Two months late

The summer finally arrived two months late. She gave it a couple of days, then mowed the lawn. Afterwards, she looked at her handiwork. It looked for all the world as scorched and inhospitable as a desert. Scrubby grass barely covered the greying earth that served as a home to the millions of ants that even now were crawling over her feet and up her legs.

She sighed and went back inside the house.

She had thrown open windows as soon as she got home from work, and now the white nets were billowing out through the glazed eyes of her house, like so many neglected bridal veils.

She drank an entire pint of juice down in one, made thirsty by the work of keeping her garden in order in the heat from the evening sun. Apple and raspberry, sharp and acidic; the juice gulped down her throat and into her stomach, cooling her body from the inside. The cat lay stretched out in a patch of sunlight, like Cleopatra reclining on her couch; her almond eyes were half-closed against the sunlight, every inch of her throbbing with pleasure.

The smells of other people’s cooking wafted on the air, and the cat’s bright pink nose twitched in time with her breathing, drawing the scents in so she could taste and savour vicariously.

Jane stood on the doorstep and did the same.

It sometimes seemed that her life was built around twos and doorsteps.

Her bare toes curled around the plastic lip of the door frame. She felt the hard ridge of plastic bite into the joints where toes met ball of foot. Burgers, sausages, the smells of British summer cooking, married with the exquisite almost-pain of plastic against flesh and she knew that, finally, it was over.

The candy-coloured hearts that sighed and swooned across her pink-strapped vest shivered in a gentle breeze against her skin.

She had expected rage, but what she discovered was pity. She had told herself that closure would feel different to this; would be a great boiling ball of steam that shrieked out of her body and left a blissful silence in its wake. Instead, she felt the merest pop, and all of life seemed to rush back in.

Her fingernails were dirty. The grey-green residue of scraped up grass clippings nestled under the nails of left hand and right. She looked at them, fingers spread out as though she expected to find webbed skin between them. Woman From Atlantis. Going into the kitchen, she rummaged in a cupboard for a cocktail stick.

The sharp end of the slender piece of wood scoured the valley between fingernail and fingertip, pulling out the borrowed vegetation, which she wiped from the stick and then onto her shorts.

Solitude stretched on for hundreds of years, punctured by the ringing of a doorbell here, a visit from the meter reader there, and regular forays out into the world to earn the money that enabled her to live like this.

Jane had thought that she would miss him. At first, she did, but she schooled herself not to and eventually not missing him became unnoticeable among the acres of other people she no longer missed. Seeing him like that, half expected and half curious as to what it would be like, she found it strange that they had ever thought they had anything in common.

She walked through the house and out of the front door, into the garden at the other side of the house. Across the road the recent widow was putting her latest victim through his own recently widowed paces. Coffers filled with money from her dead husband’s life assurance payout, the widow had put a lot of work into re-turfing her lawns and putting up new fences. Furniture went out through the back door into a skip, to make way for fresh through the front.

Jane faked absorption in her own garden so that she could earwig on the conversation. Pat and Eric; she the drunk, he the lonely man; it was ever that way. The widow’s voice was shrill and harsh, pure Mancunian screech. There was no avoiding knowing her business; from the time she set herself on fire lighting a cigarette to the time she idly mused about wanting to move to a terraced house, exactly the sort of house that the widower owned, everyone knew what was happening in her life. Whether they wanted to or not.

Jane dead-headed the roses.

Summer was here, two months late, and looked like it might stay for a while. Sweat trickled down the hollow in the small of her back, and Jane finally turned from spying on her neighbours to return to the house.

Inside, the phone was ringing. She picked the handset up from the base and listened. Her thoughts passed through groves of summer blooms and the twisted branches of trees and shrubs as he gave her the instruction.

The same story. Life defaulting to how it would always be; widows and divorcées passing from one man to the next; people seeking comfort in their supposed similarity with others; killers on the loose; plant pots stolen from gardens.

There was no need to even think about it any more. Her feet followed their own route. Her hands retrieved the tools of her trade from their hiding places. She changed out of vest and shorts and into something more suitable.

She closed the windows and locked the back door. The net curtains ceased to billow, Miss Haversham locked once again in silence and memory.

Before she left the house she painted her fingernails.

With hair pulled back and splashes of crimson at the ends of her fingers, she swung out of the front gate and trod the path long remembered and yet forgotten in its familiarity. Dark hair slashing the air behind her head, whipping from side to side despite the lack of breeze, Jane, single and singular and yet no different to any of the billions of people on the planet, set out to do what she knew best.

There was little to remark upon about her journey through the suburbs on foot and then by train. Her nails flashed red, and maybe some would remember that as a vague recollection days later. Her hair was as dark and glossy as newly mixed chocolate, liquid in its motion, and it could be that others would remember that about her, about this woman they didn’t really notice but were aware of on the edge of their existence.

Unremarkable, challenging no-one, Jane passed alongside the lives of many on her way into town, skirting their edges and unreal to each one of them. Flickers of red, flicks of brown, smudges on their consciousness. She barely noticed herself.

No cherry blossom on the street. Litter and dust and the pale pounded footprints of a hundred thousand shoppers, but spring was long gone and summer two months late. Jane slipped past doorways to shops and restaurants, bars and offices. To have dropped her head, to have appeared hurried, would have been to attract attention. Head high, eyes clear, smiling and focused, she appeared as any brisk-walking shopper would.

A phone call once; a familiar familial voice; not today. No floating, laughing midnight walk from jazz club to bar, either. Just a street and a woman, anonymous in her own skin, drowning in the joy of life. Something that someone walking the opposite way would catch sight of and remember, forcing him as it did to stop and turn and watch the woman with the laughing eyes walking away from him and turning the corner.

He didn’t pause long enough to hear the muffled pop or the crumple of clothes as the body fell to the floor. He wasn’t there to see Jane wrap the pistol once more in the cloth that was its home and drop it back into the bag she carried so casually across her body.

A flick of her phone, the keypad glowing turquoise, she selected a name from the list.

“I’m in town,” she said. “Do you fancy meeting for a drink?”

Summer was two months late and sometimes solitude needed to be disrupted.

She regretted nothing. She hadn’t missed him. She smiled from the top of her head to the tip of her toes.

The body in the alley sat slumped against the wall, blood blooming onto the white shirt from the bullet hole in his chest, as scarlet against the bleached cotton fabric as her nails were against her skin.

Long gone and put behind her.

© J R Hargreaves August 2007

Episode

The rat lay on its side, its fur plastered to the dead, greying skin of its body, bedraggled in the rain. Long dead and beginning to decay, an obscene bloom of blood on its chest marked where its heart had once been. Blood had leaked through broken skin to leave a mark like a carnation, grabbing the attention and reminding anyone who saw it that once this carcass had contained life.

She passed it, walking in the constant drizzle of a Manchester afternoon, and wanted to pause; wanted to look at this pathetic creature; felt sorry for it, even. She slowed as she went past.

The sense of falling backwards, of leaning back on her heels and waiting for the world to stop spinning, left her and everything became silent. She walked past the dead rat in a silent world where she was the only thing that moved; once past, the world rushed back into motion with all the sounds of cars tyres against wet roads and footsteps hurrying along pavements to accompany it.

The grey matted body made her think of the soldier whose remains had been dug up by archaeologists in Ypres. Boy soldiers blown to pieces at the side of the road in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bodies that couldn’t decay. ‘How do you bring such bodies home?’ she asked herself. She could understand the repackaging of a bunch of bones from ninety years ago, but how do you scrape together the remains of someone spattered across a roadway in a dusty, desert land?

Her car was almost the same maroon as the blood that blossomed on the dead rat’s chest. She unlocked it and got behind the wheel. Leaning back on her heels, she waited once more for the world to stop spinning.

“Have you stopped taking your medication?” he had asked her.

Muted by the lack of sleep and the over-indulgence in alcohol, she had set her jaw and refused to answer. She had not stopped taking her medication, and he had no right to ask.

She sat in her car, tilted back on her heels, and thought about his body spattered across a tarmac roadway. She wondered if she would flinch, were his body to spatter against her face.

Once, long ago, in a different place, she had heard the wail of a woman whose face bore the traces of her husband’s flesh and blood and bone. It was almost a different world. She kept it hidden behind a triptych; folding wooden screen, unpainted and unvarnished; she kept it hidden, buried.

She saw a group of women, as she drove home along Plymouth Grove. They were sitting, three of them together, on the pavement; backs to the wall, one of them was smoking; all three wore the fluorescent yellow vests and white hard hats of workers on a building site. The one who smoked had the cigarette in one hand, wrist angled, cocked almost, as though the cigarette should have been in a holder and the woman in a cocktail dress. Sucking on her cancer stick, she said something through the exhaled smoke from her lungs that made the other two laugh.

All that in the brief moment it took to drive past them.

“It puts me in a different place,” he had said, “reading your words like that.”

At a round steel table on a side street near the Town Hall, her chin was in her hand, her elbow on the table, two fingers lay across her lips as though she ought to have been smoking. She had looked past his right ear at nothing.

It was funny, it seemed to her, that he could string a sentence like that together and yet it still meant nothing to her. She presumed he meant to flatter, or to congratulate, or to admire. Something along those lines.

“There’s something about them,” he had said. “Something that makes my head swim.”

“Like you’re leaning back on your heels, trying not to fall, waiting for the world to stop spinning?” she had said to the nothing past his right ear.

“Yes!” he had said, his face brightening with the thrill of being understood. “That’s it exactly!”

“Funny,” she had said.

She saw a white dog running crazily along the patch of rough ground that ran parallel to her route home. He was crazed by the rain and the speed of the traffic, running to keep up with the cars as they made their way home. He had kept up with her for a time, his pink tongue flapping at the side of his open mouth. Gulping in air as he ran, he looked as though he was laughing. A carnival mask on a carnival dog, laughing as he raced against the traffic.

In the supermarket, as she bought organic and collected green points on her clubcard, she smiled at the memory of the dog and thought that she might write something when she got home.

A letter waiting, still stuck in the letterbox like a tongue poking out at her, told her that, with just a few more miles, she could soon be on her way to Vienna. If she didn’t collect more miles, she would stand still.

She was already standing still, and Vienna didn’t appeal, so she tore the letter in two and put it into the wastepaper basket underneath the coffee table.

A letter in an envelope lying fatly and A5 on the floor of the porch invited her to take out a new credit card. She could transfer any outstanding balance on her existing card. The shiny paper, the printed signature, the perky tone, all went into the wastepaper basket.

As the paper fell from her hand, she saw the signature again, briefly. Briefly, she wondered whether people really did write like that; why they didn’t buy a better pen. Scrawled, then digitised and printed with a blackness that didn’t seem real, the signature passed out of sight, joining the other crumpled and torn sheets in the bin.

Red wine leaking from a bottle; that was what the stain on the dead rat’s chest was like. A bloom of claret just beneath the mortified skin. She had wanted to touch it; to press against the claret stain; to see if the flesh was rigid in death, or whether the blood beneath it kept it soft.

The colour of the rat’s skin was the colour of pork chops when they’re cold and unwanted on your dinner plate. Deathly grey and ashen, but still with that hint of pink to let you know that this was once alive.

She closed her eyes and shook the image of the dead rat from her mind.

Behind her, the front door opened again.

“You’re home,” he said.

He closed the door and removed his coat, hanging it with the others on the rail by the door, the coat hangers jangling against the tubular metal that supported them.

She walked away from him, into the kitchen.

Standing at the sink, looking out onto the garden, she allowed him to follow her in there and sit down at the table.

“How was your day?” he asked, removing a shoe and rubbing at the sole of his foot.

His socks were grey. She knew without looking.

“I saw a dead rat on the way home,” she said. She couldn’t look at him while he was rubbing his foot, filling the air around it with the damp warmth it brought from the inside of his shoe.

He removed his other shoe and placed the two shoes neatly side by side at the back of his chair. She heard the twist of his body, the gentle scrape of the chair legs against the floor, the tick of the shoe heels making contact with the lino.

“How was your day?” she said.

He could have told her anything as she moved from the sink to the fridge and began to prepare dinner. Her head was heavy and her eyes wanted to close.

She stopped. Her head came up and she stared at the wall in front of her. She frowned slightly. How could he think she had stopped taking her medication?

She turned to look at him. He stopped what he was saying.

“What?” he asked, his raised eyebrows and round eyes taking up the opposite position to the frown on her face.

She stared at him for a moment, then returned to chopping the onions.

“Do you think it’s cold?” she said.

“Cold?” he replied. She imagined that his eyebrows were higher and his eyes even rounder. “No, I don’t think it’s cold. Why? Do you?”

“I do,” she said. “I think it’s cold.” She chopped onions, then turned slightly towards him, holding the knife towards him. “I feel cold,” she said, with all the emphasis on the verb.

“I feel fine,” he said.

He got up from the table, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt at the collar. He walked through to the living room. She heard him checking the thermostat. It was summer. The heating wasn’t switched on. Checking the thermostat would do no good. She almost told him, but instead chopped harder. The knife blade now bit against the firm bulk of a carrot. The carrot crunched as she cut it, slicing it into circles. The orange, carotene-filled slices looked bright against the white of the chopping board.

The knife in her hand was too obvious.

He came back into the kitchen; opened a bottle of wine. He poured the ruby liquid into two glasses and brought one over to her. He kissed the back of her neck as he leaned across the back of her to put the glass down on the surface to her right.

She thought his lips would freeze to her skin, so arctic did the inside of her body feel, but they just brushed against it and were gone.

Leaning back on her heels, she thought she would fall backwards forever.

“This is wrong,” she said.

“What is?” he said. His voice was muffled and she knew he was turned away from her. She could smell the newsprint from the paper he was now reading; sharp and acrid, inky and disturbing, she could feel the words on the page rising up and floating into her through her nostrils.

“This,” she said, waving the knife around in front of her, indicating the chopped onions, the sliced carrots, the peppers waiting to be chopped.

“What?” he said again, his back still to her, the inky words still rising.

She thought of the rat again; its cold grey body and the bloom of blood. Her hand felt warm with the memory and she closed her eyes to enjoy it.

“Shit,” she heard him say. “Shit. Emmie, what have you done?”

She opened her eyes. She smiled. She looked at where her left hand had wrapped itself around the blade of the knife.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s okay. Look.”

She took her hand from the blade and lifted it up to him. Blood dripped from the cut that lay across the crease of her palm. He grabbed a towel from the rail by the door and brought it to her. He wrapped it around her hand, binding it tightly, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

She was still holding the knife in her right hand.

The knife was too obvious.

A bloom of blood beneath the skin where the heart would have been. A bloom of blood beneath the skin, beneath a shirt. Too obvious.

“I saw a white dog,” she said. “It was running. I thought I might write about it.”

“Yes?” he said, still concentrating on binding up her hand. “How does that feel?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, not registering what he meant, the knife still in her other hand. “It feels fine.”

“Did it go in deep?” he asked the doctor.

The doctor was dressing her hand. He had taken off the towel and was dressing her hand in gauze and a bandage.

“Not too deep,” the doctor said. “No nerve damage. No need for stitches. It’ll just be tender for a few days, and she’ll need to not use her hand, let it heal.”

The doctor turned to her. “If you use your hand, it will crack open the tissue where it is healing and prolong the process.”

“Can I have painkillers?” she asked.

The doctor looked surprised.

“Are you in pain?” he said.

“No. Not really,” she replied. “I’d like some, though.”

“Well, if you feel any pain, paracetamol should help to relieve it.”

“I had codeine once,” she said. “I liked that.”

The doctor took her husband outside the curtain and she listened to them holding a murmured conversation.

He came back in without the doctor. The doctor had gone away, moved on to the next patient.

“You’re all done,” he said. “We can go home.”

“The knife was too obvious,” she said, as he helped her up off the bed.

“I can walk,” she told him, as he took her arm.

“Such a shame that he couldn’t give me codeine,” she said, as they set off back home in his dark blue car.

On the by-pass, as he accelerated up the hill, she opened the passenger door.

“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to look at her and at the road simultaneously; trying to lean across her and to steer at the same time.

“Looking,” she said. “Looking at the road.”

A car horn blared and headlights rushed past them as he veered onto the wrong side of the road.

She closed the door.

“You should concentrate,” she said. “How much wine did you drink?”

“You’re mad,” he said, getting the car back under control, regulating his breathing, trying to be calm.

“Undoubtedly,” she replied. “But you’re stuck with me.”

She smiled.

“I told you the knife was too obvious.”

© J R Hargreaves July 2007

Tea

He traced the bones at her neck; her collar bones. Clavicles. That was the biological term for them. He traced his fingers along their rigid straightness.

She did not react.

His finger rested in the suprasternal notch. He pressed down, lightly at first, then harder. He could feel no definite pulse from her; only his own.

“You’re healthy,” he said.

She continued to read.

“Your blood pressure is fine.”

She turned the page of her newspaper. “Good,” she said.

He flattened his hand against her breastbone. The neckline of her sweater left part of her chest bare, to a point, and his hand revelled in the warmth of her flesh and the firmness of her sternum.

She was more beautiful than anyone deserved to be.

He thought about what the poet had said. About beauty being an ecstasy and not a wish.

She was more beautiful than could be borne.

He removed his hand. She did not move, did not speak, did not pay him the slightest bit of attention. He sat away from her, turning his body so that he was square on with the edges of the sofa; his back firm against the cushion behind it; his knees hard against the edge of the seat; his arms parallel to the sofa’s arms.

He was like an old toy soldier, with its articulated joints positioned so that it seemed to be sitting.

The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of their breathing and the rustle of the pages as she turned them. He was bored. He was restless. He was a coil of nervous energy that had no knowledge of how to expend itself.

She sat, ancient and beautiful, like a posed figure in an oil painting, all sages and browns and yellows and pinks. Her bright gold hair glimmered in the sunlight that shifted across the window. Leaded lights. Mullioned.

He rolled the word mullioned around his head, imagining the feel of it in his mouth.

Her hair had been fixed in a Marcel wave a couple of days ago. He could still smell, faintly, the chemicals applied to that bright golden head to force the shafts to bend against their will.

He looked at her legs. Her stockings were pale, her ankles neat; her shoes were the same sage as her blouse and neatly fastened with a strap and a button. Her narrow skirt stopped just below her knee, constricting her legs so that she had to fold them neatly. Even if she hadn’t been trained to do so from being young, her skirt created its own demands.

Terrance entered the room, carrying the things for tea.

“Lord, Terrance, is it that time already?”

He sprang from the sofa, glad of something to do.

Terrance merely glanced at him before continuing to set out the tea tray on the table.

“Thank you, Terrance,” she said, still engrossed in her newspaper.

“Ma’am. Sir.” The servant left the room with a stiff bow to each of them.

“Do pour me a cup, there’s a dear,” she said without lifting her gaze from the pages open before her.

“What’s so fascinating?” he asked, splashing milk into a teacup and then pouring tea in afterwards.

She did not respond. He felt peeved and, knowing that she did not take sugar, he dropped two lumps into her cup. Without bothering to stir, he carried the cup over to where she sat and placed it on the small table to her left.

He reseated himself beside her, on her right.

She looked up briefly. She looked at him as though she vaguely remembered him from somewhere.

“Are you not having one?” she asked.

The callousness of her indifference was beautiful. He felt intoxicated. He shook his head.

“Odd boy,” she said, turning back to her paper.

He crossed his leg away from her. He tried to convince himself that the view through the window across the lawn was an interesting one, when in fact all that it contained was a stretch of lawn and a mildly diverting rose bush in the centre.

He rested his chin in his hand, his elbow propped against the arm of the sofa. He drummed his fingers gently against his jaw.

“You’re singing,” she said. “Do stop, there’s a good boy.”

“Was I?” he said, turning to face her again. Of course, she was still buried in the news, so he turned away again.

“I wonder what it is that holds her attention so,” he said to the room in general. He was confident that she was not paying the slightest attention to him.

He was right.

He returned to his previous pose; head propped, jaw strummed, eyes scanning the garden for something to entertain his restless mind.

“Oh, won’t you come and play tennis?” he exploded, leaping up from his seat and standing in front of her.

She reached a hand out languidly to her teacup and continued to read in silence.

He paced about in front of her.

“We’re wasting the day, sitting in here. It’s glorious outside.”

“Did you put sugar in this?” she asked, replacing the cup on the table.

The poet was wrong, he decided as he ceased his pacing and looked down on her lovely form, so elegant on the sofa. Beauty wasn’t a lively heart full of fire and soul. Beauty was her. Cold and silent and indifferent to his very existence. A pale pink mouth. A pale white hand.

He flung himself onto his knees before her, gripping her about her knees.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “I put sugar in it, yes! Now say you’ll play tennis. Leave all this senseless reading behind. Tennis! Tennis is the thing!”

She raised one lovely eyebrow, a spark of amusement flashing in, and then out, of her clear blue eyes.

“I don’t have my racquet,” she said, placing a cool hand against his cheek. He turned his face so that his mouth was cupped in her palm, and he kissed that lovely palm.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” she said. “My brother will be back from town in a few minutes.” She restored her gaze to the pages of the newspaper. “I’m sure that he’ll knock a few balls about with you.”

He picked himself up from his kneeling position and slumped back onto the sofa.

“You’re like a sulky puppy,” she said, then yawned.

She picked up her teacup and held it out to him, still without looking.

“Pour me another one,” she said. “There’s a dear.”

He ignored the hovering vessel to his left; the cup that was anchored in time and space only by the fingers of her right hand holding the handle so nonchalantly.

“No,” he said. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His legs were outstretched in front of him. The line of his spine created an empty space between his body and the angle of the sofa. He fixed himself in position with his shoulders and his behind.

Still the teacup hovered, an irritating fly in his peripheral vision.

He was just about to swat it away, and damn the consequences, when her brother strode into the room.

“Hello, chaps!” he called out, making his way straight to the tea tray and cutting himself a thick slice of fruit cake. “How long have you been here, Willows?”

“Dorrie, pour me a fresh cup of tea, dear. This one’s cold and has sugar in it.”

Her brother crossed the room to where she was holding the teacup out to him.

He winked at his friend.

“Willows, you cad, did you put sugar in my sister’s tea?”

He didn’t expect an answer so didn’t wait for one. Willows didn’t offer one, either.

Dorrie took a fresh cup from the tray and filled it with tea for his sister.

“There you go,” he said, carrying it over to her.

“You’re a gent,” she said, accepting the proffered gift as all well-bred young women do; with indifference and cynicism.

“Tuppy here wants to play tennis,” she said.

“I say,” Dorrie exclaimed with a grin. “Willows, have you been trying to court my sister, you old ram?”

Willows maintained his effortful slouch and didn’t speak. His shoulders were beginning to ache, and the tilt of his chin meant that his larynx was beginning to feel uncomfortably compressed.

“You oughtn’t to sit like that, old chap,” Dorrie said, perching himself on his sister’s arm of the sofa. “It’ll do you a mischief. Stop you talking.”

His sister laughed.

“He’s been practising his medical ways on me,” she said.

“Is that so?” her brother replied, fitting the fingers of his right hand into the waves of her hair and squeezing them together.

Willows was consumed by a wave of envy.

Dorrie got up suddenly. “I don’t think I like you practising your medical ways on ma soeur,” he told his friend, walking away from him, his hands tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat. “That’s not quite why I invited you down this weekend.”

He turned on his heel and stood firm across the room from Willows.

“For god’s sake,” Willows exploded, as best he could given his physical position on the sofa. “All I did was press my bloody forefinger against her suprasternal notch.”

“And your hand against my breastbone,” she chipped in.

Willows considered that beauty perhaps was an ecstasy.

“Sternum is the medical term,” he said.

Dorrie laughed. His sister joined in. Willows found it in himself to smile. He was calmer now; now that his pent up attraction had somehow been acknowledged and dismissed. He sat up properly on the sofa.

Dorrie’s sister smiled at him. Her eyes were like sapphires and Willows thought, if he looked long enough and hard enough, he might be able to see to the bottom of them.

“Are you not having tea?” Dorrie asked him, standing once more at the tea tray and pouring a steady stream of golden brown liquid into a cup.

“No,” said Willows, “I’m not.”

They were still gazing at each other, she and he, behind her brother’s turned back.

She broke away first, an intuitive split second before her brother turned around to face the room again.

“Tennis, then?” Dorrie said, beaming down on his poor unrequited friend before raising his teacup to his lips.

“Why not?” Willows replied, leaping once more from the sofa.

As her brother replaced his cup on the tea tray, Willows saw the shadow of a smile curve her lips.

He remembered the feel of his hand against her breast bone.

Dorrie was standing in the doorway, waiting for him.

“Come on then, old chap, before the day’s gone.”

An ecstasy and a wish, then, he told himself. A mouth and a lively heart full of fire and soul.

He followed her brother from the room. Her eyes watched his back.

© J R Hargreaves July 2007

I Dream of Tomorrow

“The first step to achieve what we want in life is to decide what we want.”

– Ben Stein

He did not give. He did not want. Instead, he twitched and fidgeted, fingering the tie-less opening to his shirt. The unbuttoned collar sitting at his throat, mis-matched with his suit, was causing him discomfort.

He regretted having removed his tie moments before he left the office to wait at the door on the street. He had waited, summoned by her text message, telling him that she had left her meeting early; telling him she was on her way to meet him.

He watched her as, thinking herself anonymous, she had climbed the steps up from exit two of Tottenham Court Road tube. He leaned against the doorway to the theatre next door to his office, affecting a casual pose; as she came to the last few steps and raised her head to see whether he was waiting, he casually lifted his hand in a gesture half wave, half indifference.

They walked, she tall in her heels, he shorter by an inch. Her advantage was unfair, until she pointed out that someone had trodden on her shoe and broken the decorative chain that adorned its front.

She made sure that he was aware of her shortcomings.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked her.

“London?” she said, almost guilelessly. He thought he sensed a hint of sarcasm around her response.

”Bloomsbury,” he replied. “I thought a literary type like you would have known that.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

Her body was a non-committal punctuation mark walking along the street beside him. He pointed out buildings of merit or remark to her, as they walked the streets of Bloomsbury. She faked her interest. He felt the heat of her beside him, even though she was a good half foot away from him. He wanted to touch her but was afraid.

They were close to the British Museum. He took her to a café across the road.

“I come here a lot,” he said. “The quality of service can be a little lacking at times.”

“This is London,” she replied.

He led the way inside. A waiter showed them to a table tucked away in the back. Her presence with him seemed to make all the difference. Service was quick, or at least faster than usual, and they barely had time to make small-talk before their drinks arrived.

They talked about nothing: map pins; equity in houses; the spending of sixty five thousand pounds. She confessed to a liking for speed. He revealed himself to be conservative and cautious.

She worked at keeping the conversation going. It was out of character for her. Somehow he realised that, but he allowed it to happen. His usual garrulous persona had taken an hour off. Conversations that they could have had remained shelved. He watched her lose interest. He recognised the attempt she made to cover over her disappointment.

He had lost his touch since becoming what the Bible would term ‘middle-aged’.

He thought that he knew what he wanted. He thought of it in terms of what he’d had but had allowed to slip away. He saw it as something that other people attained or achieved or acquired. Something beginning with A.

She had had that too; something beginning with A. He was unaware of that.

Their food arrived. They ate. When the food had gone, the conversation grew ever more stilted and he tried to look at his watch discreetly.

“I’m keeping you,” she said.

He could see on her face that she had thought his talk of a visit to the Museum was an indication that he would take a long lunch, if not the afternoon off.

“I should get back,” he said.

She looked away from him, towards the murals on the back wall.

“You could still look round the Museum,” he told her.

“Oh, I’m out tonight. I should get back.” She paused. “Give myself time to prepare.”

She waited for him to speak. He didn’t.

She summoned the waiter. All that it took was a glance.

“They always ignore me,” he said.

At the counter he accepted the bill from the owner. The owner beamed at him. He was short by fifty pence in change.

“Don’t worry about it,” the owner said.

Standing beside him, she smiled at the owner.

“You should come here with me more often,” he told her, as they left. “Usually they’re exceptionally churlish.”

Part of him wondered if the owner of the café had mistaken this lunch meeting for romance. Part of him wondered if she had thought the same. A smaller part knew that he had shied away from thinking that way.

She walked beside him, tall and striking in the early summer sunshine. From time to time he brushed against her. He wanted to do more, but the touch of his sleeve or his hand against her seemed to act like positive poles of a pair of magnets.

It was not much, but it was enough. When she hugged him at the door to his office, before descending once again to the Underground, he kept himself as limp as was polite.

What, after all, was the point? She lived two hundred miles away. She was here for a day, and then she would be gone. Far simpler to keep it as it was. Friends of a sort, connected by a mutuality of acquaintance.

Boiled down beyond all hope of attraction or compatibility, that was all it was.

Knowing what you wanted from life; that was the key. He had the sense that she knew, and it scared him. He was so long out of the game, and not yet used to being half of that fabled three score years and ten, that he no longer knew what he wanted or how to achieve it.

He watched her walk down the steps to the Underground.

She didn’t look back.

© J R Hargreaves June 2007

Without The Booze and Fags (in homage to Beryl Bainbridge)

She was old. Nothing else to be said; Gran was old.

Lying there on the floor of the book shop, her limbs bent under her, her frail bones covered by papery skin, she looked old.

“It’s not the booze, darling,” she said, looking up at me with her chocolate button eyes.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

Nobody came to help her up. The people who had come to see her tonight, on this book tour for which she was too old, just stood and stared at the drunken old woman who had lost her footing on the slippery laminate floor.

I bent down and gripped an arm. I tried to manoeuvre her, to find her other arm, but she lay there, helpless.

“Have you broken anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, darling. I landed quite softly. I slipped, you know. It isn’t the booze.”

Her best friend had died the night before. Another author, someone the reading world had already forgotten, long before she even hit her 60s.

“Don’t let me go the way she went,” she had begged me, earlier that evening. “It’s disgusting to die that way,” she said.

I had promised to smother her with a pillow if she ever fell victim to a stroke.

“I wouldn’t want to go on, darling,” she told me.

“I know, Gran,” I said. “I know.”

She was small and frail on the floor beneath me, and I couldn’t find a way to lift her up.

I straightened, looked round for someone to help, caught the eye of one of the shop assistants. She might have been a manager.

“Can you help me?” I asked. “She’s fallen.”

“Of course,” she said, coming out of her gallows curiosity.

Together we lifted my grandmother from the floor.

“I’m fine, darling, I’m fine,” she assured us both. “So kind of you to help,” she said to the shop assistant.

The woman blushed. “It’s not a problem,” she said.

I hoped that the blush was one of embarrassment for having left my grandmother so long in her indignity.

“Come on, Gran,” I said, tucking a hand under her elbow. “I’ll get us a cab.”

“It wasn’t the drink, Charlie,” she told me again.

“I know,” I replied. “Walk carefully on the stairs here.”

Slowly we made our way down the stairs to the shop entrance. The London evening was sticky with heat. I saw a cab pull around the corner, a hundred yards away. Still holding onto Gran beneath her elbow, I raised my other hand. The cab drove towards us.

I helped her in and settled her back into a seat. She pulled the seatbelt across her shoulder and buckled herself in. Not many people do that in a cab. Not many people have had an accident in a cab that catapulted them through a window, either. Cautious to the last, apart from when drunk, that was my grandmother.

“You see, dear, Sofia was my oldest friend. I had to have a little drink.”

“Where to?” the cab driver asked. I gave him directions.

I sat alongside my grandmother and held her hand and she rambled on about her friend. She was one of the few survivors. All three of her husbands had predeceased her. She still lived in the same ramshackle house, peopled and littered with skeletons and carnival masks. She still climbed the three flights of stairs to the room that housed her ancient computer.

“I couldn’t live anywhere else, darling,” she said, to anyone who asked or dared to suggest that she move to live with one of her daughters.

My mother would heave a sigh of relief when she heard her say it.

“The house is a death trap,” I would say.

“Then let her live with you, Charlie,” was her reply.

The cab stopped outside her house. She had pointed out to me the place on the corner where the van had run into the cab she was in, that night she went through the window.

“I still have the glass in my lip, darling,” she told me. “The next book I write,” she said, “there will be an accident in a taxi cab.”

She had given up smoking, though, and writing was suffering. There would be no next book. Like any writer, she needed the thing that was killing her to spur on the creative flow. Without the suck and drag, without the flick of ash, she was nothing.

We were out of the cab and I was helping her up the steps to her front door when she gripped my arm.

“You won’t tell your mother, Charlie?” she said, her face close to mine, looking up at me.

“Won’t tell her what?” I asked, playing along.

She frowned. She didn’t get it.

“You won’t tell her that I fell,” she said.

“Oh, that?” I said, feigning surprise. “No, of course not.”

She seemed to start breathing again, as though she had been holding her breath while waiting for my answer. She said nothing, just turned from me and pushed her key into the lock.

I saw her in.

“Do you want tea, darling?” she asked me, filling the ancient aluminium kettle at the tap; a tap that was connected to an ancient lead pipe. It was a wonder that she wasn’t dead a long time ago. Or pensioned off in a nursing home for the senile.

“No thanks, Gran,” I said.

“Something stronger, then?” she asked.

“No. Nothing for me, thanks.”

It was late and, although I knew that she never went to bed before midnight, I wanted to see her settled. I wanted to know that she wouldn’t sit at the table, drinking more, trying to piece together the book that would never come.

I wanted her to be a grandmother like anyone else’s; not this driven creative force that had lost its way and was drifting through its last days. I wanted her to stop being Beryl, but I knew it would never happen, and that I would hate her if it did.

She made tea in an equally ancient aluminium teapot.

“You should get rid of that, Gran,” I said. “The kettle too.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Charlie. I’ve been using these for years. All that nonsense. Do I have Alzheimer’s? Am I senile?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then.”

She sat at the table and removed her watch, scratching her wrist.

“I think I need a new strap, Charlie, darling,” she said, inspecting the grooves and redness where the strap had been resting against her too warm skin.

“I’ll call for you in the morning,” I said. “We’ll get you one tomorrow.”

I was spending a couple of months with her. I was between projects and she had got it into her head that she might not be much longer in this world, so she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.

The other grandchildren came along later than me, but she treated us all the same, answering Jo and Beth’s 3 and 5-year old questions with the same abstract clarity as she used when speaking to me about the past or about her writing. With Simon she explained the principles of making arrows and the importance of a well trimmed flight to encourage speed and distance when released from the bow. It was a moot point whether Simon wanted to know this information, but Gran persisted nonetheless.

My mother said she had been the same when she and her sisters were growing up. She was this force who thought that everyone, no matter what their age, was on the same plane as her.

She was right to think that way, as well. There was something childlike in her approach to the world that sat well with adults and children alike. Some might view it as an eccentricity, but to us it was just Beryl.

“Where does one get a watchstrap these days?” she asked. She was looking at the offending item in question. “I must have had this one for twenty years. I can’t remember where I got it from.”

“From a jeweller's,” I said. “Or a watch repair shop.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “You are clever, Charlie, dear.”

The tea was still stewing in the pot, no doubt filled with aluminium that had leached into the water.

“Are you having tea?” I asked.

She sighed.

“I don’t think so, Charlie, no.”

“Well, I think I’ll be off then,” I said, rising from the table. “Don’t be up too late. I’m coming round for you at nine.”

“Oh, I only need six hours these days, darling,” she replied, breezily. “It’s one of the advantages of getting old.”

She saw me to the door.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?” she said, as I stood on the doorstep, bending down to kiss her soft, dry cheek.

“This is London,” I said. “I’ll pick one up on the main road. Besides, the tube will still be running at this time.”

“You’re such a good boy, Charlie,” she said, pulling me into an embrace. There was untold strength in those arms. I would have bet my life that she would live until she was a hundred.

At 3 a.m., tucked safely into a deep sleep, I was woken by the phone ringing.

“Charlie?”

It was mum.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice still sludgy with the sediment of sleep.

“It’s your Gran. She’s been taken ill. We need to get her to A&E.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” I was awake now, standing at the window to my flat, stark naked and not caring if anyone could see me.

“She says she has pains in her legs that won’t go away.”

“Well, she did fall after the reading tonight,” I admitted, feeling like a traitor for having broken my earlier promise.

“I know. She told me.” My mother’s tone was flat with suppressed exasperation. “Are you fit to drive?”

“I don’t have a car,” I said.

“Oh. I forgot.”

”I’ll call a cab. I can be at Gran’s in ten minutes.”

“Good. I’ll meet you there.”

At the house, my grandmother was sanguine.

“It’s nothing, really, darling. I feel fine. It’s just when I walk up and down those stairs, or if I spend too much time on my feet.”

We took her to A&E. My mother unashamedly told them who my grandmother was, told them how old she was, explained that she couldn’t really be expected to sit in a waiting room full of drunks with cut heads until a doctor was free.

The triage nurse asked Gran some questions. In the end, it wasn’t who she was or her age that helped her to jump the queue; it was the severity of her condition.

“I told you I wasn’t long for this world, Charlie,” she told me triumphantly as she was wheeled into a cubicle to be seen by a doctor.

There were tests. There were hushed conversations. There was a period of waiting. Then my grandmother was returned to us.

“Are you her daughter?” the doctor asked my mother.

“One of them,” my mother replied.

“Then please tell her to stop smoking completely and to cut down on the alcohol she consumes.”

“They told me if I don’t stop, I’ll have to lose a leg, darling,” she told me cheerfully as I helped her into another cab, one that would take her home.

“Well, then, perhaps you better had,” I said.

“I will stop,” she replied, “but I suppose this is the end of my career.”

Neither mum nor I knew what to say.

“It’s not such a bad thing,” she said, looking at us with her chocolate button eyes. “I’ve had a good run, after all.”

“You never know,” my mother said. “You might still be able to write.”

“Without the booze and fags?” my grandmother exclaimed. “Not likely!”

We stayed the night, both worried that she might not make it through.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

In the morning, I took her for her watch strap. She chose one made of fake snakeskin.

“It has a certain shabby chic to it, darling,” she said, admiring it against her wrist. “Don’t you think?”

She held it up to me, so that I could admire it.

“Do you know,” I said, “I think you’re right.”

She grinned at me like a girl still in the first flush of youth.

In the afternoon, she sat at her computer, waiting for inspiration to strike.

“I don’t know if I can do this, darling,” she told me, when I took her up a cup of tea.

She sipped at the tea.

“Is this made with a tea bag, dear?” she asked.

“Yes, Gran,” I said.

She set it down gently on a coaster at the side of the keyboard, alongside a now empty ashtray.

“I need a ciggie in my hand!” she cried, and thumped her hands down onto the keyboard.

“It will come, Gran,” I said, knowing instantly that it was the wrong thing.

“Oh, you. You know nothing!”

She was up and pacing from the room. I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen and watched her pour herself a glass of wine.

“The sun’s over the yard arm, darling,” she said as she saw me looking at her.

“The doctor said you should cut down.”

“I am cutting down, Charlie. I’d have had three by now if I wasn’t.”

She held the bottle out to me and I took it from her. I poured myself a glass and we drank together like naughty children.

“You’ve got to have some fun, Charlie,” she said to me with a wink from her button eyes.

I laughed.

“Gran,” I said, “you’re not wrong.”

© J R Hargreaves June 2007