A small, perfectly formed “Fuck” falls from her mouth and into the twin microphones fixed above the laptop that she is trying to disconnect.
The room is as silent as she is still. She knows that the word hasn’t gone unnoticed, but if she doesn’t acknowledge it she might get away with it. She unfastens the two screws holding the connection from laptop to projector in place and avoids looking out on her audience.
The retired and well-educated have a habit of not appreciating the type of Anglo-Saxon word with which her vocabulary is peppered these days. Her boss stands patiently beside her, too far within the deadzone of the mics not to know what she has said so audibly to their audience. Her part of the floorshow is over. He is only bothered about her disconnecting the hardware in time to allow him to connect up his own.
She escapes unscathed. She flees the scene, leaving her boss to face the flak after the event. Only scheduled for half an hour, she is under no obligation to sit out the rest of the presentation. She has things to do. Like go home and get drunk.
She has started to notice that her clothes are growing tighter. She stood in the Ladies’ lavatory before tonight’s performance and saw in the mirror how her belly swelled, pushing against the fabric of her skirt. For too many weeks now she has been putting it down to fluid retention; to being due on; to putting on weight because of overeating and lack of exercise.
She needs to go home and get drunk because, if she is pregnant, she wants to pump her body as full of alcohol as she can before she officially knows the truth.
Of course, it could just be because she is addicted to McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes.
She walks quickly down the darkened street in the damp night air to the car park. She holds her umbrella above her head. It is pink and yellow and white and blue, circles interlocking to form flowers and tessellations in waterproofed fabric protection against the rain. Her hair, washed that morning, smoothed down with various products and ironed flat between ceramic plates that seal in moisture and counteract the ions floating in the ether, stays smooth and soft in spite of the humidity that surrounds it.
She thinks about holograms. The hologram on her debit card, on her credit card, on the verification sticker on her straighteners, on the lid of the scanner attached to her laptop, on the paper she used to create wings and a halo for the angel now missing, intended for the top of the Christmas tree in the office.
She thinks of the man she loved, followed so rapidly by the one she fell for, followed so abstractly by the one who might now be the father of her suspected child. He assembled the tree today; decorated it with tinsel; discovered that the homemade angel was now missing. The one that she loved and now hates. Not the one that followed or the one who might be an unsuspecting father.
Like Matthew before her, she would spin the globe backwards to turn back time if she could. Even if the globe were only tin and a tiny scale model of the real thing, carrying a pencil sharpener inside. Even if she didn’t get to wear the cape and the underpants outside her tights.
She cries more than she sleeps these days. She drinks more than she cries. The ratio of diuretics and weeping to intake of fluid is a negative one. Her skin suffers as a result.
She drives home, thinking of the next drink she can take.
She sits at the desk in the office that fills the room too small to be a bedroom but advertised as such on the estate agent’s sheet. She sits and looks at the computer screen in front of her as the central heating clicks off and the seconds convert to minutes convert to hours convert to daylight.
She stares at the screen and thinks of the people who sit inside her head, waiting to become characters on a page. She thinks, with sickness at the pit of her stomach, of the way she still can’t resist the one she fell for, the one between the man she loved and the one who could be the father of her putative child.
The world outside is silent. The house next door is silent. The hours tick by and she wishes for something more than this.
“Nothing to be done,” says Estragon.
“I’m beginning to come round to that opinion,”
Be reasonable. You haven’t yet tried everything. She tells herself this, much as Beckett’s
That simple “fuck”, dropped into the pond of politeness, sending out its ripples.
“People are bloody ignorant apes,” says Estragon.
“There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to part,” says Estragon.
“Let’s hang ourselves immediately!” says Estragon.
“Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer,” says Estragon.
“No use struggling,” says Estragon.
Estragon, she thinks. Estragon. Estragon. It sounds like oestrogen. Everything comes back to that nagging suspicion; back to that simple fuck, dropped into the pond of her tranquil life, sending out its ripples.
Why she’s thinking of Godot now, she doesn’t know. Strange things flit across her mind. She drives and thinks about the drink, about the drinks, she will have when she gets home.
She will drown her suspected child in alcohol; pickle it before it has chance to thrive.
No use struggling. Nothing to do. Doing nothing is safer. The world can go hang.
“It’s a disgrace. But there you are,” says Pozzo.
She parks the car and gets out. She locks the door and walks up the path to the house. She unlocks a different door and goes in. She closes this second door, this other door, and locks it again. She locks herself inside the house and locks the rest of the world out.
She drops her bags onto the smaller of the two sofas. She removes her coat and drops it over the arm of that same sofa. She walks through the living room and into the kitchen.
Her feet carry her to the fridge. She takes out cola. She opens the door to the cupboard that sits on the wall, above the work surface, to the right of the fridge. She takes out rum. She crosses to the cupboard that sits across the room, at ninety degrees to the first, at ninety degrees to the fridge, and opens its door. She takes out a glass.
She carries the glass to where the bottle of rum is sitting on the work surface beside the fridge. She opens the bottle of rum and pours a double measure into the glass. She fills the glass with cola from the cold bottle taken from the fridge.
Her drink sits on the work surface waiting for her to pick up the glass and raise it to her lips. She thinks about the potential child that might be growing in her belly, nestled safe in the layer of extra flesh and blood that she is eager to rid her body of. The tiny egg, fertilised by the rogue sperm that found its way through the prophylactic barrier of rubber and spermicide, dividing minute by minute into a ball of ever expanding cells.
She drinks the rum and cola, thinking, ‘Let it drown, let it drown, let it drown…’ The rhythm of the words matches the movement of her throat as she gulps down the drink. The fizz of the cola makes her eyes water; the bite of the rum makes her cough.
She fixes herself another. She drinks down half of it and feels the sweet sensation of alcohol rushing through her blood stream and her bloodstream rushing to her head.
“I wish you menses,” she says to her belly, right hand gripping the glass of rum and cola so tightly that her knuckles whiten. “I wish you cramps so mean they make you want to vomit.”
She finishes the drink with two more attempts, then fixes herself a third. She carries it through to the living room and curls up on the sofa.
“Happy days!” says Pozzo.
“Happy days!” she replies, raising her glass to the imaginary character, towards the place he stands, across the room from her.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity,” says Pozzo.
“Oh, shut up you oaf,” she snaps and takes another drink of rum and cola. Her belly twinges. She curls further around herself. She knew she wasn’t really. She simply wanted to trick her body into proving her wrong. Belief in the ghost of a pregnancy not yet conceived brings about its certain death more rapidly.
“For each one who begins to weep – “ begins Pozzo.
“Pozzo, shut it,” she says, raising her glass again but this time pointing with a finger. Accusation, not salute.
“Somewherelseanotherstops,” mutters Pozzo, unwilling to let a mere girl tell him what to do.
She chases him from the room with imaginary stones and cushions thrown at him to hasten his retreat. She hears the door bang shut behind him. She hears his footsteps echoing as he runs down an alleyway paved with cobbles.
Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. Her house is silent now that imaginary Pozzo has fled the scene.
She drinks some more and thinks about turning the tv on, but the effort of getting up from the sofa, of putting her drink down onto the coffee table, of crossing the living room floor to press the button on the front of the tv, and then all that effort in reverse to get herself comfortable again on the sofa and to press the standby button on the remote control, she doesn’t think it worth while.
Curled up on sofa, drink to hand, she begins to push down. Bearing down eight months too early, pushing down on the imagined head, the soft skull forming, breathing ripple of the fontanelle. Drink to hand, her hand moves out and pulls the drink in close. An intimate gesture, it succumbs to the softness of her lips. Cold glass against warm flesh, she closes her eyes and drinks.
Staggering and blind, without moving from the sofa, she tumbles down corridors, seeing only the dome of her unborn child’s head rising above her like a cathedral ceiling.
She bears down and feels the cramps begin. Relief floods through her body; pressure of waiting and tension dissipates. She has borne down and won.
There are things now that need to be done. Like doing the dishes she has had no interest in washing for days. First she thinks she will make a pot of tea.
In the kitchen she opens the cupboard from which earlier she took down a glass. She takes out the orange teapot and checks the inside for dust or mould or build up of tannins. It has been a while since she made a pot of tea. In the more than two years she has lived in this house, she has no recollection of a real brew being made.
The orange teapot sits in front of the white plastic kettle. The white plastic kettle, shaped (so the manufacturer would have her believe) like a jug, contains water enough to warm the pot and then fill it again when the leaves have been scooped from tea caddy to teapot. She watches the jumble of air bubbles through the clear plastic window, waiting for the kettle to decide that the water it holds is hot enough to scald tealeaves and release flavour.
She has no milk jug any more. She threw it across another kitchen when her hair was longer or shorter or browner or blonder; she can’t remember the circumstance, just the passion and the shattering pieces of pottery, bouncing back off the tiled wall and falling onto the work surface and down onto the floor. She remembers the crunch under his feet as, wordless, he walked from the house and her life forever.
“A dog came in the kitchen / and stole a crust of bread. / Then cook up with a ladle / and beat him till he was dead,” sings
She takes the teapot full of gently brewing tea and carries it with the china mug, painted with a Lowry figure (Gentleman Looking At Something, 1960) and holding a thin layer of milk at the bottom, from the kitchen where Vladimir sings to himself, now high, now low, up to the room where she sits at the computer staring at the screen, waiting for the people sitting inside her head to fall out onto the page.
She puts down the china mug. She puts down the orange teapot. She switches on the computer. She remembers that she has borne down and won, and that there are other things to attend to, which she does while the machine whirrs slowly into life.
She pours a darkening stream of liquid from the teapot to the mug. It streams clear and golden brown from the spout of the pot, but rises opaque and the colour of vanilla fudge to the top of the mug.
She opens Word. The white page appears on the screen before her, shaded at one edge to give the appearance of three dimensions. A white sheet sitting on a mid-grey background. Margins marked out, rulers positioned. A glance from the screen to the other ruler, the stick of wood with the names of real rulers etched onto its face, standing to attention in the desk tidy beside the computer.
Willie, Willie, Harry, Ste. Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three. One, two, three Neds, Richard Two, Harry Four, Five, Six, then who?
Then who? Who next in the line of succession? Who next to invade her head and send her restless nights and words to tangle on a page?
The one she loved and now she hates. The one whose half-formed offspring she bore down on and conquered. The one between, the one she fell for.
She has finished that first pure china hugged mug of tea and now regrets the milk jug launched across that kitchen long ago. The one three, or is it four, before the one she loved. The one who pegged her. She carries the mug back down to the kitchen, splashes more milk into its bottom, and carries it back again to the small room where the computer whirrs and the words sit stagnant on the page.
Borne down and conquered. Hung for a beggar. No wish to be a thief. The current bookend far away and blissful in his ignorance of anything outside his immediate world.
The second cup is never as good as the first. Too much milk; too little tea; cooled down too far; stewed too strong.
Then who? Who next? Or what, or how, or why?
“What a day!” says Estragon.
“Who beat you?” says
“I beat him,” she says. “I bore down and I won. Oestrogen and me. We won.”
She looks at the words on the white electronic page in front of her and smiles.
© J R Hargreaves December 2006
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