Knock Loud

From the street to the door is a short walk. Through the gate and up the broad steep driveway, he knows by heart the words on the piece of paper, written in black felt tip pen, taped to the door.

“Knock loud, I’m home.”

The door is painted a bright glossy yellow. It stands out against the white painted frame and the red bricks of this semi-detached, rambling old house that backs onto fields. Her back garden is littered with junk. An old treadle sewing machine takes pride of place just outside the back door, rusting slowly from endless drenchings in the rain.

The front garden is as steep as the driveway, and is paved in pink and cream paving slabs; squares of coloured cement, with spaces for rose bushes to grow. He knows this house from childhood. He remembers it from when she was a child, and he was a constant visitor. He remembers the smell of her drunken father. He recalls the swathes of clothing draped over available surfaces, few of them clean, fewer still ironed. He feels like he has been coming here for years, in his memory.

He stands on the doorstep, looking at the sign that he has seen too many times now to count. He raises his hand, fingers tucked against his palm, thumb to the outside. He is ready to knock, to make a strong firm sound of bone against wood, but pauses first. He listens for sounds. He angles his head, craning his neck slightly. He strains to hear a noise that will confirm the part after the comma.

For days now he has been knocking as loud as he can, and there has been no response. He has peered through windows, trying to see past the net curtains. He has rattled the door handles, testing them to see whether they will do their job and open the door.

He remembers how the back door was always open. They would be in and out, running up and down the garden, picking their way through the junk that her father never got rid of, the man who finally died a month ago. At the bottom of the garden, beyond the fence, was a track that led onto the fields that led to the canal and the disused railway line. Across the track was the higher fence of the grammar school where her sister used to go, taking A levels, wanting to escape, be something more than this place was used to. He can smell cut grass now, the memory of it rich in his mind. The way the school field would smell in the summer, the first week of the holidays, when the gardening staff would bring out the large mowers and cut back the sports pitch and the rough grass around it.

They would cross the track and clamber over the school fence, one giving the other a peg up, the one on the fence reaching down, legs wrapped through the railings to hold their position, pulling the second one up. They would run along the lines of loose cut grass, rolling it up, trying to make a bale. They would grab great handfuls of the stuff and pretend to be bombers, flying over enemy ground, dropping their grass incendiaries onto the unsuspecting victims below.

All this flashes through his mind in the moment he stands, fist raised, ready to knock.

The sound of his knuckles rapping against the wood surprises him. Lost in his memories of childhood, he hadn’t realised that his brain had started the process without telling anyone but his arm and his hand. His knuckles hit the hard surface of the door, which somehow feels spongy and not its usual resistant self.

He looks at his fist, at his knuckles, then up at the door. The sheet of paper with the words of reassurance and instruction written on it is drifting away from him.

The door moves open slightly. Enough for him to put his hand inside and for his fingers to feel their way across the inner box of the Yale lock. He pushes against the small round button, sliding it upwards, and the mechanism releases, the chamfered bolt springing out quickly enough to catch his wrist. It tries to embed itself into the thin skin just below his palm. The skin that on her wrist is soft and perfumed.

He catches the door edge with his fingers as he pulls his hand back instinctively, and it almost closes, locking him out again. Almost, but not quite. His reactions are quick, and he slides his fingers into the narrowing gap between door edge and door frame.

“Hello?” he calls out, as he pushes the door open. He hesitates to step inside without knowing that she is there, that she has invited him in. There is no response to his call, though. He tries again, and the silence of the house continues in place of his noise.

“Andrea? Are you home?”

Absently, he pulls the sheet of paper from the door, taking a few flakes of yellow paint with him. He folds it a couple of times, not looking at its surface, then scrunches it into a ball.

“Andrea? It’s me. Peter. The door was open, so I came in.”

Still there is no reply. Peter pushes open the door into the front living room. It looks exactly the same as it did when they used to wriggle in here as eight year olds and sit between the sofa and the window, their backs pressed into the leather of the three-seater. The cracked leather suite is the same, with its strange knitted seat covers. There are newspapers piled up on the seats of the armchairs and ladder back wooden chairs, on the piano stool. The piano looks dusty and neglected.

He stares at it from the doorway, remembering the arch of her wrist, holding her palms up away from the keys. Her fingers, long and graceful even then, seemed to stroke their way across the keyboard, teasing sounds out of the old upright instrument. Andrea Ingram with her shiny brown hair pulled back into an elastic band, practising every day at the piano, working her way through the grades.

He wonders whether the piano is in tune, but doesn’t dare to cross the threshold of the room. He doesn’t want to walk over to it and lift the lid. It isn’t his to touch, to bring back to life.

He has been holding the living room door open with his left hand, but he lets it fall closed again now, and continues down the hallway.

The house is so quiet that he feels as though he ought to tiptoe, or at least tread lightly along the floor boards. Ahead of him is the staircase, behind it the door into the kitchen, and the back door out into the garden. Just before the staircase is another door that goes into the back living room. He has never been in that room. It was where the family ate their meals, and he never stayed for tea. He was never invited, and he never had permission from his mother.

The only refreshment he ever took in this house was the weak orange squash Andrea would make for them both in the kitchen, served in huge pint glasses that her dad had brought home from the pub. The ones with handles and the strange cuboid design pressed into the body of the glass, that made him think of his grandmother’s front door inside the porch. They would gulp the squash down before racing back out into the garden and over the fields, sticky orange moustaches rising upwards from the corners of their mouths.

The door is held open now by a small piece of wood pushed home under the door’s bottom edge. He could go in, peer round the door, see what the room looks like. He chooses not to. He stands, instead, at the foot of the stairs and calls up, “Andrea? Are you there, Andrea? The front door was open.”

There’s no response, still, and the house continues to swallow up his presence with its silence. He walks further down the hallway, past the door to the understairs cupboard, into which they would shove each other during games of Hostage!, inspired by Patty Hearst.

He turns the corner and goes down the step into the kitchen. That’s when he sees her, sitting at the kitchen table, with the sun shining in through the kitchen window behind her. She is very still, and her face is in shadow, because of the brightness of the sunlight beyond her.

“Andrea? Are you okay?”

She makes no response. He doesn’t move from where he has come to a standstill, halted by the sight of her.

“I called through to you. Didn’t you hear me? The door opened as I knocked on it. I’ve been calling round for days now, but I’ve never caught you in.”

He thinks he hears her sigh. He can’t persuade his body to move any further into the room. His nerves and muscles know that something is wrong here.

He looks past her silent form, through the window, and his eyes take in the garden. It stretches away from the house. He’s not in the right place to be able to see whether the treadle sewing machine is still just outside the door, underneath the window. He can see other things dotted in long grass and tall weeds, running the length of the garden to the fence.

“I wanted to come and see how you are. How you’re getting on,” he says to the garden; not to her. She is too still for him to want to acknowledge. “My parents said that you were back up to sort things out. I wondered if you needed a hand.”

He tails off. He looks at her again. His eyes are adjusting to the relative darkness she’s sitting in. He can see that her eyes are glassy and staring straight ahead. Her hands and forearms are resting on the table, positioned as though she is about to start playing a phantom piano. There is a drinking glass by her right hand, a tumbler.

He remembers how they would sit giggling behind the sofa, pressed into the narrow gap, their feet against the wall beneath the window, their backs flush with the back of the sofa. Nobody was there to tell them off for having their shoes on and leaving footprints on the wallpaper. They would giggle at nothing other than the naughtiness they felt, and Andrea would stuff her cardigan sleeve into her mouth and convulse with silent laughter.

He stands now in the kitchen, looking at her, and wonders whether she convulsed slightly when the tablets started to shut her body down. He wonders why she is still so straight and upright, why she hasn’t slumped, why her head hasn’t crashed down onto the table. She looks prepared. She looks as though she is conducting a séance. She looks like an exhibit in a museum, or a study for a still life.

He knows, though. He knows she is only still. There is no life left here.

He walks slowly, backwards, out of the kitchen and along the hall to the foot of the stairs. Here, he turns and faces the front door. He walks the few steps necessary to reach it, and his hand goes up to the knob that will release the chamfered bolt and let him out of this house.

He opens the door and stands on the doorstep. He feels, rather than hears, the yellow door close behind him. He feels the house seal itself off from the world again.

He walks down the driveway and back out onto the pavement.

He walks away, and he doesn’t look back.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006

Like Ashes

Doors and windows wide open, sunlight and air flooding into the house, she drinks a litre of apple juice; the last of the cartons. She wishes she had bought more. Blackcurrant doesn’t taste the same afterwards.

She reads, sitting on the sofa; she reads and swallows the words, digesting them, barely chewing them as they fall into her head. She can’t read fast enough; she can’t ingest these words quickly enough; she can’t bear the blackness of the type against the page. It burns holes in her retina if she looks at it for too long.

The blackcurrant in the glass is ruby red, garnet red, jewel bright. The breeze through the front window makes the white net curtain billow into the room. She can see the outside world through the open window clearly, when it does. The net no longer obscures the scene with its opacity.

The book now lies abandoned on the sofa beside her. Its cover is white and red; mostly white, and the red like an idea of blood. It came from Borders, the book. It was recommended in an email, its title confirmed in a text sent in response to a plea for help while standing in front of the shelves containing all the books the author had ever written.

A black van drives down the street. The breeze has dropped and the net curtain hangs in its usual place before the open window. It is waiting for the next gust of wind to catch it and make it billow. The black van doesn’t belong around here. It looks out of place as it drives past her window. It looks as though it arrived on this street through a rip in the space time continuum. It looks like it came from 1983.

“Jesus,” her mother used to tell her, “wants YOU for a sunbeam.”

In all their communication, things were never more than surface deep. On one side of the equation, at least. The sentences she used to throw out would float on the surface of reality; homilies intended to uplift.

Jesus wants you for a sunbeam. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Blessed are the whatever. God’s love is like a circle.

Life is like a circle. She feels it turn around her, through time and space; through imagination as well. Love is like a butterfly.

Now she’s at it. Her homilies not drawn from Pentecostal choruses, but from cheap theme tunes to British sitcoms. Keep things on the surface.

The book is now forgotten, her thoughts turning to other things. A life lived on the surface follows the principle of out of sight out of mind. And yet, things still nag at the back of hers. Things she had hoped to put away, the way childish things out to be dealt with. “And then you’ll be a man, my son…” Bloody Bible; bloody Kipling.

Soft and gentle as a sigh. Love, supposedly. Soft and gentle, like deodorant. Not hard and galling, like some giant herbal remedy you swallow and then gag on. The book, and the people in it with their lost rooms and paranormal possession, is long gone from her mind now. It sits beside her like an after thought. A stage prop, intended to make this look like a scene of domestic normality.

Casual comments from a safe distance that show there was never anything more than surface to their collision. A grazing of minds bumping into each other. A bruising of egos. The id well hidden, under the surface. Like the swan, so graceful, its legs churning the water beneath.

She needs to stop thinking in clichés. She needs to stop thinking.

Memory recalls a night when her body wasn’t so repulsive. Her pale skin in the moonlight that came in through the window. Her wish to know that it was more than surface, and his slap in her face that comes back time and again to tell her not to be so stupid.

Throwaway lines and throwaway sentiment. Her hair feels lank, her skin greasy. She drinks apple juice in lieu of eating real fruit. She eats steamed vegetables and forgets about protein and fats. Her body is a shrine to imbalance, slowly ticking down the moments until death.

She thinks the thought “Get up” and her brain makes connections across synapses, down nerves, to muscles in her legs, and her legs push upwards, lifting her body from the sofa. Some things still work the way they should.

Outside, the day is bright and the breeze holds off the sticky feeling of too much heat too late in the year. Her hair blows in the breeze and her pink baseball boots seem too bright in the sunlight. Hidden behind dark glasses, she sees and doesn’t see the world around her. She sees enough to steer her way past obstacles. She ignores the things that impinge.

She takes out money at the cashpoint. She sees a vision of a four poster bed, a man lying on it, surrounded by flames. She sees a house burning. She confuses Jane Eyre with Rebecca; the thought that setting things on fire can create a new start, can wipe the past clean, can avenge all the wrongs that are perceived in the mind of someone who has lost.

She has cash now, in her purse. Money to burn. Throw some tricks, get a fix. Leave a trail on a bank computer somewhere. Maximum daily withdrawal limit reached. Pinpointing her to that location, that moment in time. That location, that same time each day for a week. Maximum daily withdrawal limit each time. She has slowly wiped her account clean of its balance. She has cash in her purse. It bulges obscenely with the wad of notes.

This is as far as thought has brought her. From here on in, she must learn to stop thinking. Impulse isn’t a natural instinct, though; thought always muscles in on the act and leaves her stuttering and shambolic with responsibility.

Summer is supposed to be over, but it refuses to surrender. The mainline train station is an hour’s walk away. The airport is a forty minute train ride, if she times it right. From the airport to anywhere. No thought, just that age old game of first flight out of here.

She teeters on the brink. No thought is allowed, but one crowds into her mind. What if. The great what if that holds her, stuck in the ice, unable to move across the surface, unable to sink beneath. She has a purse full of money. Cash. She could go anywhere, do anything, become anyone.

Sense and thought tell her that it would be the same, wherever, whatever, whoever. That he would find her, no matter where she went. No matter how many disguises she adopted. Sense and thought tell her that the only thing to do, to get out of this, is to find him and burn up the past in front of his eyes.

Not his past. Not his Manderley set on fire. Not him burned in his own bed while he sleeps. Her past. Her, set ablaze in front of his eyes, like some ancient ritual to cleanse the world of whatever wrong it is that unsettles the gods and demands reparation. To leave him with nothing but ashes.

Madness and suicide. If this were more romantic, less prosaic, if this were something other than what it is, she could be the new Ophelia. The next Virginia Woolf. Drowning in a river with flowers and weeds clutched to her. Drowning in a river with her coat pockets filled with stones.

A purse full of cash. Pregnant with opportunity. All the time in the world. A sunny day. Why waste opportunity on fire and flood? Why waste it on a third party? If love is like a butterfly, she chooses it to be a Monarch, migrating according to inherited paths and circadian rhythms, living for two months if born too soon, for seven months if lucky. Responding to the position of the sun in the sky. Responding to the whispers of the past. Rootless, but returning, always returning to the same point, the same surface. Da Capo al Fine. Hunched and weathered under overcoats and scarves no matter what the season; then, like the Gilliam cartoon, emerging like a game show host. Monarch butterfly ready to drink of love’s sweet nectar. Aria da Capo. Variation on a theme of cabbages.

Standing here, on a street corner, with the world rushing by in its metal boxes on four wheels, she is as pathetic and delusional as anyone who ever looked at the moon and told herself he was love. Standing here, one hour from the station, three, maybe four from a flight out of here. A day away from playing this variation again on another stage; drinking wine from another vineyard.

The rain starts to fall. Summer relinquishes her grip. Thin t-shirt and cotton trousers quickly soak up moisture and hair gets plastered to her forehead. Still she stands. Waiting on the surface. Waiting for the sun in the sky to return and tell her what to do.

She dreams of fire. She has money to burn. Manderley is not far.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

Chances Are

At 8.37 a.m. on the 18th of September, Jenny Brown walked out of her three bedroomed mid-terrace house and disappeared.

Her husband, puzzled but not unduly worried by his wife’s sudden absence, waited just over the recommended twenty four hours before he contacted the police.

From that point on, David Brown was interviewed, recorded, filmed and broadcast live into the nation’s homes on a regular basis until it became clear that he was not responsible for her disappearance and Jenny Brown was not coming back.

Public interest in the case quickly waned, and the police were left to do whatever it is that they do in cases like this one. Which is to say, they kept investigating, they kept questioning, they drank milky coffee with two sugars and they went to the pub.

David Brown went back to his life and his routine. It was strange for him at first, Jenny not being there, but gradually he adjusted and settled into a rhythm that enabled him to carry on living without too much pain or indigestion.

His neighbour, Catherine Bradshaw, barely noticed the absence of Jenny Brown. The two women had rarely spoken, beyond a polite hello if they encountered each other returning from the supermarket, or going out to work. Catherine kept herself to herself, preferring to mind her own business and stop others from minding it too.

On the 16th of November, Catherine thought that she saw Jenny Brown walking through the town she was visiting on work. The town was a good many miles from the place where Catherine lived; the town where Jenny had once lived. Catherine’s instinct was to hide, to avoid being seen by Jenny, and then she remembered. Jenny Brown had disappeared. Perhaps she wanted to avoid being seen by Catherine as well.

This thought interested Catherine and she made it her goal to follow Jenny, or this woman who appeared to be Jenny, for as long as possible, to see what she would do.

It was in Waterstone’s, inside the new shopping centre, that Jenny looked up from the pile of Books By New Authors that she was browsing and fixed Catherine with a gaze that forced her to stop in her tracks.

“What do you want?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re following me. Spying on me. Really badly, it has to be said. So. What do you want?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come off it. You’ve been five paces behind me all afternoon. From shop to shop, from clothing rack to clothing rack, from book display to, well. You know what I’m saying.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

Their voices never rose above the level of any normal conversation. Their tone and cadence was as sweet as if they had been talking about gardening or the weather.

“Okay then. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Jenny returned to her book. Catherine continued to pretend she was browsing the bookshelves.

“You like Sebastian Foulkes, then?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re very apologetic. Foulkes. You’ve been staring at that row of his books for ten minutes now. If you’re having trouble deciding, I’ll save you the bother. He’s shit.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, she says. Oh. Yes. Oh. He’s shit. Lazy. Passes off ill-researched fantasy as fact. Talks a load of bollocks. All that shit about birdsong. And that crap about the Resistance. Charlotte Fucking Grey.”

Again, her voice didn’t rise a note above gentle.

Catherine Bradshaw stepped away from the shelves; moved towards the island of books across which she was being addressed. She stood looking at Jenny Brown, wondering what to say next.

It was 3.45 in the afternoon. Catherine Bradshaw would either have to leave to catch her train or sort out a hotel room for later.

Looking at the woman, who was still flicking through books taken at random from the pile on the display, Catherine was no longer sure that she was Jenny Brown.

“You seem familiar,” she said.

“Is that why you were following me?” The woman’s eyes never left the book she held.

“I suppose so.”

Not Jenny Brown looked up. She smiled.

“So you were following me, then.”

“Yes.”

She put the book down and looked at Catherine with a frank expression on her face. Not playful, not friendly, but not hostile either. Frank.

“Who did you think I was?”

“A woman. My neighbour. Well, my neighbour’s wife. She left. Disappeared. It was on the news.”

“You thought you’d found her? You thought you’d found me? What were you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you going to try to persuade me to go back?”

“No, I... I don’t know. I hadn’t thought...”

Not Jenny Brown picked up another book from the pile in front of her. She was losing interest in Catherine.

“No,” she said, “I don’t suppose you had.”

She remained silent for a while. Catherine didn’t know what else to say, so she put her hand on the covers of books, one after the other, as though she was going to pick one up, her breath hovering about her lips as though she was going to say something. She didn’t know what else she could say.

Catherine Bradshaw turned to go.

“Why did she leave?”

“What?”

“You’re not sorry any more then? Just deaf now? I said, Why did she leave?”

“Who?”

“Me, your neighbour’s wife. Interesting that you describe her that way. Was she never your neighbour, then?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I know that she was my neighbour, yes. Of course she was. I don’t know why she left. Or why I described her as his wife.”

“Hmm.” Not Jenny Brown was bored with the books in front of her, so she moved around the island, towards where Catherine was standing.

Catherine Bradshaw felt a little threatened by this. Although the store was a big one, the shelves were close together, and the section they were in was out of any obvious line of vision. They could have been on their own in the world. Lost in a secret room within the bigger shop.

She also felt a little excited.

Not Jenny Brown stood close to her.

“Didn’t you ever speak to her, then? Your neighbour’s wife. Me.”

Catherine felt confused. She looked at the woman more closely. They were standing very close together. The woman was still looking at books, not looking at Catherine. Catherine could smell her. The mix of perfume, light and fresh, with the heat of the day causing other smells and scents to come from her body. She smelled like apples. Or melons. Something fruity and light.

The woman looked up at her. Catherine smiled.

“You alright?” said the woman.

“Mm. Fine,” Catherine replied.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh. No. I didn’t, did I?”

Catherine Bradshaw felt confused by the way the woman said she wasn’t Jenny Brown but then called herself Me in relation to the person Catherine thought she was. Catherine wondered. Had the woman said that she wasn’t Jenny Brown, or had she, Catherine, assumed that she wasn’t because she hadn’t said that she was.

The woman brushed against her as she passed behind Catherine to look at the books on the other side of her.

“Erm. We never really spoke much. Just in passing.”

“Did you talk to her husband much?”

“Not really, no.”

“But you think of this woman as his wife, not as your neighbour?”

“I suppose. I don’t know.”

“You really don’t know much, do you?”

The woman, Not Or Maybe Jenny Brown, walked off, moving over to the next island of books. Catherine Bradshaw stayed where she was.

“Do you wish that she would come back? Or do you wish that you could disappear like that, too?”

Catherine wondered about that herself. If Jenny Brown did come back, would she ask her why she had done it? Would she ask her what it was like to disappear. Catherine Bradshaw knew what it was to not exist. She didn’t know what it was to remove yourself from someone else’s life, though.

“Do you wish you were her, Catherine?”

Catherine looked at the woman sharply.

“How do you know my name?” she said.

The woman held up Catherine’s purse, which she had been looking through without Catherine realising.

“You should be more careful. Keep your bag closed. You don’t know what light-fingered people might be around.”

The woman tossed the purse lightly over to the island in front of Catherine.

“It’s okay. You can check it if you like. There’s nothing missing. I’m not a thief any more.”

Catherine didn’t hesitate to doubt the woman’s word and quickly riffled through the contents of the purse.

“You don’t even know for sure what was or wasn’t in there, do you Catherine? When was the last time you checked how much cash you were carrying?”

Catherine knew that the woman was right, but carried on checking anyway. The woman laughed.

“What was she called, this woman who lived next door and disappeared?”

Catherine put her purse back into her bag and zipped the bag securely. She clamped the bag under her arm.

“Jenny,” she said. “Jenny Brown.”

“Ohhhh,” said the woman. “Jenny Brown..” She paused, as though she were thinking. Then said, “Nope. I don’t know her.”

She smiled. “But I do know you, Catherine Bradshaw,” she said.

The way that she said it made Catherine jolt inside. She was sure, suddenly, that the woman did know her. Not just because she had looked inside her purse and found her name. She felt like she and the woman had met somewhere before. She did have a look of Jenny Brown, but it seemed to Catherine now that it was ridiculous of her to have ever thought that she could be Jenny.

“Don’t you have to get your train home, Catherine Bradshaw?”

Catherine looked at her watch. It was later than she realised. She didn’t know how long they had been standing there, lost between bookcases, out of sight of other people in the store. She only knew that it was longer than she had thought.

“See how easy it is for me to put thoughts into your mind, Catherine? You need to be careful of that. I’ve got you thinking now. Wondering if I really do know you. Wondering if I could possibly be Jenny Brown. I haven’t said one way or another have I, Catherine? I’ve only said that I don’t know her. Easily done. Just like telling you I know who you are.”

Catherine’s head was swimming. She bowed her head slightly, put a hand up to touch it.

“You’re confusing me,” she said, and looked up.

The woman was gone. Vanished, as they said, into thin air. The books on the island were undisturbed. The air around her smelled of books, of nothing. Paper. Book covers. Nothing.

Catherine felt paralysed. Only her head would move. She looked around her, as though she would be able to see the woman somewhere else. On the ceiling, maybe. Climbing up the book shelves. Crouching on the carpet, picking up something she had dropped. But she was nowhere to be seen.

“Mrs Brown?” said a voice somewhere behind her. “Mrs Brown?”

Catherine turned her head slowly to see who was speaking.

“I’m Catherine,” she said.

“Of course you are ducks,” said the woman she discovered. Catherine felt that she knew her, but she didn’t know how.

“Your husband is coming in a minute, Mrs Brown. He’s coming to visit you. Do you want to come with me and we’ll make you look pretty for him?”

“I don’t have a husband,” she said. “I’m Catherine. I’m not Jenny. Jenny disappeared.”

This new woman looked at her. Catherine looked back.

“Where did you find me?” she asked. “Why do you think I’m her? She disappeared.”

The woman didn’t speak. She took Catherine by the wrist and led her from the window she had been standing in front of. Catherine wanted to fight, but her body wouldn’t respond.

“I’m Catherine,” she said again. “Catherine Bradshaw. I’m not Jenny Brown.”

She sat in a chair with her face washed and her hair brushed out. She was wearing a little mascara, a little eyeshadow. No blusher, no lipstick. David Brown came into the room.

“Hello, love,” he said, and bent to kiss her.

“You killed her, didn’t you?”

David Brown straightened up. “No, Jenny, I didn’t kill her.”

“Don’t call me Jenny. My name is Catherine. You killed Jenny. I know you did. You told the police that you didn’t, but you did.”

David Brown sat down in a chair across the room from Catherine.

“Jenny, I didn’t kill anybody. And what you did was a mistake. Everybody knows that. And now you’re here to get well again.”

He said it as though he had said it a million times before. He said it with exaggerated patience. He spoke to Catherine as though she were a child.

She clamped her mouth shut and turned her face away from him. She didn’t know what he meant. What did she do? What was a mistake?

Chances are, she told herself, he’s trying to confuse you.

“I’m Catherine,” she said, over her shoulder, to nobody in particular.

David Brown sighed.

“No, darling, you’re Jenny. Catherine’s dead. It was an accident.”

Catherine Bradshaw thought about the woman in the bookshop again. Now that she had had time to think about it, the chances were that she was Jenny Brown. Jenny might have got away. And who was she to spoil her fun?

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

The Thing That Makes Him Feel Alive

She’s got her hair tucked behind her ears. She looks tired. She’s wearing trousers and Doc Martens. Her face, her head, is cast to the side, and she doesn’t look at him.

He holds her at the waist. People, the people she works with, are trying not to look at them through the window, and failing. They watch as he holds her at the waist and tries to kiss her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, his lips still brushing her jaw.

She is looking into the distance, away from him and beyond him. He can feel the heat coming off her body and imagines all the places he has kissed her; all those places where he has felt her heat and breathed it in.

Where once she would have cried, her eyes are now bone dry and empty. Tired. More than once, she closes her eyes, but it isn’t through any kind of pleasure or surrender. It’s a silent wish for respite from everything her life has become. Including this, including him.

If she wants to give in, she makes no sign. She holds herself upright through an effort of will. Her body sags and slumps at shoulders, knees and spine. Her posture has begun to disintegrate.

He pulls back from her slightly and sees that her eyes are closed.

“I didn’t mean it to be like this,” he tells her.

“Fuck off,” she says. Dead. No passion. Just the flat words. “Fuck off.”

Once she would have giggled and played along. “People are looking. People will see,” she would have said. “Don’t. We can’t. Stop.” And all the time her body would be saying Don’t Stop. We must. We have to.

Red wine reminds her of Communion. He remembers her saying that to him once, when they went out for dinner. She didn’t usually drink wine, but she felt awkward ordering vodka and coke at the dinner table. So he had ordered a bottle of red for them to share, and just before she took a sip, as the sharpness hit her nostrils, she looked across at him and said, “Red wine always makes me think of Communion. That smell. That sharpness of the wine against the silver.”

She had sipped, then, and smiled. “The blood of Christ,” she said, giggling like a naughty child.

He hadn’t understood.

“Can’t we go for a drink?” he asks her now.

She doesn’t answer, just lights a cigarette. He hears the kiss-pop of the cigarette leaving her mouth as she sucks in that first lungful of smoke.

“You alright, Lynne?”

One of her colleagues has come out of the office, concerned about her friend standing here with the strange man. She nods once and carries on smoking, for all the world the disaffected teenager she probably never was.

He believes that he has made her this way. It suits him to believe it. He wants to feel guilty.

He’s staring down at his shoes, at the black polished leather emerging from the bottoms of his suit trousers. He has the feeling that she is looking at him, and raises his head.

Her eyes are fixed on him, as though she’s trying to work him out.

“One drink,” he says again.

Lynne drops her cigarette onto the floor and grinds it beneath the toe of her boot. She walks away and he realises that her body’s movement has gained a roll and a precision that wasn’t there before. Put her in black satin pants, give her a frizzed blonde wig, and she would be Olivia Newton John in Grease.

He realises that she’s walking and she isn’t looking back, isn’t slowing her pace to allow him to catch up. He remembers that this isn’t a game, and it isn’t a scene from a film.

She orders wine and a sandwich. He pays. They sit at a table in the window, looking out at the traffic and the builders. She raises her glass to her lips and drinks.

“It used to remind you of Communion,” he says.

“What do you want, Drew?” she asks.

He drinks from his pint and sits back in his chair.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Something. Nothing. I don’t know.”

She’s refusing to look at him. Her eyes are fixed on the window, pretending to look at the outside world. She won’t look at him. He’s surprised that she isn’t wearing dark glasses. That she hasn’t poked her own eyes out by now.

The skin beneath her eyes is thin, like rice paper, and puffy. She is pale, her skin almost blue, reflecting back the colour of the walls in this bar.

She looks tired. He tells her so.

“You look tired.”

She looks at him now. “Thanks,” she says. “I am.”

Her eyes hold his, locked in a gaze that she is in control of now. The sound of his voice has reminded her, somehow. She has nothing to fear from looking into his eyes. She knows what he wants, and at the same time she doesn’t. She remembers what he wanted the last time, and is confused that he has come back now.

She won’t ask him again, though. Drew knows and understands that. He wouldn’t be able to tell her anyway, because he really doesn’t know himself. He has no idea why he is here, why he wanted to see her, why he can’t just leave things be.

Her sandwich arrives.

“Thanks for coming for a drink. For having lunch with me.”

“It’s my lunch hour. I’m having lunch anyway. You just happen to be here,” she says, without emotion. It amazes him how flat she can make her voice, without it actually being a monotone.

He finds that there is nothing he can think of to say to her, and she is indifferent to that fact. They sit on in silence.

The sun shines in on them, through the window, and catches the hints of redness in the chocolate darkness of her hair. She chews and looks through the window, away from him, always away from him.

He doesn’t eat. He just drinks, slowly and steadily, working his way through his pint. Her glass of wine has sat untouched since that first mouthful that she took, before her sandwich’s arrival.

“I shouldn’t have come,” he says, staring at the table, making rings with the bottom of his beer glass.

“No,” she replies. “You shouldn’t.”

The air around them is thick with the pointlessness of this meeting, with the deadness of everything that went before. She is still beautiful. He still wants to touch her. But he doesn’t know why. It was never anything more than desire, and yet he can’t let it go. He can’t quit. He tries, but he continues to think of her. Today it became too much. He organised his day so that he would be nearby at lunchtime, so that he could drop in on the off-chance, so that he could see her, if not talk to her.

He doesn’t know why.

“Do you want this?” She pushes one half of her sandwich towards him. “I’m full.”

He pulls the plate towards him, but doesn’t eat. He just stares at the half sandwich on its white plate with the blue napkin folded into a triangle beneath it.

She drinks her wine. He looks up from the sandwich.

“Does it still?” he asks, unable to think of anything else.

“Does it still what?” she answers impatiently.

“Remind you of Communion?”

“I haven’t been to Communion for years, Drew. What do you think?”

He is silent again, returns to making rings with his beer glass. She lights another cigarette. He doesn’t remember her smoking before. He watches her, head turned away from him so that he sees her face in profile. She is a pro at smoking, it seems. Elegant. An advert for its beauty and sophistication. He wonders if she’s aware of the image she creates, sitting there, staring out of the window, blowing out a stream of smoke each time she takes an exaggerated drag.

She reminds him of his Aunty Vi. All hardness and disappointment, trying not to care, trying not to let the world back in, where once she welcomed it as a child would. Aunty Vi with her nicotined fingers and her nails painted scarlet; her hair back-combed and lacquered under control.

Lynne has that hardness now, if not the nicotine stains or the lacquered hair.

He remembers suddenly how she always fell asleep for a few minutes after having sex. How suddenly she would disappear from view, her body recumbent and relaxed beside him on the bed. He remembers how he would wait for her to return, to turn to him, suddenly released from sleep and liquid with it all. The sex, the sleep, the darkness of the room. How she would smile, and how he would wonder what he was doing.

He had never meant any harm.

He looks at her now, removed from him in daylight, distant and trying not to acknowledge his presence, to remain untroubled by his closeness. He wonders what she is thinking.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

“None of your fucking business,” she retorts, instantly, as if she were waiting for him to ask all this time.

“I never meant any harm,” he tells the side of her face.

She looks at him then. She’s laughing.

“Oh, please,” she says, drawing out the please. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

She stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray. She finishes her glass of wine. She gets up and leaves the table, leaves the pub. He stares at the half sandwich still sitting on the plate and at his hand around his pint glass. There’s not much beer left in it. He lifts it to his mouth and drains it.

“See you, mate,” he calls to the barman as he leaves.

“Thanks a lot, see you,” comes the reply.

She’s ahead of him down the street, on her way back to her office. She isn’t walking fast, but she isn’t walking slowly either. He has to hurry to catch up with her.

She stops dead in her tracks when he does, and he carries on walking for a few steps before he realises that he’s slightly ahead of her. He turns back. She’s crying.

“Why the fuck can’t you leave me alone?” she asks him. “Why the fuck can’t you leave me alone?”

She hunts in her bag for a tissue and dries her eyes. It was a momentary crack that allowed the emotion out. She’s steel and wire again now. She crackles with electricity and resentment.

He takes the couple of steps back to her and stands with his hands in his coat pockets. He shrugs.

“I don’t know,” is all he can think of to say. Because he doesn’t know. He can’t say why he’s not able to leave things be. He doesn’t understand why now, more than ever, she plays on his mind. It’s almost with regret, almost with longing, but it’s neither of those things as well.

She is more beautiful right now than he has ever seen her. Her face is bright with anger and pain. Light pours out of her. She stands straight and tall. She’s taller than he is. She’s straighter than he is, too. Her spine holds her upright, shoulders back. She looks at him with animosity coloured purple at the edges by sadness.

He remembers that look from the last days, when he had tried to break her will. He had seen the possibilities and picked them off one by one. He had no more idea why he had done those things then, than he has about why he can’t quit her now.

She’s crying again. The tears are coming without her bidding, with no sobs and no down-turned mouth. He puts his arms around her and holds her to him. Her face goes down into his shoulder. All the tension goes out of her. Though he’s gone through the motions of expressing concern, in his heart he feels nothing. The smell of her does nothing, nor does the feel of her body against his.

She pulls away from him, wipes her eyes again, on the back of her hand this time. He keeps his hands on her shoulders.

“You’re a bastard,” she says, sniffing and trying to smile.

It means something to her, he can tell. She thinks it means something that he would hold her in the street in response to her tears. She thinks it explains why he can’t let go.

She manages to smile, shyly almost, looking at him coyly. He doesn’t smile back. He lets his arms drop to his sides. She’s smiling still.

“It was a mistake,” he mutters. “I’m sorry.”

He pushes past her roughly, forcing her to step to one side. He walks quickly up the street away from her. He hears her voice calling out behind him.

“Don’t fucking come back, you bastard. Don’t you ever fucking-well come back.”

He smiles to himself as he walks quickly and she recedes into the distance behind him. Maybe this was why he couldn’t leave it be. This need to know that he still controlled her. Maybe this was the thing that made him feel alive.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006