Memory

It was all as a dream would be, that morning when Joe Benson woke up without knowing where he was. Still fully clothed, in a room which he sensed should be familiar to him, his only clue to his location was the train ticket in his jacket pocket.

The room was empty except for him. Him and the furniture, of course.

Joe sat up on the sofa and rubbed his head, like a man waking with a hangover. His head had none of the dull ache of a hangover, however, and his mouth was free of the taste of stale alcohol. Joe rubbed his head in sleepiness and confusion, wondering dimly to himself whether this was a dream.

The room was furnished in an unmemorable way; pieces from the 90s that had managed to push their way into the 21^st century sat alongside the anonymously new and the inherited old.

Joe hadn’t completely lost his memory, then; just his sense of place.

He got up and went into the kitchen. Instinct moved him around the room, gathering up the ingredients for breakfast. Working like this on automatic pilot, Joe tried to remember the night before. He tried consciously remembering, and then chasing all thought of remembering from his mind, hoping to catch the memory unawares. Neither method worked. In fact, the further back he tried to remember, the more he realised that every last action that he had performed throughout his life was missing.

He knew his name; he remembered facts about objects and historical events; he knew the names of his parents, his sisters, his best friend; what he couldn’t remember was any of the things he had done. Just the ingrained results of constantly repeated actions, such as making breakfast and how to move around this flat, the location of which he still didn’t recollect.

He took the train ticket from his pocket again. Piccadilly to Euston. Manchester to London. Return. The ticket was the return portion of a trip he had made. He searched his pockets for the other ticket, for the pair to his return journey. He had come back to this flat, a place he presumed was his home, yesterday.

His laptop. Joe put the train ticket down on the kitchen table and returned to the living room. His laptop was in its bag, lying on the floor beside the sofa. He picked it up and took it into the kitchen.

Switching on, he had a momentary panic that he wouldn’t be able to remember any of his passwords. The computer booted up and he opened up his emails. A potted history of people he knew and items he had purchased sat in his inbox. He opened the receipt for his train tickets, and there he found his answer.

He had apparently gone up to Manchester two days before.

He clicked the down arrow to open up the next email. It was a message from someone he didn’t know. Someone new, perhaps, less well ingrained on his memory. Her name was O’Deigh and he had gone to visit her as research for his architecture project. He scrolled through the history of their correspondence, discovering that he was researching his architecture PhD at Westminster. She worked in a former warehouse that had been converted into a museum.

He didn’t remember any of this.

There was a telephone number. He checked his watch. It wasn’t too early to ring. But the three tiny letters alongside the date in the window by the three told him that it was Saturday.

She probably wouldn’t be there.

Joe thought about it for a moment. He didn’t think he could wait until Monday. He didn’t think he could spend a weekend not knowing what might have happened to him up in Manchester.

As far as he knew, he had gone alone. His parents wouldn’t be able to help. His sisters were in other parts of the country. He couldn’t remember the names of anyone else in his department at the University. His memory loss was annoyingly selective.

His wallet was in his pocket. He didn’t have much cash, but he had his credit card and, searching into his memory, he found that he also carried his PIN.

His brain forced the word Oyster into his mind. He looked inside his wallet, then checked his pockets. He found the credit card sized blue plastic ticket in the back pocket of his jeans.

Decision made, Joe left the flat and allowed his legs to carry him to the tube station. The sign by the door said that he was at Ealing Broadway station. Which meant Central Line to Tottenham Court Road and then Northern Line to Euston.

He was taking a risk, he knew, but he had the feeling that returning to Manchester, to the museum he had visited, was his best chance at finding out what had happened to him.

The journey took half an hour. He emerged into Euston station at 11.30. Joining a queue in the ticket hall, Joe tried to remember how long it took to get from London to Manchester. The queue was slow, but as long as it took him to get to the teller, he had no recollection of journey times to the north.

“You’ve just missed one,” the woman said to him, when he asked what time the next train to Manchester would be. “And you’re just about to miss the next one, too.”

“And the one after that?”

“12.38.”

“A return on that one, then.”

“Coming back when?”

Joe tried to calculate. “What time does it get in?”

“15.47.”

Joe couldn’t work out how long it might take him to get answers to fill in the blanks in his memory. “What time’s the last train back today?”

The woman tapped keys on her computer. “Last direct train is 20.17, gets in at 00.21.”

“Coming back today then.”

“Same day return.”

More tapping on the computer, and then, “£59.50, please.”

Joe handed over his credit card. He signed the tiny slip of paper the same size as the ticket and received the two orange pieces of card.

He checked his watch. It was now past 12. He had half an hour to kill. He wished he had brought a book. Wandering around the concourse, he saw WHSmith. He bought a paper and food for the journey. He realised that he was thirsty and bought two large bottles of water. He drank one straight down as soon as he left the shop.

Pigeons were flying around the small food area, scavenging dropped food like the feathered rats they were. He walked back towards the ticket office, looking for somewhere to sit.

Tucked away at the back of the concourse, opposite the ticket hall, he found a set of standard metal benches. He sat beside a large black woman, who was humming to herself, and pretended to read his paper.

Inside his head, Joe was recapping what he had learnt so far this morning. The woman’s humming wove in and out through his thoughts. He knew his name already. He had learnt what he was currently doing with his life. He knew, sort of, why he had been in Manchester, and for how long. But of all the things he had learnt about himself, he couldn’t really remember any of them. The facts sat in his head as though they belonged to someone else. They could have been about anyone. He might have found them in the newspaper that sat unread in his hands.

The woman stopped humming and got up abruptly from the bench. She walked out of the concourse through the automatic doors nearby.

Joe watched her go, wondering why she had been sitting there if she wasn’t going to catch a train. He looked around him, the narrow section of the station he was sitting in. It wasn’t his idea of a day out.

The bottle of water he had drunk was making its presence known in his system, and he decided to use the toilet before getting onboard the train.

As he washed his hands, he realised that he hadn’t showered or even changed his clothes before leaving the house. He hadn’t looked at himself in a mirror, hadn’t shaved, cleaned his teeth, anything. He wondered what he looked like, whether he looked okay, or whether he looked like a down and out.

He realised that he couldn’t actually remember what he looked like. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and searched through it for some kind of photo id. There was nothing in there to show who he was other than credit cards. No driver’s licence, no student card.

Somewhere in his memory, Joe felt that he should have had at least one of those items. Something that confirmed visually that he was who he said he was.

He had been in Manchester for two days. He couldn’t remember where he had stayed or who with. The lack of picture evidence and the way he couldn’t remember what he looked like had caused Joe to suddenly doubt that he was Joe Benson, as his mind was telling him.

His signature had matched the one that was on his credit card. At least, he thought that it had. He now couldn’t remember whether the teller had checked his signature against the card.

Going back to ask would make him look foolish. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost time to board the train. He realised, also, that he had been standing in the gents’ for longer than was necessary. Not knowing what he currently looked like, Joe hurriedly left the toilets in fear that he would be taken for a pervert.

Back in the concourse, Joe checked the departure board. The train was at platform 15. He hurried to the gate and showed his ticket. The guard waved him through and he boarded the train.

He found an unreserved seat and settled in. He suddenly realised that he had left his bag of food somewhere on the station at the same moment that he realised he was thirsty again. Somewhere inside him, Joe knew that it wasn’t normal to be so thirsty so soon after having drunk a litre of water.

The word diabetic flashed into his head. He wondered if he was diabetic. How would he know without going into a coma? Did you even fall into a coma when you were diabetic?

Joe thought more calmly, slowing his racing mind, reducing the panic that threatened to build. He told himself that, if he were a diabetic, it would be something that he remembered. Just as he had remembered the names of his parents and his sisters.

A staff member walked past his seat.

“Excuse me,” he called. The man returned. “What time will the onboard shop be open?”

“About ten minutes after we leave the station, sir,” the man replied.

“Thank you,” Joe said.

The man continued up the train, removing reservation slips from the seats.

Removing his jacket and leaving it on his seat as a marker, Joe decided to go to the toilet. He knew instinctively that you weren’t supposed to drink the water from onboard toilets, but he had to do something about his thirst.

He pushed the button to release the door and, once inside, pushed a second button to close and lock it. Turning from the door, he found that he faced a full length mirror. He looked at his reflection. He was there. That was something. He wasn’t a figment of his own imagination or a vampire. It disturbed him to find that he didn’t recognise himself. It was as though he was looking at a stranger; as though his reflection in the mirror was another person standing opposite him.

Joe raised a hand to his tousled hair, trying to straighten it out slightly. His hair was curly, though, and wouldn’t be made straight. He rubbed the same hand over his stubbly chin. His bristles were black, like his hair. His eyes were a fierce blue, and slightly bloodshot. He looked, in all frankness, as though he had been out on the piss all night.

Staring at himself wasn’t getting him anywhere. It didn’t matter how long he looked at his reflection, he still didn’t recognise himself.

He turned from the mirror and crossed to the small hand basin. Pushing the button for water, he cupped one hand and drank the liquid he caught there. It tasted fine, and he tried not to think that it wasn’t running water; that it had probably been stagnating inside a plastic tube for a while.

His thirst slaked, he returned to his seat. A woman was sitting there. She had moved his jacket to the aisle seat and positioned herself by the window. Joe stood there for a moment, wondering whether to say anything to her. She looked up at him and smiled, then looked away again.

On the fold down table, she had a large bottle of water, a newspaper and the same crisps and snacks that he had bought at the station. Joe frowned and picked up his jacket from the seat beside her. He stowed it on the overhead baggage shelf. While he was standing, arms raised to push the jacket firmly onto the shelf, he looked down the carriage. All the window seats were taken; there was no point moving somewhere else. He looked down at the top of the woman’s head, bowed as it was over the newspaper.

“Excuse me,” he said. She looked up at him, smiling again. She was pretty. “I wonder if I could have some of your water?”

She looked at the bottle, then back up at him. “Sure,” she said. “It’s too big for me.”

She was American. Joe sat in the seat beside her and she passed the water to him.

“You look clean,” she joked.

Joe smiled politely, and drank from the bottle. It tasted better than the water in the toilet.

“Dehydrated?” the woman asked, an understanding look on her face.

“Just a bit,” said Joe. He handed the bottle back to her. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, and returned to reading the newspaper.

“I bought a newspaper earlier,” Joe said. The woman smiled but didn’t look at him. “I lost it somewhere on the station,” he continued. “I had crisps and snacks, and a big bottle of water, as well.”

The woman carried on reading, smiling gently, nodding her head as though she were listening. Joe looked at her. She seemed familiar now that he had looked at her for long enough. He wondered if that was because he had now looked at her for long enough, somehow allowing her features to become a false memory.

“Do I know you?” he said.

She looked up at him briefly. “I don’t think so,” she replied.

Joe decided to stop talking. The train started to move, and he tried to relax.

He didn’t get chance to visit the onboard shop. He opened his eyes as someone beside him repeatedly said “Excuse me, we’re here.”

He had slept for the entire journey. The woman was waiting to get past him so that she could leave the train and continue her journey or her day or whatever it was that this arrival was the start of for her.

Joe shook himself awake and stood up to let her pass. He reached down his jacket and made his own way off the train, following in the wake of other passengers long gone.

He checked his watch. It was almost 4. He looked around him to see if he could find a map, or somewhere to obtain directions to the museum he had visited only days ago. There was nothing. Transport Police were patrolling the station in bullet-proof vests and shirt sleeves. It was a fine, warm day up in Manchester. April was being kind to the north.

Joe approached a police woman. She gave him directions from the station to the tram and told him which stop he needed to get off at. He thanked her and found himself wanting to ask her if she knew who he was or what might have happened to him on his last, very recent, trip up here.

Nothing was coming back to him. He didn’t know what he had hoped for. Some sort of epiphany, maybe, as he stepped from the train into this city that was a stranger to him.

The tram journey was strangely jerky. The seats were narrow and uncomfortable, and the tram snaked its way through the city centre. He disembarked at the stop the police officer had told him was his destination.

There were signs to the museum and, five minutes later, he was at its door. He didn’t recognise any of the scenery on his walk from the tram stop. He thought that he should at least have had some kind of recall triggered by his journey. He had only been here a matter of days before.

He entered the museum and was directed down to the study centre. He emerged from the lift and the man on the information desk asked him if he could help.

“I’m looking for Ms O’Deigh,” he said. “I don’t expect that she works on a Saturday.”

“You’re in luck,” the man responded. “She is in today. Just through those doors there.” He pointed to a set of glass doors directly behind Joe.

Joe thanked him and walked over to the doors. He pulled one open and entered the room.

At the desk was the same woman he had been sitting next to on the train.

“Hello,” she said, slightly surprised.

“I knew that I recognised you!” Joe exclaimed, his face lighting up.

“No,” she said slowly. “We’ve never met before.”

”But you’re Ms O’Deigh?” Joe said.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“I’m Joe Benson,” he told her, smiling broadly.

“Really,” she replied, “I don’t know you.”

“But I was here two days ago. You met me and gave me a tour.”

“I’ve been in London all week,” she said, frowning. “You just saw me on the train back.” She moved quickly from behind the desk, and was suddenly holding him firmly by the arm, moving him towards a chair. “Are you okay,” she was saying. “You’ve gone awfully pale. Here, sit down a minute.”

Joe sank gratefully onto the chair.

“Can I get you some water?” she asked him. He nodded.

She returned with a plastic cup of chilled water, and he drank.

“I’m so thirsty,” he said. He felt confused. His eyes began to fill with tears. The woman took hold of one of his hands. Her hand felt cool and smooth against his. He blinked at her. “I can’t remember who I am,” he said.

“But you just told me your name,” she replied gently.

“I know,” Joe responded, his voice faltering. “That’s who I think I am. Here,” he rummaged in his jacket pocket, then remembered that he had left the original ticket that proved he had been to Manchester earlier that week on the kitchen table. “Oh,” he said. “I left it at home.”

“Left what?” the woman asked.

“The ticket that proved I’d been in Manchester this week.”

“Wait here a minute,” O’Deigh said, and left the room.

She returned with the man from the information desk. “This is Lee,” she said. “He works here all the time.” She turned to him. “Lee,” she said, “has this man been in here this week?”

“I don’t recognise him,” Lee said, shrugging apologetically. He backed his shrug up with a “Sorry.”

“Thanks, Lee,” O’Deigh said.

She sat back down alongside him.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“O’Deigh,” she said.

“No, I mean your first name.”

“My first name is ridiculous. You can call me O’Deigh.”

Joe fell silent again.

“What day do you think you were in here?”

“I don’t know. Wednesday, maybe. Or Thursday.”

“Well, we’re not open to the public on a Wednesday. If you were here and you met someone, that might explain why Lee doesn’t remember you.” She paused, thinking. “And you believe that you met me, although I wasn’t here on Wednesday.” She looked at him. “Why did you come here on Wednesday?”

“I’m an architecture student. I’m doing my PhD on converted industrial buildings. I’d come to have a look around. You were supposed to give me a tour. We’d emailed early in the week, setting it up. I have all the emails on my computer at home.”

He stopped speaking and looked at the empty plastic cup he was holding in his hands.

“You want more water?” O’Deigh asked him.

“Please.”

She took the cup from him and left the room again. She was gone for a while. Eventually she came back with the water and said, “Lee’s gone to get you coffee with sugar.”

She sat down, then spoke again.

I can check back through my emails, if you like, see if there’s anything there from you.”

Joe brightened and looked up at her. “Would you?” he said, eagerly. “I’d appreciate it.”

She stood up and crossed the room to her desk. He watched the back of her as she opened up emails and read through their contents. She turned to look at him.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

Joe nodded despondently.

“I’m sorry,” she said, coming back to sit with him again. She patted his hand.

Lee came into the room with a cardboard cup full of steaming coffee.

“Here you go,” he said to O’Deigh. “I put three sugars in, as you suggested.”

“Thanks, Lee,” she said, taking the cup from him. She put it down on the table at Joe’s elbow. “Sugar’s supposed to be good for shock,” she said.

Lee had left the room again.

“I don’t understand this,” said Joe.

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “It’s all very mysterious.” She looked at him. “Is there anyone else that you know you visited while you were up here?” she asked.

Joe shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he said. “The receipt for my tickets said that I travelled up on Wednesday. The return portion that I found in my pocket said I’d gone back to London on Friday. Yesterday.”

“Well,” she said, standing up and pacing around the room, “were there any other emails saying where else you might have gone?”

Joe looked sheepish. “I didn’t check,” he said.

“Drink you coffee,” she told him. He obeyed. She crossed to the phone. “I just have to make a phone call,” she told him.

Joe was feeling drowsy. He turned in the chair and rested his head on top of his arms, against the table top.

As he dropped off, he heard O’Deigh say to whoever was on the other end of the phone, “He’s come back. I’ve doped him again. I told you that this one would be trouble.”

Joe woke up in a small dark room. As he stirred and tried to sit up, someone clicked on a lamp. Joe looked towards the light source and saw a man, vaguely familiar, sitting on an orange plastic chair beside a table.

“Ben, Ben, Ben,” he said wearily.

“My name’s not Ben,” said Joe.

“Of course not, Ben. Of course not.”

The man was small but round, like a barrel. His hair was close cropped and his head looked like a bullet. His eyes, as much as Joe could see them, were small and deep set. He tried to mask his Mancunian accent with overtones of Received Pronunciation.

Joe knew that, if he could only get his head to stop buzzing and his muscles to work, he could take him. He tried to sit up.

“I wouldn’t do that, Ben,” the man said. “We’ve given you a muscle relaxant. You won’t be able to move around very easily.”

“Where am I?” Joe asked, lying back down on the camp bed he found himself on.

“You’re still in the museum, Ben. You shouldn’t have come back.” The man paused to light a cigarette. “Excuse me,” he said. “I only smoke when I’m working. It’s an old habit.” He inhaled from the cigarette and blew out smoke.

“I’ll admit, Ben, that O’Deigh fucked up. She didn’t do a very complete job of reprogramming you. She didn’t, how shall we say, populate your memory banks very effectively.” He paused again and eyed Joe shrewdly. “I must say, though, she did very well on your appearance. You look just like Joe Benson.”

“I am Joe Benson,” Joe said.

“Yes, yes. You’re Joe Benson, Ben. Son of Mark and Hilary Benson. Your sisters are called Hannah and Laura. Hannah lives in Kent and Laura has moved to Newcastle with her husband James. Your best friend is Paul, and you’re in your second year of a PhD at Westminster University, studying the use of converted buildings in modern architecture.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “We know all that, Ben. We implanted those memories.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, well, understanding isn’t something that’s part of your system, Ben. Although, I am impressed that you’re making an effort to employ it.”

“You talk as though I’m an android, or something.”

“Not an android, Ben. A replicant. You’re human, but we’ve modified you slightly.”

A door opened behind the man and O’Deigh entered the room.

“Hello, Ben,” she said. She handed something to the man, and then left again.

“Now, Ben,” the man said, leaning forward in his chair. “We’re going to try to fix the problem, but we need your co-operation. We need you to let go of the last vestiges of Ben that we haven’t managed to completely clear so that we can put the rest of Joe back in there. We need you, Ben.” He sat back in the chair. “We need you to write Joe’s report that says nothing untoward is going on here.”

Joe remained silent. He realised that he didn’t have much choice but to comply. He didn’t understand what was going on, and without that understanding he couldn’t work out how to fight back. He nodded.

“Good lad,” the man said. He stood up and took something from his pocket. It was a penlight, similar to something a doctor or an optician would use to check a patient’s eyes. He walked towards Joe and shone the light into his eyes.

From behind him, Joe felt someone push a needle into his neck. The light from the torch narrowed to a single point of brilliance, and then blackness descended.

© J R Hargreaves, April 2007

Waiting (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought –“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Could you?” she said.

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

“I can’t –" she said.

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

“Thanks,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© J R Hargreaves April 2007

Sisters

My sister leans against the worktop, in front of where the washing machine lurks in the gloom.

I am grilling cheese and boiling pasta. Halloumi, sheep’s milk sent to curds and pressed, all salty in its briny whey, sitting on the grill pan, hissing and spitting beneath the red hot glow of the element. I turn the pieces and imagine the cheese squeaking against my teeth as I chew it.

My sister leans and does nothing; says nothing. Her long legs are encased in denim, the jeans held up by a pink leather belt. Her arms are folded across her chest and her long dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

The pasta is bubbling. The pasta is done. I lift it from the water and place it onto our plates. The halloumi hisses on the grill. My sister does not move.

“Do you want a drink?” I ask, and reach the rum down from the cupboard.

Rum tastes like autumn, like Christmas, like the promise of gifts or wrapping up in a too-thick jumper. I pour two measures into glasses. I top up with cola.

“Here you go,” I say, handing one of the drinks to my sister, although she didn’t say yes to my question.

She takes the glass from my hand and continues to stand there.

I check the halloumi. It is golden brown and sizzling. I lift the pieces from the grill pan and share them between our plates.

My sister sips her drink.

Handing her a plate, I think of how I started a story today, and how quickly its nascent form was chased away by the doings and goings and listenings of the day.

My husband is at work, and then will be at squash. My children are at after school clubs, and later will be at friends’. My sister has arrived unannounced and unspeaking, and although I welcome the diversion, I wish that she would say something.

She is as curved and wordless as my teenage daughter. She sits at the dining table, half on the chair, half off. She pushes the pasta and halloumi around the plate with her fork. I eat. I am ravenous. The halloumi squeaks. It doesn’t let me down.

My sister sips her drink again.

Her silence breaks.

“I shouldn’t be drinking this,” she says. A pause, a pushing of food on plate, then, “Is this cheese pasteurised?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Why?”

I know full well why, but I’m not about to do her the service of guessing correctly straight away. Besides which, she has dropped these hints before, and their distant rumour has borne no fruit.

She eats a piece of pasta, followed by another, and one more. Halloumi squeaks in my mouth. I pause to take a swig of rum. I pretend to myself that I am a pirate. It amuses me to play these games.

I eat pasta and think about all the stories I have begun and never completed; never set down on paper or computer screen; never allowed my fingers to create in sparse black on soulless white.

I am paused in thought, my fork poised in mid-air, pasta cooling on its tines.

“What are you doing?” my sister says. Her face is lip-curlingly incredulous. Her mad sister has disappeared, her eyes gone distant, her face remote.

I pull myself back.

“Thinking,” I say. “Just thinking.” I place the now cold pasta into my mouth and chew. My mouth still full, my jaw still working, I break one of the cardinal rules of good table manners.

“So you think you’re pregnant again?” I say.

I am suddenly bored of the game.

My sister sighs and pushes her plate away from her. She turns her face away from me, placing her hand on the back of her neck and squeezing.

She sighs again and continues to look away, over her shoulder, away from me, from the room, from the disinterested question and the disinterested way in which I asked it.

“I don’t know,” she says to nothing and no-one in particular.

I finish the food on my plate. The yellow knots of egg and flour, filled with tomato and cheese paste, gone forever, leaving behind an oleaginous sea, and my fork lying silver across the white expanse of the plate.

“You should take a test, then,” I say and pull another round mouthful of rum from the glass into my mouth. I am like a fish, pulling oxygen-rich pond swill across my gills.

“Where’s Tony?” my sister asks, turning to face me, changing the subject.

“Work and then squash,” I reply.

She plays with the cold food on her plate, keeping it at arms’ length, never threatening to resume eating. I watch her fork, like a hoe, or a rake, pushing and pulling a single piece of pasta to and fro.

“Don’t play with your food,” I say, as though I am her mother. The fork clatters from her hand and in the same moment I am on my feet, gathering up the plates and carrying them to the sink. I use the clattered fork to push the redundant meal from her plate into the waste-disposal unit. It grinds away the food until there is nothing left to be seen.

I want my sister to leave. I am tired of her presence in my house, eating away my time. I wish that she would exist somewhere else; not here; not with me; somewhere distant. Hermetically sealed in another universe.

I put the dishes and the pans, each item that I have used to prepare the meal she did not want, into the dishwasher. I close the door. There will be more to go in there later; my house is littered with unwashed cups and dishes; but for now I close the door.

“Do you want another drink?” I ask, crossing the kitchen to lift the rum bottle again from the cupboard. I look across at her, my hand frozen in its flight through the air, reaching up to the handle on the cupboard door; I look across and see that she has not drunk the first one. I drop my hand and cross the room. I finish my own drink and chase it with hers.

“I’m tired of this,” I say. “I’m tired of lies and omissions. I’m tired of pretence. I’m tired of your silences and your hints.”

Hazel eyes look back at me as I speak. They are blank. She is tired too, her eyes are telling me. Tired of what, I do not know, and do not want to ask. My tiredness competes with hers. I think we are equally matched.

“If you have something to say, you should say it,” I tell her.

“If you want me to do something, to say something, to help, you should ask,” I say.

“Are you scared of something?” I ask her.

“Is there something you need? Something I can do?”

“Do you even know why you came here tonight?”

I realise that I am standing over her, my hands gripping the back of my chair, my knuckles whiter than marble, whiter than bone bleached by the sun and the sea. I realise that my voice has been rising in pitch and volume; that I am almost screaming at her.

Her hazel eyes continue to look at me.

I sit down. I try to calm down. I try to remember that she is my sister, my flesh and blood. I remember the story I was beginning to write today, forming the words in my head. I remember that it began, “I used to want to be adopted.”

My sister sighs, breathes deeply but shortly through her nose. She stands.

“I should go,” she says.

I am tired now, remembering the story I chased away with thoughts of housework. I am tired, remembering the errands I ran rather than write.

“Are you pregnant?” I ask, all the stress on the first word of the question.

She doesn’t answer. She walks through the living room to the hallway. She pulls her coat from the coat rack.

“You don’t have to go,” I say, but she has already opened the front door and closed it behind her again.

“Do you want another drink?” I say to myself, and go over to the cupboard so that I can reach down the bottle of rum again.

“I’ll ring her later,” I tell myself, although I know that I won’t. It is another of the lies of which I am so tired.

I fix my drink and leave it on the side. I walk through the house on a dirty pots trawl, gathering up abandoned plates, mugs, glasses and cereal bowls. I drag my heavy net behind my ship and land its catch into the dishwasher. This time I start the cycle. This time I mean business.

I am on my fourth drink and snoozing on the sofa by the time my husband returns with our offspring.

“Has your sister been here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “How do you know?”

“I can smell her perfume,” he replies. “What did she want?”

“The usual,” I tell him, because I don’t know what else to say. I am too tired, too drunk, to think of a useful description of my sister’s visit. “How was squash?” I say.

“Good,” he replies from the kitchen. “I won.”

“Good,” is my response from my slump on the sofa. “I’m glad.”

He reappears in the doorway with a beer in his hand.

“Have you eaten?” I ask.

“I’m not hungry,” he says.

“I’m drunk,” I tell him.

He smiles. “So I see.”

“She thinks she might be pregnant again,” I say. “Although her exact words when I asked were ‘I don’t know’.”

“Oh,” he says. Then a heartbeat’s pause before, “Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know.” And it’s true. I don’t. Either that she is pregnant, or that she doesn’t know. I belch. Too much gas.

“Nice,” says my husband, and comes to sit with me on the sofa. He lifts my legs over his and strokes them from knee to ankle and back again.

“She needs to be more careful,” I say.

“Mmm,” comes back the non-committal response. “Mmm.”

I am sleepy and curl towards my husband, resting my head on his shoulder, safe within the crook of his arm.

“She needs her own you,” I murmur into his chest. “Not these nobodies she sleeps with and never sees in daylight.”

He holds me tight against him with both arms around me.

“I love you,” he says.

I am almost asleep, too stupefied by rum to remain conscious.

“How do you know her perfume?” I ask him.

He does not answer.

© J R Hargreaves March 2007

Horses

I slept on a mattress on the floor of youngest son's bedroom last night.

When I woke up this morning, he came running into the room (he is two), flung himself on the mattress and lay there, grinning up at me, as though he had fallen into the comfiest place in the world.

I suppose, to him, it was the comfiest place in the world. At that precise moment, at least.

I remember when relationships were like that. The sense of falling backwards with absolute trust into something soft yet supportive; something that would break your fall and keep you from harm.

But any insistence that love is epitomised by the story of Rapunzel is steadily eroded by experience and cynicism. There's no such thing as absolute trust between people. Falling backwards is what idiots do; idiots who end up landing flat on their backs on concrete, with all their limbs out of joint and a crushing headache to boot.

This is how it seems to me, from the perspective of a mattress on the bedroom floor of my youngest son.

The elder of our two boys is talking to his uncle, my brother, in the spare bedroom; the room in which I would normally sleep at times like this. He is ignoring the fact that I am clearly in youngest son’s room, and have been for the entire night.

Youngest son is excited that the mattress is here. He bounces and flops and giggles, looking up at me with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket clutched to the side of his face.

He looks like his mother.

I stand in the doorway to the bedroom and look across the hallway at my brother sitting on the spare bed being attacked by eldest son with his sponge sword.

“So what’s going on?” he asks.

“I’ve been stupid,” I say, and walk downstairs to the kitchen.

I grind coffee beans and make a pot of coffee. Strong and dark, I wait for the bitterness to brew so that I can scald my mouth with it and convince myself that this is not a dream.

It has been going on for two weeks now. Since she found out about my inappropriate behaviour with a student.

I look through the kitchen window at the fields behind the house. The days are growing longer, and the sun is shining on the harsh springy grass. I watch the horses moving slowly from spot to spot, seeking out the best grass, enjoying the feel of the sunshine on their backs.

My brother comes downstairs and leaves the house without a word. I hear my wife move from the bedroom to the bathroom. I hear the drum of water from the showerhead hitting the bottom of the bath. I look through the kitchen window at the horses.

Eldest son comes down the stairs, dragging his sword behind him, looking for his uncle.

“Where’s Will?” he asks me from the hallway where he stands at the foot of the stairs, just behind the front door.

“Uncle Will’s gone out,” I tell him, turning from the window and smiling.

He nods and runs at me with his sword. I withstand the battering my legs receive. He grows bored and wanders off into the living room.

I pour myself some coffee. It is strong and black and I can smell the bitterness. It will choke my breath with its sour smell and burn my stomach with its acidity.

My brother returns with the Sunday paper. He comes into the kitchen and hands the financial supplement to me.

“Look at number 85,” he says.

I take the paper.

“What?” I say, staring at the newsprint in front of me. “What am I looking at?”

“Number 85. It’s The Times’ Top 100 companies. Look at number 85.”

He is grinning and I am helpless, as though my brain can’t translate his words into the action that is expected of me.

Impatiently, he takes the paper from me, my younger brother, keen and bright and full of pride in something. He leafs through the pages until he finds the profile for company number 85. He puts the newspaper back in my hands.

I look at the page in front of me. My head is still full of horses and the loss of falling backwards into comfort and security, so it takes a moment for me to register the words in front of me.

“Oh,” I say eventually. “Your company.”

He nods.

“Yes,” I say. “Your company is number 85.” I look up at him. “Congratulations,” I tell him. “You must be proud.”

He grins and takes the paper from me again, looking at the page with pride.

“Isn’t it great?” he says.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Yes it is. I’m pleased for you, Will.”

He leaves the other sections of the paper on the work surface beside me and reads his way to the living room.

“Do you want breakfast?” I call after him.

“Please,” I hear him reply.

I take bagels from the freezer and slice them open. I drop them into the toaster and push down the handle. I pick up my coffee and the magazine from the pile of supplements and walk into the conservatory.

The sun is falling onto one of the chairs, so I sit in that one and let the warmth from the sun heat up my body. I read about The Police reuniting for a tour. A journalist asking them questions about why they are doing it; each band member not really answering. Youngest son comes downstairs and climbs up onto my lap, his blanket again clutched to his face, his thumb jammed into his mouth.

I place my hand against his head. He feels hot.

“I’m not tired,” he tells me. “I’m just resting.”

I let him rest and read the magazine around him.

Sundays are slow.

The bagels pop up out of the toaster, but I am helpless; youngest son is sleeping in my lap.

“Will?” I call. “Will?”

Eldest son appears in the doorway. He is four.

“Will’s reading,” he says. “Is Petey sleeping?”

“I think Peter’s not well,” I tell my son. “Please ask Uncle Will to come and sort out the bagels.”

My brother appears behind eldest son.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks. The newspaper trails from his hand.

My wife comes down the stairs.

“The bagels need taking out of the toaster,” I say, to either of them, I don’t mind. I just don’t want to disturb my son, who feels hot and needs to sleep.

Will goes to the toaster. My wife is already unloading the dishwasher, dressed in jeans and a long blue cardigan that reaches to her ankles. Eldest son comes over to give his brother a hug as he sleeps on my lap. Peter kicks him away. Eldest son begins to cry. My wife swoops in to take him in her arms.

“Shhh, Mikey,” she says. “Petey’s not feeling well, that’s all.”

“What’s wrong with him?” she says to me.

“I don’t know,” I say. “He feels hot and he climbed up so he could have a rest.”

She continues to cuddle our eldest boy. Michael peeps out of the circle of her arms at his younger brother and at me. He knows there is something wrong.

My brother is buttering bagels in the kitchen. Everything seems normal, but that is far from the case.

I look at my wife, whose eyes are closed. She is kissing the top of Michael’s head, burying her nose into his thick brown hair. He is the child who looks like me.

“We will work this out, won’t we?” I ask her, quietly.

She doesn’t look at me. “We’ll have to,” she says, then pulls back from her son and says to him, “Is that better now?”

He nods solemnly, then runs off to continue whatever game he was playing in the living room.

My wife bends down to take Peter from my lap. He mutters and grizzles and clings to his mother. She carries him over to the sofa and investigates his body.

There is a rash, apparently. Nothing alarming, but a rash all the same.

“I’ll take him to the doctor’s tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll ring work and explain.” She looks at me. “I’ll probably have to work Thursday to make up the time, though.”

“That’s okay,” I say. Any sort of conversation is good at the moment, even if it is only practical stuff about the care of our sick child. “I can rearrange things at work so I can be at home on Thursday.”

I want to say sorry. Over and over and over again. I want to apologise for my stupidity, for the hurt that I have caused her. I want to tell her that, at thirty nine years old, I am a fool and an idiot. She knows this. She has the evidence of the returned gifts, pushed through our letterbox with no stamp, no postmark. She has the evidence of the note slipped in with the book, the last gift to be returned.

“The cds, the dvds, the jewellery,” it read, “all mean nothing. The book meant the world to me, and I no longer want it in my house. You knew what you were doing all along.”

The book that arrived a day before I returned from giving a lecture in London. The book that had been the first thing I gave to her, that night when I lied about going for a drink with Paul. My old college-mate Paul; back, I had told her, from his latest stint in the States. I had carried that book hidden in the inside pocket of my jacket. I had known that she would understand what it meant; that she would understand that the weeks of making eyes, of talking in corridors and in my office with the door open, was about to become something more. And she had.

I want to say sorry for that first false move and for all the subsequent false moves, but I know that sorry is just a word. It won’t undo the year of lies that I thought I had packaged up so well; the year of secrets that, two weeks ago, came bursting out of the package that contained the book.

The sun is shining through the conservatory window. It bathes my wife and our youngest child in its glow. My brother brings a plate in from the kitchen; on it sits my bagel, buttered and still warm; the butter is melting into the dense bread, leaving islands of unmelted yellow, rich and golden like sand.

Will sits on a chair at the dining table and silence momentarily falls on the room, broken eventually by the sound of bagels being eaten.

Our awkwardness is interrupted by the telephone ringing. I get up out of my chair to answer it, taking the half-read magazine with me; it feels stuck to my left hand.

“Hello?” I say into the handset.

It is Helen. She is calling to find out whether Michael wants to go over to play with Simon. I walk into the living room to ask Mikey, who nods solemnly.

“I’ll bring him over after lunch,” I say.

“Bring him now,” she says. “He can have lunch here.”

I hang up and tell Mikey to get his shoes on and his coat. I walk into the kitchen and, standing in the doorway, tell the silence in the conservatory where I am going.

“I’ll come with you,” Will says. “I could do with a walk.”

“I was going to take the car,” I say.

“We’ll walk,” he says. “You’ll like that, won’t you Mikey?”

We walk.

“Not now,” I say. “On the way back.”

My brother knows what I mean. Not in front of my son. Small ears take in everything, and he already knows that all is not well in his world. I don’t want to be responsible for it becoming worse. I don’t want what I have to say being repeated by a four year old.

We keep an eye out for bears lurking in people’s gardens. Mikey carries his sword, just in case a bear decides to leap out on us. He holds my hand tightly for the same reason.

I try to find words ready for the walk back to the house. I try to work out the best way of explaining things to my brother. When it comes down to it, when we have deposited Michael with Helen for the day, all I can do is say it.

“I had an affair.”

My brother doesn’t speak, so I continue.

“One of my students.”

Again the silence, neither judgmental nor encouraging. Just a non-committal silence into which my painful words fall. The sound of my words makes me cringe; the stupidity of what I did still fresh enough to embarrass me when I hear myself say it out loud.

There is no explanation that I can give, so I deliver the bare facts. I tell him about the flirting. I tell him that I was the one who moved things on, that she contributed by not resisting, that one thing led to another and a night when my wife was out of town with the children, visiting her parents. I brought the student, I brought Lucy, back to the house and I fucked her on the living room carpet. Her back was scratched by the hard fibres of the seagrass. She liked it. She laughed about it. I brought her back the next night and the night after that.

I told her that nothing would happen. I told her that I was married, that I liked my life, that I wouldn’t leave my family for her. I told her these things and she smiled at me across the dining room table. I told her these things as she lay naked on the living room floor, and still she smiled. I told her each time we made love, had sex, whatever you want to call it. Each time she smiled. Each time we took it a little further. Each time I enjoyed it more.

We are almost back at the house.

“I don’t know why I did it,” I say. “I ended it a month ago.”

We are standing at the bottom of the drive.

“I thought I’d got away with it. I thought that she understood the position I am in.”

My brother remains silent.

“I was wrong,” I say, and start to walk up the drive to the door. My brother follows.

Inside the house is silent. My wife is sitting in the living room, reading Will’s newspaper. She looks up as we walk into the room. She looks at Will, not at me.

“Has he told you, then?” she asks.

Will nods.

“He’s told me,” he says.

My wife looks at me.

“Fucking idiot,” she says.

Will nods again, sitting down in the armchair.

“Yep,” is all he says. Then, “Have you got the sports supplement there, Susan?”

My wife passes another section of the newspaper to her brother-in-law across the living room.

I walk into the kitchen and stare at the horses through the window.

© J R Hargreaves March 2007

Blindfold

Neither of them was there for the most obvious reason. His staff badge dangled on its strip of blue webbing; her friend dangled in the background.

She took the piece of purple fabric and wrapped it around his head, binding his eyes closed gently, not wishing to hurt.

The dismantled seat lay in pieces on the floor at their feet. As he stood, blindfolded and vulnerable, she mixed the pieces up, as though they were a jigsaw, a puzzle meant to confound.

“Crouch down,” she told him, and he did. “There’s a piece to your side, on your right.” His hand slid across the floor until it found the side of the seat. “Lift it,” she told him. He obeyed. “Hold it there and lean forward, feeling with your left hand,” she said. “That piece there, that’s the back.”

He felt along the edge of the piece she had led him to, his hands stroking the surface of the wood.

“No,” he said. “That’s the front.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well in that case, feel to your left and slightly behind. That piece must be the back.”

He picked it up with his free hand and brought it to meet the side piece he was still holding up.

She crouched down, the silk of her dress moulding itself to her form, hissing slightly with the sound of motion.

“Here, let me help you,” she offered, her hand touching his briefly. He didn’t shrink away but raised a finger slightly to link with one of hers. She laughed.

“Now,” she said. “If I hold this here, you slide to your left again. The other side piece is at an angle three steps left.”

He found the piece and married it to the back piece. She held the structure upright and told him to stand and take three paces backwards.

“Under your left foot is the seat,” she told him. He crouched and retrieved it from the floor.

“I should have put this in first,” he said.

She saw that he was right.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll take the back piece out and you can slide the seat part in.”

“Agreed,” he said.

They worked together, her watching him working deftly, unable to see. His hands were strong, his body poised. The seat, sides and back were linked. Their hands had touched again as he tried to slot the seat into one of the sides. She had guided his fingers to find the slot and marry it to the notch.

“The front is to your right,” she said softly into his ear. They were both crouching, their heads close together. She had no need to raise her voice. “Move over two steps. It’s just there.”

He brought it back to where she was holding the rest of the seat. His hands worked out where the notches were that needed to fit with those on the seat sides. He slid the last piece in.

“Ta-dah!” she said as he removed the blindfold.

They stood and looked at his handiwork.

“You put that back together again quickly,” she said.

“That’s because I made it,” he replied.

“Oh,” she said, looking away from the seat and at him. “You’re a carpenter?”

“A carpenter. A furniture maker. Not usually in mdf, though,” he laughed.

He turned to her. “Now it’s your turn,” he said, smiling.

“Oh no!” she replied. “That wasn’t the deal.”

He grinned and brought the blindfold around her head anyway. He was less gentle than she had been with him. He tied it tightly at the back, then brought the ends round to the front and knotted them again in front of her eyes.

“Can you see?” he asked.

“It’s so tight, I can’t even open my eyes,” she said.

He disappeared from beside her and she heard him dismantle the seat and move the pieces around. She felt disorientated, lost suddenly. The room seemed to have expanded, leaving her in a vacuum. She put out a hand and found his curly head. She withdrew as quickly as she had touched.

She heard his voice, close again.

“Okay,” he said. “Crouch down.”

Again the rustle and hiss of the silk as she moved her body into a crouching position. She hoped that her skirt hadn’t ridden up too high. She hoped that the seams would withstand this crouching. His voice was gentle, his accent different to hers. She concentrated on what he was saying, knowing that she was frowning behind the blindfold.

She moved her hands around the floor, seeking out the pieces as he directed. She used her fingers to work out the shape of the notches and the slots. She sensuously learned the shapes and patterns of the pieces, bringing them together, his voice encouraging her all the time.

“Here,” he said, his hand brushing against hers, “I’ll help you.”

His fingers closed around hers and helped her to push the seat home into one of the sides.

“I’ll hold this up while you find the other piece. Over to your right. Three paces.”

She tried to hold up the seat as she moved.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “I’ve got it.”

Slowly, perhaps more slowly than was strictly necessary, she put the seat together.

“Well done,” he said, when she removed the blindfold and looked to see what she had created.

There were other people waiting.

“I have more customers,” he said with a wink. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

His eyes were blue.

“He liked you,” her friend told her later, as they left to look at the exhibition.

“He was doing his job,” she replied.

Halfway up the stairs, she looked back over her shoulder. He smiled at her across the room, then blindfolded somebody else.

© J R Hargreaves February 2007