Ceci n'est pas une histoire

I could see a spider making its way slowly and smoothly across the supermarket floor.

Standing there at the till, I watched it as it crossed from one checkout desk to the other either side of the aisle in which I was standing. Once it had disappeared, I looked up and to my left and saw a box filled with plastic wallets. The plastic wallets contained vampire capes. Forty-five inch vampire capes. Hallowe’en was just around the corner and the supermarket was confused about what to display more prominently; the tricks and the treats for the fake festival just around the corner, or the endless aisles of pointless food for the festival that was still two months away.

Selection boxes and outsized tins of Quality Street and Roses filled an entire aisle marked “Seasonal Goods”. Another was filled with those plastic trays of tiny biscuits and pretzels that only ever seem to be in the shops in the run up to Christmas. Tiny biscuits shaped like fish.

I looked at the vampire capes and I knew.

I paid for the few things I had put into my basket. Long days caused by late arrivals inevitably lead to impulse purchases of food packed with salt and sugar and bottles containing liquids that leave your head aching the next day.

I smiled at the cashier as I paid. He was tall and dark and bored. I handed over that small piece of plastic. I keyed in the four digit code. I took the card as he handed it back. I looked at him and I smiled, and he didn’t look back. He didn't smile.

My interior zeitgeist told me that everything was fine. Life smelled and tasted and felt as good as it ever should.

But the vampire capes in their plastic wallets had given me the nod.

I daydreamed, as I drove home, that everything was in its rightful place. All arguing had ceased. All striving to prove that I was the person that I should be. All fevered hope that despair was put far behind me in the past.

I knew this film, though. Like everyone. I knew the score, the script, the lighting and the direction. I knew to start counting; to hold those numbers firmly in my mind. I knew to start waiting for the delivery.

Fishermen place maggots into their mouths to warm them up before attaching them to a hook. Walking from the car to the back door of the house, I wondered whether the bait that was waiting for me was still warm from his mouth. The thing that the vampire capes had hinted at, as orange and synthetic as they were, folded tight inside their plastic wallets. I wondered if it was waiting for me inside. The house was in darkness, and opening the door onto silence was like holding a stopped watch, waiting for the moment when the hour has finally gone back and it’s alright to start ticking again.

I walked through the silence into the living room. I left the lights switched off. I walked through silence and the half light from the garden outside until I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

There is always silence in this house. Even when it’s noisy, the silence never leaves. It simply allows the sounds and the vibrations to pass through. The silence is always there.

I waited at the bottom of the stairs for a while. I listened to the silence, which seemed to float half a metre from the ceiling, like thin fog above a culvert. When I was absolutely certain that no sound was interfering with the silence’s signal, I walked up the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, just outside the bathroom, is a tiny picture of the sea. A small square of glass covers over the image, which is no more than ten centimetres by ten more, if that. The sea is flat and cold and a silvered shade of palest purple. Like lilac.

I stopped at the top of the stairs and looked at the picture. It seems like a window at times. A peep-hole to a world that I once knew and can’t regain. A peep-hole or a porthole. I can’t decide which.

I paused in front of it for a couple of minutes, head craned forward, peering through the small glass square at the cold flat sea. I don’t know what I was hoping for. A ship, maybe.

But there was nothing there.

I walked into the bedroom. We have this competition, he and I. There has never been any formal declaration, but the competition still exists, nevertheless. We are building a tower of clothes. Clothes worn once. Clothes pulled from the bottom and worn a second time. Clothes from the middle worn three times. All returned to the top of the pile, along with new clothes pulled fresh from the wardrobe to start the process again.

I walked into the bedroom, and the tower of clothes had shrunk. That meant that there would be a tangle of damp items in the washing machine downstairs. That, in turn, meant that I had won the competition this time.

I pulled off each of the things that I was wearing and began to build a new layer on the dishevelled pile that remained. Everything except for my underwear went onto the pile.

The silence seemed to hiss in my ears.

In the bathroom, the bath bore the marks of the cat’s paws around its rim. I wiped them away with a damp cloth. I used the shower to rinse away hairs from the bottom of the bath. I put the plug into the plughole. I turned on the taps.

I stood in front of the mirror and gave myself a good, hard stare. That morning a colleague had said that I had good skin. I looked. I didn’t know what I was comparing it with, though. It looked like skin to me. Freckled in places, with spots in others and downy hairs on the cheeks and jawline. I looked at myself and my eyes reflected in the glass looked back at me with frankness.

I listened to the water filling up the bath, with the silence waiting to fill the space when the bath was full.

I stepped into the bath still wearing my underwear. I have never wanted to be found naked. There is something shameful about your body exposed to strangers and you unable to do anything about it.

I lay half submerged with my knees raised so that I could get more of my torso under the water. Our bath is white plastic and small. Our bath is designed for people a good foot shorter than me.

The water was hot and soothed me. I drew a thin line across each wrist with the vegetable knife I had brought up from the kitchen. I allowed my hands to slip under the warm and soothing water.

I didn’t want to watch the water turn pink, so I closed my eyes and began to drift. Aspirin helps to keep the blood flowing. Aspirin also helps to absorb the pain.

Warm water around me, soothing and holding my body.

He must have found me. I don’t know. I was elsewhere for a while, neglecting my duties of observation.

The bridge that I crossed between then and now is white and curved with lattice-work railings, carved from soap. It smells clean as you cross it; as though the soap is rubbing off on you as you pass over it.

The bait was warm. The smell of her still fresh on the air. The bait pulled from his mouth, lingering with the silence half a metre from the ceiling. Like a fish, I leapt to take the bait in my own mouth. Barbed hook pulled me clear.

So I don’t know if he found me. But I presume that he did. My hands lie on the cover before me, my wrists bound in comedy bandages. Not as funny as if I had set my hands on fire. But comical enough.

Wisdom tells me not to ask whether it was him who pulled me out of that cooling water. I don’t want to know who else it could have been. I don’t want to know who saw me there.

I’m waiting now to be asked. The whys and the whys and the whys. Y is his symbol and X is mine. Why is the question, and my mouth is stitched closed like I’m Miffy the rabbit.

I sit and I wait. The silence hides in corners here, as though it’s scared to venture any further out than that. Like the spider crossing the wide and shiny aisle between the two checkout desks.

When I leave this place, I shall take some of the silence with me.

When I leave this place I'll hold my scars face out to the world.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006