Penetration

Her mind is like one of those penny cascades on the pier at Blackpool; she puts one thought in and, if it’s timed just right, about fifty others fall out. Gone forever, not even caught and put in her pocket for safe keeping.

The roses in the flower beds around the park are having a second bloom. Over on one of the lawns, a fake wedding picture is being taken. A fake bride in a voluminous gown; no groom, but cascades of lilies. She’s laughing too much to be a real bride. There’s no pinch of stress around her face.

“Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.” Altered at the altar in snowy white and darkest grey. The flash of scarlet beneath his suit, the blue of the irises in her bouquet; her mind retains these images, primary in their colouring. No cascade of coins will ever force them out. The flash of scarlet, open against his white shirt as he danced at the reception with bridesmaid after bridesmaid and guest after guest, until he had danced his way into the toilet for another dance that showed his true colours. Hands gripping the edge of the sink basin, arms braced, receptive. The shutters going down in her mind when her dad told her what he had seen. Her mind closing off as her dad threw her brand new husband, that unknown quantity, out of his own wedding reception.

The first who wouldn’t penetrate her, that night or any other.

“Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,” her friend had read during the service. It wasn’t love, then. Unable to survive the alteration it found, it couldn’t possibly be love.

“I want you to know that I won’t be penetrating you tonight,” another had said, later. Much later.

A quick progression from idle intent to dangerous edge. Half naked in a living room waiting for daylight, knots of carpet pile burning into her back, scrubbing the skin. Half hearted in the throes of something masquerading as passion. Something more like boredom and a need for distraction.

She didn’t know what the difference was. Just because he didn’t get his dick wet, it didn’t make him noble. It was still an infidelity. All those other things he’d felt free to do, with Catholic logic. “I did NOT have sex with That Woman…” It was still a betrayal of trust.

And so he hadn’t penetrated her, that night or any other.

No penetration, no adultery.

The penetration of her mind didn’t count.

She finishes her packet of crisps, wipes her hands clean on a tissue, wipes her mind clean of its thoughts.

She sits in the sunshine, her eyes closed behind her sunglasses. The plastic carrier bag that held her lunch, bought from the supermarket around the corner, is empty now. She keeps one hand on it, to stop it blowing away.

Men in City shirts lounge on the grass, reading newspapers. She hears House Classics playing on a car stereo somewhere behind her, on the road beneath the park. Lazy lunchtime with no pressure.

The music from the car chases away the Dusty Springfield song she’d been singing in her head. All I See Is You. The song he played every time. She hadn’t known a Dusty Springfield song could hold such menace. There were times when being in his vast and gloomy house felt like being in an episode of Prime Suspect. The low lighting. The menace of Dusty singing in the background, “I won't live again ‘til I'm with you; oh, darling, I won't love again unless it's with you…”. The waiting for DI Jane Tennyson to come swanning in, being simultaneously butch but fem, to announce that she, Ailsa Graham, was the latest victim of the Butcher of Heaton Moor.

Flights of fancy take her over more regularly these days, since the days began to stretch out before her so endlessly. Hours no longer seem to connect or add up to something as delineated as days. They just yawn on into the void that she meanders through, punctuated by light and then no light.

It’s the fantasies that make her life more bearable. In her fantasy realm, she is in control. Penetration is at her behest. She cues up diversions from whatever mundanity surrounds her like a dj in a booth.

The sun hides behind a cloud, and she shudders. Pavlovian reaction. Standing, she picks up the empty carrier bag and takes it over to one of the park bins. The world smells of the threat of a storm. She can almost taste it in the air. The clouds over the sun are growing darker and the closeness in the air is oppressive.

Thunderclap. The heavens open, and she is soaked to the skin in warm summer rain as the sky is littered with flashes of electrical energy. Roll after roll of thunder. People around her are scurrying for cover, trying to get out of the rain, sheltering in the shadow of the buildings that surround the park. She stays central, arms thrown wide, mouth open to catch drops of the rain. It’s years since she has stood in the rain for the sheer hell of it. The downpour invigorates her. Mascara runs into her eyes and down her cheeks. Her hair is plastered to her head, her clothes plastered to her body. Anybody looking will be able to see her underwear, the outline of her breasts, her nipples standing proud, the rise of her belly and the swell of her thighs. She doesn’t care. She feels alive for the first time in months. People are still running, with t-shirts pulled up over their heads, or newspapers serving as inadequate paper umbrellas. Some of them glance at her as they rush past, but she is oblivious. She lets the water penetrate her clothes, her skin, her mind. It washes away the grime and the cares of her life. It washes away her lethargy.

The downpour lasts ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It stops as suddenly as it began. No petering out. No half hearted attempt to squeeze a few more drops out of the clouds. It stops, the thunderstorm stops, and the clouds drift off, their load lightened.

Her clothes are dripping water, and she leaves the park, walking up into town. People walking past her, and the people she walks by, look at her as though she’s mad. Nobody is as wet as she is. Nobody.

She makes it to Kendal’s and flashes “Don’t you dare stop me” eyes at the security guard on the door. She walks through the cosmetics department leaving drips of water in her wake and takes her wetness up two floors.

She is so alive in this moment that she doesn’t care about the price of things or whether she can afford to buy, she simply takes things from the rails.

She doesn’t even try things on, just takes them to the till and buys. The saleswoman barely flickers as she rings the items through. You never question someone who is paying good money.

It feels liberating to do this. She receives her purchases in their bags and takes them to the fitting rooms. The saleswoman on duty looks at her and smiles.

“Getting changed, are you?” she says, almost laughing.

Ailsa grins back at her, alive and full of laughter.

“I’ve got a receipt,” she tells the woman.

“Go on in, love.”

Brand new underwear, new shoes, a skirt and top. She transforms before her own eyes, in the mirror, like Mr Ben. Colourful and vibrant, she emerges from the fitting room, her old, wet clothes stuffed into the same bags that mere moments ago held the new feathers she’s wearing now.

She’s high and laughing, washed clean by the storm, washed clean of him and all the things in her past that she has been carrying for too long. She leaves the store, smiling, her eyes wide open. Ready and willing to greet the world.

Something in that rainstorm penetrated her soul. Something cleaned her outside and in. Something that is going to lift her and carry her away, clean out of sight.

She feels it.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

The First of Many

Thumb to the outside, her fist connects. She feels his nose collapse under the impact of her punch. Blood, bone and gristle merge and splinter. She tastes some of his blood on her lip at the same time as she registers the damage she has done. It thrills and sickens her. She is not angry; she just needed to do this. She needed to feel the aggression, bunching up through her arm and out through her clenched hand. Thumb to the outside, just as her brother had taught her.

He is stupefied with shock. His nose is pulpy, blood pouring from it in clots and globules, mixed with mucus. His nose is no longer the shape it used to be. She has smashed it with one blow. She never knew that she had it in her.

“Good aim,” he says, eventually. His voice sounds thick. Blood has run down from his nose into his mouth. Maybe it has gone down his airway to his throat as well.

She looks at him, and then contemplates her fist. There is the barest mark on it. Some pinkness around the knuckles, and traces of his blood, but nothing more than that. She looks at it as though it is a miracle.

“Was there any particular reason?” he asks her.

She shakes her head.

“That’s reassuring,” he says.

She is still looking at her fist as he walks past her to the bathroom. She hears the light click on and the sound of water running into the sink. Her fist is a miracle. All that power, and she never realised.

“I never even knew,” she says, to nobody other than herself.

He returns to the living room and stands in the doorway behind her. She turns to look at him. His eyes are puffy and bruises are starting to show, as though she has given him a pair of black eyes as well as a bloodied nose.

“I’d say it’s broken,” he tells her, as though she has pointed it out to him in conversation and he is agreeing.

She doesn’t move, just looks at him.

“I’ll make my own way to the hospital, then, shall I?”

She looks at him, mystified.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” she asks.

He laughs, derisively, then winces with pain at the air he snorted through his nose.

“I need to do something,” he says. “It’s not going to fix itself.”

She stares at him then looks back at her fist. It amazes her that something as simple as clenching her fist could produce something as satisfying as a broken nose. She hadn’t realised that she would actually feel the bone and cartilage give way. She hadn’t actually given any thought to the process at all. She had simply felt a sudden aggression that needed to be released, and her fist had formed and made contact. That was all.

She could do that to anyone.

He is in the hall, pulling on his coat. The car keys jangle as he picks them up from the key dish. She sits down, cross-legged, on the sofa and turns the tv on with the remote control. Noise fills the living room. The fake laughter of a sit-com. It makes her feel sick to hear people pretending to enjoy themselves.

“I’ll be back when I’m back then,” he says to her from the doorway.

She doesn’t even look at him. “Okay, see you later.” As though he is off to work, or off out to the pub to meet his mates.

His brow furrows in disbelief and then clears with resignation.

She lets the waves of tv idiocy wash over her and thinks of the ways in which she can use her new fist, its unleashed power. Previously, she has only ever battered with futility on pillows and cushions. Her hands were too well received by the soft plumpness of their stuffing. Now she knew what it felt like to be met with flesh and bone. The hardness slowly giving way to the force of her fist. The resistance and different sensations. The cracking sound, with its slight crunch.

She picks up the phone and dials for pizza. He will be gone for hours, and she is hungry. She orders for one, and waits.

The next day she wakes to find that she is alone in the bed. She stumbles, half asleep, across the laundry strewn bedroom floor and out into the hallway. She needs to use the bathroom, but decides she should check to see that he is home first.

The living room is in darkness, the curtains drawn. The sun is trying, weakly, to penetrate the thin weave of the fabric. She turns on the hall light, so that the living room can be seen, at least in part. He is dark and heavy on the sofa, curled in on himself, away from the door. She turns and heads for the bathroom.

Sitting on the toilet, feeling the warmth of her night’s urine leave her body, she wonders again at the power she discovered last night. She wipes, and smiles to herself, then washes her hands at the sink. She looks at herself in the mirror that hangs above the sink. She smiles at the person she sees there. She is someone different. Someone with new knowledge about herself.

She leaves the bathroom and goes into the kitchen. Filling the kettle, she hums to herself. As the kettle boils, she opens the fridge door and begins to take breakfast things from the fridge, setting them out on the kitchen work surface. She brews a pot of tea and puts bagels into the toaster.

She walks through to the dining area between the kitchen and living room. It is just a fold out table with fold out chairs, the ones that stow away inside the table’s centre legs. She folds out one leaf of the table and sets up two of the chairs.

He stirs on the sofa.

“Morning,” she says gently. “I’m making breakfast.”

“Umph,” he responds.

“How’s your nose?” she asks. She thinks she ought to, even though she doesn’t really care. She’s not even curious.

He sits up, groggy. She can see that he has some sort of plaster strip across the bridge of his nose. His eyes are both definitely black now. He stares across the living room at her. The flat is peaceful.

She moves to the curtains and draws them back. The mid-morning light streams into the living room, and he blinks, shielding his eyes until he is used to the sudden brightness.

She looks at him. “It looks nasty,” she says.

“It looks worse than it is, apparently,” he replies. “No serious damage. You just got a lucky strike.”

Lucky. She laughs to herself. Maybe out loud, because he looks at her sharply.

She walks back to the kitchen and pours out two mugs of tea from the pot, adding milk, then carrying them through to the dining table.

The bagels pop up from the toaster, and she flips them onto a large plate. She carries them through with two smaller plates, then returns to the kitchen one last time for butter and jam.

“Come and sit down,” she tells him. “I’ve made us some breakfast. Did you manage to eat anything last night?”

He gets up from the sofa and comes to sit with her at the table. “No,” he says, picking up a bagel and starting to butter it. “Funnily enough, I didn’t.”

She feels happy this morning, with her new found strength. The element of surprise. She will use it sparingly. No need to give him reason to expect it. She understands that most of its power lies in the fact that it is unexpected and unprovoked. She looks at the picture on the wall. A string of Christmas lights in silhouette on a stark white background, reaching out from a shaky shape like a Christmas tree, running towards her and just shy.

He is eating his bagel gingerly, and sipping intermittently on his hot tea. She looks at him and is suddenly filled with love for him. She waits for him to put his mug down, then places her hand over his.

“I love you,” she says.

He looks at her blankly for a moment, then smiles, his eyes softening. Forgiveness, she supposes. Not that she’s asked for it. Forgiveness can only be given to the repentant.

He doesn’t know that she has no regret.

She pats his hand and continues eating her breakfast. He sits and watches for a while, then she smiles at him, and he carries on with his.

I love you. Such simple words. All the hidden meanings they can contain. All the violence that waits behind them, anticipating the moment when it will be released.

This will be a good day, she knows. The first of many.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Boredom

When she takes her ring off, she can still feel its weight on her finger.

When she bites her lip too fiercely, she can taste the blood in her mouth.

Both sensations are metallic. The heaviness of the ring in its absence is greater than when it is there. The taste of iron in her mouth is greater when she runs her tongue over the raw flesh on her lips than when the blood is flowing.

Feeling intensifies when its cause is lacking.

When she stares out of the window at the street, she can see the sea inside her head. Immediately in front of her eyes, beyond the white net curtain, are cars and doors and windows. Brick fronted terraced houses with grey slate roofs face her from across the road. Her mind sees the sea, like the picture in the pale lilac frame at the top of the stairs. Grey and pent up, contained within her conscious thought, the sea is everything.

Flowers still bloom in the garden. The rose bushes still carry pale pink blossoms, although their glory is fading now. The delphinium has opened and is a deep, shocking violet. Autumn is approaching. Damp is already heavy in the air, even though summer hasn’t yet reached its end.

She imagines the year as a series of hills and valleys. Summer is a valley; a flatness like the coast. It runs on, with little concession to variation in feel or smell or appearance. Autumn is an incline, leading up towards winter, which is a peak; a plateau of ice and winds and snowstorms. Then everything begins to fall again, down through the tranquillity of spring, stirred by the crash of winds and rain, until summer’s flatness is regained.

The days have been stretching on forever, pushing all thoughts of motion to one side. She has been torpid, her life a vacuum. It is boredom that is a person’s undoing. It isn’t temptation, or danger, or even wilfulness. Boredom is the thing that drives you into the arms of each of these things; it is the thing that helps you to force open the door.

She feels as though she has been waiting for something to happen all her life. She feels as though all her life has been condensed into this one summer. Her boredom and apathy have reached a fever pitch, and she knows that this is a contradiction in terms. Still, the pressure that has built up through the lack of stimulation is threatening to blow, and she knows that she must find herself an adventure.

She looks out of the window, kneeling on the smaller sofa, her elbows resting on its back, her chin resting in her hands. She feels like she did when she was eight, and summer holidays never seemed to end. Waking up not knowing what the day would bring; whether it would be fun with mum, or entrapment with dad. Whether her older sister would spare a few minutes, or even hours, out of her day to entertain this inconvenient younger sister, eleven years her junior.

Lying on her bed, listening to a clarinet quintet, she would read – consume – book after book. She would set herself maths homework. Some days she would make an effort and find her friends. They would go roaming aimlessly over the fields, throwing stones, avoiding rivals, searching for something to do to relieve the relentless heat and yawning stretch of boredom.

She feels like this today. Waiting at the window. Her only distraction found in books, or mathematical puzzles. The jumble of noise from the television only distracted her attention in fragments of time.

She waits and wonders; when will he come back for her. Like a child, waiting for an absent parent. Like a teenager, waiting to be called for by her friends, dreading the moment that sometimes came, the realisation that nobody would come.

Solitude.

Curled into sleep each night, she unfolds her limbs every morning and faces another day. The long drag of it undisturbed by any novelty.

She moves from where she is lounging. She twists and drops from the sofa, landing on her feet, moving straight into motion across the room to the kitchen where, through force of habit and for want of anything better to do, she fills the kettle and switches it on. More tea, more reading, more waiting for the next moment to fill with something other than this boredom.

The darkness is gathering, and lights come on in houses across the street. She turns her own lights on and leaves the curtains open. Anyone wanting to look in from the street will be able to see what she is doing. She doesn’t care; there is nothing for them to see.

Three rings of the telephone. The sound shatters the silence that has wrapped itself around her all day. Just three rings. The fateful signal. She picks up the phone and makes sure that she won’t connect when she flips it open. She selects Received Calls from the list and deletes his number from the list. She has the number committed to memory. It is stored nowhere in her phone. She presses the buttons that release the digits onto the screen, then presses the green button.

He answers immediately.

“Thirty minutes,” is all he says, then puts the phone down.

She pulls on her shoes and her jacket. She pulls her hair back into a ponytail. She picks up her keys from the table and leaves the house, passing the rose bushes in the garden, walking through the gate and onto the street. She has thirty minutes to get to the meeting point.

She has made this journey innumerable times before, but each time is the same; each time she feels the flutter of panic in the pit of her stomach that she will not be on time, that she will mess things up for everyone else. She walks quickly, but not so that it attracts anyone’s attention. Purposefully and with speed, she moves along the street.

After twenty minutes of walking, she can see some of them already standing at the allotted place. She maintains her pace.

No words are exchanged when she reaches them. Two more arrive, and then the van. They all climb in. She gets to sit in the front with him, the rest of them hidden in the back. When they get out again, at their destination, he will get out with them, and she will slide across into the driver’s seat, ready to take off. With or without passengers, depending on how well things go.

There was a time when she was one of the ones to go in and carry out the job. She was efficient and calm. But the old driver had been taken out one day. As ever, she had been riding up front, and it was up to her to push him out of the way and slide into his seat. She remembered how he had hit the tarmac with a thud, falling through the driver’s door that she had pushed open while trying to keep the van straight on the road. They had been impressed. It didn’t take much for her to impress them. They still, after all these years, couldn’t see past the fact that she was a woman.

She misses the methodical nature of the work. She misses the precision of knowing where to place the blade, how much pressure to put on, to split joints, to cut through bones. How to minimise the flow of blood, so that cleaning up afterwards wasn’t such a chore. She had been good at that. Driving bores her. It is part of the overall boredom she is beginning to feel with everything. It is a different kind of danger. She knows what the risks are of being the sitting target in the driving seat. She knows there is a higher chance that she will be killed. But she isn’t in this job for the thrill of potential death. She is here to use her skills.

She has been trained to save life, not end it, but all skills are transferable and can be used for other ends.

Sitting in the van, waiting for them to come out with the sacks, she remembers A Level Biology. She remembers the yellowing white rats in their formaldehyde filled plastic bags. She remembers the boards they would each lay their rat out on, and the pleasurable because sickening crack of the bones as they broke the rats’ legs and pinned them to the surface of the boards. That had been the most enjoyable part for her. More so than the slice of scalpel blade into the chemical toughened skin. More so than the realisation that you had a female one, and her womb was full of foetuses. It was the crack and crunch of bone coming away from cartilage.

That was what she missed about the job.

The night is silent around the van, and she finds herself thinking of the sea again. The number of jobs they carry out each year is shrinking. She doesn’t know how much more of this she can stand. All this waiting, and then not doing the thing she wants to do.

They will be in there for a couple of hours, to do the job properly. All she has to do is wait.

She slips from the van, leaving the keys in the ignition. She pushes her hands into her jacket pockets and walks away, huddling down into her jacket, hiding her chin behind its up-turned collar. She walks quickly, and doesn’t look behind her. She knows there is nobody to see her, she doesn’t need to look back.

She walks through the warren of streets and out onto the main road. The street lights are brighter here, and she slows her pace and relaxes her shoulders. She keeps an eye out for a passing cab with its yellow light showing. It will take an hour for her to walk home from here, ten minutes in a cab.

She knows where her papers are. She knows what she needs to throw into a bag; the things she can’t get away with not taking. Other things she can get hold of wherever she turns up. She has her real papers, her false papers that everyone working in this business is issued with, and her spare set of false papers. Those were the ones she would travel on. The person who had provided her with them, the only one who knew she had them, had been dispatched months ago.

She flags down a cab, and he takes her back to the house. She tells him to wait, she will be in and out in no time. He asks where she is going to next. She tells him the airport.

She will at last play the game she has always wanted to play; the one that sounds like true adventure. She grabs all the things she needs, and locks the house behind her. She posts the keys back into the porch. She won’t need them again. They lie, silver and glinting, on the doormat.

She gets back into the cab and sets off for her future.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Something More

In the crushing half light of this bedroom, where you can see bones through skin, she thinks of the plates draining in the kitchen; the way you can see your hand through them when you hold them to the light. Bone china, as thin and delicate as the bones in your hand. As translucent as the skin in this half light. She thinks of anything but him, keeping her eyes on the ceiling above and beyond his head.

Rachel thinks of the other one. The one who she will never be with. He offers her more and less than Richard ever could. She suffers Richard’s failure to be the thing she needs. The other one will never be the thing she needs, either, but he offers her far more and far less in the way of promise than Richard ever could.

She waits for this ritual to be over. She hopes for some semblance of passion, some sign of anger and hatred that will lift her above the banality of expression that is found in their love making.

That she has to refer to it as love making sums up, for her, the suburban quality of its disappointment. Rachel stares at the ceiling and feels Richard’s muscles moving beneath her fingers. Her hands are spread across his back, and his muscles ripple as he moves in and out of her. She thinks of swimmers, swimming the butterfly stroke, swimming the breast stroke, bobbing up and down. She thinks of swimmers, swimming the channel, a feat of endurance. She thinks of the sea, cold and grey and relentless, stretching on as far as the eye can see. No end to it, just a beginning on a shore, and a distant horizon over which she’ll never pass.

Rachel thinks of Steve’s hand in her hair, the way it pulled and the snap of her neck as her head was forced back. She thinks of the way that he pulled her top down and pulled her breasts out of her bra. She thinks of the way he left her gasping, panting for more, when he had done nothing, just threatened her with violence and hurt and indescribable pleasure. She feels her body heat rise. She feels herself become wet with desire. She knows it because Richard slips slightly, loses his grip, almost falls out of her. She grips with her vagina, with her thighs; she holds him in there and hates him, pushing herself forward into climax. She can’t look at him, bending her head back, arching her neck, her back, burrowing backwards into the pillow, looking at the wall behind the bed. Her shudders are silent. It isn’t enough, but it’s all that she will get tonight. All she will ever get from colluding in this pretence.

Richard strokes her hair, and Rachel pushes him off her, carrying traces of him with her into the bathroom, where she showers and washes herself clean of him. She imagines him lying in the half darkness, the half light, the summer darkness not fit for purpose, not creating a shield for what they have just done. Rachel waits in the bathroom until she is sure he will have fallen asleep, then she dresses and leaves the house.

There is no way of knowing what time it is, once she is outside. Her watch is on the bedside table. The clock in the car hasn’t worked for months, telling the correct time only twice a day, and never when she expected it to. She starts the car and drives away from the house. There is no purpose in her mind, all that she seeks is freedom from the prison of her life. She is sober, she is awake, she is no danger to anyone else on the roads at whatever hour this is.

Across town, she knows, he will be awake, smoking and drinking himself to death in a dark kitchen. He is scared of what he wants, and so pretends he doesn’t want it. He is scared of what she represents. She felt it in him, she tasted it on his breath. She has seen the look in his eyes, the way he searched her eyes for that same feeling, and when he saw it, he withdrew.

Scared little boy, hiding behind the notion that he is in control, that this is a nothing. Arrogant arsehole who pretends that she was just a diversion that he doesn’t need any more.

Rachel drives, barely noticing the roads she is travelling along. She drives away from the city, away from Richard, away from the other one. The sun is already coming up. There has barely been an hour of darkness, and it was a poor excuse for darkness anyway. Nights spent in twilight for two months of the year, either side of the 21st of June.

She pulls into the car park of a roadside caff, one that has been open all night. She orders tea and pours it, dribbling, from the spout of the stainless steel teapot. It is dark and strong already. She can smell the tannins coming off it. The milk is thick and oily, UHT. It leaves a swirl of creaminess after she has poured it into the tea. She stirs it round, and the swirl disappears, but the oily film doesn’t.

Staring ahead into nothing, Rachel waits for the tea to cool so that she can drink it. She waits for an idea to come into her head, as well. Everything is tight around her, but there is also too much space. She can feel every molecule of air against her skin, and it seems like she is floating in a void.

She sips the tea, which is bitter. Too strong. Too stewed. She considers going back to the counter and asking for a pot of hot water, but she knows it will make no difference. Red label tea bags from the nearest supermarket, no doubt. Dust left over from the quality blends, scraped together to fill teabags that make tea that tastes like the end of time.

She has brought nothing with her except house keys and purse. Her phone is still at home, in her handbag, at the bottom of the stairs. She knows that she could leave her house keys here, that she has all that she needs, and enough in the bank, for her to leave and never come back. Rachel doesn’t know how far she has driven so far, but she senses that it’s far enough to be a point where she carries on moving and doesn’t turn back.

Richard had ceased to matter long ago, and the other one only frustrates. Rachel leaves him behind every day, and with every day the thoughts of him grow less. It is a kind of love that she feels for him, this recognition of someone like her, someone who could offer her precisely more and infinitely less than anything she has received or wanted before. It is a kind of love that borders on hate. The surprising sentence “I could fuck his brains out” had fallen into her head not long after they met. The surprising thing was not that she thought it, but that she meant it literally and with violence. She had wanted to be the man, so that she could deliver great pain and physical tearing on him. She had wanted to draw blood, to rip him open, to spear him, castrate him, hang him on her wall as a trophy. She had wanted to subdue him, curtail him; he needed to feel what it was like; she needed to be the one who made him feel it.

He knew this, because he felt the same. It delighted her to understand this. It shocked her that it felt so normal.

Her tea is cold now, and the liquid in the pot stewed beyond recognition. She leaves it at the table and goes back out to her car.

A decision has to be made. Rachel knows that she can’t go back to Richard. To return to that life, to that stultifying existence, would be the end of her sanity. Her violence is better contained in other actions, not in the killing of her husband.

Rachel also knows that she couldn’t go to the other. It isn’t an option; he isn’t her future. He was a blind; an opportunity that opened her mind and her eyes to other opportunities. Even though he could have delivered more than Richard could even contemplate, he was too weak and unwilling. Rachel needs something more than him. Rachel needs something she will never have. She already knows that each encounter will only disappoint, the way all previous encounters, even before she understood what it was she was looking for, had disappointed.

Something stops her from driving on. Something makes her turn back, and head for the city she was thinking of leaving. Something more than the people that it contains.

She drives back, and arrives at the dark green door of a friend. She rings the bell. It is morning now. People are up and ready for work. Her friend answers the door, surprise the main expression on her face.

“I’ve left Richard,” Rachel tells her.

“Come in,” her friend says. As Rachel passes her in the doorway and walks down the hallway to the kitchen, her friend closes the door on the world outside.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” she asks.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

The Smell Of Her

“I sold one for four fifty,” he said.

“Wow, really?”

There was noise and conversation all around them, the two colleagues in their dark suits, out of place in this small bar tucked away from the rest of the drinking establishments in this part of town.

The juke box was loud, and they were having to huddle together over the small round table. The quieter of the two men was playing with a beer mat. It was advertising a Belgian beer called Kwak, and was a postcard as well as a beer mat. He stared at it for a while, barely listening to what his colleague was saying. His shirt was white and crisp, even after a long day in the office. His suit was a very dark and subtle charcoal grey. Elegantly tailored without being ostentatious. Everything about him was muted but stylish. His edges were perfectly soft.

His colleague had the blonde, mussed hair and brash arrogance of the recently moneyed. His skin was just the wrong side of tanned and looked strange. Not precisely orange, but not a natural brown either. He spoke loudly above the noise, not caring if other people heard him; quite enjoying it when they did.

“Yeah,” he was saying. “Some couple moving into the penthouse in the Box Works. Wanted some art. I was trying to shift. Bored with it now. Cut out the middle man, advertised on eBay, and the price went up and up.”

“Wow, eBay? I never would have thought.”

He tapped the edge of the beer mat absent mindedly against the table and looked across the room at the group of men and women sitting in one of the orange upholstered booths. They were already sitting there when he and Marc had arrived, and by now they were drunk. Their laughter was almost as loud as the music from the juke box, and because they were seated directly under one of the speakers, they were shouting their conversations at each other.

The loudest of them was American. He talked long and loud, above all the others, silenced only by the occasional, “Shut up, John” from one of the group.

“Jesus, how fucking loud are they?” Marc said, looking back over his shoulder at the raucous collection of people.

“Hey!” shouted the American, seeing Marc look over at them. “Don’t you look at me, man. Don’t you go looking at me, asshole. Fuck off.”

Marc held the American’s stare for a few seconds, before slowly and deliberately turning his gaze away and resuming his conversation with his colleague.

“Yeah, so the woman was really pleased with it. I don’t think the guy knew that much about art, but she was spot on. If her bloke hadn’t been hanging around, I’d have been in there. She was spot on. You know?”

“Really?”

“Foxy little minx. Too right.”

“Do you want another one?” He stood up and looked down at Marco, who lifted his glass, drained it, then waggled it from side to side.

“Another one of these, thanks mate.”

He pulled his wallet from his pocket and walked over to the bar. As he stood waiting to be served, he looked out through the window onto the street. He wondered vaguely what they were going to do with the office blocks that had been done up recently.

Behind him, back, deep into the bar, he could hear the American guy’s voice rising. He was shouting something. He could hear Marc’s affected bray competing to be the loudest.

He distracted himself from the noise by thinking about the smell of her skin, and the way she had stood among the sand dunes, dressed in the flimsiest cotton dress. There had been very little breeze that day. Her hair was thick and glossy, her fringe reaching down past her brows, almost into her eyes. Her eyes were laughing, and she had one arm pulled across the front of her, held in place at the elbow by her other hand, so that she was looking at him over her shoulder. Her lips were curved into a half smile, and it was all he could do to stop himself pulling her down to the ground and fucking her right there.

He wondered what she was doing now; where she was.

The bar man asked him what he would like, and he asked for the same again. He could hear one of the women from the group sitting in the booth saying insistently, “John sit down. Just sit down. It’s not worth it.”

The bar manager was keeping his eye on what was going on, standing just behind the bar, ready for the first sign of trouble.

He could hear Marc goading the American. He wished now that he hadn’t ordered another round. It would have been more sensible to leave.

He paid for the beers and carried them back to the table.

“What a cunt,” Mark said, picking up the pint glass as soon as it hit the table. He said it loudly and clearly, enunciating every word.

The American stood up.

“What the fuck?” He looked around at his friends. “What the fuck did he just call me?”

“I think he called you a cunt,” one of his friends said.

It happened quickly. He was sitting back, taking a drink of his beer, and suddenly the American was looming over Marc with a bar stool raised above his head. Before it even registered with him what was happening, the stool came crashing down onto Marc’s skull.

Marc fell forward slightly in his seat, but in a flash regained his balance. His hand went straight to his jacket pocket, and he pulled out a flick knife.

“For Christ’s sake, Marc,” his colleague said, putting his beer down violently and standing up. He didn’t know what he hoped to achieve by this, but some impulse forced him to do it.

Marc paid him no attention, and swung the blade towards the American.

The juke box was still playing, but the rest of the bar had gone quiet. All eyes were on Marc, swinging his blade back and forth in front of the American guy. Every so often he would make a lunge towards him.

The American had his hands up, and was standing his ground, but trying not to be too confrontational.

“Hey, man, be cool. Be cool. There’s no need for that.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Marc said, inching closer to the American guy.

“John, sit down. Leave him alone. It’s not worth it,” the same woman who had tried to reason with him earlier was saying.

“No, no. We’re cool, baby. We’re cool,” the American said to her.

“I’ll give you fucking cool, mate,” Marc almost screeched, and lunged at the American.

Everything seemed to freeze. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. Marc’s hand was missing a knife. The American had shut up, his hands raised in the air as though in surrender, and was now looking down at his stomach.

Marc had stepped back and was also looking at the American’s stomach.

He looked too and saw the slow bloom of a blood rose spreading through the material of the American’s t-shirt. It was almost beautiful to watch. It was like watching the blood seeping through her wet cotton dress as she lay there in the sea, at the shore, with the waves lapping around her.

He had stood silent and helpless that day, too. He had been unable to think what to do. He didn’t know if she was speaking or just mouthing the words, but she seemed to be saying, “Help me.” He hadn’t known how.

“You fucking stabbed me, man,” said the American.

“Shit,” Marc was saying. Over and over. “Shit, shit, shit. Mate, I’m sorry. Shit.”

The bar manager came over. He held a towel to the American’s stomach.

“Are you okay, John?” he asked. “I’ve called an ambulance and the police. Just sit down. We’ll try to hold the towel tight, eh? Stop you losing any more blood.”

His friends started to come back to life. They started to take action, to help their friend sit down in the booth.

Marc had sat back down on his chair, and was looking at his hands, which were clean. No blood. No knife, either.

He looked around on the floor, and saw it, lying where it had dropped when Marc had let go of it. He must have stuck it in and pulled it straight out, when he realised what he had done.

She had been pregnant, quite a way gone, that day she started bleeding on the beach. She had looked so pretty earlier, up in the sand dunes. And then it was all over, right there in that split second that their child lost its tenuous grip on life.

She had pleaded with him to help her, and he had done nothing. He was paralysed, incapable of thought, incapable of movement. It had taken a stranger to come along and sort things out. He hadn’t even called an ambulance for her.

He gave his witness statement to the police while the paramedics were seeing to the American guy. He was free to go after that. They were taking Marc in. The American was taken to hospital, and his friends dispersed soon afterwards.

Marc was taken out to the police car and driven away. He picked up his case, checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and his keys, and started to walk out of the bar.

“Don’t come back, eh?” said the bar manager. “You or your mate.”

Don’t come back. That was what she’d said to him, sitting there in the hospital bed, after he’d spent another half hour at her bedside, not knowing what to say.

It was the last time he’d seen her. Three years ago. And the memory of the bloom spreading across her thin, wet cotton dress remained.

He wondered what she was doing, where she was now. He remembered the smell of her skin.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006

Hollows (For S)

She is young and old. Old like the pebbles on the beach with their ancient fossil creatures entombed within; but not as old as those that have been worn away to grains of sand. She sits there, looking out to sea, wrapped in woollen hat and scarf and gloves, woollen coat and trousers. She is like some schoolchild from the 1930s picked up and put down again some seventy years later.

The pebbles, stacked up like a monstrous wall with an almost sheer cliff face drop from sea defences to shore, are hard beneath her, where she sits. On the beach, dogs race each other and themselves, back and forth, and round and round, mad with the joy of sea spray and wind, racing time, letting their ears blow behind them as they face the wind head-on, tongues lolling from panting mouths that make them look as though they are laughing. Asthmatic laughing, but joyful.

She is protected from the wind, inside her woollen layers, but it kisses gently against her face. Its kisses are cold on her skin, and she tries to remember the last time she was naked in someone else’s presence; to remember what it felt like, who she was then. She tries to recall how the sheets felt against her skin; her hair falling over her shoulders. She can’t, because that would be invention. She won’t allow herself to remember the facts; the roughness of the carpet against her back; the bruising on her spine; the roughness of his mouth against her breast; his hand pulling her hair; snapping her head back, so she could not look at him; his hand covering her eyes when she tried. She doesn’t want to remember that, or who the woman was to let that happen.

She thinks, instead, of marbles. The tins and bags of them she and her brother had as children. The feel of the glass when you rolled a fistful of them against each other in your hand; the way the glass surfaces would crunch and grate against each other; the cold, almost metallic feel of them inside her mouth. Glass marbles taste like fear. They fill your mouth with fear and make you gag. Some of the older marbles were pitted with craters, where the force of impact in play had chipped away the surface. Those were the ones that grated the most, the ones that tasted of chaos and death. She shudders to remember.

A long time ago, she was small and young and still almost innocent. But glass marbles in her mouth told her everything she needed to know about life.

She is wearing a silver ring on the third finger of her right hand. In cold weather, her fingers are thin, and the ring slips around, too big, but smooth as well, on the inside. She can feel that the ring is loose inside her glove, that the smoothness of its crafted circle is moving against her finger.

In her bag she has a notebook, and a green pen from MOMA. The pen is a green plastic labyrinth, and there are tiny silver ball bearings trapped inside. Smaller than the sugary ball bearings you can buy to decorate a cake with. Tiny, like the ball point in a ball point pen. The pen is an impossible puzzle to complete, but it is fresh and green, and sits in her bag, waiting to be utilised.

She is unable to write today. She has taken the notebook and the labyrinthine pen from her bag over a dozen times. At the kitchen table this morning, toast and jam on a plate in front of her, a window looking out over the bay there for her to gaze through. Curled up in an armchair in the living room, snuggled inside a blanket, in front of the fire, waiting for the weather to decide its action for the day. Here, on the pebbles in front of the sea, in this winter-spring hinterland of cold winds and dampness in the air. Writing is not for her today, though. The ink stutters from the pen, and the words refuse to even stutter from her mind. She is a blank, content to listen to the sea; happy to watch daft dogs circling on the beach.

She can no longer write to the formula expected of her. She can no longer surrender to the free association of her thoughts. She is stuck. Abandoned. Uninspired and far too calm to care. In her daylight, waking hours, she is a ship whose sails won’t catch the wind; who sits and waits for inspiration to strike once more.

She has been here forever; for the period of her entire existence, and that of the planet, of the universe. She has been here and never moved, staring out at that same cold, green sea. And yet, she only arrived two, maybe three hours ago. All of this clean and fresh to her eyes, all of it painfully familiar.

She came here to escape. Her mind needed rest and peace. When she opened up the house again, turning on heating to chase away the damp, pulling back the heavy shutters on the outsides of the windows, the light came through from the outside and showed up traces of the last time she was here. The rabbits peered out at her from the dull bronze of the bracken at the back of the house. They are slower in the winter. They were huddled together, their eyes shining back at her as she looked out of the kitchen window.

Pots, pans and glassware that had not been put into cupboards needed to be cleaned again, and the first hours back in the house were spent fixing small jobs like that one. The clean sheets and bed linen she had brought with her from home were put onto the bed, and the sheets and towels that had been tucked away in the airing cupboard during her absence were brought out to air in front of heaters and radiators. All of these things she did alone, in the silence of this big stone house that sits among the bracken on the side of a mountain, a hundred miles from what she had left behind. A hundred miles, and a hundred years.

You can't go back to the start. She knows that. Things have happened that ruined all the positives there were between them. She is no longer able to go back and make them good again. The only way forward is to start over, trying to find new positives, hoping that the new will be as good as the old once were. The old positives underpinned everything that they were together, and enabled forgiveness, but now they no longer work. Some things happen that ruin them completely. Her choice now is whether to start over as part of a pair, or whether to take this opportunity to be free, with her own positives, and the hollow of missing him to fill.

So she sits here on the pebbles, and thinks about marbles and the taste of fear and death in her mouth. She could use the pebbles to fill the hollow, but even all the pebbles on this beach, and all those lying at the bottom of the sea, and along the coast, would be too few to fill that space. She is everything and all of time, but he is even more. The hollow where he was feels bigger than the universe right now. Throwing pebbles into it would be like trying to fill a black hole with grains of salt.

Lies and corruption on all sides. His lies far worse than her own, though. She only toyed with the idea. She didn’t go out with the idea that out of sight and out of mind meant the usual rules no longer applied. And the hollow that is left by the knowledge that he did is larger even than the hollow of missing him.

The pebbles clink as they hit each other during the infinite fall into the void. She stares out to sea, cold and grey-green, wrapped in woollens and hard as nails, but melting, distorting. Failing.

She places pebbles into her pockets, lets them fall through the holes she has cut there, so that they fill the edges of the lining of her coat. She shakes them round, standing upright on top of the pebble cliff; she feels the weight of them, and knows they will do the trick.

She crashes down the pebbles, sliding her feet into the mass of them, leaving behind a trail. Landing safely on the beach, she strides purposefully towards the sea, trying not to think of how cold it looks, how cold it must be. She wades out to waist deep, and the coldness of it shocks and thrills her. She gasps when the cold first hits her.

Moving out against the waves, the water becomes deeper, and the sandbar falls away beneath her feet. Her instinct is to swim, but the pebbles that line the inside of her coat want to pull her down, and she surrenders to their will.

As her head goes under the water, she hears dogs barking, and people shouting. She keeps her eyes open, so that she can see the glassy grey-green of her underwater resting place on the way down, but the salt water stings her eyes. She is sinking, and the air she had saved inside her lungs is beginning to burn, telling her that she needs to gulp more in or die. She knows that if she gulps, she will only draw in water, flooding her lungs with liquid instead of air.

She breathes in the sea through her nose, and suddenly arms pull her up out of the water, and she is spluttering and gasping, and air instead of water is rasping into her lungs.

She is pulled onto the beach, and she vomits salt water into the sand beside her head. She hears voices above her, raining down on her from the sky, but they do not make sense, and instead she concentrates on the chocolate coloured face of the dog that has come to lie down more than an arm’s-length away from her. Its eyes are a dark brown, too, and the whites are very white. She stares at it for a long time, it seems to her, and then the blackness descends.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006