographer whose name I have forgotten.

This frantic world that heaves and thunders is drifting now, you tell me. You don’t speak the words, but I know.

“I’m hungry,” is what you say, so I go to cook you food.

You follow me into the kitchen.

“I was looking at my hands,” you say. “How they’re aging.”

“You still have good skin,” I tell you. “You’re not aging.”

You smile, and it’s a smile that says I’m wrong, and that you know I’m only flattering. But I’m not flattering. It’s true that your skin is good and that you seem to me exactly the same as you ever were, in appearance. In this quietness of your mind, you seem more distant, and I can’t say that I understand who you are, but when I look at you, you are the same, for all of that. I should put that into words and tell you, but you would only smile again.

Your smile is the thing that seems older. Your smile, and the look in your eyes. Wide and ancient, as though there’s nothing left to see. A tranquillity that seems to accept that this is how life is.

I miss the wildness, and the anger. I miss the burning hope that this isn’t it. I miss the girl I used to know, who would drink all night, and laugh all night, and swear and crash through life. But we wore her out, didn’t we? And any number of moonlit nights won’t bring her back.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Sketching Out The Numbness

Slip, and keep slipping.

“What is this?” he says.

You can fall a thousand times, a thousand ways, but it doesn’t make any difference. You’ve still fallen. You’ve still failed.

“What is this?” he says, and taps his fingernail against the glass.

He knows what it is, it doesn’t need explaining. It’s her, falling; it’s her, drowning; it’s her, unable to stop.

And he has no room to talk. She has seen him sink a bottle of wine. She has been there when he has drunk pints enough to bring most men to their knees. She’s matched him. And now he comes with his “What is this?”

“You know what it is,” she says.

His eyes slide away and they sit. She stares at the glass in front of her, at the table it sits on. He looks at his own thoughts, turned away from her.

There’s something broken here. There’s something hollow and yawning that both of them know can’t be filled. She’s like the sea; she feels it. She looks down into herself and can’t see bottom. There’s only green and black and purple stretching deeper than can be understood.

She slips and keeps slipping.

She looks up, because she thought his eyes were on her, but she must have waited just too long. He’s looking away again, seeing something hidden in the distance; hidden from her, barely visible to him. She looks at him and sees all she ever will. Lost boy, blanking himself off because the world doesn’t hold him; filling himself with knowledge and facts and theories. She sees a man, who holds so much of her that she wants to understand but is afraid to ask for; a man who is looking away.

The sun is coming up, and she stirs.

“I’d better go,” she says. It feels like she’s been saying that for hours.

He moves to the phone and calls a cab. There is no goodbye; she simply leaves with the dawn, crossing over into morning and beyond him.

Fair promises were made at one point during this night of slipping. Fair promises that both know will never be kept, and the telephone rings while she is still in the cab, and the message is left that confirms it. Fair promises that are broken so quickly.

For all the comfort she would like, he delivers introspection. A quiet numbness, like foam sprayed over a fire, that sits and stops the oxygen from penetrating. This quiet numbness sits and covers over all the rage that she could unleash, if she were ready to fall completely.

She leaves the cab on the corner. She doesn’t want to be dropped outside her house. She prefers to walk the last few yards. It is starting to rain. The drops are fat and warm and they mix with the drops that fall down her cheeks, splashing together onto the ground as she walks. She is the sea and could flood the world with the tears she contains.

Her tears are deep and green and salty and they fill the street. Cars float off. Litter floats off. She keeps walking until she reaches her house and the waters subside. She will not drown the world today.

She slips, though, and keeps slipping.

The phone call confirms, and she hangs up with a sigh. In a week that voice will be lost forever. She knows.

She makes a phone call of her own and starts the process that will slip her under, like she has been slipped under before. No bottle this time, but a blister pack of small white pills, named for the days of the week that she will ignore when she comes to pop them through the foil. One at a time, a day followed by a day, followed by a day, but in reverse. Trying to work backwards to a point when – what? He was not the thing she wanted? Or the point before some other he crashed in and took her essence away?

She slips and keeps on slipping, like a pebble skimmed across the surface of a lake, that loses momentum and starts to sink. She slips into her own green depths. Green and purple and black like the sea. Never ending, no beginning; a point that stretches beyond where the eye can see.

He sits on, after she is gone, and looks towards that point. He carries everything of her, and he looks at his own thoughts. She is slipping, and he knows it. She is falling to that point, and now he looks away.

For everything and nothing, he has sat here at this table. For everything and nothing, she has fallen and been broken. She takes up her pen and begins to write him, without knowing. He sits and looks at his own thoughts.

They slip, and keep on slipping, and her pen carves him out in purple-black against the page. She is writing him without knowing, sketching out in words the numbness that he brings.

The cat is worrying around the television stand, so she lays down her pen to look. She kneels, she lies almost flat against the floor; she looks beneath the tv stand and sees a huddle of brown fur, pink ears and twitching nose.

“Poor mousey,” she says, and pulls away the stand to see the tiny panting thing with half its tail missing.

The cat sits by and watches.

He sits at his table and watches.

She scoops the mouse into the dustpan and carries it out of the house and into the back alleyway. She puts the mouse down on the ground, on a pile of gravel, and it doesn’t move, it just pants and blinks and twitches. It will be dead before the day is even halfway begun.

She turns her back on it and goes back into the house.

She turns her back on him and the pieces of her he holds. She slips into the numbness.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

A Guilty Pleasure

She eats ravenously, her hair falling forward as she leans over the dish, her spoon hungrily scooping the food into her mouth. It’s as though she hasn’t eaten in months. She looks up every so often and grins at me, chewing on the chicken that seems not to cost her anything to eat.

I watch her devour every last morsel in the dish, mopping up the sauce with a piece of naan.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she says when she is done, and I promise that I won’t.

There is nobody I could tell, even if I wanted to. But that’s not what she means. She means don’t mention it to her in conversation, this return from her self-imposed exile. This fall, it must seem to her, from her moral high ground.

She looks happy. Happier than I have seen her in a long while. She pushes her hair back from her face, sits back in her chair, pushes the dish away from her. The spoon clatters inside the bowl as she moves it.

She looks smaller, too. Younger. Like she must have looked when she was 18 or something, although I didn’t know her then. The expression on her face makes her look younger, the way she’s sitting. She’s half slumped on the dining chair, pushed back from the table, arms outstretched and hands resting with the base of the palms on the table’s edge. Her posture is teenage, but not sulking. She’s smiling. Content.

She looks up at me and sits up in her seat. She laughs.

“You’re studying me,” she says.

“I’m looking at you,” I reply.

“You’re studying me,” she repeats, holding my gaze, looking straight into my eyes. She smiles, and suddenly I feel bashful. I feel coy about having looked at her, about having been looked at in return. I feel shy of the way she has been transformed, with that smile, from teenager to woman.

We look at each other and we know. We can’t move. The world seems to slow around us, and we are sitting here oblivious to all else except each other. Eventually I have to break the spell. I have to bring reality back.

“Do you want pudding?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer for a moment, just keeps looking at me and smiling. Then she looks away and it’s as though a light has been taken off me. She’s still smiling, but she’s looking to her left, through the window at the garden.

“What have you got?” she says.

I get up and go over to the fridge. All I have is yoghurt and fruit. Not really pudding. Not really anything.

“You haven’t got anything, have you?” she laughs. I’ve taken too long to respond, you see. I should have had my answer ready, not had to think about it. I look back at her, round the open fridge door, and affect sheepishness.

“Sorry,” I say.

“That’s okay,” she replies. “Take me to bed instead.”

I undress her upstairs. I take my time, peeling away layers, slowly revealing the skin I thought I would never touch again. She came back, though. Unexpectedly. She appeared at my door tonight and demanded food. All I had in was a microwavable chicken balti. She was so hungry, she said, that she’d take it. And with that, almost twenty years of vegetarianism came to an end.

As each piece of clothing comes off, I kiss the bit of her skin that is exposed by its removal. Arms, wrists, shoulders. Neck. Feet, shins, knees, thighs. Stomach. Throat. The perfumed dip between her breasts.

She touches me when she can. Her hands, her fingers, in my hair, cradling my head. She strokes my arms, grips my shoulders, pulls me to her so there is no air between our bodies, no space. She pulls me to her and I sink into her warmth.

She hasn’t changed. She smells and feels the same. We glide around each other, we pull and push and wriggle and sigh. She laughs. She laughs. She laughs and cries out, and I can’t get any closer, though I’d climb inside her if I could.

She holds me to her for a while and I feel her pulse against my skin, surrounding me. Her heart bangs, then slows. Her muscles relax and eventually we sleep.

I wake in the morning, and she’s gone. A note on the table, by the dishes left to go dry and crusty. Thanks for dinner. Those three words on the paper. More words I hear inside my head. Thanks for dinner, for pudding, for everything. Perhaps she whispered those words to me while I slept. Perhaps they’re memory, and not just wishful thinking.

I know, though. Thanks for dinner is all it is. She needed to be fed. She needed to cut free for just one night and be touched and held without reason, without permanence. She needed to eat chicken. She needed to be here.

I pick up the note and crumple it in my hands, then put it in the bin.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

More Than One Way To Skin A Rabbit

“Don’t you care? Doesn’t it matter to you?”

I shrug. I have no idea what is going through her mind right now. I am clueless as to what it is I’m supposed to care about.

If it’s her, then the answer is yes. Of course. I care about her. She’s my wife. I love her.

If she’s asking about anything else, then I don’t know how to answer, because I don’t know what else there is. By default, then, it doesn’t matter to me. She could be talking about the price of cabbage for all I know. It doesn’t matter.

There are shoes littered all over the house. Clusters of them in the hall, under the stairs, tumbling out from the shoe racks she has pushed them onto in haste and disarray. Clumps of them underneath the coffee table in the living room, crawling out across the rug and into the doorway, like a chain of giant footwear ants trying to join the rest of the battalion in the hallway.

There are stray ones upstairs in the bedroom, lying gauchely knock-kneed where she has pushed them from her feet, lazy in her haste to take them off, too lazy to untie laces or unfasten buckles.

I pick my way through them daily, like I’m picking my way through her questioning now. She has moved on, left “Don’t you care and doesn’t it matter” behind. Now the questions have taken a different tack.

What do I think about it? She seeks an opinion, and now I have to seem as though I have been listening, as though I am interested in whatever itch she is asking me to scratch. My words could be the calamine lotion to the chicken pox irritation of today’s obsession.

I try to distract her. “Are those shoes new?” I ask, looking at her feet. Not even a heartbeat’s break in her drive. She doesn’t even pause.

It’s too late to fall back on that other trusty diversion. “Have you had your hair done?” won’t wash now.

She saves me, in a way, with her next query, which is actually a statement.

“You haven’t been listening.”

“No,” I agree, “I haven’t.”

This is where she surprises me. I have come to expect that my lapses in concentration will be met with one of two responses. Anger or sadness. Fury or tears. Rage or withdrawal.

Today she laughs. A proper laugh, nothing false, nothing intended to signify “I’m laughing for now, but this isn’t over.” She laughs and it’s also in her eyes, which dance and sparkle with amusement. Her giggle makes me smile, even though I don’t quite understand why it’s there.

She starts to pick up shoes and pair them up. She takes them into the hall and carries out the same exercise on the abandoned and wantonly jettisoned items that range across the floor. I follow her and stand to watch as she brings together shoes long separated and stows them neatly away on the shoe rack. I see the bend of her spine, its curve as she kneels and crouches and leans her way around the footwear she is imposing order on. Her skirt waistband gapes a little as she leans forward and across. It stands proud of her back so that I can see the creamy smoothness of the skin and the tiny freckle that lodges at the base of her spine.

She straightens and the waistband fits back to her body. She kneels on the floor and looks at me over her shoulder. She is still smiling, half laughing.

“That’s better,” she says. “And yes, these shoes are new.”

I laugh, too, then spoil the moment by asking the wrong question, grinning all the while like the fool that I am.

“So what is it I’m supposed to care about?” I ask, and her eyes darken.

She looks away, still kneeling on the floor in the hall, in front of the now full shoe rack. Her hair falls forward with the movement of her head, and it covers her face, obscuring it from my view.

“It’s nothing,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t matter.”

I walk closer, then crouch down beside her, trying to see her face, raising a hand to pull back the hair that covers it, and tuck it behind her ear. But she stands before I have the chance, and walks past me, smooth legs and new shoes all that I can see.

I’m still crouching but I turn slightly to watch as she opens the front door and walks out into the garden, down the path and through the gate. Her skirt sways as she walks, and those new shoes make her legs look good. As she knows they do. I’m struck by the sudden realisation that we have been having a row without me even knowing it. Now she has walked out and is striding down the street in her new shoes. She will make it to the corner and turn and I have no idea where she is going, or whether I’m expected to follow.

I get up from where I’m crouching and shut the front door. When I turn back to walk through the hall into the living room, the hallway seems an alien place. The clutter of shoes, now tidied away; the space and expanse of floor that seems to stretch on forever into the distance; it throws me for a moment.

It takes forty minutes to walk from this house up to the shops and back down again, whichever way you walk the circuit. She is wearing new shoes, so I decide to give her an hour to stomp the anger out of her system without crippling herself.

I sit on the sofa and take a couple of the red and white mints she brought back from New York from the glass dish on the coffee table. I pick up the photography book she’s been reading, intending to flick through it until she comes back, and that’s when I see what we have been talking about, hidden underneath the book, scattered then pushed back together in haste. I sit and look at them and somewhere out of a filter in my brain, where the words I haven’t been listening to get caught up like hairs in a plughole, the thing I am supposed to care about, that is supposed to matter, falls free.

I pick them up, these photographs that do not depict my finest hour, and hold them in my hands like foreign currency I’m about to use to buy my way out of jail. There are at least a dozen, and are smaller than I thought surveillance photographs would be. They are more like holiday snaps in size, and the images on some are as badly framed and blurry.

I am still holding them and staring at them when she returns. She hasn’t been gone long. At least, it doesn’t feel like she has.

“It doesn’t matter to you, then?” she asks, “You don’t care?”

“I wasn’t listening,” is all I can say, as I sit there staring in disbelief at the photographs I’m holding in my hands. “I didn’t realise this was what we were talking about.”

I look at her, and her face is blank. There is no anger there, no pain, no sign that she feels betrayed.

The silence stretches on until I say, “I don’t know what to say,” after which the silence continues, uncluttered by sounds, or shoes, or any sense of reality.

She takes a mint from the dish and unwraps it. The rustle of the cellophane becomes the only sound in the room. She pauses, before she puts the mint into her mouth, and addresses me.

“I thought you said that you were a country boy.”

I look at her, unable to fathom what that has to do with these pictures, with what I’m suppose, or not supposed, to care about. I grew up in what might be called the countryside, the commuter belt version of it. Son of a solicitor and a teacher. Brought up in relative affluence in the sanitised country on the edge of the town where she was raised. A sticking point that I have never understood. A thing that is always flung at me in arguments, this accusation that I come from the country and yet am so useless.

“Daddy didn’t teach you how to skin a rabbit, then?” she says, the mint still between her fingers, suspended, waiting.

There’s more than one way, I almost tell her. There’s always more than one way. We can go on like this, talking in riddles, edging around the subject, or we can be straight and to the point.

She smiles and puts the mint into her mouth, pursing her lips into a pout as she begins to suck. She is still smiling and the curve of her pursed lips makes me smile too. I begin to think I know what she is thinking.

“Why don’t you teach me how to do it, then?” I say.

Her eyes are filled suddenly with wicked glee and she has to look away. She crunches into the mint; one, two, three, four bites, a swallow, and it’s gone.

She looks at me. She’s trying not to laugh; trying to suppress a giggle; a wave of laughter and relief and excitement filling her from her toes up to the top of her head.

“I thought you were having an affair,” she says.

I look down at the photographs that are still in my hands. The trick, apparently, is to use a really sharp knife and to take your time. You’re also supposed to keep them alive. It makes it easier. I read about it in a novel. The Manchurians were experts at skinning a man alive. In the novel, a Russian Army Officer captures a Japanese spy and his Manchurian War Lord ally skins the man alive. Murakami wrote the description well. I shivered when I read it, repulsed but at the same time excited by the idea.

We do it now because if the body turns up afterwards, it’s better that there is no skin on it. It makes it harder to identify. No fingerprints. No blemishes. Birthmarks harder to discover. It’s a practical thing. We’re not sick, and we’re not trophy hunters. We’re just paid to do a job.

She isn’t offended by the act in itself, I realise. She’s offended that I don’t take care to do it well. Consideration of style and appearance. Even when you are meting out a violent death, a death that is a crime, even when the death is deserved, reparation and revenge. Under her rules of play, you have the right to have your skin peeled from your body with skill and with care.

Doesn’t it matter to me, don’t I care? The fact of her asking, the realisation that her concern is an aesthetic and not a moral one repulses me and I feel the bile rising from my stomach into my throat.

I can’t look at the photographs any longer. Somehow I had managed to separate my mind from my body when I was carrying out the task. It was a job. Her excitement about it makes me see things differently. I can’t hold the vomit in any longer, and I run to the kitchen and empty the contents of my stomach into the sink.

She stands in the kitchen doorway as I splash my face with water and wash the puke away down the plughole.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

I look at her. She means it. I look at her and I realise that I do not know this woman at all, and I probably never have.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Red Dot

The notion was an improbable one.

She left the curtains open, even though she had the lights on. It was evening, the sky was darkening. Having the curtains open with the lights on went against the grain.

He could see her moving around in the living room, her net curtains no defence from prying eyes with the lights on and the curtains open. It was almost like being at a peep show.

He had the curtains open, but he didn’t have the lights on. That would be foolish, and he almost marched straight across the street to tell her so. But that would be more foolish.

The notion was ridiculous.

She had sat down on the sofa now, and all he could see was the very top of her head, with its dark brown hair. He had spoken to her once, in the street, and the sun had made her hair glow bronze. He didn’t usually like brunettes.

Inside the house, in the brightly lit room with its curtains flung open to the world, she was talking on the phone.

She was listening and talking.

It was madness to think that this plan would work. They had no evidence. There was no cause to think that he would fall into the trap.

They needed him to fall into the trap.

She leaned forward as she listened to what was being said to her over the phone. She leaned forward to type something into the search engine on her laptop. She leaned forward in obedience to the instruction she had just been given.

She was thinking about something else, all the time that this half baked plan was being put into action. She was thinking about another house, and another room. There were no curtains where her mind was wandering. The lights were dim and the garden filled with trees that strove to keep the daylight out of the rooms. No need for curtains, no need for blinds. The neighbours might want to look, but there was no opportunity.

That was the house she wanted to be inside, trying to understand the man who chose to live that way. When she’d been growing up, when there had been five in that house, and there had been curtains and no trees and daylight at the appropriate times and lights at the appropriate times, the curtains would have been drawn when the lights went on.

She picked up the nail clippers and trimmed her nails. It didn’t do to let them grow too long. She spent all of her time worrying about breaking one, once they reached a certain length. So she kept them neat and square.

When this job was over, and everything tidied up, she was going to go back to that house. She was going to sit down with him in the kitchen and drink, and she would ask him all the questions she never had before, so that she wouldn’t wake up one day and realise that it was too late.

There was a crackle of static from the garden.

None of this made sense.

In the house across the street, he was thinking the same thing. It didn’t make sense to him for her to have her lights on and the curtains open. He was becoming agitated. He didn’t like to be agitated. He wished she would just close the curtains, and then he wouldn’t have to look. He wouldn’t have to be agitated. He could feel the pressure rising in his head. He could feel the blood pounding through his arteries, the swell of it at his temples.

He could see her occasionally leaning forward on the sofa. She was looking at her hands. It made him look down at his own. When he looked back up, a red dot was trained on the centre of his forehead. He couldn’t feel it. He didn’t know that it was there.

She glanced across the road, out of the window, into his living room. She couldn’t see anything but darkness and a red dot. She understood what that meant. Although, understood was a strange choice of word. She didn’t understand what any of this was about, but she accepted that this was the way things had to be.

She saw that kitchen in her mind. The plates never used so they would never have to be washed up. Food eaten from pieces of paper towel. Disposable. Transient. A life that had been put on hold for more years than she cared to think about.

She kept her eyes fixed on the red dot and she knew that it would be positioned in the centre of his forehead. She knew that she mustn’t move now. Anything that fouled up the operation would be like a red dot in the middle of her own forehead.

The crack was barely audible. The bullet had been chosen well, passing through the window pane as though the glass were nothing more than a sheet of water. She imagined that the result was instantaneous. Death in all its colours, combining together to form white light. And then the absence of colour crashing down into black.

She would go to the other house tomorrow. She would sit at the kitchen table and listen to him talk, asking him the questions she never had before. It would be different this time.

The notion was a sweet one, but unlikely.

It was never anything other than what it was.

“Job well done” came the voice over the radio, the preceding burst of static alerting her to the incoming message. “Stand down.”

She closed her eyes. In a moment, she would get up and close the curtains. In a moment she would choose to change her life.

She picked up the phone and dialled a number.

“Dad?” she said. “How are you fixed if I call round tomorrow?”

A burst of static across the years. A huge hand that used to drown hers as a child.

The notion was an improbable one.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Towards The Moon

Full moon, caught up in the trees behind the houses, lodged in the topmost branches, a perfect circle with a silver halo. René Magritte could not have painted a moon more perfect.

She is lying naked on the bed, staring out of the window at the moon. Her hair is loose and blown by the breeze from the fan which is skimming along her body. She is stretched out and milky in the half light from the moon and the lights in the street outside the window.

Moonbathing at midnight. I would have her naked in the grass in front of the house for everyone to see. She lies there on the bed, close enough to touch but beyond my reach. In love with the moon; in thrall to it. She lies, with a look to the side, her hand pressed to her lips, or maybe her lips pressed to her hand. I can’t see her face but I know that her eyes will be large and round. They will match the moon in their perfection. Lee Miller could not have photographed a nude more lovely.

The air from the fan ripples across her body. Its curves are like desert dunes, sculpted by the wind, smooth and feminine. Her skin is pale; I know its softness; I know its taste; I know its scent at different points.

I move my hand and let it brush the curve of her lower back, and she sighs. Her eyes never leave the moon, but she sighs.

We have spent the whole day in the garden, the six of us. Franny wanted a barbecue. The street was filled with the smell of burning, of indiscriminate meat products combusting gently. Michael said it was carcinogenic. Funny how we’re concerned with our own personal causes of death. The potential ones, anyway.

She said it was risky, being outside to plan things. Suburbia is small; we encroach on each other daily. She has a point, but we have spent the day in the garden all the same, and now we know what it is that we have to do. Every step, every action has been planned and reviewed and revised and gone over until we know the sequence inside out. We know that the plan is watertight. She would say if she wasn’t happy, and all this revolves around her. I trust her judgement.

Terry has questioned her repeatedly, but, languid in the heat, she has said nothing all day to suggest that this is anything less than perfect, and now she lies in the moonlight, looking at that perfect circle with its halo of silver light.

She is finalising details in her head. She is running through scenarios; all the things that could go wrong, and all the solutions to resolve them. She carries everything in her head.

I withdraw my hand and carry on writing. I’m drawing the scene repeatedly, positioning people and equipment and calculating angles and trajectories. The floor beside the bed is littered with paper, balled up and flung aside each time I think I’m struck by a new configuration.

Unball those sheets, though, and place them side by side and you will see that none of them differs in any material detail from any other. I’m drawing the same scene over and again. I’m marking our positions with pinpoint accuracy. She is doing the same in her head. Mine is a freeze frame photographic still; a stop-motion animation that would only make sense if all the pictures were run together. Hers is the entire thing played out in glorious Technicolor inside her mind.

I can see that her breathing has changed. She is flat on her stomach now, her head still turned to the side, away from me, towards the moon. Her breathing is deep and resting. I put the pen and paper down and pull the bedsheet over us.

In a week, this will be over. In a week, this will be done. Neither of us knows it yet, but it will be ten years before we’ll see each other again. Once the dust has settled, I will be gone. Terry will see she’s alright.

I wrap an arm around her, underneath the bedsheet. The air from the fan blows gently across us both. She sleeps, stirring only slightly. I feel the softness of her skin, and start to miss it already.

© J R Hargreaves 12 June 2006

And All The While Knowing

It swings. It crashes. It moves from one extreme to the other, and that’s what tells her that this is real.

This is no play acting approximation. Every encounter brings out some form of violence. The violent palpitations of love that echo the adrenalin fuelled desire to fight. That very morning, she wanted to punch him until he lay senseless on the floor. She wanted to punch him with a fervour that mixed love with hate with lust with frustration, and all the while knowing that she wanted nothing more than to be near him. Mentally, physically, his presence in her life a drug. As good as any chemical she could shake from a bottle. As good as any endorphin her body could produce.

A fist. Thumb on the outside for strength. First principle of bare knuckle fighting. A fist, a clenched hand, offered up in challenge. A hand, clenched and angry, that he could then kiss open.

This makes her mad; the knowledge that his kiss, real or implied, can so easily bring her to submission.

The day has to begin, in all its mundanity of motion. She stands, for as long as she thinks she can get away with, under the jet of water in the shower. She stands and hopes that the water will wash away the anger, will leave her cleansed. She washes her hair, the shampoo lathering strongly in the soft water. It takes an age to rinse away; an age she can’t afford. She rinses and conditions, with the water playing around her body. Her body is clean now, but still vibrates with anger.

Every thought in her mind this morning is a diatribe against him. A string of expletives that feed and frenzy and procreate, producing ever more colourful turns of phrase, fat with insult and spiked with venom. She would write them all down on a square sheet of paper. She would shout them at him down the phone. But she hasn’t an address, and she hasn’t a number any more, and he isn’t here to receive those words in person. All this feeds her anger.

Every thought in her mind says she hates him. An expense of energy and a passion that is uninvited but willingly embraced.

He is sleeping in some bed, in some house, in some suburb across town, while she is showering and hating. He couldn’t even tell her himself that he was back.

She leaves her hair wet while she makes her breakfast. The day is warm and humid already. Her hair dries quickly, but it dries badly. She feels it frizz, and knows that no amount of straightening will help it hold out today, so she pulls it back, she pins it up.

The tv is on as she eats her breakfast, but it doesn’t hold her attention. She has all the news she needs in her head. He is back. Headline news. More important than the mended metatarsal of some footballer. More significant than the death of some terrorist leader in the Middle East.

He is back, and the world begins to spin in the wrong direction. He is back, and it will start up again. The secret meetings. The planning, the organising. This island has been quiet for ten years. The biggest bomb in mainland Britain. His work, her work. The rebirth of a city.

He is back, and the only way she knows is that Terry told her. He has yet to make contact. She shivers, and her hands clench. She remembers the last time. Standing beside the van. She had just fitted the explosive. It had taken months of preparation, working out the exact position, so that the explosion would be clean. The van was to be parked on the busiest street in the city centre. It had to explode cleanly so that the brunt of the damage was borne by buildings, not by people. The explosive had to sit in just the right place.

She was good at what she did, back then; best person for the job. The bosses back home, the others on the team, Franny, Michael, even Terry; they hadn’t wanted a woman, but he had believed she was fit for the task. She paid him back for that belief. She placed the explosive just right.

Terry was the only one to congratulate her afterwards. Terry was the only one who was left behind. The others had already gone; fled the country, back home. No goodbye. No “well done”. She understood. She had been employed to do a job, and she had done it. No congratulation necessary. If she’d fucked up, then she would have heard; but a job well done was congratulation enough, in his book.

His “well done” was what she wanted, though.

Standing there, beside the van, the explosive fitted, he could have said anything to her. He could have, but he didn’t. And afterwards, when the dust had settled, he was gone.

Terry was the one who stayed. Terry, who waits around her edges, never confident enough to ask for what he wants. He waits and is solicitous; a good man, and uncomplicated, but he doesn’t get the fire going in her belly. She can take all the goodness in the world, but if she has no fire in her belly, then what’s the point?

Comfort in the night. Dependability. A guaranteed warm welcome. Is that the point? She thinks she'd be better with a dog.

She leaves the house and walks up to the bus stop. Northenden is quiet this morning. The schools have broken up for the summer, and there are no children dragging their feet along the pavement to the bus stop. The day is already warm, and she regrets the jacket she picked up as she left the house. She doesn’t remember when she became so cautious. She doesn’t remember when she started planning for the worst.

As she passes the old mill site, she wonders how the dig is going. The car park has been taken over and tape marks out squares where the excavations are taking place. There’s nobody there at this hour. The site is deserted.

She crosses the main road and stands at the bus stop. Her phone rings. Woolworths is just opening for business. She looks at her phone and doesn’t recognise the number, so she lets it ring out.

Later, she will be glad. For at least a week, she can be glad, because of the message he leaves on her voicemail. For a week she can listen to the richness of his voice, to those same words that he is speaking now, unheard, while she stands at the bus stop waiting.

The bus arrives, and she hears her phone beep. She sits at the back of the bus and tries to listen to the message over the sound of the engine she is almost sitting on top of. The first rise and fall of that familiar baritone makes her heart stop beating, rise up into her throat, then thud back into life. She no longer wants to punch him. She no longer wants to make a fist, thumb to the outside. The sound of his voice again is kiss enough to unfurl those fingers.

She listens to the instructions. She memorises the place, the time, the date. She knows that she should delete this message as soon as she has heard it, but somehow she presses 2 to save, and the evidence is there. The solace is there too, for her to listen to, each day for a week. The richness of his voice, its cadence. She plays it back now, as she sits on the bus, as it makes its way up Palatine Road, through Withington and on to Oxford Road.

So he is back, and she has her instructions, and his voice, captured on her phone. She gets off the bus and starts to walk to work.

She is halfway from the bus stop to the Town Hall when her phone rings again. She knows the number this time. It is Terry. The conversation confirms the instructions, fills in some of the missing pieces. The saved message is a danger, a weak link in the chain, but it isn’t the whole story. He will have been doing the rounds, collecting his team, doling out individual shapes and symbols that they will have to piece together.

There will be at least six more conversations like this one, if memory serves her right. She is always the final point of contact. She is always the one who sews it all together. She is always the one who blows it all apart.

The job this time surprises her. But passing the dig at the mill this morning gives her an idea. Holes in the ground, ready made; the site will be closed and recorded by the end of the month. Less than a week away.

The job surprises her because her specific talents aren’t needed. And yet, she is still part of the team; still the last point of contact. She only has his message and what Terry has just told her, but it is enough to go on. It is enough to know that her skills won’t be called upon.

She is valuable, though. Her position, her job, the living she earns now; that’s what makes her valuable. She is best placed to find him what he wants. And the hole in the ground that he wants her to find will be filled by someone she has worked with.

She remembers the talk that followed what they did ten years ago. She remembers the conspiracy theories. The bomb was too clean. The destruction of the city’s infrastructure too convenient. The loss of life too small for the size of the bomb.

She was good at what she did, back then. She knew where to place the load.

She remembers the whispers in the corridors, that it was partly an inside job. Someone high up in the council knew what was going to happen. Someone high up arranged for it to happen; went along with the Firm; eased their passage. Back scratching. You destroy the crumbling heart of a crumbling city, no loss of life, massive government investment to rebuild, we give you the publicity. The biggest bomb in mainland Britain; your swansong in the fight.

But he’s back, bringing the fight back with him. And the love and the hate and the lust and frustration, that peaked into anger this morning, that’s back too. All those hints of his return over the preceding weeks. The unconfirmed messages. The clicks on her answering machine; phones being put down before she could ask “Is that you?” The untraceable numbers. The essence of the silence before the click and the buzz of disconnection, as rich as the timbre of his voice left behind in the message on her phone this morning.

The memory swings. It crashes. She can taste what he used to smell like in the air; she feels the tang of it against her tongue.

It’s hot, and the windows in this office don’t open. She drinks water, tries to keep hydrated. She works. She files planning applications. She mentally records which places in Manchester are due to begin building works; which are due to complete soon. She compiles a list of suitable places, and all the time the mill site in Northenden seems the best. A new 13^th century Pale. An Irish creation in England, this time.

The phone doesn’t ring again all morning. Only the message from him and the follow-up from Terry. She has had no instruction to pass on her message to anyone else. She calculates whether this is a job that might only take the three of them, but she doesn’t have all the information, so it can’t be. There has to be someone else involved, but she is not the last point of contact. She won’t be sewing this one together; won’t be blowing it apart.

She is tempted. The number is stored in her missed calls register. The option is there at the end of the saved message to call back the person who left it.

She is tempted to hear his voice in real time, to ask to see him again. She no longer wants to punch him. Hate is calm now, which leaves only love, lust and frustration. She discounts love. Infatuation passes, and ten years is a long time to hold a candle. So lust and frustration, then. The driving forces of temptation.

She is tempted to save the number, so that next time he calls she will know that it is him. She won’t ignore the call next time.

Terry phones after lunch. He asks how her morning has been. She talks about the places that are undergoing work. She mentions how much she has enjoyed the recent excavation work being done at Northenden Mill. She talks about how sad she is that it will soon be over, and the holes filled in again. She hears Terry listening. She hears the change in the way he breathes. She is onto something. She can sense that he feels it too.

She knows the rules, so she doesn’t ask. She knows better than to ask. The lust and the frustration. Her hands forming into fists; thumbs on the inside this time. No fighting fists, these, just childish frustration, the clench of longing. The fist that is formed to be bitten along the knuckle. All the Christmases of her childhood formed into curled fingers and tucked in thumbs.

She bites a knuckle.

She puts down the phone.

In the dreamlike dullness of the afternoon heat, as she files and records and carries out her duties as an officer of the council, her brain whirrs away, trying to calculate the wider nature of this job.

He is back for a reason, and she is not his number two.

A weak link in the chain, she thinks. Someone too close to the truth. Someone who might blow this all apart.

She catches the bus home again in the early evening swelter. She sits by a window, hoping that the breeze will be enough to stop her from melting, or passing out.

She can smell her own sweat on her, mixing with the chemicals in her deodorant, mixing with the chemical-pheromone smell of everyone else on this bus.

It is sharp, and it brings back the memory of how he used to smell. The tang of it.

She gets off the bus and crosses the road. She walks past the car park, on her way home. She glances to her left. She knows the dig team should all have gone by now, but there is someone standing there.

They face each other. He is back. Her hands form into fists, and the lust. The lust. Even in these last few moments, as he raises the gun and she releases her fists, the lust is the thing that dominates.

He looks good; she wants to touch him; and her hands are opening to welcome the conclusion.

She is the weak link in the chain. She is the one who could blow this thing wide open. She has drifted through this day, all the while knowing that this could be the only end.

Her hands are open. His hand is raised. His hand forms a fist around the handle of the gun. His accusatory finger points then curls.

She smiles.

The final point of contact.

© J R Hargreaves June 2006