Opportunity

Margot sits at the table smoking a cigarette. Wisps of smoke curl up from the burning end of the tobacco-stuffed paper roll. Margot is dark and small like a doll; her hair is pulled back into two tiny bunches just behind her shell-like ears. Margot is dressed in black and white with splashes of red. She is bored. She has been waiting an hour or more in this kitchen.

A half-read book lies face down on the table, the spine springing up, making a tent of the pages. Margot stares out of the kitchen window at the rows of windows across the courtyard at the centre of this apartment block. Her husband is outstaying his welcome in the living room, talking to Chris who wanted to be somewhere else hours ago.

Margot isn’t the world’s best-looking woman, but she is smart and stylish and cute in her doll-like clothes and secretary glasses. She knows she could do better than Ian, who has a head full of conspiracy theories and whom she has to carry around with her out of a sense of obligation.

“Ian.”

There is no response from the living room. Margot’s barely raised, enthusiasm-deadened voice doesn’t carry through and can’t be heard above the sound of the tv show the men are watching.

“Ian.”

She hears him laughing like a fool at whatever piece of nonsense has just played on the screen in front of him. She imagines Chris with his attention fixed on the tv, counting the minutes he has already wasted sitting there that morning. She knows how many minutes there are. She has counted them herself.

He walks into the kitchen, goes to the fridge and gets himself a beer.

“It’s early,” she says.

“Not that early.”

“Just cause, huh?”

“You could say.”

He leans against the work surface, folds his arms across his front. His right arm hinges at the elbow, resting in the nook made by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand holds the bottle of beer which is sweating in the warmth of the kitchen.

Margot has her back to him, but she doesn’t want to turn around. She likes the feel of his eyes on the back of her head, roaming over the back of her body. She knows that if she turns around the spell will be broken.

She imagines that he is mentally undressing her and it gives her goosebumps. The hairs on the back of her neck and along her arms stand to attention. She imagines his breath, cold against the nape of her neck, blown out in a thin stream from between his pursed lips.

“Ian.”

She says it louder this time. She hears him get up off the couch; hears the shuffle of his feet as he makes his way from the living room to the kitchen.

He leans in the doorway.

“What?”

“We gotta go. We’re late.”

“You’re late, you mean.”

“Okay, I’m late. So’s Chris.”

Her husband leans around the doorframe to look at Chris.

“Chris, man, I’m sorry. You shoulda said.”

Chris is silent and still Margot doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t want to know his reaction.

“So we’re going, then?” Ian questions her with impatience, as though she is the one holding things up.

Margot stands and stubs out the cigarette in the red glass ashtray. The filter tip matches where her lipstick has come off onto the paper. She pulls her jacket from the back of the chair and picks her purse up from the floor.

“See you,” she says to Chris who is lean and leaning. Margot tries hard not to think how his hands would feel against her body.

Chris raises his bottle of beer to her but doesn’t speak. As Ian bids him farewell he takes a swig of beer so that he can’t answer him.

They leave the apartment. She knew last night that Chris hadn’t wanted them to stay. Ian had been too cheap to get a cab home, so they had caught the train with Chris and sat up until too late, or too early, drinking Chris’ booze.

“You drank all his booze,” she says now, as they head down the hill to the station.

“You were drinking too.”

“There was over half a bottle left when he went to bed. It was still only half done when I went to bed. There’s none this morning.”

“What’s it to ya?”

“You drank all his fucking booze, you cheap fuck.”

Margot has stopped in the street. Her voice is rising in volume and pitch. It isn’t the booze. It isn’t even his cheapness. It’s everything. She wants nothing more than to walk away from him, to take a different train, to get home after him if that’s what it takes. She doesn’t want to sit next to him on the train. She doesn’t want to feel his leg against hers or hear his laboured breathing.

There is silence between them now. Ian is looking at her, just staring and staring, then he shakes his head and walks off.

Margot stays where she is. Back up the hill and across the way, she knows she can catch a train on another line that will get her to where she wants to go. She watches Ian head down the hill, sees the back of his head, the weird shape of his skull.

She flings her arms wide and throws her head back. She laughs at the sky.

“You dumb fuck!” she shouts after him, down the hill.

He is disappearing into the subway station. Margot stands there laughing to herself for a moment longer, then turns on her heel and walks back up the hill.

At the crossing, she sees Chris coming out of the apartment building. He is on his cell, laughing, apologising, animated. He hasn’t seen her standing across the street from him; the street that runs down the side of his building, with the fire escape that leads to the window to his room; the exit in his room protected by a grill, by bars, by a deadbolt lock.

Margot watches Chris walk across the street away from her, at right angles to her, heading down a different hill to the other subway station. She has two options now. She can go to the station where she knows that Ian will be waiting for her, thinking she will get over herself, thinking that she will turn up eventually and that everything will be okay, she won’t be shouting any more; or she can follow Chris down to the other station.

The marriage vows she made without thinking, the piece of paper she signed that bound her to him legally but not intrinsically, she knows that these are the things that should take precedence. She knows that she should honour the promises she made; that she should compromise again and work at this, keep it from falling apart completely. She knows this like a physics student knows the theory of particle acceleration

Margot also knows that she doesn’t want to keep working at this.

Standing on the swell of the hill, Margot doesn’t know if she wants to follow Chris and get into an explanation of why she’s there.

Just as she is about to turn and make her way back down the hill to where her husband will be waiting, letting trains come and go from the station without attempting to get onboard, she sees Chris return and stand at the opposite corner, waiting for the signal to change.

“Margot?” he shouts across to her.

“Hi.”

“Did you forget something?”

The signal changes and he walks across the road. There is never any traffic on the side street, so she crosses as well and they meet on the corner, at the apex of the triangle they were making.

“I left my wallet. Just came back to pick it up. What did you leave?”

He is walking away from her, towards the door to the apartment building, talking to her over his shoulder, smiling.

She follows him into the building, through the inner door and up in the elevator.

“Where’s Ian? Did he make you come back up on your own?”

Margot doesn’t speak, she lets him fill the silence with questions and breathless laughter. She follows him out of the elevator and along the corridor to the apartment. Chris lets himself in and she follows him there, too.

Margot stands in the hallway, uncertain why she’s there, how she got to be there, why she isn’t on a train with her husband.

Chris goes through to the living room, finds his wallet and comes back down the hallway towards her.

“You not looking for your stuff?”

“I didn’t forget anything.”

“Oh.”

They are standing opposite each other in the brightly lit hallway with its cream painted plasterboard walls and its blonde wood floor boards inlaid with ebony or mahogany or some dark, mysterious wood.

Margot looks at him and she knows that she would let him do anything to her. In the same moment that she knows that, she also recognises that Chris isn’t interested. She stands in the hallway, feeling as though she is naked, as though she has thrown her arms wide open again, but not as she did outside on the hill. She feels like she has sacrificed something by following him up here, by standing here in the hallway with him, wordless and heavy with paralysis.

She can see from the awkward way that Chris is still holding his wallet up to show that he has found it that he wants to go, to continue his day. Something prevents him from saying excuse me to her, though. It’s something almost like obligation.

Eventually the stillness and the silence is broken.

“I’m sorry I…”

“Yes, of course…”

“It’s just…”

“I know…”

They are awkward with each other now, there in the hallway. Eye contact is broken. The spell is broken. She would have let him do anything to her.

Chris starts to walk towards her. His hands are partly held out in front of him, as though he is going to usher her out of the apartment; as though she is a mildly inappropriate intruder.

“I’d better go and catch up with Ian,” she says. “He’ll be waiting at the station.”

“Okay.”

They go out into the corridor. Margot hovers, uncertain whether to linger, whether to make her way out of the building with Chris.

He pauses in the process of double locking the door and looks at her.

“You’re sure you didn’t forget something?”

“No. I didn’t forget anything.”

“Okay.”

As he locks the door, she can see him trying to work out why she’s there and whether it’s worth asking. She sees the moment when he decides that he doesn’t want to know. He wants to get on with his day. He doesn’t want a dark, small doll’s thoughts rattling around in his head.

He pockets his keys and checks again that he has his wallet, then smiles at her.

“Shall we?” he asks.

They make their way down the back stairs, which are narrow and less well used than the elevator or the front stairs. He walks down behind her, and she knows that he isn’t looking at her.

As they step out into the sunshine on the street again, she turns to say goodbye. He holds a hand up in a wave, flipping it back at the wrist.

“Later,” is all he says.

The signal changes for him and he’s off and away across the road before Margot can say anything in reply.

She sets off down the hill, knowing that stored up trouble is waiting for her underground.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006

The Arnolfini Bride

The captured words of another mind lay on the page before her. A virtual page, illuminated from behind a screen; pixellated and whirring, a gentle flicker of electrons bouncing from the flat surface of the screen to her retina and into her brain.

The words that edged into each other and expanded, chasing away the crowded sense of a New York afternoon to reveal a corn field dream of Ohio.

Paused in her aimless, rushing oblivion of connection and connectivity; reminded of the existence of other minds, other voices; she sits and stares at the screen, at this page blundered on so blindly in her search for someone other. The noise of the internet café burbles on around her and she doesn’t hear the crash of coffee cups or the laughter of friends. She is paused in the chaos of her life, made still by the words of a stranger.

She thinks back and remembers; that sense of wonder the first time she looked on the Manhattan skyline; the craning of her neck to look up and up and up, beyond the usual eyeline of shop frontages and pavement and other people’s screwed up faces, hurrying and cursing past the curiosity of this tourist. She remembers how that sense of awe, that spine-tingling joy and disbelief that a fairytale could be real, faded with familiarity. The words on the page, flickering on the screen, remind her of how it felt the first time.

“I never look up,” he said to her.

“You miss so much,” was her reply.

You miss so much with your hurry and your pavement dwelling eyeline. You raise your eyes only to check whether it is safe to cross; if the hand is red or the man a white diamond-encrusted outline.

A pair of shoes, palely pretty, cross-buckled with a kitten heel. His eyes had come to rest on them one day, seated at a café table in the Village. She had paused to check a street sign. He was reading a newspaper, his eyes were lowered, always lowered, but then they rose; up from the shoes, along the line of her leg and past the hemline of her skirt. His eyes rose up to cross the landscape of her body and come to rest on her face.

Outside on the sidewalk at Caffe Reggio, McDougal Street. A mid-morning cappuccino, monk-like habit, and a pair of shoes.

“I’m lost,” she had said, matter of fact, unabashed, unashamed, illiterate in this new language she was struggling through.

He had reached out and taken the scribbled directions from her hand. He had read them, frowning slightly as he tried to decipher what her friend had written.

“No,” he said eventually. “You’re not lost. This is McDougal Street. Minetta Tavern is on a little way from here. Keep going. You’ll see it eventually.”

“Thanks,” she said, taking the crumpled scrap back from him. The paper was beginning to wilt from the fervent clutching of her hand; it resembled the leaf of a plant that saw water a few days ago, but was beginning to feel the need for more.

He, tall with hair that couldn’t decide between dark blonde and light brown, almost let her go but then remembered the sight of her shoes and the pull of her legs up to that face that only vaguely seemed to fit.

“Joe Gould fan, huh?”

She had begun to move off, her attention already returned to the scrap of paper and the route through this unfamiliar landscape to the rendezvous she was minutes away from missing.

She halted. She looked back at him with a smile part nervous, part hoping to disarm whatever conflict might suddenly be arising.

“Pardon?”

“Little Joe Gould. He used to drink there, eat soup there. Thought you must be a literary type.”

“Oh. No. Well, I am, but that’s not the reason. I didn’t know that. I don’t know who he is. I mean…”

“You’re a literary type and you don’t know Little Joe Gould?”

“I’m not from round here.”

She was awkward now. Whatever assurance that normally held her bones in alignment was gone, leaving her gawky and angular like a teenager. The clothes, especially the shoes, indicated that her usual demeanour was assured. Poised, even. He smiled.

“It’s okay. He’s a little known literary celeb.”

She smiled back and started to return to the job in hand, namely meeting her friend at the Minetta Tavern for some kind of lunch or cocktail, he suspected.

“He was a friend of Cummings’,” he offered, looking back at his newspaper, but hoping she would linger again.

The trick worked. He glanced up and saw the sunshine behind her light up the stray wisps of her hair like a halo. He smiled again, pushed at the other chair at his table with his foot, and indicated that she could sit if she wanted.

The gesture, his confidence, something; suddenly everything that made her who she was in her own environment flooded back, and the clothes became one more disguise meant to trick people into false impressions. Her eyes glittered with mischief and her face cracked open into a grin that was at once childlike in its amusement and wicked in its potential.

She sat. He waved for a waiter. She ordered a hot tea, with milk, no sugar. He listened to her British vowels and imagined her dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

“You’ll be late for your meeting,” he said.

“I’ll say that I got lost.”

“You could always ring and ask for directions.”

“My phone doesn’t work over here.”

“Are you in the habit of drinking tea with strange men?”

“It depends on the man. Which poets he knows.”

“Cummings does it for you, then?”

“Cummings and enough cheek to proposition an unknown woman in the street.”

“Welcome to New York. You might not have heard, but we’re all predators round these parts.”

Her tea arrived. They both looked at it, the conversation stalled by the intrusion of the waiter. She placed both hands around it, staring down into the surface of the liquid, suddenly uncertain again.

“Here on vacation?”

She looked up as though surprised he was sitting there, as though she had forgotten.

“Yes. Visiting a friend. Just for a few days.”

“Never been before?”

“You can tell?” She laughed, and looked sideways, away from him. Her profile was pretty. He liked the curve of her cheek and the way her eyelashes curled up towards her brows. He liked the straight line of her nose and its tilt at the end.

She looked back at him; caught him staring. She laughed and blushed; picked up the cup of tea and, holding the edge of the cup to her lip, blew across its surface.

She took the barest sip and put the cup down again.

“Too hot,” she said. “Needs to cool.”

She kept her eyes downcast for a moment and allowed him to soak up her appearance. He appreciated the effort she was making to feign shyness on his behalf. He had seen the mischief in her eyes, however. He wasn’t going to be fooled.

She remembers all of this reading those words on another person’s webpages, lost to their spell, to the cadence of sweet memory. Propped up by circumstance, she allows herself the luxury of fading out of her surroundings until –

“Are you going to be much longer, lady?”

Startled, she looks round from the terminal to see a teenager boring holes in the back of her head with his stare. She checks her watch. She has two more minutes. She composes herself to return his stare.

“Two minutes,” she says.

Grumbling, the boy moves off, hunting for another terminal that might come free sooner than in two minutes; sooner than that whole lifetime of wasted opportunity that comes in packets of one hundred and twenty seconds.

She abandons the page that paused her life for a moment and sent her tumbling back to the meeting that would change her life. She’s forgotten what she came in to search for, though, so she abandons the session altogether, remembering to log out of different sites and wipe her history from that electronic memory bank.

The youth who woke her from her reverie is far off across the café from her; his back is to her and he doesn’t notice that she has left.

She leaves the building, out onto 8^th Avenue and the bustle of people going about their lives. She is one of them now, no longer a tourist, no longer filled with the awe that the internet poet spoke of. She lost her enchantment long ago, became one of the oblivious, hurrying through the days to cover up the fact that life can be achingly slow.

She crosses Times Square from west to east, heading for 5^th Avenue, aching now to do something with her day that will recapture something of the enchantment of New York.

The Public Library, across from the bookshop where he worked, alongside the park where they would meet, huddled in the autumn air, those first few months after she moved to the city; buildings looming over them, peering down through the branches of trees beginning to lose their leaves. She had just begun to understand that bravery is a form of deception.

That first meeting in the Village, she had taken him along with her to lunch at the Minetta. He had cried off work. She later learned what that meant to him; a day without food, his usual grocery money spent on lunch with her in a place he couldn’t afford, his income cut by an afternoon’s pay.

She had taken him home with her. A snack, her friend termed it. Something about the falling away of circumstance and preconception, being someone other than herself in someone else’s land, made it an okay thing to do. She had snacked and then, months later, she had found herself a job over there.

His bravery in picking her up that day, in allowing himself to be picked up, was a sham. Circumstance and preconception can be different things even on your own turf. He was cut loose by the thought that he would never need to see her again; and although she hadn’t returned for his benefit, her presence in the city became for him some sort of habit. Like a once a month cappuccino at Caffe Reggio on his half day, when he was working for money instead of art.

The Public Library, where they would spend damp afternoons and early evenings listening to talks and wandering through the divisions and reading rooms, getting to know each other’s surfaces.

They had gone through winter months wrapped in each other’s warmth; knowing and needing only the other’s body; skating wide rings around the darker places of psyche and emotion. Nights spent in foreign beds with morning’s ritual of not knowing where to look until clothes were reassembled and breakfast, if there was time for breakfast, had been negotiated. A tumbling of limbs and pretence at still being a tourist in another’s land brought her one spring day to a day without spots of blood at the time they should have appeared.

Courageous and brave, he told her to get rid of it, then shipped out of town on a twelve month tour of Shakespearean theatre. Something, he claimed, he had always wanted to do. Something, she suspected, he needed the correct impetus to commit to.

Her belly swollen, she now sits at a table in the Public Library, reading books about the Renaissance. Van Eyck, Raphael, Holbein, DaVinci all float before her eyes; the influence of the Medici; Guttenberg and Caxton; Shakespeare. Always, somewhere, Shakespeare.

Her belly swollen, she curses Shakespeare and the camaraderie of players. Roommates in a dormitory of poetic invention. She curses Cummings too and shies away from remembering the words mumbled across a sleep indented pillow. Since feeling was first, attention to syntax seemed unnecessary; redundant. The study of rules and patterns had no part to play in their loose ritual.

Since feeling was first, the gut did away with rules and six months on, her belly swollen, she knows she will not see him again.

The poem that she found earlier that day; the poem that haunts her now and reminds her of a time when wonderment and awe were all that mattered in her life; the poem reminds her that there is death again in the trees and life passes achingly slow at times. Twelve months have passed that could have been twelve years or twelve generations, it seems so long since she first stepped foot on this island as a resident.

The richness of new life stirs in her swollen belly. Like the Arnolfini bride in the picture in front of her.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006

The exhilaration of change

And in the end it was easier than she expected. A sleight of hand; a momentary distraction; the entirety of who they were, what they had been, done away with. Deleted like an email or a phone number, she consigned him to the past.

The small grey and white cat lay curled and purring on the sofa beside her, nose clamped between pressing paws, lost in a world unknown to anyone but her.

She listened as the rumblings of contentment faded; she relished the silence when it came.

On the table in front of her sat a half glass of ruby red wine. The day had begun with champagne; her present to herself. The tail end of a bottle, she had finished it with toast before moving through the house, cleaning up the aftermath of the party.

She was a success at last, in her own right. She had long ago cast off his Svengali-like posturing and need to control. She had flicked through the scrapbook of characters he had chosen for her to wear and had seen through each one of them; she had seen through him.

In her widow’s weeds, she had entertained her guests. In the elegance of black, in the simple black georgette sheath that skimmed her curves and rippled at her feet on the floor, she had shone with happiness and glory. Everyone was there to fête her; people from her past, people from her now. People she knew would be important in her future. Like Mrs Dalloway, she had planned this social triumph. Unlike Mrs Dalloway, she deserved it.

The returning prince was herself. She was the one wreathed in laurels. All it had taken was a moment of faith; to accept the risk that all she would ever know was the obscurity he chose for her, and to seize the chance to prove him wrong.

And how wrong he had been! She was a diamond in the sky, a bright glittering jewel. She emerged from the shadows he had placed her in; the cloth was pulled free of the statue he had been sculpting all this time, but was never (he said) ready for exhibit.

And all it had taken was a few drops in his food, in his drinks, in his toothpaste. All it had taken was patience and time before she at last was rid of him.

Put the poison in the well, let him drink.

She had raged at him; she had simpered and pleaded; but all she had needed to do was kill him.

She dropped him, dead, that long weekend in New York. She swore blind to him, before she went, that she would never leave him. That was just the prelude. The inevitability of that statement was, of course, that she was leaving him. An act of will. Not a slipping away, but a leaving.

And in that city that never sleeps, in that town of eight million souls, she had found peace. She had discovered that who she was mattered more than who she was supposed to be, and that nothing that came before that fact was important.

He had always said that she would be the one that quit; in a way he was right. She had stopped wanting the fight. She had stopped wanting the instruction. She had stopped wanting.

She was not satisfied with the lack of things on offer. When you have exhausted all the nourishment from something, all you can do is throw out the husk. That was how she looked on it now. He had fewer dimensions than she had thought; or she had wanted more than he could ever have given.

In that city of no sleep, she had found the thing she wanted. Acceptance. Indifference to the wheres, the whys, the how-comes. Indifferent to where she had been, what she had done, he had taken her for the moment in which they were living, and he had given her back her own mind.

He didn’t even know it. He had no need to.

Her mind had been taken and kept from her for too long. Alternating current that changed direction and magnitude as often as their heartbeats, it was all she could do to keep up with moods at times. The positive pleasure and the negative withdrawal that kept the current moving burnt out the filament eventually; forgetting to step-down the voltage left her shaking. Electrocatalysis wasn’t what she was seeking.

The exhilaration of change had seduced her and enlightened her; she would admit that to anyone; he wasn’t entirely bad. But the exhilaration of not being found lacking meant more to her now than he ever could.

The day after the restoration of her mind had been bright. She had risen before anyone else in the house. She had showered and finally washed away all traces of what had been. She made breakfast; she read the papers; she felt the lightness of freedom all over her skin.

The liberation carried her past all awkwardness in the presence of the one who set her free, although he didn’t know where to look or how to stay. All she could do was laugh at the way the world sometimes turned out. Turned itself out, and you; inside out and upside down. All she could do was laugh.

He hadn’t understood, standing with his head inside the fridge, exclaiming over the existence of cheese, why she had laughed. He hadn’t understood, but he enjoyed it.

“What did I do?” he asked.

She couldn’t say.

That long weekend in the city that never sleeps; that long weekend that brought her here.

“He will be there tonight,” her friend told her as she helped her to dress.

“Who will?”

“Both of them.”

“Oh.”

A heart beat. A pause. A moment. Then: “Let them be. That’s alright. It doesn’t matter any more.”

Her daughter ran into the room, four years old and charming; blonde curled and blue eyed, she carried her doll whose hair she had hacked until the doll looked like she should be the singer in a new wave band.

“Does mummy look nice?” she asked her daughter.

The girl paused and stood in front of her mother with her head on one side, her lower lip bitten by her upper teeth. She took stock of the woman in front of her; the dark hair pinned up; the white skin against the black of the dress. She weighed up all the evidence inside her four year old head, and then she nodded.

This night was hers. She had waited five years since shedding the skin he had placed on her. She had worked towards this moment without a backward glance.

It didn’t matter that he would be there. It didn’t matter that the father of the girl would be there. Her prize possession, bizarrely bound up in that bundle of three and a half feet of need, was her independence.

So one had travelled thousands of miles across an ocean to witness this moment and undoubtedly would try to spoil it. And the other had come from where? She didn’t know where in the city, or even if in the city, he lived these days.

The grey and white cat slept on beside her as she remembered the sight of the one and the presence of the other. Two wildcats believing in nothing. Two toms who liked the same parts of her body. Two children who would never grow up. One who had meant the world and threatened to take it; the other who just was.

Her daughter had woven her way around the guests until it was time to say goodnight. Sleepy kisses and damp hugs, her dress creased, her face happy, she bade her child goodnight.

There would be nothing she would do better in this life than create that child; she knew that, but she knew also that this night meant as much in a different way.

Skilfully, she managed to avoid him. To the unknowing father, she was all grace and distant approbation. He was working hard, successful on his own terms. He was older and she appreciated the changes in him. She appreciated his coming.

Their hands touched, as they had that night, in a bar, the day before the child was conceived. The touch was familiar, and so too was the look that passed between them. Acceptance and recognition that they were who they were, and nothing other.

2011, the start of another decade, approaching the end of her 41st year. Success had come late to her, to him. The other had had his share and she no longer wished to know him. She let him stand there across the room from her; always across the room and never near her; she sensed when he tried to cross the divide and made sure she moved on; or she refused to acknowledge him, so that he had to go away again or appear foolish, listening in on someone else’s conversation.

“I think he wants to talk to you,” he had said.

“Let him,” she had replied, and drank from her champagne glass, keeping her eyes fixed on him.

“Your daughter’s beautiful,” he told her.

“She is. She’s like her father,” she said.

“You’ve never told. You’ve been asked. I’ve read the interviews. And you’ve never told.”

“I never will.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t need to know.”

“Is she his?”

She had laughed at that. “Does she look like him?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

She remembered, as the cat stretched and yawned and sat up before hurrying off to continue her day, the way her agent had swept her off just then; carried away across the room to talk to someone this and someone that; none of them important, all of them demanding.

She had looked up at one point, in time to see him leave. He had looked at her once and held up the glass he was about to set down on the tray by the door. A salute she did not return.

Yes, he was dead to her now after too much time spent coursing through her veins. She regretted it in some ways, when she let down her guard. Some small, silent part of her still thought it could have been different. Wrapped tight in bubble wrap and put away, she checked its condition every now and then. It still said love, in faded pink across a white shell; if you held it to a mirror, it still said hate. That fine line of beaten polished silver.

The door closed after him and her life continued. In the end, it had been too easy.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006

Plenty

He is like a cat, lying there on the bed, eyes half closed, or are they half open? He is stretched out, feigning relaxation; the muscles beneath his skin are coiled; he is ready to pounce or to flee the instant she makes a wrong move.

They are top to tail, curled like commas on the bed. The white space of the sheet lies between them. Yin and Yang. Polar opposites. Attracting and repelling simultaneously.

She uncurls and stretches her body. Her spine elongates, her legs and arms unfurl like the fronds of a fern. She stretches and yawns and now it is she who is the cat. She flops over onto her back, stretching out beside him with still that white sheet sea between them; rippled and peaked in waves caused by the gravity of their opposing bodies.

“Kate,” he says. “Kate.”

She lies with eyes closed, one arm now placed across her forehead, bent at the elbow.

“What?” she replies.

“You’re leaving today, right?”

She smiles, but doesn’t answer. He touches her ankle. She knocks his hand away by shifting her leg. He touches her ankle again. She repeats the previous movement. Da capo; da capo; da capo, until finally she sits up and shifts position, the better to fight with him.

Breathless and naked, they push against each other, half-laughing, half-serious in their intent to emerge triumphant.

Breathless and naked, he pins her down against the bed, his arms locked straight, his hands gripping her wrists, his hair falling down around his face like cloth of gold.

“You’re leaving today, right?” he repeats, and she smiles again.

“Don’t worry,” she says.

He releases her and falls back down onto his back beside her.

“I’m not worried,” he says.

“Then why ask?”

“Dunno.”

They lie side by side, silent, listening. The usual sounds come into the room, muffled by the pane of glass in the window. Distant sirens. Car horns. Voices rising and falling like mini arias in the street opera that goes on daily outside this room, outside this apartment. She listens to him trying not to breathe, trying to seem like he is relaxed. Still the white sea of bedsheet. Still the cat-curled muscles waiting.

She sits up; sits on the edge of the bed. She pulls clothes from the tangled pile on the floor; the monument to passion’s impatience. She begins to dress, and all the while he lies still and frozen on the bed.

She pulls on underwear, then jeans and shirt. Last she pulls her boots on.

In the kitchen she fills the kettle with water and lights the gas under it. She unpacks the dishwasher; stows crockery and cutlery in cupboards and drawers. She makes tea and goes to sit by the window so she can smoke. Her fingers absently rub and shine the leaves of the plant that grows so spindly from its pot. Smoke from the tip of her cigarette drifts out through the gap around the airconditioning unit and she drops ash into the round ceramic dish that serves as an ashtray.

His papers and lighter are on the table. She picks up the book he’s reading and flicks through the pages. A drunk, marking time in the Postal Service, working towards the day that he becomes a writer. She reads for a while.

The light changes outside the window. Someone throws some kind of packaging from an upper window; it’s made from the same material that they wrap runners in after marathons. It floats down past the window behind her, but she is lost in the book and doesn’t see it.

“I thought you said you were leaving.”

He floats in the doorway, suspending his bodyweight by jamming his arms inside the frame and pushing outwards. He can’t keep up the pressure and lands back on his feet.

She doesn’t look up from the book.

“It’s still today, isn’t it? I’ve got a few hours yet.”

He walks into the kitchen, over to the refrigerator. He opens the door and stares inside. She allows herself a glance across the room and sees his face illuminated by the light inside the fridge. She sees the curve of his cheek and his hair tucked behind his ear. She has no feelings for him, but she appreciates his beauty. He feels her looking at him; she can tell by the minute movement of his ear and the slight stiffening of his cheek and jaw. He feels her looking, but he maintains position, affecting disinterest.

She puts the book down on the table. The front cover curls up and out and she places her hands over it, trying to force it flat, but it has been read and bent back too many times to be anything other than buckled.

Like cats, they are; the pair of them. Curled close for warmth, seeking out pleasure on their terms. It works; far better than any previous attempt at symbiosis she has made. No obligation or responsibility.

She kids herself.

He closes the door to the refrigerator and comes to sit at the table, empty-handed.

“Is there any coffee?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my kitchen.”

He rubs his eyes and yawns.

She picks up the book again, but does not open it; she merely holds it between her hands, as though it’s a hymnal or prayer book; something she ought to revere, but doesn’t know why.

“Post Office,” he says.

“You should read more,” she tells him.

“I read enough. I read plenty.”

She places the book down on the table again, one hand pressing firmly on its cover.

“I should go.”

He doesn’t respond. He sits back in the wooden chair, his legs stretched out underneath the table, his arms folded across his abdomen. His head is tilted downwards, his chin tucked into his neck. He stares at where her hand is still pressing down firmly on the front of the book.

“It’s a good job books don’t have nerve endings,” he says.

His eyes have lost focus, and she knows that he’s thinking of something else. He’s lost somewhere in a private universe.

“Where’ve you gone?” she asks softly.

He shakes his head; he keeps his eyes unfocused.

“Nowhere,” he replies. “I’m still here.”

His eyes snap back into focus and he looks up at her, smiling his brilliant smile.

“I’m still here, and so are you.”

She laughs.

“I know. I thought you’d forgotten.”

“You shouldn’t have spoken just then. You drew my attention back to you.”

“Are you hungry?” she asks him. “I could cook, if you like.”

“There’s nothing in the fridge.”

His voice is flat. He isn’t interested in prolonging her tenure in this kitchen. He needs her to leave. He doesn’t need to give her a reason, but she finds herself wanting to know why.

He’s like Teflon™. Nothing ever sticks to him. It’s his own patented design for maintaining a healthy distance. The strip of bedsheet sea; his avoidance of all intimacy; his refusal of responsibility. He kisses better, though, than anyone she has ever known. And this convenience-store, disposable arrangement suits her well.

She’s not going to leave until she’s ready. She made that decision even before he asked.

He gets up, suddenly, and paces through the apartment. A display of catlike frustration. Stare out the invader, stand your ground; but she is the tougher cat; she knows this ground better than he does; she forces him to concede territory by not being bothered.

He can’t stand authenticity.

She lights another cigarette and smokes it half way down. She thinks for a moment about leaving, but there is still plenty of time.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006