She Is Not Soft

“It’s all about you. You know that.”

She lies there, face down on the bed, in her turquoise underwear and he strokes her hair, lazy beside her, wondering how that piece of string she’s wearing doesn’t cut her in two.

The evening is close. Too warm. She is drowsy and her body slackens as she submits to the stroking of his hand.

She mutters something, deep into the mattress underneath where her head rests, supported by the well-walls of her arms.

Everything is a circle with her. He never knows which point he’s at. He doesn’t even know at which point he came in. He only knows it’s all about her.

“What did you say?” he asks her.

She raises her head from the crook of her arms.

“I think Jordan’s had something done to her face,” she repeats, then returns to her previous position.

Sisters and brothers who mourn their siblings. Parents who grieve for the loss of a child. Children suddenly orphaned in a split second of time. As long as it takes for the red glowing numbers to count down from one to zero. That’s how long it takes to create devastation.

She knows the consequences of such actions, but she is not soft. She does not weep.

She gets up suddenly, without a word, and goes into the bathroom. He listens to the sound of bottles opening, plastic bags rustling, something dropping into the metal bin.

When she returns, her face is clean, all trace of make-up gone. Her eyes are big, her cheekbones high and rounded, her face narrows to its impish chin. She wears her hair loose at the back, caught up at the sides. She’s like a dark haired colleen from the old country, transported here through time. She could be a selkie for all he knows.

She’s looking at him now, chin on shoulder, right hand playing with a strand of hair. Her lips are curved, the corners slowly creeping upwards until she smiles fully and looks away, as though she has guessed the things he was thinking.

She has lain further away from him, and he has to lean over to touch her skin. Her shoulder is like marble, but warmer.

“It’s always been about you,” he says.

She laughs. “Oh, fuck off,” she says. She has picked up a magazine from the floor by the bed and is reading and flicking and refusing to look at him.

But it’s true, and he knows it more than ever now. He knows it with every last drop of blood in his body. It is all about her, always has been, always will. She is not soft, and she will not have it, but he thinks she knows he’s right.

Her eyes in certain lights show more green than grey, in others they are dark, all pupil, pushing out the iris to its dark-rimmed edge of blue and grey. The inner ring of pale gold is like a corona round the moon when it passes between earth and sun. It fires and flares and makes the colours in her eyes mix and separate. Now blue, now green, now grey.

She is reading, and he cannot see her eyes. The room is too ill-lit for there to be much to see, anyway. Her pupils will be devouring the irises whole.

The countdown of red numbers. Devices fitted to cars. Packages sent through the post. Vans packed full of explosive left in the middle of a busy shopping street. Buttons pushed. Pins pulled. Signals sent. Any number of permutations to cause chaos, to inspire grief, to crown loss queen of random kingdoms.

And it is all about her.

In breaks of time he rests here. He drinks her in and stores her up. She is not soft, but when she breaks and crumbles in his arms, he knows. He understands. It’s all pretence and she is still as hard as she ever was, playing the game, acting out the part as though she understands it.

Sisters who mourn brothers. Daughters who grieve for dads. She doesn’t understand the meaning of love or compassion. She only knows hard. She doesn’t know fear. She did away with that the year she replaced it with anger. Not the flame hot fire of passion, but the coldly calculated ice of the malcontent, the betrayed, the avenging spirit come down to visit terror.

He looks at her, flicking through a glossy magazine, clad only in the sheerest turquoise gauze, through which tonight he has seen her skin, the dark circles of her nipples, the darker whorls of her pubic hair. He looks at her, and she feels it. Eyes snapped to darkest black, she looks back at him, feral for an instant before composure is regained. It whispers dark within him, and he unsnaps the back of her bra. He pulls the strap nearest to him from her shoulder. He straddles her and pulls the other strap away.

He works his hands along her sides, his thumbs pressing on the dip and ridge of her spine. He moves down her body and pulls aside that flimsy piece of stuff she chooses to call her knickers. She shifts position. Her backside swells then comes to a point at the small of her back, at the place where her waist dips in. It looks like a heart. An upside-down heart.

He enters her and they fuck.

The countdown of red numbers and a swell of explosions, personal and intense. She is not soft, and her cries are no softer. There are no tears, there is no gratitude. When it is finished, she falls instantly asleep, the stain of his semen between her legs.

It is all about her, this prickly cactus, desert rose. Her spines decorate his skin like ritual piercings; her blood, and spit, and anger tattoo his body.

In five hours, six, in seven, she will wake him, tell him he must go. He will pull on clothes, he will tie the laces on his shoes. She will go back to sleep as he goes down the stairs and lets himself out of the house, onto the street in those first moments of daylight.

But for now, she is there, marked by him, sleeping. He will not close his eyes for an hour or so yet. He will lie and stare at the ceiling. He will calculate the possibilities. It’s all for her, and for moments with her like this. It is all for the hardness of her anger bound tightly in her cunt. It is all for the hatred of the nation that she lives among, and the causes of that anger. It is all because he knows that she will never be soft, and he has nothing to fear. He need never worry about softness again.

Softness is a mug’s game. The countdown of red numbers and the swell of explosions, impersonal and intense, tell him so.

In the morning, he wakes up. He makes his rendezvous. She sleeps through two more hours after his departure, then waits to see it on the news.

The sister who grieves. The daughter who mourns. She is not soft, and never will be.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006