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