The Thud Of It

Halfway through September and the back door still open at nine. Warm, too warm for the time of year. And why do we call this an Indian Summer?

I can feel it coming. That same need. That same desire; to flee; to fly.

I kill the Daddy Longlegs that has come floating through the door. I chase it with the washing up brush, swiping at it, creating a draft that it rides, taking it away from me. It lands flat on the floor, its legs splayed, like someone’s skeletal hand. I pick up one of my many shoes that happens to be lying close by. I squash it. And I feel the desire return.

I have to get away from here. Even though he is gone. This isn’t about avoidance. This is about sorrow and failure, disappointment and memory. This is about denying that I am the same girl, still.

If I leave; if I flee and ride the draft created by my own swipes of panic; if I land in some other place, I can almost convince myself it will be better. But how many times have I done this now? How many times have I run because the horror of the truth was too much to bear?

The ring on my finger is slippery with the water that lies trapped between its smooth inner curve and my finger. I pull it off and wipe my finger dry, then rub the tip of my index finger inside the ring. It slides back onto my ring finger gracefully, smooth and heavy and familiar.

Am I? The same girl. Am I? I do not know her, this one who stands in the bright kitchen light, underneath the square panels of the light fittings, with their four halogen bulbs causing light and shadows to mottle the yellow-painted walls and plucking the lights of redness from her hair. I do not know her at all, it seems. What she is capable of; what lengths she will go to; what depths she will plumb.

If I sit on this doorstep, one half of me is inside the house in the bright light of the kitchen. My legs, all 32-inch inside leg of them, two inches short of being half of me, are on the outside, in the dark. My bare feet on the concrete paving stones, hoping in their nervous way that there will be no slugs, no beetles, no more Daddy Longlegs to slip or creep or crawl across their surface. My hands gripping the edge of the doorstep, anchoring me down to earth.

It seems as if, as when younger when I would lie in the swimming baths with my arms hooked around the rail, holding myself back against the side of the baths, it seems as if my legs could float free, suspended in this ocean of nothing. It seems as if my whole life could do that, and that it is only my hands gripping the doorstep that prevents it from happening.

If, at sea, you lie and let the salt water catch you; if you bob out on the current and allow yourself to drift; if you stare up at the sky, at the sun reaching its zenith; how long would it take you to choose to go under? How long before the endless drift and the blinding light of the sun would drive you mad and you would let the burning saltwater into your mouth, your stomach, your lungs?

Doors are open, and I hear the shout of “Leonard” from the mouth of Pat. I hear the voices of children, begging to be allowed to stay up, whiny with the heat. I hear the sound of my home, the place I have settled in. I hear the stillness and the calm, the life that carries on regardless. There are people on this street who have lived here their whole adult lives, and I am not ready to leave. I am unwilling to leave.

But the desire sends electric impulses along the nerves in my legs. It stirs my blood; adrenalin telling me to choose flight.

If I sit here and close my eyes, I can see the sea. I can take myself away from here, with its cooling memories of hope and disjointed emotion. But it doesn’t last and the peace is shattered by my own murderous intent. My blood runs thick and dark, and flight secedes, replaced by fight.

That he is not here makes no odds. He is anywhere I want him to be, near or far. He is in my memory, in waves of anger, in pressure points on my skin. Battered and bruised, face livid with the marks of my fists. The pulse of my anger is the thud of cock against cunt. His cock, her cunt; my fists fucking up his face.

The guttural curse of my mother tongue is all I have to define this.

Sitting here, I remember the hiss and slap of conversation. I remember the toxic narrowing of veins and arteries, and the way my nails felt against my palms. I call up the fizz of life in my bones, the love and the hatred, the salty taste of it; tears and sweat; the metal of blood in mouth; the sourness of bile in stomach. Hope and disjointed emotion are far away now. I have remembered the pulse of my anger, and what caused it.

The sting of flesh against flesh. The pinch of skin caught between fingers. The friction of my hand forming a fist around his dick. Teeth and lips in tender places. Turned aside, banged away. Cut off, cut out, deselected by committee.

Side by side on a sofa somewhere, legs stretched out, feet resting on a table. Silent with contentment. Familiar and comfortable. How would anyone guess the storm waiting round the corner?

Clink of ice cubes in a glass; black straw abandoned in the ashtray. Twin mobile phones lying on the table. A summer beer garden, the football on the telly. His cock, her cunt; the thud of fist against cheekbone.

I was so quiet then, so dozy. I was serene in my naivety. Slow pressure hissed out from time to time, and hate was all the pleasure there could be had. Hate and its twisted sister, love.

He gave nothing away. Nothing. Hayfever sneezes in pub gardens. Shirt sleeves rolled up to not quite the elbow. Side on view of that face I loved; that head so full of life’s mysteries. That I should think that I could learn what it contained, when he gave nothing away.

I blunder through these days at times, since his departure. It was slow and sudden. A gradual disappearance, and then a physical absence. Truth rushing past me like air from a decompressing cabin.

My hands still grip the doorstep. Knuckles white with grief and disbelief, I hold myself tightly, fix myself to this place.

Face to face, so close that all we could see was eyes, I asked him once to kiss me, and he did. But he was absent, and I closed my eyes so I would not have to see.

My bare feet on the concrete are cold. The only sounds beyond this garden and this street are the whine of planes in the sky and the rumble of traffic on the roads. The high-pitched squeak of someone’s brake discs. I listen to my pulse, and I forget.

I let go of the doorstep but do not float off into the night. I am fixed here now. He is gone, and this place is my castle.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006