Waiting (3)

And there he stood in the winter light; the hardness of the sun casting his form in blackness that drew the eye. He had appeared again as silently as he had left.

He stood on sandstone paving patched with damp just within the automatic doors; the same doors swished open and closed behind him, confused by his presence, unable to settle; now open, now closed, they let the ice cold air intermittently cross her body.

Opposing forces, equal and exact, they stood facing each other.

“Hello,” she said, eventually. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m just visiting,” he replied and stepped away from the doorway into the artificial light at the bottom of the stairwell.

She could see his face; that same mix of hard and vulnerable; the wary eyes waiting to see if he had been found out; the façade of blithe indifference ready to fall. She had seen behind it once; the tiredness that dwelled there.

Now she didn’t care. She turned to go, back to her desk, to the work that was waiting for her. His voice tried to stop her.

“I thought –“

His thought was suspended in the air, waiting to see if she would turn and show her interest. She stopped; she thought about turning round. The pause was enough.

“I thought we could go for lunch,” he finished.

She laughed but still didn’t turn to look at him.

“What do you think?” he said. “Just a quick bite, nothing fancy.”

She looked at last over her shoulder. Her body made no other move apart from that one concession to acknowledgement.

“I don’t think so, do you?” she said, then began walking again.

More automatic doors opened and then closed behind her. She didn’t walk slowly; she didn’t pause; she didn’t care if he followed her or not.

He did follow her, though, after a while, down the long grey corridor. Both pairs of feet made footsteps loud and clear that echoed ahead and behind. Her light, high-heeled tapping merged with his more resolute stomp, blending and harmonising like a syncopated concerto.

She passed through more automatic doors into an area where the flooring was no surface for the percussion of her feet. By the time he passed through the doors himself, she was gone.

A faint flicker of movement, a flash of the red of her coat, and he knew to pass through the final heavy glass and steel door at the end of this long corridor.

The room that he entered was brightly lit and silent; a quiet place that held whispers of turning pages, but for now was empty of all sound, save his breathing and the hum of the air conditioning.

He sat down at a wooden table, on a grey chair, beneath the draft of the air handling unit. He waited.

She was nowhere to be seen. No trace of her before him. His hands stretched out upon the table as his mind wandered and remembered; the dark crown of her head supported by folded arms that lay upon the surface of another table; one which stood miles and days and night-times away, on the other side of town. The hands of his memory had wanted to stroke that gentle dark brown head, but his misplaced sense of propriety kept them firmly adhered to the surface of the table, an arm stretch away from the silent desperation of the woman he could not love.

The darkness of that kitchen; the litter of hardware, papers, bottles and stars; the canvas folding director’s chairs; the somnolent repose of her head across the table; all were there inside his head, fixed in place by the taste of bitterness in the air and in his mouth; the violence of feeling; the sullen rebuttal of all concern.

He felt them now in the calm of this brightly lit place as he patiently waited for what must come.

Those circular nights of brutality and hate moved like a musical canon through his head, repeating their phrases, chasing one another with familiar words and tunes dissimilar but perfectly matched. Those nights and conversations always ended up back at the beginning, like a roll in a player-piano.

Their fingers had no need to move across the keys. The script had been punctured so that the mechanism of their mutual obsession could play forever the selected tune. It should have left them free; instead it bound them tightly, for long enough until destruction became the only option.

He sighed and saw the square ends of his blunt fingers resting before him on the table.

The winter loneliness of his middle-age; the strange hardness of her fear; the soft pliancy of her surrender; his brutal need to subjugate and destroy. He thought that they could go for lunch. She did not care. Hidden alongside him in the other room, she worked and was oblivious to his location.

His reappearance after all this time had served to reawaken her stubborn resolve, but also that pliant need to be complicit, to dissolve resistance and fall.

She worked. Cold in anger, she shifted boxes, climbing ladders to reach top shelves, pushing the stiffness through her muscles, beneath the lifeless light of fluorescent tubes. Miles of shelving stacked on top of one another, running the length and breadth of this storeroom, filled with boxes, filled in turn with documents. Silent witnesses to days long past. And her, a living filing system of her own, filled with memories, her own witnesses to what went on.

Her body shuttered against the cold of the room she worked in, she picked up a stack of boxes and carried them out through grey-painted wooden doors into the room in which he sat.

Clothed in cold, she placed the boxes on the table in front of him and did not speak. She crossed behind him to a table with a telephone upon it and he heard her pressing buttons, dialling a short code.

“I’ve brought out the boxes you wanted,” he heard her say. “You can collect them whenever you’re ready.”

She walked alongside where he was seated and took a chair at a desk that bore a computer. She shook it into life with her mouse and, stiff-backed and angular, commenced working. Her fingers roamed the keys, peppering the screen with letters, characters, words.

Behind him, the glass and steel door opened and another woman entered the room. She crossed to the table and came into his sight line. He looked up at her; she smiled cautiously and picked up the boxes.

“Thanks, Nance,” she said to her colleague.

She walked back behind him and then he heard her voice again, directed towards him this time.

“Could you?” she said.

He turned and looked. She was standing at the door.

“I can’t –" she said.

He cracked the code and rose from his seat to open and hold the door for her.

“Thanks,” she said.

He watched her for a moment, walking down that long grey corridor, the stack of boxes in her arms, then he let the heavy door creep closed and went back to his seat.

He didn’t look at her, seated as she was at an angle to him, just beyond the periphery of his vision. He stared straight ahead and remembered the summer warmth of her in a beer garden somewhere across town. The sun had shone and bathed her in its glow. It was evening, and she was catlike in her sunshine somnambulism. Drawing words from her was like pulling teeth at times. That evening had been no different. She wore a flower printed skirt that bounced when she walked on 1940s wedge heels to the bar. She wore a crisp white linen blouse. She wore her hair picked up at the sides and the dark gloss of it was like molten treacle.

A refugee from another time, silent and languid in the summer evening warmth, she sipped her drink and cast glances from those grey, wicked eyes in his direction.

The skirt pushed up too easily. The skirt that revealed the silken length of her legs against which his blunt fingers passed until he caught the essence of her at their tips and she sighed, pushing her fingers into the thick crop of his hair, holding his mouth to the exposed nipple of one breast, leaning against the dark red wall of his hallway.

One hand supporting him against the wall, the other drawing her on, he played her breast with tongue and teeth. No penetration.

Aspiration and indifference met in his hallway. She was the woman he could not love. It was inevitable that everything became different in the months that followed.

He called a cab for her, to carry her home. He pressed a twenty into her hand as they kissed goodbye on the doorstep, in full view of the cab driver. It was 7 o’clock in the morning and she had already rung in to work, telling them that she was ill.

Six months. He left town without saying goodbye somewhere in the middle of those months. He left town and she was left to make empty gestures that he did not see, but that she told him about, in texts and in emails; not speaking to him, but finding a way to communicate all the same.

As silent as she had been then, sitting in that beer garden, she continued to work at the desk just beyond his peripheral vision. He continued to sit. Waiting. Outside the winter air was cold.

Her anger was passing, but her dismissal of him was still cold. She didn’t care to know the purpose of his visit, hidden as it was behind his invitation to lunch.

She finished her work, shutting the computer down. She crossed the room, walking behind him, and collected her coat. She walked from the room and down the long corridor, back to the outside world and its chill, damp demeanour.

© J R Hargreaves April 2007