Christa

“You’ve got nothing left to cling to. Pulling your suitcase around from apartment to apartment, wearing the leather from the soles of your shoes. You’ve got no pride. Nothing left to cling to.”

Christa rubs her hands across her belly. She feels the tightness of denim holding her in. Her hair, pulled back from her face, crinkles in the summer-like humidity of this unseasonable autumn. Her legs are too hot inside her jeans and she longs for a cool breeze to blow against the dampness of her neck.

Chester takes a cold beer from the fridge. The day is so hot that the can immediately gets the sweats. He walks over to Christa, behind her. He presses the cold of the can against the cervix of her neck, letting droplets of condensation fall down the skin towards her spine. He places his free hand on the top of her head and pats her hair. Christa wants to reach behind her and feel the solidity of his body, but he moves on too fast and her hands are glued to her belly.

Chester moves past her, taking the beer with him. His transit takes him from the orbit of this kitchen, out into the hallway, through to the lounge. Christa watches his back, sees the muscles beneath the thinness of his t-shirt, until he is no longer in view; but she keeps looking as though he is still visible, a shrinking dot on some far-distant horizon.

Christa listens to Mike and Paul rehearsing. Paul is enveloped in his role: the father disappointed in his dissolute son, returned from war, without a skill, and the country sinking ever deeper into depression. Christa listens to the bandying of words and thinks about Chester’s hand on her head; his beer can pressed against the back of her neck. She thinks of the slenderness of him, the length, and the kisses she let fall on his skin, the teeth marks he carries on his shoulders. The way neither of them looked at each other; couldn’t see in the blackness of the room.

There is silence in the kitchen, and she looks back from the imagined dot of Chester on the imagined horizon to see Mike and Paul are looking at her. Mike looks at the script she holds in her lap, at her hands still folded, glued across her belly.

“Prompt?” he says.

Christa looks down at the forgotten script, the white pages tattooed with ink from a bubble jet printer. She looks up again.

“I forgot,” she says, without apology, just wide-eyed surprise that she is there at all.

“Maybe we should break anyway,” Paul suggests, snapping out of advanced middle-age to become himself again. He gets up off the chair and goes over to the refrigerator. Mike is sitting backwards on his chair, facing the window with his back to the doorway. He is wearing sweats and a baseball cap. Christa thinks that, for all that he carries more weight than Chester, it is Chester who is the more solid.

Paul comes back from the fridge carrying beers, bread and cheese. He has a knife and a chopping board. He cuts hunks of bread from the stick loaf and chunks of cheese from the block.

“Want some?” he asks her, cube of cheese balanced on blade of knife. She shakes her head and thinks instead about packing a suitcase of her own; wearing the leather from the soles of her shoes; dragging the case from apartment to apartment. Maybe even from town to town.

She thinks of how kisses against the skin of another human being can bring about freedom; how the contact of man against woman in the hard, warm, liquid places of the night can liberate. She smiles and laughs a little, turning her face into her shoulder.

The child of a dissolute son would be glorious, she thinks. He would carry with him the gold of dissatisfaction. She is suddenly aware that the play sitting neglected in her lap is badly written; a pastiche of the stones already cast, the stories already told, by Vonnegut or Bukowski, although set out of time. The humanity of the time isn’t quite ready for the sentiment.

She remembers her body against Chester’s. She remembers the moment when he held her by the hips. Her hands fold across her belly and she longs again for the breeze to fall across the nape of her neck.

“Turn the fan up?” she asks Paul, abbreviating the question to a command. He is the closest to the window, but he is eating, so he nods at Mike, dark and glowering, still cross that she lost her place. Christa knows by looking at him what he will smell like as he passes behind her and makes his way around Paul to the table’s other side and the window.

She is right.

“Do you need to do laundry?” she asks him. He has turned up the fan and is returning behind her to his seat. As he sits he takes the play from Christa’s lap, just at the moment when she imagines she feels something in her belly. She tells herself it was a stomach flip at the thought that Mike’s hand might touch her. She tells herself it is nothing more than that. Even though she knows. She remembers her mother telling her. You always know.

Paul offers her beer and she takes a sip, as though to prove to herself that stomach flips mean nothing. It tastes cold and wheaty and she enjoys the thinness of it against her tongue. She swallows and takes another sip.

Mike is flipping through the script and he folds it back when he reaches the page where the lines were forgotten. Christa hadn’t even been paying enough attention to know whose lines lay dormant, waiting for the prompt. She hated when they asked her to help them rehearse.

Mike reads the line from the page and then tells it to Paul. He grins and sets aside the cheese and the bread. He resumes his position as an older man, too weary with the world to want to make sense of its shift, but finding himself face to face with a new reality. Christa watches him age before her eyes.

Mike hands the script back to Christa. He doesn’t need to say anything. His face tells her not to lose her place again. But Christa isn’t interested. She knows that Chester is somewhere else in this apartment; hiding out in his room; lying on his back on the bed still rumpled and creased, still bearing the imprint. Christa smiles as she thinks he is smiling, staring up at the ceiling, detached from everything worth worrying about.

Christa stands up and lets the script fall onto her vacated chair. She walks from the kitchen into the hallway and through the living room. She stands at the closed door to the room she was in last night. It is bold and dark in front of her, the door knob white and smooth. She raises a hand as though to knock, but stands there instead, as still as a woman waiting to hear a pin drop. As still as a woman waiting to feel her belly move again.

Silence greets her, swallowing her up, and she knows that, whatever she knows, she isn’t going to say anything. She smiles that knowing is hers and nobody else’s. She stands for a while longer, thinking about a suitcase, thinking about wearing away the soles of her shoes. She goes into the bathroom and runs some water, flushes the toilet, rattles the towels on the towel rail.

She emerges to find him standing in his doorway.

“Hi Ches,” she says as she walks past him.

“Christa,” he says. It isn’t a question, so she carries on walking, back to the kitchen where Mike has taken control of the script at last.

Christa walks over to the sink and draws herself a glass of water. She leans against the kitchen units, arms folded across her belly, one arm tilted at the elbow, holding up the glass to her lips. She watches them. Mike and Paul. It could have been either one of them, but it was neither. She laughs to herself and goes to sit back down on her chair.

She takes the script from Mike, who looks at her blankly. She holds it open on her lap and follows the dialogue as they speak it. They are word perfect from now on, as though whatever agitation there was in her has now passed and they are free to do what they are here to do; rehearse and perform, prepare for the play they will appear in over the next few small weeks.

Christa listens to them recite and thinks about the plans she must make. She drinks from Paul’s can of beer, marking her place in the script with a finger so that she doesn’t fall away again. She adopts, unconsciously, the posture her body will take on for real over the coming months.

The dialogue runs on, over and around her. The rhythms are sharp and false. She tastes metal in her mouth. She drinks more beer.

Chester passes the doorway to the kitchen, raising a hand but not breaking his stride.

“See you guys later,” he shouts from the door.

Christa drinks more beer and follows the dialogue with her finger, like a child who can’t read.

The scene is over and Christa stands.

“I have to go,” she says.

“Thanks, Christa,” says Paul, giving her a hug.

“Yeah, thanks, Christa,” says Mike.

She leaves the apartment, wearing the big coat that is too hot for a day like this one. She knows that she won’t be back. She knows she won’t see either of those men again, nor the one who placed his hand on her head and his beer on the back of her neck. She knows she won’t drink beer again for another slow nine months.

She knows it, but Christa doesn’t admit it to anyone.

The man with the smart cane and the generous smile is waiting outside his building, as he waits most days. He smiles the same way at everyone, but Christa has come to capture that smile as her own, intended for nobody but her. He walks slowly, leaning on his stick. Christa wants to smile first, but he beats her to it, welcoming her approach as though she is a long lost friend come back from a voyage over seas and mountains far away. Their smiles collide and Christa passes by, on her way somewhere else. She chooses not to look at the map beneath her feet, just walks forwards feeling the weight in her belly and the metal in her mouth.

She rides the train for almost an hour, walking the few blocks from the station to her building. The door is unlatched again. She climbs the stairs to the fourth floor and takes a left to the end of the tiled corridor with the cream painted and wood panelled walls; the same décor as any other apartment block in this city; the same map of living as anywhere else on the planet. Doors, walls and stairs. Smells and hums. Community and solitude.

She opens the door to her own apartment, and the cat comes running to see who it is.

“It’s me, Lady Miss Fantastic,” she says. She bends to pick up the cat, and she knows how it will be in a year or so’s time. She carries the purring bundle of fur and bones into the kitchen, talking to her the while.

Tucked under her arm, the cat watches as Christa pours cat biscuits from the packet into the bowl. She wriggles free and lands on the floor at the precise moment that Christa puts the bowl down. Purring and wiggling as she eats, the cat can’t sit still. The purity of pleasure. Cats and babies alike. They don’t feel hunger, they are hunger. Satiation is their goal.

Christa pours herself a glass of milk, which she carries through to the living room. She sits on the sofa and swings her legs up onto the coffee table. She drinks her milk, changes channels on the tv, strokes the cat when she comes to sit on her lap.

Nothing has changed, but the world is so different.

Christa knows.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006