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