Flight

Bright sun. It pierces. He is blinded by it as he walks, blinking, towards town. His sunglasses are in the glove compartment of his car. Tucked away, with thoughts of summer all now memory, no longer current. A sudden return to the stage, though, for the ball of burning gas in the centre of the sky.

He walks quickly and tries not to think about the taste of her last night. Sweet and salty, both in balance. A different kind of honey.

He remembers the piece of grit that had somehow found its way onto the coffee table. The way he pushed his empty mug away from him, the piece of grit trapped beneath it, scoring the surface of the wood. The way she had looked at him, so distant. And he had tasted her. Eaten her up.

He walks away from the home that is no longer his. The death that fills it chased him away. She would not be comforted, and he – what of it? Where did he fit? He could only seek to take from her that which she gave without emotion.

He left her sleeping, her eyes wide open, lying in the bed; sleeping and staring and seeing nothing beyond whatever images danced before her eyes, inside her brain. He cannot comfort her, he can only take.

He hurries down the hill, towards town. The brightness of the sun makes him blink and tears fall from his eyes.

At the bridge, he stops, just before he walks onto it. He left her sleeping, and somehow she is there. The wind is blowing her nightdress tight against her body, which is full and firm, rounded and complete. He sees the curve of her breasts, the swell of her belly, beneath the thin satin covering. Something stirs within him to see it, and he remembers her taste again.

She is standing, balanced, on the railings, high above the rush of traffic on the motorway below. He can hear the cars, ceaseless in their passage, untroubled by the sight of the woman standing on the railings of the bridge above them. He wonders how they can continue moving, how their drivers can’t stop, when he is unable to move, standing here, looking at her.

Cars driving along the road beside him don’t stop either. Everything except him is carrying on, moving through time, perpetual in its motion.

She is standing with her feet hooked through the narrow gap at the top of the railings. The bottom part of her shins rest painfully against the metal, holding her in place as she sways in the wind. Her body is beautiful; the ripple of the satin against it enhances it. He is transfixed by her.

She throws her arms wide and stares up at the sky. He half-expects to hear her cry out from the pain he knows she carries, but she remains silent, and the traffic continues to move beneath her and behind her. Then, as he knew that she would, she pitches forwards and falls, arms outstretched as though she is flying.

He waits to hear the sound of tyres screeching, of cars swerving, of horns blaring, but nothing comes. Just the continued rush of the motorway traffic passing under the bridge.

He walks to the railing where she had stood and looks over it, down at the flashing colours, the metallic blues and silvers, the bright reds and yellows. There is no body. She doesn’t lie crumpled on the tarmac as he expected her to. There is nothing there.

He stares down, his knuckles whitening as he grips the metal railing. The wind buffets his face and whips his hair. As hard as he stares at the tarmac surface metres below him, he cannot conjure up an image of what isn’t there.

He vomits. The surface tension holds that noxious fluid together in globules as it falls. He watches it fall. Car horns sound and pass off into the distance as drivers curse him, safe inside their metal boxes. He smells the acrid odour of his bile as it leaves him. He heaves and retches a couple more times, but nothing else comes, and he wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

The taste of bile fills his mouth. He begins to walk, more slowly than before, in the direction of town. He no longer knows what he is doing. The image of her, perched on the railings, falling through the sky, out of his line of sight, fills his mind. He doesn’t understand what he saw; how she could not be there, lying on the tarmac, waiting for someone to chalk an outline around her.

He waits at the pelican crossing through two changes of lights. People passing in their cars stare at him, but he doesn’t register their curiosity. He doesn’t move until the moment when he sees her again, across the road from him, walking away from him, down the hill into town.

He steps out into the road to follow her, oblivious to the traffic screeching to a halt at either side of him. Inside his head, he is calling her name. He thinks she turns slightly, once. He thinks his Kathy heard him.

She moves quickly along the back streets. He follows her up the ramp to the car park at the top of Debenhams. His breathing is laboured; he is out of condition, unused to moving at such a pace. He turns to the left at the top of the ramp, but doesn’t see her. He looks to the right, and she isn’t there either. His eyes stare ahead of him. She is standing on top of the lift housing. He has no idea how she got up there, or how quickly. He has the sense that there is something not quite right in all of this.

He walks towards her. She is standing with her back to him, facing out at the main street, the busy A6 that cuts through this satellite town, leading south, away from trouble. She adopts the same stance as before; arms outstretched, head tilted up at the sky, and then she drops. She launches, soaring out before disappearing from view.

He walks slowly this time. He walks over to the low wall above the pedestrian area and looks down. People are walking, laden with shopping bags, sitting at bus stops. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the scene he witnesses. It is only extraordinary in his head.

“Are you alright, love?”

A woman, returning to her car, plastic carrier bags in her hand, stops behind him. He looks at her. Something in his face makes her put down her shopping and move over to him.

She places a hand on his shoulder.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says.

“I’m fine,” he tells her. “It’s nothing. Just a little out of breath.”

She looks at him a few moments longer, as though she is trying to see into his mind, trying to read what thoughts are in there. Then she smiles and pats his arm.

“Well, if you’re sure, love.”

He smiles back, weakly, and nods.

He tasted her last night. That house is full of death. Her body lies broken, the newspapers full of it for weeks. Her body, that he can taste, flying through the air, the torment more than she could live with. He left her body lying there, glassy eyed, staring off at nothing, at things he could never hope to see. He left it, cold, on a mortuary slab, the curve of her breasts and the swell of her belly visible through the sheet that covered her.

He pushes back from where he is leaning over the wall. He turns and walks away from the place.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Lies

It is necessary to feel every last jolting moment of your own existence. From those moments in the darkness, when your head pays no attention to your body’s need for sleep, to the seconds of silence when you remember that you hate him.

She, at least, is convinced of this, standing as she does at a crossroads in the rain. His hand is at her waist, drawing her to him; her hand a barrier between them, touching but not feeling; pushing him away; preventing him from drawing her too close.

Jack and Angi, standing again at this crossroads. The rain is something new. So is her determination. The rain weighs her hair down; her determination roots her firmly where she stands. Resisting.

“I promise I’ll call you a cab,” he’s saying.

A moment she has to experience; repeatedly, it seems. The promised phone call never made until a lifetime has gone by in the seven hours between last orders and dawn.

“I need to go home. To sleep,” she tells him.

“You can sleep at mine.”

“Fully clothed? On top of the bed? Between the blanket and the quilt?” She laughs shortly. “And then what? You give me money on the doorstep in front of the cab driver? Make me look like a prostitute?”

She stares at him. He’s silent, unapologetic. He doesn’t even have the sense not to smile.

“I hate you,” she says.

“I know,” he replies, “but you’ll still come back, won’t you?”

It’s not a question. It’s cocky self-assurance.

Angi’s face is pale, framed by dark hair. The moon is large and round in the sky. Its silver reflection of the sun’s rays from the other side of the planet is lost in the yellow glow from the street lights. Her eyes seem black and stare out at him from the pale orb of her face, challenging him. Jack stares back. More moments experienced as time seems to grind to a halt to watch the stupidity of their behaviour.

Angi knows that she could step away, step off the pavement at this corner. She could cross the road and walk up to the taxi rank, without once looking back at him. She knows that, if she did, it would be the last time. And yet she still stands there, meeting his gaze.

Something in this two penny opera that hasn’t been said yet keeps them both centre stage. Something in this story that has yet to be told.

I hate you isn’t it; that didn’t need to be said. His hand is still at her waist. Angi relaxes her own hand’s resistant pressure, allowing him to draw her closer to him. They kiss.

“I could fuck you right here,” he says into her ear, his breath moist against her hair, mixing with the rain water there. She smiles, then laughs, then steps away from him. Angi steps out into the road just as a car drives too fast through the traffic lights turned red, catching her up, throwing her across its bonnet, and carrying her forward as it tries to brake.

When the car comes to a halt, her inert body slides down onto the road. She is still smiling, her eyes still staring, her face a pale orb in the mass of her dark hair.

Jack has been frozen in time from the moment she left his embrace. It isn’t even clear to him whether he has registered what has just happened.

He can’t move. The driver of the car has left his door open, and the chime of the alarm is all that Jack can hear. The driver is crouched over Angi’s body, shouting back over his shoulder to Jack.

The street is deserted but for the two of them and her silent form.

Jack starts to move. He walks the 300 yards from the crossroads to his house, under drops of rain that fall from the trees lining the road. The car driver’s head follows him as he walks past; the head rotates slowly like that of an owl. There’s something strained in the man’s face, as though he is shouting. Jack sees it, but he doesn’t respond.

He sits in his house. The silence is broken momentarily by sirens passing in the street outside. He starts to build the lies he will tell, the lies he must tell, if the police come knocking.

Every moment was a dangerous game in this dance they started together. He would have fucked her tonight. There and then in the street, when he told her he would. There was hate enough between them to do it. He would have fucked her and made her laugh, but it’s too late for that now.

He wonders whether he does have to think up any lies. There is only the car driver’s word that he was there. No other witnesses.

Then he remembers.

She will have a last number received in her phone. It will be his. It will lead them straight to him, and he won’t be able to deny that he knew her.

He begins to construct his lies.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Helen

Something jolts the woman out of her sleep. The room is in utter darkness; no crack of light shows at the window; no street light’s flare seeps around the edges of the curtains. The woman is alone with the silence and whatever it was that jolted her awake.

Her heart pounds in her chest, and she holds her body still, the better to scour the air for a sound or a sign of what it was that woke her. All she can hear, though, is the blood swooshing through her ears and in her veins; the pressure of it making its own sticky, coagulating rhythm in her head.

The woman sits upright in her bed, not even leaning back against the headboard. Upright, straight and rigid, all muscles in her body tense, her jaw clenched.

It becomes clear that there is no sound anywhere in the house. There is nothing that could have woken her. It must have been her body twitching, muscles going into spasm, shaking her as though a hand had grabbed her by the shoulder.

She lies down, flat on her back; she holds her arms straight by her side; her legs are stretched out straight and flat upon the bed. Her eyes are fixed on the ceiling above her, even though it is too dark for them to see anything. She keeps her eyes wide open. Now she is awake, she is resistant again to sleep.

Gradually, her muscles relax and, without realising it, as though she has been given an anaesthetic, she drifts off, tumbling slowly down into sleep.

Seconds later, she jolts awake again. In her mind, the image of a hand gripping her arm and shaking her is burned. It appears in sepia relief, its shades and tones all wrong, like some badly exposed or deteriorating Kodacolor print from the ‘70s. Sitting up again, she touches her arm where she imagines the hand has been, and feels a tenderness to the flesh.

She clicks on the bedside light and looks at her arm. A rose tattoo is blossoming there; a mark left behind by a hand bigger and stronger than her own. The hand that imprinted itself on her mind.

The silence makes her feel as though she has gone deaf. The bedroom seems smaller in the light from the side lamp. The woman recognises the hand, but doesn’t remember why. The bedside light dips; a power surge somewhere else, no doubt.

Four fingers to the outside, the thumb on the inside, digging into the softest part of her arm. This is where the tenderness is. There will be a bruise in the morning, she is sure of it.

The woman lies down on her side and clicks the light off. She remains on her side and waits for sleep to catch up with her again. Her breathing slows and deepens, and her eyes slowly close.

In the morning, she feels slightly confused. It is hard to tell whether she dreamed the things that happened in the night, or whether her arm really did bear the marks of someone else’s hand.

She rubs sleep from her eyes and adjusts her vision to the sun shining on the back of the curtains, haunting the room with the promise of daylight. She yawns and stretches like a cat.

She rises from the bed and goes into the bathroom. In the glare of the spotlights bearing down on her from the ceiling, the woman regards herself in the mirror. She stands and stares, immobile, for an age of desperate minutes before she opens the mouth that should be there and tries to scream.

“Helen? Helen? Wake up!”

He is shaking her by the shoulder. Helen hears herself moaning slightly, somewhere in the distance. She swims up from the depths of sleep, surfacing to find his concerned face peering at her over her shoulder.

She feels damp. His hand releases her shoulder, stops shaking her now that he is certain she’s awake. His same hand brushes her damp hair away from her face.

“I had the dream again,” she says. Her voice comes out a whisper. His hand, intending to soothe, is almost more than she can bear, and she clenches her jaw to contain the growing irritation. His fingers are barely grazing her temple, but the rhythm of his stroking and the way he continues to brush away hair that is no longer there is enough to make her want to scream.

“The same one?” he asks, his voice hushed and packed tight with concern.

Helen turns her face away from him and nods. He takes his hand away and lies back down beside her. She knows from the pitch and roll of his movement that he has landed staring up at the ceiling. They lie there, side by side, not speaking.

Eventually, he gets up and goes downstairs to the kitchen. She hears him moving pots around, filling and boiling the kettle, making morning noises. Saturdays are always like this. In twenty minutes, he will have drunk a small coffee, pulled on his jogging bottoms and his trainers, unlocked the back door and set off for the newsagents. Helen knows the ritual.

He comes back with the day’s paper, makes more coffee, some toast, puts it all on a tray and brings it up to her. The sections of the paper are shared out according to preference, and they sit and read and eat in companionable silence.

Every so often, he reads aloud something that has caught hold of his attention. Something funny, something silly, something that stokes his ire and makes him outraged. Helen is expected to respond in the correct way; with laughter, with a giggle, with pursed lipped disapproval.

Something in her has turned to stone, though. Today she is unable to raise the response he requires from her as his audience. She drinks her coffee, draining the horrifically bright and cheerful oversized teacup, and sits beside him, feeling the weight of the cup in her hand.

He snorts and sniggers at something he has found amusing, and Helen considers how it would feel to smash this giant cup into his face. She considers the damage she could do, if she were to smash the cup against the edge of her bedside table and use one of the shards to carve his face into ribbons of bloody flesh.

She looks long and hard at the cup, and quiet voices sing inside her head.

Images flash into her mind. A man, grabbing at her, gripping her arm. Her eyes moving from his face, to where his hand is, and back to his face again. He is falling in front of her, pleading. Something warm and sticky has landed against her cheek. The man’s hand has released her, and she sees the mark his fingers have left behind. She looks down at him, at the place where his left eye used to be, at the hole and the ragged edges and the blood. She lifts her hand to her cheek and pulls away the lump of flesh that she finds there. She shakes it free of her fingers and watches as it falls to the ground.

Everyone around her is falling to the ground. In the distance, Helen can hear screams and loud male voices shouting. They sound like barks, harsh and sharp and jarring to her ears. Only Helen is still standing, looking down at the man who has fallen to the ground in front of her, looking around at the rest of the commuters on their way home like her.

Someone grabs her arms, pinning them to her sides, and lifts her bodily away from where she stands. It seems to Helen as though she is suddenly airborne, flying gently through the air, and coming to land in one of the connecting tunnels between platforms.

They ask her questions over the days and weeks that follow. All kinds of people, in all kinds of rooms. She is unharmed physically. Some bruising where both men gripped her arms; the man who died and the officer who removed her from the platform.

She moves along the surface of her life, knowing that nothing matters any more. Helen can’t find a way to let things matter now. She talks and laughs and drinks and eats. She pulls together a disguise for herself to wear.

She dreams of waking and having no face. She dreams of a man’s hand, gripping her arm. She dreams of waking and still seeing the rose tattoo.

She wakes, and she is with him, going through the motions. If they could kill the one man in front of her, why can’t she kill the one now beside her? This is a puzzle Helen knows she will never unravel.

She puts down the cup, moves her legs from under the duvet and the newspaper sections that sit on top of it, and walks from the bedroom.

From an old shoe box in the cupboard under the stairs, Helen takes the gun she bought weeks ago. She places the barrel in her mouth and pulls the trigger.

Skull, hair, brains and blood form a Rorschach inkblot on the wall behind her. The world disappears from Helen’s view and, upstairs in the bedroom, falls into slow motion for Jonathan.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Last - or, The Trouble With Mullane

Mullane had been handsome once, in his younger, slimmer days, before his love affair with red wine had taken him over. There were echoes of that youthful beauty still there in the curve of his lips and the shape of his nose, but he was barrel-chested now and paunchy. His eyebrows had gone the way of Denis Healy’s.

Mullane had been a pin-up poster boy, years before I knew him. I learned his secret past from photographs passed round at parties by the people who had known him longest. The man in the pictures was only a glimmer of the Mullane I knew, and it had given me a secret pleasure to think that the Mullane they held onto was not the same man.

Mullane had sought me out as one in a chain of diversions. My mother had warned me that it would never last.

As I rush through the rain now, my umbrella no barrier against the seeping wetness that sprays under its edge, my mother’s warning echoes in my head. Right as always. Mother knows best. I hurry along the street, avoiding the edge of the pavement with its proximity to puddles and the wheels of passing cars, listening to my mother’s voice, knowing she was right.

Somewhere, once, I’d thought there was a place for us, for me and him to prove my mother wrong. Somewhere hidden deep in darkest night. Somewhere her words and our own instincts couldn’t touch us.

We should have listened to our instincts. Maybe. But if we had, none of this could have happened. Our instincts weren’t wrong, you see. It didn’t last. But, with all the weight of history and my mother’s divination behind it, how did it stand a chance?

I ate toast without jam this morning, alone at my dining table. There are two ulcers on the underside of my tongue, and they kept catching on the edge of a molar at the back of my mouth. I chewed heavily on the other side to compensate. That is an ancient habit.

I thought of nothing. I just stared at the yellow-painted wall, with the window looking out on the garden to my left and the archway through to the living room on my right. The blankness of the painted plaster drew my eyes and held them in a no man’s land of vision. I thought of nothing and I saw nothing. When I finished eating my toast, I looked down and saw a scattering of crumbs across my chest. I brushed them onto the plate, and took the plate to the kitchen sink.

And now I am sitting damply in the Central Library, remembering Mullane.

Mullane first saw me with purpose and deliberate intent. He had heard of me from friends. He had come instinctively to the opening, knowing he would be able to view me, as a potential buyer views a piece of art. I was a collectable for him.

I was the assistant at the opening. The curator who blended in to the background, facilitating the needs of the artist, directing the invited guests to their seats, to the wine, to the art.

I wasn’t the focus of attention for anyone but Mullane.

Mullane wasn’t interested in art. He was interested in people; people as creations, formed by society, by parenting, by childhood memories and fears. Mullane wasn’t interested in anyone who would try to compete with him intellectually, although his pretence was to find everything you said minutely interesting. He would listen to me, for example, just long enough to make me believe he was taking me seriously, and then he would destroy me. It was nothing I understood. It didn’t appear to make him feel better. It just served to make us both miserable; me with wounded pride, and him with disappointment that the world had let him down again.

He claimed it was because he felt passionate about certain things, but he didn’t feel passionate about anything. He had borrowed that sentiment from a book, because it had seemed the sort of thing a man like him ought to feel. Passion.

What Mullane felt most of all was boredom. He was always waiting for something to happen. He didn’t know what, but he waited for it all the same. He tried out new things at every opportunity, building a chain of diversions that trailed behind him, linked together with clumsy welds of forced social interaction.

That was why I was present at gatherings. That was how I saw pictures of him in his prime.

I was introduced as a friend. I was his secret, an unknown quantity among his social group. They knew me from various events. They were the ones, after all, who had brought me to his attention, although none of them knew that had been their role.

I was, in public, his source of entertainment. The centre-piece of some Victorian debauch, stood in the middle of the gathering while he wrapped clever words around me, like a corset, pulling the laces tighter and tighter until I could no longer breathe.

And afterwards, I would rage at him for his disrespect and his arrogance. Loving him all the time. Those were the nights when passion would overspill into hatred, and we would damage each other, physically and emotionally, between his unlaundered sheets.

It couldn’t last. There was nowhere for it to go but the point of destruction. And how could it go anywhere from there?

The library is warm and smells of damp coats and drying out umbrellas. That faint sickly smell, like clothes that haven’t dried properly before being put away in the wardrobe or in a drawer. People are browsing the shelves and, seated here in a corner, unobserved by anyone, I am browsing people.

It is months now since I last saw Mullane. That final night when he tipped me over the edge into something from which I thought I would never recover.

I did recover, though. I am sitting here now, two maybe three months later. Alive and missing him. Hence the path my thoughts are taking. Hence my mother’s voice in my head.

I would ache for him, those months we were together, peppered with sporadic meetings, when he or I, one or other or both, would pick a fight and raise our blood until it pounded in our ears and through our veins, and could only be calmed by fucking. I would ache, in the core of me, behind my pubic bone, and my pelvis would tilt at the thought of him and the hatred I felt.

He would lecture me for hours, and badger me with questions. He would reduce me to tears of exasperation. He would mockingly say, “I so enjoy these moments we spend together, don’t you?” to which my frustration could only reply, “No, I fucking don’t.”

I have no idea if he treated me that way in spite of himself, because I let him, or if he even thought he was doing harm.

The trouble with Mullane was, I had to keep going back for more.

Deviation is the only thing you can allow yourself when you are filled with loathing for yourself and the world. I needed a sickness in my life; I needed something I could wrap around myself to distract me from everything else. Mullane was more than willing to comply, to satisfy that need.

My mother, when she made her statement of fact, didn’t know who I was seeing, didn’t know the details. She only knew that there was someone, and that it wasn’t the thing she wanted for her daughter. I think she recognised something in me, at that time, that reminded her of herself.

The cushion of time doesn’t make these memories of him any easier. Mullane worked his way too effectively into my blood. He’s there, like a virus, underneath my skin, waiting for the opportunity, for conditions to be right for him to flare up again.

Remission is a long way off.

I have seen Mullane abandoned in thought. The hardness of his public face let go. I have seen the tiredness there; the deadness. The good in me still wants to console the sorrow that I saw. The opportunity to take that boy in my arms was never on offer, though. The hardness maintained a fence, arms-length, around him. All attempts to cross over, past the defence of his last name, were rejected by a swift return to detachment. To call him by his first name was to ensure being pushed out into the cold.

I felt tenderness from him once. Two of my fingers gripped in his hand across a table in sympathy and comfort.

I cling to the belief that it was genuine. Even now.

Remission, you see. It’s such a long way off.

That’s the trouble with Mullane. That’s why it couldn’t last, and why it will probably never end.

The last time that I saw him he had already decided. He carried out his plan of action. He pulled back. He didn’t touch me once. We spoke of nothing consequential. But he pressed me until I broke. He reversed his own strange addiction and placed it onto me. But I wasn’t willing for that to happen.

So now I eat toast without jam on my own at my dining table. I sit in the library and observe. I walk in the rain. I hear my mother’s voice.

Mullane and I, we couldn’t last the course.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Penetration

Her mind is like one of those penny cascades on the pier at Blackpool; she puts one thought in and, if it’s timed just right, about fifty others fall out. Gone forever, not even caught and put in her pocket for safe keeping.

The roses in the flower beds around the park are having a second bloom. Over on one of the lawns, a fake wedding picture is being taken. A fake bride in a voluminous gown; no groom, but cascades of lilies. She’s laughing too much to be a real bride. There’s no pinch of stress around her face.

“Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.” Altered at the altar in snowy white and darkest grey. The flash of scarlet beneath his suit, the blue of the irises in her bouquet; her mind retains these images, primary in their colouring. No cascade of coins will ever force them out. The flash of scarlet, open against his white shirt as he danced at the reception with bridesmaid after bridesmaid and guest after guest, until he had danced his way into the toilet for another dance that showed his true colours. Hands gripping the edge of the sink basin, arms braced, receptive. The shutters going down in her mind when her dad told her what he had seen. Her mind closing off as her dad threw her brand new husband, that unknown quantity, out of his own wedding reception.

The first who wouldn’t penetrate her, that night or any other.

“Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,” her friend had read during the service. It wasn’t love, then. Unable to survive the alteration it found, it couldn’t possibly be love.

“I want you to know that I won’t be penetrating you tonight,” another had said, later. Much later.

A quick progression from idle intent to dangerous edge. Half naked in a living room waiting for daylight, knots of carpet pile burning into her back, scrubbing the skin. Half hearted in the throes of something masquerading as passion. Something more like boredom and a need for distraction.

She didn’t know what the difference was. Just because he didn’t get his dick wet, it didn’t make him noble. It was still an infidelity. All those other things he’d felt free to do, with Catholic logic. “I did NOT have sex with That Woman…” It was still a betrayal of trust.

And so he hadn’t penetrated her, that night or any other.

No penetration, no adultery.

The penetration of her mind didn’t count.

She finishes her packet of crisps, wipes her hands clean on a tissue, wipes her mind clean of its thoughts.

She sits in the sunshine, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses. The plastic carrier bag that held her lunch, bought from the supermarket around the corner, is empty now. She keeps one hand on it, to stop it blowing away.

Men in City shirts lounge on the grass, reading newspapers. She hears House Classics playing on a car stereo somewhere behind her, on the road beneath the park. Lazy lunchtime with no pressure.

The music from the car chases away the Dusty Springfield song she’d been singing in her head. All I See Is You. The song he played every time. She hadn’t known a Dusty Springfield song could hold such menace. There were times when being in his vast and gloomy house felt like being in an episode of Prime Suspect. The low lighting. The menace of Dusty singing in the background, “I won't live again ‘til I'm with you; oh, darling, I won't love again unless it's with you…”. The waiting for DI Jane Tennyson to come swanning in, being simultaneously butch but fem, to announce that she, Ailsa Graham, was the latest victim of the Butcher of Heaton Moor.

Flights of fancy take her over more regularly these days, since the days began to stretch out before her so endlessly. Hours no longer seem to connect or add up to something as delineated as days. They just yawn on into the void that she meanders through, punctuated by light and then no light.

It’s the fantasies that make her life more bearable. In her fantasy realm, she is in control. Penetration is at her behest. She cues up diversions from whatever mundanity surrounds her like a dj in a booth.

The sun hides behind a cloud, and she shudders. Pavlovian reaction. Standing, she picks up the empty carrier bag and takes it over to one of the park bins. The world smells of the threat of a storm. She can almost taste it in the air. The clouds over the sun are growing darker and the closeness in the air is oppressive.

Thunderclap. The heavens open, and she is soaked to the skin in warm summer rain as the sky is littered with flashes of electrical energy. Roll after roll of thunder. People around her are scurrying for cover, trying to get out of the rain, sheltering in the shadow of the buildings that surround the park. She stays central, arms thrown wide, mouth open to catch drops of the rain. It’s years since she has stood in the rain for the sheer hell of it. The downpour invigorates her. Mascara runs into her eyes and down her cheeks. Her hair is plastered to her head, her clothes plastered to her body. Anybody looking will be able to see her underwear, the outline of her breasts, her nipples standing proud, the rise of her belly and the swell of her thighs. She doesn’t care. She feels alive for the first time in months. People are still running, with t-shirts pulled up over their heads, or newspapers serving as inadequate paper umbrellas. Some of them glance at her as they rush past, but she is oblivious. She lets the water penetrate her clothes, her skin, her mind. It washes away the grime and the cares of her life. It washes away her lethargy.

The downpour lasts ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It stops as suddenly as it began. No petering out. No half hearted attempt to squeeze a few more drops out of the clouds. It stops, the thunderstorm stops, and the clouds drift off, their load lightened.

Her clothes are dripping water, and she leaves the park, walking up into town. People walking past her, and the people she walks by, look at her as though she’s mad. Nobody is as wet as she is. Nobody.

She makes it to Kendal’s and flashes “Don’t you dare stop me” eyes at the security guard on the door. She walks through the cosmetics department leaving drips of water in her wake and takes her wetness up two floors.

She is so alive in this moment that she doesn’t care about the price of things or whether she can afford to buy, she simply takes things from the rails.

She doesn’t even try things on, just takes them to the till and buys. The saleswoman barely flickers as she rings the items through. You never question someone who is paying good money.

It feels liberating to do this. She receives her purchases in their bags and takes them to the fitting rooms. The saleswoman on duty looks at her and smiles.

“Getting changed, are you?” she says, almost laughing.

Ailsa grins back at her, alive and full of laughter.

“I’ve got a receipt,” she tells the woman.

“Go on in, love.”

Brand new underwear, new shoes, a skirt and top. She transforms before her own eyes, in the mirror, like Mr Ben. Colourful and vibrant, she emerges from the fitting room, her old, wet clothes stuffed into the same bags that mere moments ago held the new feathers she’s wearing now.

She’s high and laughing, washed clean by the storm, washed clean of him and all the things in her past that she has been carrying for too long. She leaves the store, smiling, her eyes wide open. Ready and willing to greet the world.

Something in that rainstorm penetrated her soul. Something cleaned her outside and in. Something that is going to lift her and carry her away, clean out of sight.

She feels it.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

The First of Many

Thumb to the outside, her fist connects. She feels his nose collapse under the impact of her punch. Blood, bone and gristle merge and splinter. She tastes some of his blood on her lip at the same time as she registers the damage she has done. It thrills and sickens her. She is not angry; she just needed to do this. She needed to feel the aggression, bunching up through her arm and out through her clenched hand. Thumb to the outside, just as her brother had taught her.

He is stupefied with shock. His nose is pulpy, blood pouring from it in clots and globules, mixed with mucus. His nose is no longer the shape it used to be. She has smashed it with one blow. She never knew that she had it in her.

“Good aim,” he says, eventually. His voice sounds thick. Blood has run down from his nose into his mouth. Maybe it has gone down his airway to his throat as well.

She looks at him, and then contemplates her fist. There is the barest mark on it. Some pinkness around the knuckles, and traces of his blood, but nothing more than that. She looks at it as though it is a miracle.

“Was there any particular reason?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.

“That’s reassuring,” he says.

She is still looking at her fist as he walks past her to the bathroom. She hears the light click on and the sound of water running into the sink. Her fist is a miracle. All that power, and she never realised.

“I never even knew,” she says, to nobody other than herself.

He returns to the living room and stands in the doorway behind her. She turns to look at him. His eyes are puffy and bruises are starting to show, as though she has given him a pair of black eyes as well as a bloodied nose.

“I’d say it’s broken,” he tells her, as though she has pointed it out to him in conversation and he is agreeing.

She doesn’t move, just looks at him.

“I’ll make my own way to the hospital, then, shall I?”

She looks at him, mystified.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” she asks.

He laughs, derisively, then winces with pain at the air he snorted through his nose.

“I need to do something,” he says. “It’s not going to fix itself.”

She stares at him then looks back at her fist. It amazes her that something as simple as clenching her fist could produce something as satisfying as a broken nose. She hadn’t realised that she would actually feel the bone and cartilage give way. She hadn’t actually given any thought to the process at all. She had simply felt a sudden aggression that needed to be released, and her fist had formed and made contact. That was all.

She could do that to anyone.

He is in the hall, pulling on his coat. The car keys jangle as he picks them up from the key dish. She sits down, cross-legged, on the sofa and turns the tv on with the remote control. Noise fills the living room. The fake laughter of a sit-com. It makes her feel sick to hear people pretending to enjoy themselves.

“I’ll be back when I’m back then,” he says to her from the doorway.

She doesn’t even look at him. “Okay, see you later.” As though he is off to work, or off out to the pub to meet his mates.

His brow furrows in disbelief and then clears with resignation.

She lets the waves of tv idiocy wash over her and thinks of the ways in which she can use her new fist, its unleashed power. Previously, she has only ever battered with futility on pillows and cushions. Her hands were too well received by the soft plumpness of their stuffing. Now she knew what it felt like to be met with flesh and bone. The hardness slowly giving way to the force of her fist. The resistance and different sensations. The cracking sound, with its slight crunch.

She picks up the phone and dials for pizza. He will be gone for hours, and she is hungry. She orders for one, and waits.

The next day she wakes to find that she is alone in the bed. She stumbles, half asleep, across the laundry strewn bedroom floor and out into the hallway. She needs to use the bathroom, but decides she should check to see that he is home first.

The living room is in darkness, the curtains drawn. The sun is trying, weakly, to penetrate the thin weave of the fabric. She turns on the hall light, so that the living room can be seen, at least in part. He is dark and heavy on the sofa, curled in on himself, away from the door. She turns and heads for the bathroom.

Sitting on the toilet, feeling the warmth of her night’s urine leave her body, she wonders again at the power she discovered last night. She wipes, and smiles to herself, then washes her hands at the sink. She looks at herself in the mirror that hangs above the sink. She smiles at the person she sees there. She is someone different. Someone with new knowledge about herself.

She leaves the bathroom and goes into the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she hums to herself. As the kettle boils, she opens the fridge door and begins to take breakfast things from the fridge, setting them out on the kitchen work surface. She brews a pot of tea and puts bagels into the toaster.

She walks through to the dining area between the kitchen and living room. It is just a fold out table with fold out chairs, the ones that stow away inside the table’s centre legs. She folds out one leaf of the table and sets up two of the chairs.

He stirs on the sofa.

“Morning,” she says gently. “I’m making breakfast.”

“Umph,” he responds.

“How’s your nose?” she asks. She thinks she ought to, even though she doesn’t really care. She’s not even curious.

He sits up, groggy. She can see that he has some sort of plaster strip across the bridge of his nose. His eyes are both definitely black now. He stares across the living room at her. The flat is peaceful.

She moves to the curtains and draws them back. The mid-morning light streams into the living room, and he blinks, shielding his eyes until he is used to the sudden brightness.

She looks at him. “It looks nasty,” she says.

“It looks worse than it is, apparently,” he replies. “No serious damage. You just got a lucky strike.”

Lucky. She laughs to herself. Maybe out loud, because he looks at her sharply.

She walks back to the kitchen and pours out two mugs of tea from the pot, adding milk, then carrying them through to the dining table.

The bagels pop up from the toaster, and she flips them onto a large plate. She carries them through with two smaller plates, then returns to the kitchen one last time for butter and jam.

“Come and sit down,” she tells him. “I’ve made us some breakfast. Did you manage to eat anything last night?”

He gets up from the sofa and comes to sit with her at the table. “No,” he says, picking up a bagel and starting to butter it. “Funnily enough, I didn’t.”

She feels happy this morning, with her new found strength. The element of surprise. She will use it sparingly. No need to give him reason to expect it. She understands that most of its power lies in the fact that it is unexpected and unprovoked. She looks at the picture on the wall. A string of Christmas lights in silhouette on a stark white background, reaching out from a shaky shape like a Christmas tree, running towards her and just shy.

He is eating his bagel gingerly, and sipping intermittently on his hot tea. She looks at him and is suddenly filled with love for him. She waits for him to put his mug down, then places her hand over his.

“I love you,” she says.

He looks at her blankly for a moment, then smiles, his eyes softening. Forgiveness, she supposes. Not that she’s asked for it. Forgiveness can only be given to the repentant.

He doesn’t know that she has no regret.

She pats his hand and continues eating her breakfast. He sits and watches for a while, then she smiles at him, and he carries on with his.

I love you. Such simple words. All the hidden meanings they can contain. All the violence that waits behind them, anticipating the moment when it will be released.

This will be a good day, she knows. The first of many.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Boredom

When she takes her ring off, she can still feel its weight on her finger.

When she bites her lip too fiercely, she can taste the blood in her mouth.

Both sensations are metallic. The heaviness of the ring in its absence is greater than when it is there. The taste of iron in her mouth is greater when she runs her tongue over the raw flesh on her lips than when the blood is flowing.

Feeling intensifies when its cause is lacking.

When she stares out of the window at the street, she can see the sea inside her head. Immediately in front of her eyes, beyond the white net curtain, are cars and doors and windows. Brick fronted terraced houses with grey slate roofs face her from across the road. Her mind sees the sea, like the picture in the pale lilac frame at the top of the stairs. Grey and pent up, contained within her conscious thought, the sea is everything.

Flowers still bloom in the garden. The rose bushes still carry pale pink blossoms, although their glory is fading now. The delphinium has opened and is a deep, shocking violet. Autumn is approaching. Damp is already heavy in the air, even though summer hasn’t yet reached its end.

She imagines the year as a series of hills and valleys. Summer is a valley; a flatness like the coast. It runs on, with little concession to variation in feel or smell or appearance. Autumn is an incline, leading up towards winter, which is a peak; a plateau of ice and winds and snowstorms. Then everything begins to fall again, down through the tranquillity of spring, stirred by the crash of winds and rain, until summer’s flatness is regained.

The days have been stretching on forever, pushing all thoughts of motion to one side. She has been torpid, her life a vacuum. It is boredom that is a person’s undoing. It isn’t temptation, or danger, or even wilfulness. Boredom is the thing that drives you into the arms of each of these things; it is the thing that helps you to force open the door.

She feels as though she has been waiting for something to happen all her life. She feels as though all her life has been condensed into this one summer. Her boredom and apathy have reached a fever pitch, and she knows that this is a contradiction in terms. Still, the pressure that has built up through the lack of stimulation is threatening to blow, and she knows that she must find herself an adventure.

She looks out of the window, kneeling on the smaller sofa, her elbows resting on its back, her chin resting in her hands. She feels like she did when she was eight, and summer holidays never seemed to end. Waking up not knowing what the day would bring; whether it would be fun with mum, or entrapment with dad. Whether her older sister would spare a few minutes, or even hours, out of her day to entertain this inconvenient younger sister, eleven years her junior.

Lying on her bed, listening to a clarinet quintet, she would read – consume – book after book. She would set herself maths homework. Some days she would make an effort and find her friends. They would go roaming aimlessly over the fields, throwing stones, avoiding rivals, searching for something to do to relieve the relentless heat and yawning stretch of boredom.

She feels like this today. Waiting at the window. Her only distraction found in books, or mathematical puzzles. The jumble of noise from the television only distracted her attention in fragments of time.

She waits and wonders; when will he come back for her. Like a child, waiting for an absent parent. Like a teenager, waiting to be called for by her friends, dreading the moment that sometimes came, the realisation that nobody would come.

Solitude.

Curled into sleep each night, she unfolds her limbs every morning and faces another day. The long drag of it undisturbed by any novelty.

She moves from where she is lounging. She twists and drops from the sofa, landing on her feet, moving straight into motion across the room to the kitchen where, through force of habit and for want of anything better to do, she fills the kettle and switches it on. More tea, more reading, more waiting for the next moment to fill with something other than this boredom.

The darkness is gathering, and lights come on in houses across the street. She turns her own lights on and leaves the curtains open. Anyone wanting to look in from the street will be able to see what she is doing. She doesn’t care; there is nothing for them to see.

Three rings of the telephone. The sound shatters the silence that has wrapped itself around her all day. Just three rings. The fateful signal. She picks up the phone and makes sure that she won’t connect when she flips it open. She selects Received Calls from the list and deletes his number from the list. She has the number committed to memory. It is stored nowhere in her phone. She presses the buttons that release the digits onto the screen, then presses the green button.

He answers immediately.

“Thirty minutes,” is all he says, then puts the phone down.

She pulls on her shoes and her jacket. She pulls her hair back into a ponytail. She picks up her keys from the table and leaves the house, passing the rose bushes in the garden, walking through the gate and onto the street. She has thirty minutes to get to the meeting point.

She has made this journey innumerable times before, but each time is the same; each time she feels the flutter of panic in the pit of her stomach that she will not be on time, that she will mess things up for everyone else. She walks quickly, but not so that it attracts anyone’s attention. Purposefully and with speed, she moves along the street.

After twenty minutes of walking, she can see some of them already standing at the allotted place. She maintains her pace.

No words are exchanged when she reaches them. Two more arrive, and then the van. They all climb in. She gets to sit in the front with him, the rest of them hidden in the back. When they get out again, at their destination, he will get out with them, and she will slide across into the driver’s seat, ready to take off. With or without passengers, depending on how well things go.

There was a time when she was one of the ones to go in and carry out the job. She was efficient and calm. But the old driver had been taken out one day. As ever, she had been riding up front, and it was up to her to push him out of the way and slide into his seat. She remembered how he had hit the tarmac with a thud, falling through the driver’s door that she had pushed open while trying to keep the van straight on the road. They had been impressed. It didn’t take much for her to impress them. They still, after all these years, couldn’t see past the fact that she was a woman.

She misses the methodical nature of the work. She misses the precision of knowing where to place the blade, how much pressure to put on, to split joints, to cut through bones. How to minimise the flow of blood, so that cleaning up afterwards wasn’t such a chore. She had been good at that. Driving bores her. It is part of the overall boredom she is beginning to feel with everything. It is a different kind of danger. She knows what the risks are of being the sitting target in the driving seat. She knows there is a higher chance that she will be killed. But she isn’t in this job for the thrill of potential death. She is here to use her skills.

She has been trained to save life, not end it, but all skills are transferable and can be used for other ends.

Sitting in the van, waiting for them to come out with the sacks, she remembers A Level Biology. She remembers the yellowing white rats in their formaldehyde filled plastic bags. She remembers the boards they would each lay their rat out on, and the pleasurable because sickening crack of the bones as they broke the rats’ legs and pinned them to the surface of the boards. That had been the most enjoyable part for her. More so than the slice of scalpel blade into the chemical toughened skin. More so than the realisation that you had a female one, and her womb was full of foetuses. It was the crack and crunch of bone coming away from cartilage.

That was what she missed about the job.

The night is silent around the van, and she finds herself thinking of the sea again. The number of jobs they carry out each year is shrinking. She doesn’t know how much more of this she can stand. All this waiting, and then not doing the thing she wants to do.

They will be in there for a couple of hours, to do the job properly. All she has to do is wait.

She slips from the van, leaving the keys in the ignition. She pushes her hands into her jacket pockets and walks away, huddling down into her jacket, hiding her chin behind its up-turned collar. She walks quickly, and doesn’t look behind her. She knows there is nobody to see her, she doesn’t need to look back.

She walks through the warren of streets and out onto the main road. The street lights are brighter here, and she slows her pace and relaxes her shoulders. She keeps an eye out for a passing cab with its yellow light showing. It will take an hour for her to walk home from here, ten minutes in a cab.

She knows where her papers are. She knows what she needs to throw into a bag; the things she can’t get away with not taking. Other things she can get hold of wherever she turns up. She has her real papers, her false papers that everyone working in this business is issued with, and her spare set of false papers. Those were the ones she would travel on. The person who had provided her with them, the only one who knew she had them, had been dispatched months ago.

She flags down a cab, and he takes her back to the house. She tells him to wait, she will be in and out in no time. He asks where she is going to next. She tells him the airport.

She will at last play the game she has always wanted to play; the one that sounds like true adventure. She grabs all the things she needs, and locks the house behind her. She posts the keys back into the porch. She won’t need them again. They lie, silver and glinting, on the doormat.

She gets back into the cab and sets off for her future.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006