The End (2)

How do you put together the pieces of a story?

He used to watch her, every morning, putting on her make-up. Every night, he would watch her take it off again. He even watched her going through the motions in the hours in between.

He did this without ever setting foot inside her house. He never leaned in the bathroom doorway. He never sat on a chair at the table in her kitchen. All the same, he watched her.

The evidence, the episodes in her life played out for his viewing pleasure, was laid out in words and characters that only existed electronically.

Words. Dishonest representations of a life, framed by the lives of others who fell fresh from her imagination. Words intended to paint a particular picture. Words that could be read in any number of ways.

To take it beyond writer and observed, out into the surreality of drunken encounters in bars and public houses across the city was a mistake. He knew that. Coming into public view, making contact beyond the words written on a page; he knew it was a mistake.

How do you run together the lines and phrases that say one thing but mean another? How do you make sense of the pieces in between, the ones that never get shown?

He saw enough to think that he knew her.

Every morning she would shower, do her hair, clean her teeth, apply her make-up. She would leave the house and do the things that kept her life going. She would work. She would drive. She would shop and read and eat and socialise, documenting the activities in stories about fake people, male and female, who were all her, who were all nobody.

She had hair that was long, dyed brown, made straight by application of extreme heat. Her eyes were grey, her skin was white. She had a freckle in the small of her back. She had a scar under her chin, another along her right wrist, a third and fourth on her left thumb, a fifth on her left index finger. Her second left incisor was chipped; its twin on the right set back from the rest because the milk tooth had refused to budge.

Each thing about her body that had not been born that way, the dyed hair, the scars, the chipped incisor, had a story behind it that she did not tell. Each thing remarkable about her body, the freckle, the crooked tooth, was made so because its existence drew comment.

In watching from a distance, in reading words, these were things he could not possibly have known about her; things that made it impossible for him to really know her. And the words that she chose were the ones that she wanted him to read. The make-up applied each morning wiped clean from her face each night.

That her mind was crumbling in public was a diversion for him, but still the kind of freak show that only entertains for as long as it takes that kind of shit to become tiresome.

Writing about it became tiresome too.

There was more to the story than that and she knew that, as intently as he read her words, the day would come when he was impotent to move her story along and she would cease to write for him.

The day came, and as she wrote she knew. This was a story about him. He took the bait. He sent her word.

“Good story today. Your best one in a while, if I’m to be the judge of anything.”

She didn’t care. Although the story was about him, she had not written it for him. His approval of its existence didn’t matter. She didn’t care and she realised that she had reached the end of this particular story.

She thought he knew that from her laughter. She thought he must have finally realised.

The pieces in between were now the things she cared about. What had started out as therapy had become a self-perpetuating mythology; of herself, of him, of people in the middle.

She put away her pens and paper. She switched off the laptop and unplugged it. She erased him from every memory bank, address book and phone book.

She smiled as she did it, tidying everything away. He had seen what he wanted to see. Somewhere along the way, she had become the thing he needed her to be for the amount of time it took her mind to stop crumbling.

So this was it. She had reached the end. He was redundant. No longer a friend; no longer her focus; no longer significant or a catalyst for her progress.

The woman smiled, knowing that he was still watching, hoping it would still be about him. Her life wasn’t based on any of the books he read and recommended to the people he wanted to impress. She wasn’t a librarian living in Brooklyn. She wasn’t any of the people he had cast her as in his mind.

She was herself. Somebody he would never know.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006