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