The Last Time

She hummed as she cleared away dishes and cups and glasses from the table. He started to sing along, the wrong words, and she changed her tune to accommodate him.

He sat at the head of the kitchen table, watching her float about the room, starting on the washing up. Their golden-haired daughter sat close to him, apparently enraptured by her parents. She sat there and looked at him, the man who had helped bring her into being, and nobody could say what it was she was thinking, but the look on her face was love.

She paused in her labours to look at them, her husband, her child, and she absentmindedly twisted the wedding ring round on her finger until she had moved it up past the knuckle and off.

She walked over to her daughter, crouched down, and held out the ring.

"Will you keep this safe for mum, sweetheart, while she does the washing up?" she said.

Her daughter nodded solemnly, taking the ring with her five-year-old fingers and wrapping it inside her tiny fist.

She stood up and he was smiling at her. She smiled back and thought how wonderful it had been, knowing him.

"I'm becoming a little obsessed with your bottom lip," he said. "I have this strange desire to kiss it."

She kissed the top of her daughter's curly head. "Your daddy's a funny man," she told her, and ran her fingers through the child's golden curls.

"Is there a cure, do you think?" he asked, as she went to the sink and plunged her hands into the hot, sudsy water.

"A cure for what?" she answered, out through the kitchen window, out away from this house and into the world outside.

"A cure for obsession with someone's bottom lip," he said.

"I don't think so," she replied, taking a plate from the water, washing it clean, then rinsing it. "I think it's probably hopeless to try."

"Hopeless? You mean there's nothing that can be done?" he said.

She washed and rinsed another plate.

"I think the best thing for you to do is to not look at the lip in question," she said.

"I can't see it now," he replied, "but I'm afraid I can still picture it."

The third plate from lunch was washed and rinsed, and the three plates sat together, stacked on the dish drainer, gleaming under the fluorescent light. The cups and glasses joined them, then the cutlery. She started to put the pans into the water. Her hands were scorched pink and she looked at her wedding finger, the way it was slightly waisted where the ring usually sat.

She looked over her shoulder at her daughter.

"Are you keeping mummy's ring safe?" she said.

The child nodded and showed her the fist, which would be hot and sweaty by now, her ring tightly clenched within it. Her daughter's other hand was on the table, her fingers tapping close to her father's arm, but not touching it. Her tongue was pushed firmly into her left cheek.

"You're a good girl," she told her daughter, and turned her face back to the window.

"Do you want me to dry up? Make a bit of space?" he asked.

"If you come over here, you'll only look at the lip again, and then where will we be?" she said.

"True," he said, "you caught me. I only wanted to see your bottom lip again. To check if it's the same as I remember it."

"It is," she said. "There's really no need to check."

She rinsed the last of the pans clear of suds and balanced it on the drainer.

"There," she said. "Done."

She dried her hands and turned around. Her daughter's right hand was still tapping its fingers next to her father's arm. Her tongue had left its refuge in her cheek, and she was examining the wedding ring as though it were rare treasure.

"Time to give mummy her ring back," he said, not looking at the child.

The girl looked up at her.

"Oh, let her look after it a little longer," she said to him. She didn't want to put it back on just yet. She was allowing her finger to enjoy its nakedness.

He stood up and came over to where she was standing, and took her in his arms. He kissed her on the bottom lip, and she let him.

"O fabulous bottom lip," he sighed, "I am so besotted with you."

They stood there together. Her arms had gone up automatically to return his embrace, and they maintained the pose beyond his kiss. There was a sound like a coin being spun on a wooden surface, and their curly blonde daughter wriggled her way into the centre of the embrace, wrapping her arms around her mother's legs. So now they both had hold of her, and now she knew.

The ring sat on the kitchen table, and she knew.

This was the last time that this would happen.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Nothing

There’s blood on your hands and you don’t know why. You stare at it for a heartbeat and then you realise. The blood is from his pocket. You put your hand back inside and find something sharp and slightly sticky, something you hadn’t wanted to acknowledge was there before. Your heart is pounding, the pulse in your neck throbbing, and you pull out the knife.

This isn’t what you had been looking for. You hold it in your hand as though it’s a fish, or a piece of spaceship, something alien, foreign, unrecognisable. Then you bend at the knees, your back straight, your eyes still on the knife, and you place it gently down on the floor at your feet. Straightening up again, you look at his jacket hanging on its coat hook in the hall. Thick brushed cotton, almost velvet but more dense. You move your hand towards it, as if to stroke its pelt, then remember the blood. Instead, you put your hand back into the pocket a third time and begin to pull out pieces of paper. A tube ticket. You haven’t been to London since last summer, can he really not have emptied his pockets since then? You check the date. Two months ago. He was there two months ago, but when? A cinema ticket. A cloakroom ticket. A Glasgow underground ticket with a phone number scrawled in turquoise ink on the back. None of these pieces of paper make any sense, and none of them is the thing you are looking for. Although, you don’t really know what it is you are looking for. Some sort of evidence.

As if the blood isn’t enough.

You put the tickets back and turn your attention to the other pocket. The knife sits on the floor at your feet. Your feet are encased in kitten-heeled, round-toed black leather, shoes with a scarlet lining that clip as you walk, shoes with pink orchids painted across the front.

His other pocket turns up nothing.

You stare down at the knife at your feet, then look at the blood that is still clinging in smears to your hand, in spite of having rubbed against the linings of both pockets.

You hadn’t realised that you were the going-through-pockets, snooping type. You wonder whether, if it turned out he had a secret diary, you’d sit down on the bed to read that. You wonder whether it would be you that you would be looking for, or evidence of whoever the other one is.

You’ve never been this curious before. You’ve never thought it mattered.

What did you think you would find, when you first walked into the hall from the kitchen and saw his jacket on the coat hook? What impulse sent you to rummage through his pockets, knowing he wasn’t in the house? You look down at the knife. It certainly wasn’t that.

You walk back along the hall, into the kitchen, and you wash your hands at the sink, removing every last trace of that blood that isn’t yours and surely isn’t his. You won’t allow your mind to question whose it might be. You turn, and take a piece of kitchen towel from the roll, then a couple more, and go back into the hall.

You pick up the knife and wrap it in the kitchen towel. Your black linen pencil skirt has no pockets, but you feel as though you want to put the knife into a pocket. Keep it with you. Away from him. Instead, you open the drawer of your grandmother’s oak telephone table that sits under a mirror to the right of the coat hooks, and you push the knife in its swaddling clothes inside, as far back as you can make it go.

A wisp of hair falls down from your French pleat and brushes your cheek. You look up and into the mirror to brush it back into place and you do not recognise the woman who is looking back at you. There is a blankness to her expression, as though she is waiting for understanding to tell her face what to do. Her face is a pale oval beneath dark hair, above the black of her cotton blouse. It seems as though she should be you. You leave the stray hair where it is.

You are still staring into the mirror when he opens the front door and steps into the hall.

“Hello,” he says. “Your hair looks nice like that. Been to have it done?”

“No,” you say, and touch your cheek gently where the fallen hair is lying.

He hangs his heavy overcoat up, covering the jacket, and he drops his keys onto the telephone table, giving you a squeeze round the waist in passing. He walks on past you, into the kitchen, and you hear him open the fridge.

So normal. So innocent. So unknown.

You hear him pop open a beer and he walks through the dining room into the living room. Directly behind you, through the wall against which the stairs climb, he is sitting on the sofa.

You look at the woman in the mirror. She looks back at you.

He calls through to you, “What are you doing standing there, anyway?”

You and the woman break eye contact. “Nothing,” you say, smoothing your skirt. “Just fixing my hair.”

© J R Hargreaves 2006

The Archivist

People in boxes. I have them all over the house. Some of them are starting to smell.

What's an archivist to do?

It wasn't always like this. The collecting wasn't always such an obsession. And please, don't misunderstand. These are real people, in real boxes, inside my house. It isn't even a huge six-bedroomed detached and rambling pile of a house, all peeling paint and stuccoed walls with a fake turret and a veranda right the way around, and a driveway leading up to it overgrown with bushes and trees. It's a small, modern, three-bedroomed mid-terrace property, with gardens front and rear, separate garage, and small porch to front.

Don't I sound like an estate agent? I'm not, but I have one here, somewhere among my collection. What started out as a joke has now become something of an obsession, I'm afraid. It irks me to have to leave the house and go to work, but my collection doesn't make me any money. The only thing that lessens the frustration is that going out to work brings me into contact with all kinds of people. I'd like to preserve one of each kind.

My first specimen is my favourite. He's the one who started all of this. His uniqueness. We all agreed, during the short time that he worked with us at the museum, that he was a truly unique individual. His style of dress, his quaintly old fashioned views about the world, his desires, his dislikes, his manner of expressing himself. All of these things simultaneously fascinated and repelled us.

I wish that I could say that putting him into a box was my idea, but that would be a lie. I am many things, but a liar is not one of them, and I believe that credit must be given where it is due. In this instance, the credit belongs to the curator of community history. Who else, of course, could come up with the idea? To put someone, a member of our working community, into a box could only have come from her mind.

Except, she had wanted to encase him in perspex as a punishment for slurping on his carton of juice too loudly one lunchtime. As I said, I am not a liar, and every word of this is the truth.

It was shortly after this that I began to think in terms of creating a collection. People fascinate me. Their psychology, behaviours, styles of dress. And the way they think they are the norm against which the rest of us must be measured.

My plan at first was to keep things simple. I would collect people by describing them on paper. I would devise a classification scheme: fonds, series, sub-series, file and item. I would interact with the specimens who interested me the most, and compile facts about who they were, what they believed, how they behaved. Finally, I would catalogue them, separating them out into their different groups, creating record after record of every type you could hope to encounter on this planet.

I didn't get very far before I realised what would have been blindingly obvious to most people - even to me, had I not been so consumed by my desire to collect and describe and structure the human race. Cold facts on a page are no substitute for the living, breathing reality of the thing you are trying to describe.

That isn't to say that I have abandoned my catalogue. Far from it. Every collection needs an access point.

I still had the desire to collect, but now I realised that I needed to collect specimens of the thing I was trying to describe. It was then that I remembered my colleague's words: "If you don't stop slurping on your box-juice, I'm going to put you in a perspex box and feed you through a hatch in the top."

Bless her for giving me the very form and functionality of the box in which I would keep my specimens alive!

The place at which I am employed is not very good with money, so it was no trouble to convince the finance department that I would require a number of large perspex boxes, of varying sizes, in which to display items for a new collection. Technically, this was not a lie. I quickly obtained an approved purchase order.

The heritage sector is the perfect environment to find suppliers of display cases and storage solutions, and in no time at all I had myself a supplier who would create perspex boxes to a high spec based on the measurements with which I would from time to time provide them.

My very first addition to the collection was acquired the night his contract ended. I had already questioned him about certain important facts, and as I have good three dimensional judgement, I was able to have his box ready for him. I invited him to stay at my house after his leaving do - since I live closer to town than he did, he did not refuse.

I didn't even have to use anything to drug him or otherwise knock him out. He was so drunk, and fairly dopey by nature anyway, that on entering the house and seeing the box, he exclaimed with glee "Wow! A perspex box!" and stepped straight into it.

I could hardly believe my luck. The box was so designed that, once someone stepped inside, a pressure pad closed the door behind them and the self-locking mechanism engaged. There was no latch or other means of opening the box from the inside, and only I and the designer knew how to open the box from the outside.

I stood, amazed at how simple it had been, and watched him exploring the interior of his new home. Then I pulled myself together and got down to the job of making a few preliminary notes for the catalogue entry.

In the morning, when I came downstairs, he seemed a little dejected. Mindful of what had been the purpose of my colleague's original idea, I had been careful to ensure that the boxes would be soundproofed. I could not hear what he was saying (it appeared to be some sort of half angry, half frightened plea), nor could he hear me. I smiled and walked past him into the kitchen, where I prepared breakfast. I fed him through the special air-lock style hatch on the side of the box.

It took him a few hours to realise that I wasn't about to let him out of the box, and he was reluctant to eat at first, but by lunchtime his usual healthy appetite for food had returned.

And so he was the first, to be followed by many more, of different types, who interest me in different ways. But he remains my favourite because he was where it all began.

My one mistake was not to have considered the need for hygiene. I had provided no washing facilities, no means of clothes removal for cleaning, no opportunities for haircuts or other personal grooming.

That's why some of them are starting to smell. The ones that unfortunately died I simply deaccessioned and disposed of. They didn't fit in with the collecting policy. What else was I supposed to do?

©J R Hargreaves 2006

Snake Eye

There’s a pig on the floor and there are dice in his hand.

The ginger fires his tongue. The vodka burns his throat. With each sip another skin of reality is peeled away. Light pours through him, and he falls. The mule’s kick is his impetus.

Gouging fingernails into his palms, the analgesics numb his skin but leave his mind alert. He stares down at his wrists. Blue veins and purple form a web there, blood coursing through them.

He widens one hand, stretching out his square ended fingers, so like his dad’s, and he presses his thumb into its centre. He feels nothing, and is reminded of a Richard Bachman story, where a man has a hole in the centre of his hand.

For two days now he has eaten nothing, felt nothing, and if anyone could see the state of his handwriting in anything he has written over those two days, they would know the madness that existed in the moment of the writing. They would know the madness in his slowly dropping heartbeat.

If they could see, they would know.

He looks at the pig on the floor. Not a pig at all, but his dog. A dog named Pig that lies at his feet and is doting and docile.

The peeling of reality makes him wonder why the pig is there.

The dice are on the table now. They are red dice, and clear, with white spots for the numbers. They are dice from a yahtzee set, made to look like dice from a casino.

The pig snuffles in its sleep.

He takes another sip and the ginger fires his tongue again.

Two dice. Snake Eye. If he scores, he will know what to do. The same as tossing a coin, or shaking a magic eight ball. If he throws the dice and he scores a snake eye, he will know.

If they could see, they would know.

He thinks about ringing her. He thinks about hearing her voice.

He drains his glass and gets up to fix himself another one.

If he rings her now, she will not say no, and he will fall completely. He will drop away from everything he has built up here and give in to the seduction.

If he’s going to ring her, he must first throw a Snake Eye.

The pig snuffles in its sleep. His slowly dropping heartbeat pulls him down.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

On Her Way Somewhere New

Ripples move out from a pebble dropped into the stillness of a pond. A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and somewhere in San Francisco someone’s vase falls from the window sill. What would happen if he came and she wasn’t there? In the theory of waves, even in the theory of butterflies, there would be some effect.

But really, what would happen if he were to come to the door now, if he were to knock, or ring the bell, and there was no answer? Would he use his key to let himself in? Would he turn around, leave, and never return, thinking she had changed her mind? Would he ring her to find out where she was?

She stroked the heat from the scar on her wrist where a piece of rose thorn had once embedded itself in her skin. It still hadn’t worked its way out, months and years later, and every so often the scar would turn pink and glow with warmth. She stroked that heat now, absently wondering what would happen if she were to disappear.

The breeze outside picked up and blew the muslin curtain back into the room. She could hear traffic on the street outside, the sound of sirens. This could be anywhere. It was their old flat in Blackheath, currently vacant of tenants, its walls freshly coated in a new skin of cream, replacing the life-weary sheen left behind by its last occupants. It was suburban London, but it could have been Stockport or Stockholm.

The ceilings in these old converted houses were high, the cornices and ceiling roses painted white, bright against the cream. The carpet was hard, knobbly seagrass. The blandness of the colour scheme was soothing.

She lifted her arm and rubbed her lips against the scar, breathing in the mix of sunshine and soap that scented her skin.

There was a bang downstairs, the door to the house closing, then the sound of someone coming up the stairs. She tensed herself, then toyed with the idea of pretending she wasn’t there when he knocked. If he knocked. Of course, he might not. They owned this flat together, he was still living round here, acting as the landlord to their tenants, he surely would come straight in.

The person carried on up the next flight of stairs, and she heard a key slide into a lock, a door open and then close again, a radio turned on. She let out the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.

Waiting for him like this was almost torture. She wished he would appear, wished he had been waiting outside when she arrived. She didn’t know why he couldn’t have sent the papers up to her to sign, why he couldn’t have done what everyone else did and sorted all this out through their respective solicitors.

Her mobile phone was on the table before her. She watched the grey bar with the time in it slip down the screen, notch by notch. He was late. Later than even he usually managed to be. She told herself that worrying was permitted on this occasion. The time bar slipped down and returned to the top of the screen and she willed the screen to light up, bringing a message from him, or a phone call. She remembered how it had been like this all the time at the start, when she would wait impatiently for his communication.

She had arrived. She hadn’t rung or knocked, but had used her key and let herself in. He hadn’t been here, but then she hadn’t expected him to be. Maybe this was the beat of a different butterfly’s wing. Maybe a wave of effect was rippling its way towards her from some other cause.

The screen on her phone lit up and the phone began to ring. “No Number” appeared in brackets on the screen. She stared at the phone. Something in her gut told her not to accept the call. She didn’t even pick the phone up to press reject. She just sat on her mum’s old sofa and stared at the phone as it rang and rang and rang.

The breeze blew the curtain, catching her attention, and she turned her head away from the phone. The sound of its ring began to mix with the sounds from outside. Somewhere a car door slammed. There were voices. A man and a woman. Children were yelling and laughing at each other. And all the time her phone kept ringing.

It was like that moment at the end of The Ring, the Japanese version. For some reason she knew that if she picked up the phone she would die, or some other catastrophe would happen.

She looked back at her phone, and it stopped ringing. Instantly she wished she had answered it. It might have been something important. It might have been him, ringing from a payphone, telling her of some flat tyre emergency he’d had on his way, and how he would be later than even he could normally justify.

Except he wouldn’t have used a payphone.

The screen on the phone had returned to telling her the time. He was now an hour late. She stood up and walked over to the window. She pulled back the muslin, intending to close the window in preparation for leaving. Before she pulled the window closed, though, she looked out and down into the street. His car was parked outside the house. Or a car very much like it. A man, short haired and nicely turned out, was sitting in the driver’s seat, head bowed. A man who looked, from this distance, a lot like him.

Her phone started to ring again. She closed the window and put the curtain straight. She took the keys to the flat from the pocket of her coat. She placed them on the table, next to the still ringing phone. Then she put her coat on and picked up her bag.

She looked round at the flat one final time before she let herself out and walked down the stairs, out through the front door and onto the street.

She walked past his car (because it was his car, she knew that) and didn’t look at his partially slumped figure in the driver’s seat, didn’t think about the slow thin trickle of blood from his temple. She walked past, as though she hadn’t seen him, on her way somewhere new.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

The Day Of The Dead

Ice clings more willingly to the dead xylem of a tree ring. She knew this by looking through the kitchen window at the tree stump where the kitsch plaster frogs sat.

She held the phone to her ear, loosely balanced between middle finger and thumb, and worked out how much longer before she could take the next dose. Her left arm ached, her hand tingling.

Apparently, having a migraine was like having a mini stroke. But less dangerous, obviously. The doctor who told her this was in love with knowledge, and oblivious to the effect those words might have on someone.

Twenty minutes. She could take some more in twenty minutes.

He'd rung out of the blue. Wanting to catch up, he'd said. Her head was floating, her arm tingling, her mouth thick with the numbness of the codeine.

Maybe she was having a stroke, but she didn't know it.

"I get out plenty, thanks," he was saying. "Wish I was in more. You?"

She realised she was supposed to say something in response. She had, after all, asked the question in the first place. Asking questions usually led to trouble like this. The asking of questions in reply. Resultant conversation.

Her arm ached, and she couldn't be bothered. She moved the phone away from her ear and pressed the red button. Then she dropped the phone into the bowl of washing up.

She'd regret that later, but then, what was life for if not to have regrets about dropping your phone into the washing up?

Under the camellia bush, the ugly black cat from two doors down was scratching at the soil. They stared at each other through the pane of glass that separated them. She knew what she was thinking. The cat was probably thinking the same.

She thought about ringing work, telling them she wouldn't be in, then remembered that the phone was in the washing up bowl.

She fished it out. It had switched itself off. She laid a teatowel on the worksurface by the sink and clicked off the phone cover. Gently and methodically, she took the phone apart and placed each separate item onto the teatowel. Covers, keypad, sim card, battery. She patted at them with another teatowel, then left them to dry out.

She could always take it to the phone shop and claim it as an accident on the insurance.

She stopped in her movement from kitchen to living room and smiled.

He had been good for something, then.

Nobody normal took out phone insurance.

The other one had rung to catch up. His sense of guilt would wear him down if he wasn't careful.

She sat on the sofa and pulled the blister pack from her bag. She popped out two of the yellow ones. Pink ones, yellow ones. The yellow ones were a con, but she liked the way the boxes matched.

Sitting back on the sofa, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to think.

He'd had it coming for a long time.

That's what the other one didn't understand.

©J R Hargreaves 2006

Civility Has Its Limits

He stood up. All six lanky plus feet of him.

“Would anyone like a drink?” he slurred, three sheets to the wind and sailing off into his own personal oblivion.

The chat and hubbub of the rest of us swallowed his words whole. I was close enough to hear, though, I said yes, please. Somehow the altitude affected his hearing, or his ignorance did, something. He wasn’t looking at me. He had spent the whole night pretending I occupied a vacuum.

He asked again, and still nobody responded. Other than me, I responded again. Yes, please. He waved his hands, trying to gain the attention of the others seated around the table. Radiohead blared out of the speakers behind his head. I fixed him with my stare.

“YES!”

He turned his attention on me, the vacuum dissipated.

“VODKA AND COKE!”

“Oh,” he said, the words inching from his mouth like a glacier, “it’s like that, is it?”

“What?” I said. “What?” Exasperation building, confusion mixed in as well.

He turned away.

“Rachel, would you like something to drink?” His body, his voice, his whole being unctuous like Fagin, making some ridiculous point about how I was the one being rude.

“Vodka and tonic, please, Jim,” she said, sweet girl that she is.

He looked back at me.

“That’s more like it,” he said.

Three days of niggling, three days of clinging to civility, finally came to a head.

“I asked you nicely twice already, and you ignored me. I only shouted so that you could hear me,” I said above the misery of Thom Yorke.

He waved a hand dismissively in my direction, and continued asking around the table, who would like a drink, who would like a drink, would you like a drink, so very politely.

“Forget it, then,” I said. “Just forget it.”

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” said his idiot friend, laughing and clapping his hands.

Fight, fight, fight. Somehow it had become a fight. Still, I managed to turn away and pretend he hadn’t spoken.

Conversation turned back to work, and life, and what do you really want out of it all? He returned from the bar. A drink was put on the table in front of me. He sat back down next to me. The drink, unacknowledged and untouched, sat on.

© J R Hargreaves 2006