The Madeleine

She is leaning, bright and smiling, out of the window. There is nothing she can explain to him any more. She’s laughing; a young woman filled with sudden knowledge. She’s reached a final point, and he stands awkwardly, half naked in the garden, clad in combat trousers and no shirt. His torso is tanned, his skin shiny in the sunlight. Her teeth are white, her lips a perfect pink, peeled back in a laugh to expose those clean bright teeth. He doesn’t understand why she’s laughing, but he knows that it doesn’t bode well for him.

She’s like a painting of a woman leaning from a window, laughing at the scene in the garden before her. She is paused in a moment of her life, relishing her awareness, drinking in the feeling it gives her. That moment when a bubble bursts within you, and everything you have been burdened with is set free to float away, leaving you clean and breathing in new air. She is paused and enjoying that feeling.

Across the road, Desi’s wife leaves the house, all bent and crumpled in the sticky heat of the day. She’s off to the corner shop for cans and papers. Desi will be out the back, smoking in the garden, thinking about getting the barbecue started. Waiting for his cans.

Mike takes a step towards the open window. She stops laughing, drops it down to a giggle. Her eyes dance with amusement behind her sunglasses. He can see them faintly through the smoky glass of the lenses.

She’s leaning out of the window, and he’s walking up the slight rise of the garden towards her. Mike thinks it’s like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, except this window is a ground floor window, and she’s laughing, not sighing with pangs of teenage love.

He starts to scale the patch of ground beneath the window.

“Get out of the flower bed, you idiot. You’ll crush the lobelia.”

She’s still laughing. He stops just at the edge of the flowers and looks down at his feet.

“Size of your feet, the poor buggers don’t stand a chance, Charlie.”

He looks up at her, and thinks he sees a flicker of annoyance cross her face, but she smiles and he lets it pass.

“What are you after anyway?” she says.

Mike is suddenly shy of her, as though they are back at school, all those years ago, when the unwritten law stated that she and he must be boyfriend and girlfriend. There was always reluctance to commit to honest expression of feeling. Hers was subtly different to his. He was just a lad. She had something else about her.

The unwritten law meant that he didn’t need to question his right to hold her hand, or his right to kiss her with tongues round the back of the annexe while everyone else, their group of friends, stood around and watched, or yawned, or kicked their heels during break time. The unwritten law said that it had to be that way.

She was always smiling then. It unsettled him.

He can’t answer her question. “Ah, nothing,” he says, grinning and hopeful. Hopeful for what, he couldn’t tell you if you asked him. Hopeful all the same.

She retreats from the window, that madeleine, shell-like and sweet. She disappears inside, into the shadow of the living room.

She’ll be sharpening her knives, he thinks. She’ll sit there later, all demure, sticking forks into the backs of her hands, thinking the thoughts that he’s never privy to.

She has nothing left to say to him. He will never understand what goes on inside her. He might think that he has prior knowledge, but he knows and understands nothing of who she is. She is rich with it, richer than he could ever stomach. Sweet and rich and capable of giving you a stomach ache.

She smiles as she moves across the room and through the doorway, into the kitchen. The backdoor is open to let air into the house. She opens the door to the washing machine and pulls out the tangle of sheets, towels and pillowcases. She pulls them, knotted and confused, into the washing basket, and then takes the basket outside.

She methodically pegs out the clean washing. She has perfected the half stare that enables her to avoid making eye contact with the neighbours. She has only had conversations with either of them when they have had a piece of mail to hand over the fence. She has gone out of her way to be friendly in only the politest of terms.

So much hatred of the world around her. So much boredom with the way things are. What unwritten law was it that said she would have to live a life like this?

She kicks at the pile of dust that the ants have churned up around a dandelion. It’s reddish brown, like brickdust, or soil mixed with sand. This house was built on a school playground, and the soil in the gardens isn’t deep. It amazes her that anything manages to grow in such shallow earth.

She is leaving him tomorrow. While he is at work. She hasn’t yet decided whether she will leave the wedding ring on the bedside table, or whether she will take it and pawn it for cash. She isn’t short of cash. She smiles. Leaving it would leave him in no doubt. Pawning it would be funny.

The sunflowers in the back garden are lined up against the garage wall, slowly turning their yellow heads with the chocolate centres to follow the path of the sun.

This house is in his name. He pays the mortgage. Every month, though, she has put exactly the same amount from her salary into an account. Ten years of savings. Almost £45,000.

He comes marching through the house. Michael. Charlie. The bane of her existence. Tomorrow, she will be somewhere else. There is nothing she can explain. No reason she can give.

Mike looks at her from the open back door. She is as beautiful as any of the flowers that grow in the garden. She is as mysterious, as well. Her petals furl when the light isn’t on her. He doesn’t understand.

A magpie sits on top of the garage. It chatters something to its mate. Magpies come in pairs, that’s why it’s one for sorrow. She looks up at the roof, but her position on the lawn means she can’t see where the magpie is sitting. She can only hear it. She looks back at Mike, over her shoulder, and smiles her enigmatic smile. Her grey eyes are smoky and bright, hidden behind her sunglasses. Mike knows what they are like, knows what expression will be in them. He knows that he can see so far into them, and then it’s as though shutters come down, and he isn’t permitted to see any further.

He has the feeling that she will leave.

She turns away from him and looks up at the garage roof again. She wills the magpie to appear at the edge of the roof, so that she can see it. In her mind, she can see herself, charged with violence, running at him as he stands there in the doorway, running to attack, to rid herself of this non-existence in her life. If someone asked her to describe him, she would say that he was beige. His eyes, his hair, his clothing. It’s all beige. Non-descript. He is slight and inconsequential and life, she now knows, is too short.

He is carob, when she wants chocolate.

Tomorrow, she will leave it all behind. She will take no photographs from this life, no reminders. She will take clothes, her hi-fi and the cat. Everything else she will rebuild from scratch. Start over. Her own personal beginning.

She submits one last time to the inevitable, and regains entry to the house by the giving and receiving of a hug. By the giving and receiving of a ring, was how this all began. By taking the inevitable and running with it. A marathon that went on too long. She is followed by him up the stairs, and she submits again to the sowing of seed that will find no fertile ground. She disengages with practised ease. She raises her legs, accommodates him. There is no eye contact. When he kisses her, she closes her eyes, but not in surrender to pleasure. In avoidance of being seen. He thrusts himself in and out, in and out, sweating in the summer afternoon heat, and her mind cuts free. She hears him, she feels him, but her mind thinks through all the most mundane things she can call into being. Where her nearest supermarket will be when she moves into the new house. How soon she’ll be able to get a cat flap fitted. She makes no noise.

He finishes. He withdraws. She wipes herself clean, goes to the bathroom and showers, washes away as much of him from her body as she can.

Mike lies on the bed, breathing heavily, recovering. He listens to her going through her usual ritual in the bathroom. She was more disengaged than ever today. She comes back into the bedroom, smelling clean and fresh. She dresses. She smiles at him, pink lips pressed together, hiding those bright white teeth. She leaves the room and goes back downstairs.

Mike lies on the bed and wonders what the inevitable will bring next.

A dance around the kitchen, a meal made and eaten together, a curl together on the sofa, watching Silent Witness. Comfortable companionship with no spark of passion. She is incomplete in this environment.

The smile on her face is like an ache.

The hollow in her belly won’t be filled.

She looks up at him, from where she is curled, her head in his lap. She looks up and smiles and knows that tomorrow all of this will be torn asunder. He has dozed off, his head nodding forward. The light from the tv casts shadows over his face and she traces the shape of his jaw, of his lips, of his nose with her eyes. She wonders what it would be like to have loved him. She is dead, though. Hard and cold and solitary. Her passion still, after all this time, unopened. The knot of it rigid at her centre, its denial as hard as a cancer, eating her away.

And this will not end with her new beginning, but at least she will no longer be lying.

© J R Hargreaves July 2006

Kiss, Kiss

Open. Close. Open again. Like breathing. Like taking in gulps of air, but tasting. Like drinking, but eating. Soft pressure, then harder. Soft again, and tender. Dry lips, become wetter, are soft and dry and gentle on the outside, but the inside turns itself out to leave wetness, vulnerable and soft, but hard with the sucking, drinking motion of mouth against mouth. Tongues flick. Mouths part, but not completely part, separate gently, then return, and tongues flick again. A sound escapes her throat, half sigh, half call. Her head tilts back, exposes her throat. Their lips part and he travels in kisses down her throat and to her sternum. Hard, bony sternum that he kisses with mouth closed.

Does this lead anywhere? How can it not? In minds and hearts, does this kissing signify? They both tell themselves it doesn’t. So it doesn’t. They both say to themselves that it’s meaningless. So it is.

It stops. They sit. They rearrange the slight dishevelment of their coats, straightening their outward appearance. Sitting on a bench in a park in a city centre that neither can call home.

Meaningless kisses that go nowhere but say everything about their lives. Reassurance and danger. Boredom. They pick words from the air to give themselves some meaning, ignoring the words that sit, ready made, inside their heads.

At their age, they should know better. Both of them should know that their age is not the age to be sitting on park benches kissing.

“I’d better get back, then,” he says, though he doesn’t move a muscle, gives no sign of any intention to move.

“Yes. Me too,” she responds, and doesn’t move either.

They sit. His hand steals across to hers and touches it gently, then retreats as quickly as it advanced. He leaves his hand resting on the bench, close enough for her to put her own on top of it, and squeeze.

It means nothing. They are not everything. There are other things. Other people. An entire world that surrounds them and separates them, and keeps them from making this something.

Even though this is meaningless and could only ever be nothing.

Leaves fall from the trees. The rose bushes that bloomed and lost their petals through the summer have been pruned back and stand bare and witch-like in the flower beds. Like Raggety in Rupert The Bear. Spindly limbs and scratchy fingers. The branches of the rose bushes are black and damp looking, even though the day is dry.

Kiss; touch; kiss again. They sit and replay it in their minds, with different interpretations.

Never more than this. Never anything other than this. Brief meetings in the park to kiss and touch. Fleeting moments that do not count, because flesh has not been bared, secret scars have not been touched.

Neither wants the other to leave, but neither has the claim to keep the other there. To do more than this would spoil it. To see more would break the enchantment, make this something real.

She is the one who stands first. She is the one who can’t stand the way they sit on like this. She needs motion. She needs to get away, get free of this interminable moment, inert and unlovely as it is. So she stands and turns to look at him.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

The last kiss, then. This is the last kiss. She bends to deliver it, and tries to fill it with meaning. Her mouth lingers over his. She kisses his bottom lip, taking the soft cushion of it between her own two lips. She holds it there as the seconds tick by and she breathes him in, the closeness of his face to hers. Then she releases him.

She walks from the park and she doesn’t look back.

She takes the train home. The carriages are almost empty. Mid afternoon. Other people at work. The journey is quick, but seems to take forever, and the walk from station to home takes longer. Climbing the stairs, walking through damp fallen leaves, worrying that her hair is beginning to frizz in the autumn air. Hurrying to reach home and close her door.

She hangs her coat up in the hallway, and walks through to the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she looks out of the window onto the back garden. The cat teeters along the fence, unsteady and risking embarrassment by looking back at her through the window from the outside.

She goes to the back door and calls the cat in from the garden by making a kissing noise. She purses her lips and lets out a puff of air as she releases the tension. She calls the cat in and scoops her up, pressing her face into her fur. She looks at the cat, and the cat looks back at her.

“Kiss, kiss,” she says. “Kiss, kiss.”

The cat licks her nose, and she kisses her on the head, before putting her down again.

The cat runs to her bowl and starts to eat, looking up every so often for reassurance that her owner is still there. Security.

She looks at herself in the small mirror. Her hair has begun to frizz. She sweeps it to one side and plaits it, making a thick rope of it, brown and glossy. She tries to smooth the stray wisps, but they make an aura round her face, a halo backlit by the lights above and behind her. Her face looks tired as it gazes back at her through the mirror. There are fine lines around her mouth. The appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, as the adverts would have it. Fine lines around her eyes, too. Growing older. Losing the elasticity of youth.

One last kiss, ill-prepared for. Spur of the moment. A reaction. Listening to codes he didn’t even know he was speaking. Ending it while she still had the chance, before she was swallowed or left behind.

Trained to react, like the cat to her words. Conditioned to see endings tied up in innocuous sentences. Schooled in keeping the upper hand. Determined never to fall over the barrel, or be placed there.

Brief seconds of time. Moments when the silence said more than the kisses or the words. Those were the times when she could well have fallen. It wasn’t the kisses or the caresses, it was the silence of understanding. Silence with its own language that takes form in the kiss, in the movement of a mouth that says nothing and everything, but mostly nothing.

His voice falling into her ear, soundwaves and vibrations carrying the message through bone and membrane and nerves. Soundwaves and vibrations translated by her brain; the aural patterns saying one thing; her interpretation saying another.

If La La means I Love You, then I’ll Call You means Goodbye. Her interpretation, and a last kiss ill-prepared for.

“Kiss, kiss,” she says to the cat, and the cat turns her head away.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

A Simple Act

“It starts with a simple act of violence.”

“What happens?”

“There are two women; girls, really. They’re standing at a quiz machine in a bar on a hot summer evening. Just behind them and to their right, over their shoulders' right, three people sit at a table. Dropped down a level from the rest of the bar, nobody can see what is going on. Two of the people at the table are women, the other is a man. He eyes the girls on the quiz machine with malice. He wants to play the quiz machine himself. It’s a compulsion with him, never stronger than when other people are playing the machine in his sight.”

We are sitting on a bench in a park, side by side, staring straight ahead. The tops of our arms are touching, the sides of our thighs. That is the only way we ever touch.

“Go on.”

“One of the women at the table looks at the man, and says, ‘Burn them.’ The man looks at her. He hasn’t heard her properly. ‘Bone them?’ he asks. ‘No,’ she repeats, ‘burn them.’ She pauses, then continues, ‘They don’t deserve to be boned.’ The man looks at her for a moment, then laughs. He thinks she’s joking. The second woman is looking off to the side, away into the distance. She isn’t part of the conversation. She is thinking about other things. The first woman speaks again, pushing a glass jar that holds a tea light towards the man. ‘There’s a candle here. The rim of this jar will be hot. You could get some nice rings going on their skin.’ The second woman comes out of her reverie. ‘Ring of fire,’ she says. They all laugh. The man is looking from the jar to the girls on the quiz machine. He’s no longer sure that the first woman is joking. He’s no longer sure that burning the girls wouldn’t be a good thing to do. Ends justify means, after all. The second woman changes the subject of the conversation. She starts to talk about being an extra in the new film about Ian Curtis. The burning of the girls is forgotten.”

“So it doesn’t start with a simple act of violence at all.”

He looks at me.

“The violence never happens. It’s just talked about.”

He doesn’t understand.

“What’s the difference? In a film, to understand that the man is thinking about the violence, how it would play out, you’d have to show it. It’s going to start with that simple act, that moment where he takes the jar and pushes it against the bare skin of one of the women, searing her flesh, leaving a ring on her arm, or her shoulder, or somewhere.”

“You should say that, then. Don’t say that it starts with an act of violence and then talk about what the scene is like.”

“Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?”

I look straight ahead. There is grass and a few trees in front of me. There are people walking dogs along paths that go round the grass and the trees. There are other benches, but they are empty.

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand. I’m just saying. If you want to make a statement, if you think you’re going to shock them into listening by telling them it starts with a simple act of violence, you’d better describe the act of violence straight away. That’s all.”

He is silent. I am silent. It’s an argument that isn’t an argument, because we won’t ever let ourselves become heated about it. It’s an exchange of views. An interesting conversation. In all likelihood, he will go away from this bench sitting chat and he will think about what I have said. He will revise it and make it his own and I will have no acknowledgement for my work. The revision of history is there to make the reviser seem more glorious.

He revises everything after a point. In his own world view, where he is king, he is noble and upright and strong. I know him as something else. But I let him go on thinking that he is the king. I have no choice.

“And is there more to this film?”

“It’s a short.”

“A sting?”

“No. It’s just a short. I’m not trying to sell anything. It’s not a piece of advertising.”

“It’s advertising you.”

“No it isn’t. It’s art. It’s not commercial. It’s art.”

He says this in a low voice, and I have to look away; properly away, over my other shoulder, my line of vision moved to the line of the path this bench sits on. I look away and I try not to laugh. I smirk into my shoulder. If I laugh he will feel the shake of my mockery.

“It’s art,” he says again. “It’s a short and I’m submitting it as a short. They show shorts on that channel.”

“They show them at obscure times.”

I’m not being helpful, I know, but I’m bored. We all need to be bored. It pushes things along. It allows us to play with our victims. I feel like a cat playing with a mouse. I know that he is indulging me. I know that he has the ability to devour me. He’s not a mouse. He’s a black hole, a shape-shifter, a dragon. But I am bored, and I will take this risk for a few moments. My boredom demands that I see how far I can take it.

He is silent now. He knows what I am doing. I can feel the sulk building up inside him. I use him for these feelings. I use him for my boredom, for my antagonism, my frustration. Sitting at a table in a bar right now, with a candle in a jar in front of me, I would burn him. I wouldn’t talk about it. I wouldn’t declare that this begins with a simple act of violence. I would just burn him.

Sado-masochism. I want to hurt him so that he will hurt me later. I need his antagonism, too. I need him to reject me, to repel me, so that I can come crawling back. It’s a sick dance, but we both need it. I need to feel forgiven for my bad behaviour. He needs to feel that I need his approval.

A man with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail is rollerblading along the path. I follow his movement with my eyes, and it pulls my head back around so that I am once again looking at him. He is resolute. He is staring straight ahead. He is plotting his response. I will pay for this later. It fills me with a sick kind of glee.

I sugar my voice and patronise him.

“It sounds really good, darling. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

He wants to believe that I am sincere. He needs to believe that, because the sarcasm doesn’t sit with his internal view of his own abilities. He needs to hear what he wants me to say. I give him the words, but not the meaning. It’s up to him to choose his meaning.

In a flicker of an instant he chooses. His sulk evaporates, and he turns to me and smiles.

“Thanks, baby,” he says.

We kiss. It is light and airy, a quick brush of lips and acres of air in between, like an arid desert with a momentary breeze. It’s like two snooker balls glancing off each other.

We turn our heads, we face the landscape in front of us. He has chosen to let it pass this time. There will be nothing for me later, and I am now too bored to try again.

“I think I might walk.”

He doesn’t respond.

I get up and walk along the path, leaving him to sit in silence on the bench. Thinking. I pull my scarf closer around my face, and bury my jaw and mouth in it. Just my nose peeks over the top. My hat is pulled down tight against my brow. I push my hands firmly into my coat pockets. The winter trees are showing the first signs that spring will soon be here. The frost has gone. It ended weeks ago. I walk and follow the path around the piece of grass we were gazing out over minutes ago.

I am directly opposite where he is still sitting. I can see his form through the corner of my eye. He is a dark mass of denim and wool and leather. I walk straight ahead. I don’t follow the bend back to him. I walk on, out of the park and away.

The buildings I walk between are tall and dark and imposing. I feel dwarfed by them. My stomach rolls. I would look at my watch, but it is buried with my wrist under sleeves and in my pocket, so I trust my instinct and listen to my body, obey its need for food.

I go into a café and order tea and toast. The toast comes brown and golden with the butter melted right into the surface. The tea looks muddy. It is warm and wet, though. I have peeled off some of my layers and sit at a table with my back to the window. I don’t want to look out at the world on the street outside. I want to be alone with my tea and my toast and my thoughts.

There’s a blandness to his arrogance that I hate and also like. There’s an arrogance to his blandness that frustrates me. The violence in our interactions is pent up and distorted by the civility with which we communicate. He makes me seethe and weep and rage and whimper.

I eat my toast, and the tea is still too hot. My phone begins to ring in a pocket of my coat, and I let it. I need to change the locks soon. I need to redecorate. I sip on the still hot tea.

My phone rings like a doorbell to tell me I have a voicemail message. I will listen to it later. I blow on the tea and suck it into my mouth, in the hope that the air will help to cool it. When you drink hot tea this fast, it’s impossible to finish it. It seems to expand in your stomach. I leave it, three quarters drunk, and pull my layers back on.

The city is quiet today, and I walk onto the main street where shops are having sales of clothes it will soon be too warm for people to wear. There are trousers that I like, and skirts; boots and jeans and jewellery. No cloaks of invisibility, though. And that is what I would like. I’m wearing too many layers to be trying things on today, so I just look into windows and stay on the street.

I think of that kiss and how it might be our last. I think of the boredom, the yawn of our continued play, and the loss of inspiration each time we follow the script. Improvisation and free association has become its own pattern. We set off down the path and make the usual stops along the way. He has cast the players in this drama, and I have accepted my role, like always. But now I want to shake him and say that I am not the woman he has cast me as. I want a new role to play.

But I can’t be bothered. Boredom is sucking the marrow from my bones.

I answer the phone when it rings this time.

“Where are you?”

“Shopping.”

“Shopping isn’t a location.”

“Here, there, everywhere.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Whose home?”

There is a pause while he thinks about this.

“What do you mean?”

“Who pays the mortgage on the building you’re in right now?”

“Oh.”

I look through the window into Hobbs, at all the winter clothes I couldn’t afford in season and I still can’t afford now. The silence at the other end of the phone stretches on for a while. He breaks it eventually.

“Are you going to come round later?”

Come round from a knock out. Come round from an operation. Come round to a new way of thinking. Am I ever going to come round?

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.”

That kiss was probably our last. In its own way, it was a simple act of violence. Its lack of meaning ripped something apart; made some kind of tear in the fabric of life. Not betrayal, but not love either. A nothing, floating in the winter air on a park bench with nobody there to witness it. An everything, that bore its own witness to the end.

I move on up the street. The city is quiet, and the day not halfway old.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Marilyn

She sings breathily, as though she thinks she is Marilyn, or Jane Horrocks mimicking Marilyn.

“Happy Birthday. To You,” she sings, with all the pauses. She bends at the knee in her cheap pink satinette dress. There’s half-hearted applause as she comes off-stage and makes her way to the toilet to get changed.

He follows her in there and gives her a gram.

“Good girl,” he says.

“Throw me a fucking peanut. I might dance,” she says, ignoring the wrap as she starts to remove her heavy make-up. She’s freckled and fair underneath all the blusher and foundation. Her face is pretty in a natural way, an uncommon way.

He pushes the wrap towards her.

“You did well, though,” he says. “You deserve a treat.”

She unzips the dress and steps out of it. It has fallen to the floor around her feet, and she is semi-naked, with her back to him. He traces the curve of her spine with his eyes. He counts the notches of her vertebrae where they show through at the top of her back. He lingers over the hollow that forms in the small of her back. She’s reapplying mascara and lip gloss, and she watches him through the mirror. She says nothing; she doesn’t have to. It’s all there in her eyes.

He laughs.

“You’re safe, Princess,” he says. “You’re really not my type.” He walks over to where the wrap of cocaine still sits on the vanity unit.

“You sure you don’t want this?” he asks. “Finest Columbian.”

She pauses with the mascara brush in mid-air, and looks at him. He laughs again and pockets the wrap.

“Suit yourself,” he says, and turns to leave the room. “It takes more than dirty glances to get rid of me, though.” He looks at her from the doorway. “I’ll give you a call, yeah?”

She doesn’t even look at him, but carries on fixing her make-up, half naked and beautiful.

She pulls on a bra, pulls a t-shirt over it, pulls on jeans. She unpins her hair and lets it fall around her shoulders and face. She pushes the cheap blonde nylon wig that makes her scalp itch into a carrier bag with the pink dress and the heels. She puts on a pair of flats and tidies away her make-up.

In her new disguise, nobody recognises her as she leaves the club. He’s back at the bar, whiskey in hand, watching the next act on the stage.

She pushes her way through the double doors and out onto the street. The summer night is sultry, and she regrets her jeans. Winter will be here soon enough and she will be in her natural habitat once again.

The plastic bag holding her stage clothes rustles at her side as she walks and swings in time with her rhythm. She hums to herself as she makes her way through town and down the hill to the taxi rank. It’s not too late and she doesn’t expect that there will be much of a wait.

“You’ve finished early, love,” says the man on the phones behind the counter.

“Short one tonight,” she says.

“Usual address?”

“Yes,” she says, and sighs.

He smiles at her. “About ten minutes, okay?”

“Okay,” she replies, not quite managing to smile back. She turns and takes a seat on one of the benches. There’s a quiz machine in the corner, and a lanky youth is slumped over it, flicking buttons and feeding coins periodically into the slot. She crosses one leg over the other and twitches her foot back and forth, up and down, gazing out of the cab office window at the cars going past, on their way out of town. People going home, one or two drinks over the limit most of them, in all probability.

The ten minutes seem to take an hour to pass, but eventually the bloke at the desk calls out, “You’re next, love” and she goes outside to stand on the pavement. The cab pulls up at the kerb and she gets into the back seat.

“Alright, love?” the driver grins over his shoulder.

“Fine, thanks,” she says.

“Where to, then?”

She gives the address and the cab pulls away from the kerb.

When she gets into the house, she strips off again, leaving her clothes in a pile on the living room floor. She goes upstairs, enjoying the cool of the air against her skin. She goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower, setting it to cool. She pulls clean towels out of the airing cupboard and places them on top of the toilet lid. She cleans off her make-up again. Vanity is the only reason she puts it on for the journey home. She can’t be seen without mascara and lip gloss. Not even by people she doesn’t know.

She gets into the shower and lets the water run over her, washing away the grime of the day, the scum of the night. She tries not to think about the events of this evening. It has been one of the worst ones. She can’t remember how she got into this, how he found a way to – she can’t even bring herself to think what he has made her do.

Stepping out of the shower, she wraps the larger of the clean towels around her and the smaller one around her head. She rubs gently at her hair, squeezing out the moisture, then turns the towel into a turban.

She stays wrapped in her towels and goes back downstairs. In the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of wine. Cassis and vanilla, it says on the label. It tastes like wine to her. Good wine. She sips at it and walks through to the living room. The wine goes to her head, makes her feel sleepy. She sits on the sofa, wrapped in her towels, drying off, winding down.

Across town, the club is closing. He’s made a few phone calls. The mess in the gents has been cleaned up. She’s neat, but you can’t do this kind of thing without some mess.

Her phone rings and she ignores it. The wine in her glass is almost gone. Her eyes are closed. She isn’t sleeping, not yet. She sits and listens to the phone ring on. She knows it will be him. Smart in his suit, even in this heat. She has never seen him sweat once.

She has opened the living room window, and the breeze sweeps through the room, blowing soft against her shoulders. She has pulled the towel from her head, her hair almost dry. The breeze catches at the ends of her hair and pushes it gently against her skin.

She opens her eyes and looks down at her hands. They are stronger than they look. Her fingernails are clean and white against the creamy pinkness of her skin.

Her phone beeps to tell her there is a message. She longs for the time when her nights were her own. No messages on her voicemail. No phone calls in the morning with the where and the when for that night.

At times, she wishes she could disappear, but she knows that he would still find her. He’d track her down. There’s always a trail, always a path. Once you’re involved with a man like him, there is no escape.

She closes the window, switches off the lights, makes sure that the front door is locked. She makes her way upstairs to lie on her bed in the heat of the night. She refuses to think of the look on his face, that man she had never met before, when she meted out the other’s punishment. She tries not to wonder what his sin was, his crime. She tries not to think of them as people.

She lies, naked, in the darkness. She closes her eyes and tries not to see his face.

© J R Hargreaves July 2006

Cracks

There is a book beside her bed that lies half read. She has carried it with her from place to place since she has owned it. It’s a book that means everything and nothing. It’s an insignificance in the face of the universe, and somehow it’s the whole world.

She lies and she flexes her fingers so that the sore on her palm rips open along its fault line. She lies and stares at nothing, feeling the pain that tells her she is still alive.

From a spinning, spiralling dance through midnight streets, one cooling spring night, to this. A lying and a realisation. She wonders what the half life of love might be. Half the time it took to be irradiated, perhaps. Which still gives her a lifetime to feel this way, since she has known him from the beginning of time, and no other like him.

She sighs, and opens her eyes to stare once again into nothingness. She knew that this was how it would be. It had to fulfil its own promise. Hollow promise, that bleeds into nothing and salutes expectation as it leaves.

For a night and a day (her lifetime) she was convinced that there could be nothing other than this, that there would be no-one better. For a lifetime she has known him, and when she found him, he was a stranger.

She has fallen down the stairs. She has fallen down a well. She is lost in a cavern, a catacomb, an ill-lit labyrinth. Paths branch from every side, and she stumbles into them, groping in the darkness, and when she tries to reach understanding again, she rises from the dark, onto the infinitely stretching road.

When she closes her eyes, she can hear the sea. It is the blood rushing through her head. She dreams of a cottage on a hillside, looking out onto the sea. She dreams of standing on a road, running up behind the cottage, looking down on the people going about their lives. She dreams that she is floating far above all this, far beyond the reach of love, and life, and hurt, and forgetting.

She would throw herself from that road, from that hill, so that she flew out across the sea. And then she would drop, plunging down into the sea that is deeper than her, deeper than him. Miles away from land. Miles away from everything. She would drop and disappear.

When she opens her eyes, she sees nothing. The shapes and objects in this room mean nothing to her. Only the sea. Only infinity.

She must snap out of this, pull herself together, get out of bed, get on with life. She has no responsibility, though. No-one is dependent on her for survival.

She leaves the house, later. She goes out, with her bag swinging from her shoulder, and her sunglasses shielding her eyes from the sun. Her hair is tied up, swinging behind her as she walks. She buys a sandwich from Sainsbury’s and takes it to the small park, a tiny green space in this city of brick, glass and concrete. She sits on a bench in the sun and listens to the sound of birds in the trees. Their song is a ricketting caw. A chattering clatter. She listens to them and stares at the monument in the centre of the park. In an hour, he will ring, but she won’t hear her phone. She will miss the call.

When she sees, an hour or so later, that he has rung, she wants to call him back, but it’s too late. The moment has gone. He will be in some other space, some other time, and it will be impossible to say the things that are unspoken. She flexes her hand and peels away broken skin, forcing the wound, prolonging the hurt it causes.

She sleeps all night with the phone in her hand, hoping he will ring and wake her. Hoping he will find the time again to say what he wanted to say. She dreams of conversations with him, through the night, and remembers how it feels; the sense that while they are speaking, she never wants it to end; and while they are speaking, it all makes a kind of sense. It’s only afterwards, in the silence and the not knowing, that things make a different sense, and she knows that it had to stop before there was any real beginning.

She sleeps all night, and halfway into the day, and there is no call, no ring to drag her up to the surface where she might let her unconscious self respond to his words. She wakes at 11 and takes her pill. She knows the days of the week because they are printed on the blisters that the pills sit in.

She lies in the golden cocoon of her room, tumbled and half awake on the bed, with the sun shining onto the yellow velvet curtains at the window. The purple phone lies flat and closed in her hand, its silence a challenge and a reminder.

She flexes her hand and sees that, overnight, the wound has almost healed. She picks away the crust that lies along its fault line, but it no longer hurts. Only faintly, when she curls her hand into a fist. Only then does she feel the ghost of pain.

She has half a day to get through, and he has made the decision for her. She will not break this open again.

She rises from her bed and opens the curtains. She looks down onto the street. She pulls on her dressing gown and gets back onto the bed.

She’s like a piece of apple peel, flung over someone’s shoulder. She’s landed, bent and twisted, on the bed; limbs curled at awkward angles; jettisoned and staring at the patterns the light makes on the insides of her closed eyelids.

Through the window a silver tube carries people impossibly into Ringway. The breeze outside taps the net curtains.

She dreams of the roses in the garden; their blooms packed onto the well-pruned stems and branches. They are pale pink. Queen Elizabeth. They are the same pink as the stripe in her pyjamas, and the nose on her cat.

The roses in her dream do nothing. They are just there, identical to the ones in the garden now. Full-bloomed, delicately pretty, with thorns that grab your clothes and scratch your skin.

She moves her limbs into another configuration. The net curtains have a string of heavy beads sewn into the hem, to hold them straight. It doesn’t stop the breeze from catching them, and the beads rasp against the window casing.

The net curtains are white, and plucked where the cat has danced with a fly or a moth. The sky, glimpsed through them, is a pale blue and cloudless. The roofs of the houses opposite are slate grey. The red brick fronts of the houses are in shade. The sun shines across the street.

She curls her body inwards, folding her arms across herself, tucking her knees up tight to her body. Her feet point downwards, their soles creased, their toes clenched. Outside, somebody sneezes.

The day is empty and drifting. Neighbours on either side of her are in their gardens, talking. They are of an age, and older than her. Their children are older than her. They laugh and joke and arrange to meet up on Thursday. Her day is empty. She drifts.

People are peeling away. They cut themselves free and float off to new beginnings in different parts of the country. She is static now, for the first time in a decade. She is more run aground than moored. She likes to be the one who leaves, not the one who is left.

Another silver tube, audibly closer, sails overhead. She opens her eyes to watch its safe passage. People arriving and returning. People passing through on their way somewhere else. People she will never know; has never met.

She dreams of him, though she shouldn’t. She dreams that he is close, though he never will be. She dreams of the life that he woke in her, that fades now in this endless, drifting day.

She pities herself. She is shameless about it. She opens herself up wide to it and sinks into its embrace. She holds his memory clenched in her fists. She inhales, deeply, and smiles. As she breathes out, she opens her fists and he is gone. A new opposite to leaving. A casting out.

She had thought that she would leave this bed today; go out somewhere; visit the world, the pavements around where she lives. She had thought it, but not acted. She had let herself drift with the day, devoid of content, a piece of apple peel thrown backwards onto the bed.

Her house is silent. The only noises are those which seep in from the outside.

© J R Hargreaves July 2006