So Far Untitled

Sound waves bounce and wiggle. A certain pitch, a certain frequency, a certain ratio of noises, and she can’t hear properly what is being said. She smiles and nods and hopes it is the right thing. Blank looks every now and then, and conversation stuttering to a close, tell her she has missed the point.

But the music is everything, with its depth and its range, and so what if this is the thing that has brought her to this point? What is making conversation, in comparison with hearing notes on a page, or inside someone’s mind, make the leap to reality?

If she thinks of the things that might have been said, the things she might have missed, she could go mad with not knowing which opportunities have been lost. If she thinks like that, it’s only one step to thinking about all the conversations she’s never had, all the memories she won’t ever gather or remember, all the paths she’ll never walk down.

She walks down a path now, the same path she walks down every day, from the front of her house to the street. There are moments in her life, she knows, when it is convenient to not hear, or to mishear, or to otherwise twist the truth of the sounds falling against her eardrum.

The sky is high today, and there are smells in the air saying spring is on its way. There are buds of vibrant vivid green on the trees and on some bushes, and the grass on her lawn is beginning to look like it might need a haircut.

Halfway along the street, she remembers. But she carries on walking.

Halfway across the city, he remembers too.

Is this a love story? She no longer knows. She no longer believes in love, or the emotions that masquerade as love. This feeling she has is so far untitled, and most definitely unrequited. There is nothing between them but smoke and mirrors, suppositions and game play. A lot is at stake, and at the same time nothing. A shabby pretence at hoping.

She has the feeling that she needs to leave. The feeling that a moment has ended and it is time to move on. But she does not want that moment to end, and she does not want to move on. She wants, more than anything she has ever wanted, more than career, and security, and stability, and control, the feeling that she is pinned.

The tears fall uncalled as she walks along the street. She keeps her head bowed. That way, should she encounter anyone walking in the opposite direction, her tears won’t be so apparent. She is ashamed of them. Ashamed of the weakness they represent. She is the strong one, the resilient one, the one who has carved out a life for herself without recourse to the strength of others, without the need for anyone’s support but her own steely will.

And that, she knows, is bollocks of the highest order.

Her gut is hollow from the lack of food and the excess of alcohol. Her skin is waxen from the lack of sleep and nutrition. She stops the tears and wipes away the remains of lacrymosity that stain her face.

Lacrymosity. There’s a word. She mocks her own thoughts as she walks and tries not to think the other thoughts that are playing on her mind.

So many clichés today in her head. So much emptiness.

Halfway across the city, she knows he is not thinking of her.

Halfway to the station, she is thinking about last night. That space filled with noise, and chatter, and music, and all her ears can really hear is the music. Everything else is lost, especially if it’s at the wrong pitch. Too low, too soft, too abstract. She can’t hear anything these days, not if there is something bigger demanding to be heard from a PA system that she sits or stands too close to. You’re not alive, though, unless the bass threatens to replace your heartbeat and send you crashing.

She knows that there were moments last night when she appeared bored, or rude, or vaguely stupid. But there are only so many times you can say “Excuse me?”, and usually it’s not even worth trying. It’s better just to avoid conversation.

So she nodded and smiled, and she knows that it wasn’t the right thing. But last night there was never going to be a right thing.

Her thoughts today are not right. They are not straight. She is thrown, off balance, off trajectory. There’s a richness to this feeling that she loves, and yet she knows it is not right. To feel so alive, and yet to feel nothing.

There is so much about this that is not right.

The paths and conversations that she did not cross, did not have. The times in the past that their paths must have crossed, and the conversations, what of them? When you are in the same room as another person, someone you do not yet know you will know, how can you imagine that there are conversations that you are not having?

She ties herself up in knots. All these thoughts about nothing that will never exist. She sighs, and realises that sleep would be a good thing.

She reaches the station. She isn’t sure how, but she is there, and there are people waiting for the train. She stands close to the edge of the platform, and wonders whether, if she were to fall onto the tracks, people would be angry, or shocked, or just confused by her action.

She would never know, in all likelihood, and the thought of that oblivion makes her smile.

She hears the muffled voice through the tannoy make an announcement. Indistinct because of the poor quality of the equipment, not because of any damage she has done to her eardrums. Still, she guesses that a train will be arriving soon. There’s a whistle-hum in the rails that tells her that another, faster train is coming. One that will not stop.

Ultimately, she did not know that the people on the platform were both angry and shocked, and that some were even confused by her action. She did not know, because she did not hear them. She had already left.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

Unless

Sound waves bounce and wiggle. A certain pitch, a certain frequency, a certain ratio of noises, and she can’t hear properly what is being said. She smiles and nods and hopes it is the right thing. Blank looks every now and then, and conversation stuttering to a close, tell her she has missed the point.

But the music is everything, with its depth and its range, and so what if this is the thing that has brought her to this point? What is making conversation in comparison with hearing notes on a page or inside someone’s mind make the leap to reality?

If she thinks of the things that might have been said, the things she might have missed, she could go mad with not knowing which opportunities have been lost. If she thinks like that, it’s only one step to thinking about all the conversations she’s never had, all the memories she won’t ever gather or remember, all the paths she’ll never walk down.

She walks down a path now, the same path she walks down every day, from the front of her house to the street. There are moments in her life, she knows, when it is convenient to not hear, or to mishear, or to otherwise twist the truth of the sounds falling against her eardrum.

The sky is high today, and there are smells in the air saying spring is on its way. There are buds of vibrant vivid green on the trees and on some bushes, and the grass on her lawn is beginning to look like it might need a haircut.

Halfway along the street, she remembers. But she carries on walking.

Halfway across the city, he remembers too.

She carries on walking, but her mind is on something else, something other than walking to the train station. She has left it behind in the house. The thing she is supposed to bring with her. Accidentally or deliberately, she’s not entirely sure. She carries on walking and doesn’t know what she should do. She should turn round and go back for it, carry out her side of the bargain, meet him as planned and get this finished once and for all. But she carries on walking. Her legs won’t let her stop.

She’s warm now, and she wishes she had fewer layers on. She walks along the main road as far as the next street on the left, then she turns back on herself, walks the triangle round, and goes back to her front door.

She stands there, like an idiot, for some reason unable to put her key in the lock. She doesn’t want to get it. She doesn’t want to go. She’s being stupid, and she knows it. It isn’t as though she can just ring him up and make an alternative arrangement. He needs it today. Yesterday would have been too early, tomorrow will be too late.

If she doesn’t take it to him, there will be a different end, and one that she will have no control over. At least with this end, she knows what to expect.

She hears a voice, suddenly, to her left, and she turns to see her neighbour leaning around the side of her porch.

“Are you okay, love?” she asks. “You’ve been standing there for a while. Have you lost your key?”

She smiles and tells her that she hasn’t lost her key. She waves the bunch of keys at her as evidence of their continued safe-keeping in her possession. She says that she’s fine, she’d just forgotten something. She lets herself into the house.

Her neighbour continues leaning around the side of her porch for a few minutes more, in case there are further developments. Then, disappointed, she goes back inside her own house.

She stands in her hall for a minute or two, to give her neighbour the chance to get bored of hanging around, waiting for something to gossip about. She makes a decision, and she starts to leave the house again. Then she stops. Again. She didn’t used to be like this. She used to be firm in her decisions, and precise in her actions. Somewhere she lost that precision, along with her direction.

He would be on his way now. She had already missed one train, and would probably manage to miss another, and consequence would follow consequence, but at least she would be there eventually.

She goes to the cupboard and she pulls it out, heavy in its wrapper. This isn’t the first time she has done this. She hopes each time that it will be the last, but this has been going on now for 19 years, and she can’t see it ending any time soon.

Unless. Unless. Unless...

She puts it into her bag, and for the second time today she leaves the house. She knows as she opens the front gate, steps through to the street, and closes it behind her, that her neighbour is watching from behind her living room curtains. She knows that her life is alien to her. Why would anyone who wasn’t born round here choose to live on this suburban street?

Because it was far away from the places she could be found, was why. Far away and still under their noses.

She walked at a normal pace towards the station. Twenty minutes it would take to get there, and now she didn’t know what time a train would arrive, or whether she would get there in the backwash of a departure. She does not hurry, there is no point. She is already late, and if he needs it so badly, then he will still be there. If he doesn’t, he will be gone, and this might well be over. One way or another.

It feels heavy. They always do, but today this one feels heavier than the others. She walks up the main road, past houses she thought about living in until she found her perfectly nondescript bolt hole. She cuts across to the A6 down one of the side streets cut in half by bollards to stop people using it as a rat run shortcut. She walks and walks and reaches the station. The ticket office is closed, and she goes onto the platform via the side path, under the bridge. A man is standing at the edge of the platform. She wonders whether, if she pushed him, he would fall easily onto the tracks, and if he would be angry or just confused by her action. She doesn’t push him, though, and he speaks to her.

“Just missed one, love.”

She smiles and carries her heavy load to the shelter. No Metro News left at this time of the day. She sits on one of the cold metal benches and tries to work out how long it will be until the next train.

Her phone rings in the depths of her bag. She knows which number will be showing on screen. She doesn’t have to take the phone from her bag to discover that fact. She sits, knees together, huddled in her coat, her bag now resting against her belly. Her phone rings on.

Of course, there is a simple way to end all this. She tucks her chin into her scarf and leans forward slightly, curling her body around her bag that is resting against her belly as though she is carrying an unborn child. Her hands are in her pockets. She feels no maternal instinct for the bag or its contents. Just as she feels none for the thing inside her.

She didn’t used to be like this.

She thinks of the way she might end all this. Domino effect, the cascade of events that would follow, one toppling into the other, and her above it all, beyond its grasp. She smiles. It would be good to be the first domino to fall, the one to cause the clatter.

She looks at the man on the platform, still standing close to the edge. He is looking down the tracks, down towards the south, as though doing this will make the train arrive sooner. She knows that looking down the tracks doesn’t make anything happen sooner. It just makes your eyes ache.

She looks away from him, and across to the other platform. The rails are whistle-humming, meaning a train is about to come through. There’s a man standing on the other platform. He is looking at her. She looks at him. They are too far away to make real eye contact, but they are both, without a doubt, looking. She cocks her head to the right. He does the same. She cocks hers to the left. The same. She sits head forward and stares at him. He turns away and walks further down his platform. The train that was threatening its arrival through the rails hurtles through the station, and when it is gone, so is the man on the other platform.

She looks up towards Manchester, along the platform, to see where he can be. The train went through too quickly for him to just disappear like that. He is no longer there, though.

An announcement is made over the tannoy. This time she can’t hear it properly, not because her ears have lost their accuracy, but because the tannoy is useless. She takes it to mean that there will be a train for her to get on soon. Or there will be a train for the other platform. Or there is a delay. Something. She does not move from where she is sitting. She just sits on, knees together, hands in pockets, chin tucked into scarf, her body bowed over the bag that rests against her belly.

She doesn’t hear him coming. She doesn’t hear the whisper as he pulls the gun from his jacket pocket. She doesn’t hear, see, think or feel anything.

There was more than one way that this could end, you see. More than one way for the first domino to fall.

© J R Hargreaves 2006

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