Why Breathe When You Can Choke?

“The colours are bright.”

“I’ll spend my money my own way.”

“It wasn’t a criticism. I was only saying. The colours are bright. Cheerful.”

“Emma thinks I’m selfish.”

“Oh?”

“Spending money on myself. It’s my money. I’ll spend it how I like.”

“Do you want to buy me a new pair of shoes?”

“Why? What’s wrong with the ones you’ve got?”

“Bored of them.”

“Oh.”

“So will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Buy me a new pair?”

“No.”

“Oh.” There is a pause. “Emma’s right.”

The woman who has been defending her right to buy cashmere sweaters in every available colour moves across the room, away from him. She wants to put distance between them. She wants to move away from him, away from the newspaper he is reading and hiding behind, and away from the doorway into his study.

She stands at a wide bay window. Sunlight filtered by the muslin curtains pulled across the window falls on her face and hair. The light in the room is soft and muted. It muffles the air around them with its warmth.

“I don’t see why,” she says eventually, half to herself, looking out at the street through the muslin.

“Why what?”

“Why it’s selfish. Who else is there to buy me things? I’m husband, wife, mother, sister, lover to myself. Why shouldn’t I spend my money on me?”

“You seem to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t.”

“It seems that way to me.”

“I don’t feel bad about it. However it might seem to you.”

“Then shut up about it. You shouldn’t care so much about what Emma says.”

“I don’t.”

He stays silent. The room smells of grease, the kind that mechanics smear on a car engine to make it run more smoothly. She looks across the room and sees, sitting uncomfortably among papers and books on a bureau, a table-top vice. The gears that enable the rod-like handle to narrow the gap between the vice’s jaws are what give off the smell of grease. As soon as she looked at it, she knew that this was where the aroma originated.

“Can I have a cup of tea please?”

She still doesn’t look at him, switching her gaze instead from the vice back to the window. He looks at her. He lowers his newspaper and stares at her before responding. The note in his voice is incredulity.

“A cup of tea?”

“I’m thirsty.”

He gets up out of his chair and leaves the room. Just off his study is a small kitchenette. She continues to stare through the window, at the cars parked across the street and at the small park beyond them. The square is a haven from the bustle of the city, mere streets away from where she stands.

“What will you do when the money’s all gone?”

She hasn’t heard him come back in. She has mistaken the rattle of cups on the tray for a continuation of his preparations in the kitchenette.

“It won’t ever be all gone.”

“Really? At the rate you’re spending, I’d have thought you’d run out by Christmas.”

“Well you’re wrong. What I’m living off is the interest.”

“He left you that much?”

“Yes.”

He whistles, a long drawn out note that descends through a minor key to silence. She turns to look at him, sees the tray with cups, a teapot, milk on it.

He picks up the milk jug and pours a splash into each cup. Her picks up the teapot and fills both cups to within a millimetre of the brim. He picks up a cup and goes to sit back down in his chair.

His chair is ancient, made of green leather with wings that cocoon his head. The leather is worn from contact with clothes and with hands and head. It shines when the light is turned on, catching its polished patches. She remembers it from when their father used to sit in it, smoking his pipe, his hands still bearing the traces of grease from the machines he had been working on all day. The smell that was coming from the vice was the smell of their father’s hands.

“I didn’t know you had dad’s chair.”

“It isn’t dad’s. It just looks like it.”

“What happened to dad’s, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. You must do.”

“Sorry, but I don’t.”

She wants to call him a liar. She wants to run over to where he is sitting and fall on him, as she used to when still a child, fighting and scratching and biting. She turns back to the window.

“Do you want a biscuit,” he says. “Your tea’s getting cold.”

She ignores the question and the reminder.

“Why do you have a vice on your bureau?”

“Do I? I don’t remember.”

“You do. It’s just over there.”

She doesn’t point, but his eyes go to the bureau anyway, seeking out the vice.

“It smells of grease.”

“You can smell it from over there?”

“Yes. It smells like dad.”

“I don’t remember putting it there. It must have been the best place at the time.”

He doesn’t care; he isn’t interested; she knows she shouldn’t have come. She hears him drink his tea.

“Shall I drink yours as well?”

“If you like.”

“I thought you were thirsty.”

“So did I. It’s gone off me now.”

“Something I said?”

“No.”

If his flat were on an upper floor, she would push herself through this window and land on the road in a glitter of glass.

“Irene?”

She realises that she is trying to push herself through the glass. She stops. There is nowhere to fall apart from the small rose bed outside the window. This not being a fairytale, it would be unlikely that one of the roses would have a poison thorn on its stem to take her from her misery.

“What’s the matter?”

Her head pulls back from where it has been resting on the glass, with the muslin in between skin and windowpane, the better for her to see the rose bed below.

“Is there something wrong, Irene?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

“Irene, do you miss him?”

She laughs, and the sharpness of the sound surprises her.

“Miss him? Miss him? Why should I miss him?”

“He was your husband.”

“Yes. He was.”

“Irene, what is it?”

“Stop talking to me like a psychiatrist would.”

She balls her fists and presses them into her eye sockets. She pushes until everything is black and red inside her head and she can see her blood pulsing before her very eyes.

Her brother is suddenly behind her, pulling her fists from her face, pulling her round to face him and burying her inside an embrace. He smells of books and acetate and soap and sweat. His jumper is lambs wool, green and prickly, and tiny fibres from its surface tickle her nose.

“I hated him, Bill.”

“Would you have thrown yourself through that window if it was higher up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because.”

“Because what?”

“Because why breathe when you can choke? Why carry on when the thing that’s supposed to give you freedom binds you more tightly in your cage than the living, breathing presence of him? Why hurl yourself through life when you can just as easily hurl yourself into death?”

“I don’t know.”

“No. I didn’t think you would.”

They stand there; the baby sister held close by the older brother in an embrace that is tighter than any they have shared since childhood. He is helpless in his desire to help her. She is lost in her self-pity and self-absorption.

Someone presses the buzzer to his flat; a student announcing their arrival.

Brother and sister part. Irene’s face is damp. Bill pulls a handkerchief from his pocket.

“It’s clean,” he says.

Irene smiles and takes it from him, uses it to dry her tears. She goes through to the kitchenette to splash her face with water, while he goes to answer the door.

The student is long and thin with a shock of orange hair. He looks as though he hasn’t eaten vegetables or anything nutritious since his arrival at university this term. She smiles at him as she collects her coat, her shopping and her bag from the chair where she left them on her arrival.

She thinks of Emma and the conversations they have on the telephone, long distance to the city where she now studies. She thinks of the matter of fact way her daughter views the world.

Bill squeezes her arm as they stand at the door.

“Take care, sis,” he tells her.

“I will,” she says.

He watches her down the steps and across the street to her car. Then he closes the door and disappears from view.

Irene sits in the car with her unwanted cashmere sweaters beside her and the rubber hose coiled in the boot, waiting.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006