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