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