Aurelian Did Not Weep For The Death Of John

Incurable diseases become part of your life. When you rid yourself of them, what do you do? Do you find some new weakness in which to immerse yourself? Or do you step forth into the world, free of all incumbrance, free of all limits?

Sukie doesn’t know the answer. Sukie has wiped her life clean of an incurable disease. She has washed her hands of all contamination, and yet she feels a terrible void in her life. She feels an emptiness that she doesn’t understand. All the battling is over. The war has ended. Sukie knows she needs to re-educate herself, to compose for herself a new way of living.

In the late summer evening, sitting in her garden, Sukie Meredith contemplates the future, now that the past has been swept away. She has her life ahead of her, and her mind is a blank.

She is not completely immune, she knows this. Not yet. She is still in remission.

In the kitchen are the remains of a meal, the sauce congealing on the plates and in the pan. A last supper of sorts, eaten early. The sun is slowly going down. Somewhere in another garden, someone turns on the radio and a familiar tune plays in the background as Sukie sits and thinks.

Music by numbers. Death by misadventure. Sukie smiles to herself and congratulates herself on her success. To rid yourself of an incurable illness sometimes takes drastic measures, and although she isn’t out of the woods yet, Sukie feels she has the right to celebrate. She sips on her drink, the clink of the ice cubes against the glass a pleasant sound.

Thoughts that pass through her head say that she is alone again. Thoughts tell her that the wound is tender but it will heal. She has not wept for the passing. She has kept her sunglasses on. She sips on her drink and smiles, watching as the day’s light slowly fades.

In the darkness, beneath the trapdoor that is hidden by the sofa in the living room, the one underneath the stairs, he sits alone and unaware. A cancer cut from her life; a wasting disease halted in its progress. He sits in boxes, the remnants of their life together. Letters and books, photographs, records and cds. He sits in boxes, alone in the cellar. He sits wrapped in plastic, and when she leaves, when she quits the lease on this house, he will stay there, alone in the darkness.

Aurelian did not weep for the death of John, and she will not weep for this passing.

Sukie Meredith is a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

Half way across town could be half way across the world, and another life is emptying, draining out in a sea of tears and regret. Fanning the flames of desire, reality consumed in the heat of jealousy, Richard waits to hear what will happen next. He is her slave, her prisoner, shackled and chained, bound to her by a single act of violence. The surgery that removed that sickness from her life, that brought this sickness into his. Heresy that to her is orthodoxy. Murder to him, cleansing to her.

Claire is in the kitchen, washing up the dishes. How do you explain something like this to someone like her? How do you live with this, day in and day out? He knows he has to live with this, that he will get nothing more from Sukie. He stands in the kitchen doorway. The light is almost gone from the sky, and Claire’s hair shines under the kitchen lights, brown and glossy. He watches her, hands plunged into the soapy water, pulling plates and bowls and cutlery from the suds and rinsing them off under the tap. She washes the glasses from which they have both drunk tonight. The wine a ruby red, staining their lips with its tannins. He walks to her in guilt and holds her from behind. She laughs and submits to his embrace. He embraces her in guilt. He will never be free of it. His hands will never be clean again.

In boxes and bags under the stairs, under the trapdoor, in the cellar of her house are the remains of a life. In bags at different waste disposal sites across the city are other remains of that same life. Her hands are clean. Sukie Meredith is without guilt.

It was a hot, high, early summer day when they met. Over a year ago now. That was when it started. She knew him. A brief conversation, and she knew him. She reeled him in and enveloped him, drove him to distraction, until he was defenceless in the face of her powers.

And now here they are. He has carried out her will. He has removed the incurable disease from her life, and now he is redundant. Surplus to requirements. He is here, with his wife whom he loves but is not intoxicated by, and she is there. Free from all incumbrances and disinterested in him.

He has killed for nothing.

He releases Claire, and she smiles at him through her reflection in the kitchen window, then continues washing up. He steps away from her and walks from the kitchen into the living room. He goes on, into the hall, and takes his jacket from its coat hook. The weight of it is still in one of the pockets. He shrugs his jacket on, takes the car keys from another pocket, and leaves the house.

Sukie Meredith has taken up a similar position at her kitchen sink. She washes away the congealing sauce from her plate and from the pan. She cleans up the remains of her meal. Her last supper. She smiles. She knows him. She knows his weakness, his inability to keep this to himself without going mad. She knows that Richard will be here soon, playing Romeo, and she is expected to be Juliet. A tragic love story that holds no love.

She is empty. She has no war any more. She has nothing around which to base her existence. The thing that defined her for so long is gone and she has been sitting all evening in the garden trying to find something to replace it.

Richard holds the key to her future.

A car pulls up outside her house. Someone comes in through the front door. He kept his key. Sukie dries her hands on a towel and walks through the house to meet him. They stand and face each other. Richard puts his hand into his jacket pocket. The same hand, the same pocket. He pulls out the same gun. Sukie stands and waits. Richard holds the gun in his hands. He’s looking down at it, as though it’s something he’s never seen before. Then he looks up at her and she braces herself.

For an age she stands there, waiting, and then she realises. He’s holding the gun out towards her.

“I can’t stand it, Suke,” he says. “I can’t stand the guilt.”

She takes the gun from him and looks at it.

“I’ve never used one before,” she says.

“It’s easy,” he tells her. “Easier than you think.”

And then he watches as she turns it on herself.

© J R Hargreaves July 2006