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