Perfect Binding

I couldn’t wake up this morning. The past was too far behind me to make any sense. I applied my mascara in the bathroom and looked at my mouth in the mirror. The freckles around it made me look as though I had the Black Death. Ring A Ring O Roses, and all that.

What did I think would happen? Nothing. It couldn’t have been any other way.

The roads weren’t as busy as I was expecting today. At 8.30 I had done 100 miles exactly since I last filled up with petrol. I was level with the last red car on that stretch of road, just past the newsagent’s. It was a perfect moment. I looked down at the trip mileage reading and it sat plumply at 100.0

Simple pleasures.

The past is too far gone now to be able to tell me what’s what.

The past has been trying to tell me something all week, shouting something to me that comes over all jumbled because the distance is too great. I don’t listen. I never have. I’m like any historian. I document what happens, but I never learn.

I was clenching my jaw in my sleep last night. Some erstwhile tension seeking release. Now it feels as though my teeth are loose and might fall out.

I am falling apart.

I’m reading a book. It’s called Hope. When you take the red dust jacket off, the book cover is someone's mouth in the process of saying the word. "Hope". It's a pair of lips, a mouth if you will, in sepia. The inside of the mouth is perfectly black, shaped like a diamond. The word Hope is written in red capitals in the middle of the black diamond. I'm looking at the book on the coffee table, and the cover is lifting up slightly at the bottom right hand corner. It makes the person look as though they are falling to their right. Maybe falling backwards. Maybe the word Hope is coming out of their mouth as their body falls away, so that it sounds as though their voice is falling too, but not as quickly as their body.

That's how I feel today. Falling backwards, with hope coming out of my mouth.

I’m forgetful today. I left the tv on standby when I left for work this morning. I left my purse on the sofa under the window. I left my mobile phone on the coffee table, next to the laptop. I carried a story with me, in my head, as I drove and the trip mileage reading went past 100.

There have been books to catalogue today. They are books that I’m supposed to be trying to get rid of. Before, when I hadn’t even looked at them, when all I was bothered about was how much space they take up in that tiny library room, I just wanted to be rid of them. Today, I sat down with them, and looked through them, checking the titles and the pages. There are books there made from Chinese and Japanese hand made papers, printed with kanji characters and woodblock illustrations, too beautiful to discard. There are books over 300 and 400 years old, in Latin and in German, the type heavy on the whisper thin pages. And now I want to keep them. Even though I know they’ll never be used, I want to keep them because they are beautiful, worked with skill in the bindings and in the leaves between the bindings. They would be like poetry if they had nothing written in them at all. Russian books printed in Cyrillic that my ill-used knowledge struggles to translate.

There are dregs, of course. Modern publications it is an insult to place on the same shelves as these masterpieces.

Not that any of it matters. Nobody comes to look at them. Nobody comes to learn from them. Those Nobodies who make loud noises when you tell them that you’re getting rid of things. Even though they don’t use them, they like to know that things are there, in the place they should be.

Much better to not say anything. Nobody needs to know.

I’m a book on a shelf. It has suddenly come to me that that’s what I am. A book on a shelf in a library where people seldom trespass. I’ve been pulled out from the line of inconsequential reads. My spine has been creased; bent back, the better to see what’s in my middle. He has creased me for all time. My perfect binding threatens to fragment. Pages of me are beginning to scatter.

That’s why I couldn’t wake up this morning. Pages of me have gone missing. The past is too far behind me to make any sense.

And what if the pages turn up again? They can be stuck back in using invisible tape that pulls too tightly across the paper’s weave and leaves it buckled along the inner edge. Pages stuck back into a book leave the outside untidy; ugly, almost. Scarred like a weal left behind by a burn.

My jaw is clenched again. My teeth feel like they might crumble any minute, as though they were made from Edinburgh Rock.

If I’m a book, then where has he left me? Let’s follow this analogy to its logical conclusion. He has left me on a bus, a train, at the bottom of a bag, slipped between the cushions on a sofa, lost down the back of the bed. He has forgotten to take me back, and now the fine is too much. He could buy a new one for what it would cost him to take me back.

But this book didn’t come from a lending library. So technically, it was theft. He stole me. Slipped me out when nobody was looking. Hid me beneath his jacket. I was his guilty pleasure, taken so that nobody else could read, and then forgotten when his curiosity was sated.

More fool me for not being tagged, then. More fool me for being so tightly bound that no tattle tape tag could be placed at my middle. So tightly bound that he needed to crack my spine to see what was buried within.

Hardly worth the effort, though. It was hardly worth the effort.

And now I sleep so deeply, and I dream such terrible things, and I can’t wake up in the morning because the past…

The past lies too far behind me to ever make sense again.

The mouth on the cover of that book I’m reading. It might not be saying Hope. It might be sucking Hope in, swallowing it, choking on it. With all that rush of air that sounds when someone sucks in the air and whatever is floating on it; whether it’s Hope or Lust or Please or Leave Me.

Maybe that mouth is sucking Hope in.

A lingerie catalogue arrived today, while I was at work, reading the spines of books, checking their title pages, loving the feel of their pages beneath my fingers. I have clean underwear in the washing basket on the floor in the kitchen. It has been there for weeks. It came out of the washing machine and went onto the line, but the wind was too cold and it came back in damp. It never did make it upstairs to the clothes airer. It just sat there, damply, in the washing basket on the floor in the kitchen in front of the yawning mouth of the tumble drier. And I let it.

I wonder if his fingers loved the feel of my pages beneath them.

I expect that the underwear and the skirts and the tops that are too flimsy to be dried in the tumble drier, too prone to shrinking, I expect that they smell musty now. Damp and slightly mouldy. As though I’m a student who can’t spare the 50p for the drier.

But I’m not a student. I’m just lost. I’m falling apart. Falling backwards. Hope coming out of my mouth, or maybe being sucked back in.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006