Some Kind of Wonderful

I don’t look my age. Thank god for good genes.

It’s snowing. I hate snow. One of the houses across the street doesn’t have proper insulation in their roofspace. I suppose they don’t know. Or don’t care. The house is up for sale. Or have they just bought it? There was a removal van there a week or two ago, and there are cards lined up in the front window today. Whatever. Their house is leaking heat through its roof.

So yes, I hate snow, but this morning when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw it blanketing the back garden, it was alright. It’s melting already now, and this is precisely what I don’t like about snow. The mush and melt and wetness that follows the pretty postcard image. Pat who has her washing out at all times, in all weathers, has her washing out today. Blues and maroons and purples. Stiff enough to crack, even just by looking at them.

I wonder if I have enough insulation in my roofspace. If I go out (if I go out, of course I’m going out, I’ve got to tax the car), maybe I’ll look up at the roof. Maybe.

I went to see that film yesterday. Factotum. Matt Dillon pulls off a fair approximation of old Bukowski. Listen to me, talking like I know anything about Bukowski. All I know is that he died of old age and I feel slightly cheated by this ending. He was supposed to die of alcohol poisoning, or being run over by a runaway ice truck, or something. It’s a funny film, though, and I’m glad I went to see it.

I’m annoyed with myself for using a cliché like “blanketing” to describe the snowfall up there. I’m going to leave it, though, to remind myself that I’m no Bukowski.

It’s from Old French, according to the dictionary. Blankete. As in blanc. So maybe it’s the perfect word for snowfall, and not a cliché at all.

Words are crazy. The other day I learned that the bogies we have in our noses are actually bogeys, because the synonym comes from ice hanging down from the underside of train bogeys. I think this is bullshit, but I admire the man who spoke it as truth, because he did it with such conviction.

So, what’s so wonderful? Apart from not looking my age, and having a day off so I can stare out of my window at my neighbour’s roof, of course. Well, everything. It’s some kind of wonderful that I can sit and have coffee with someone (of course, you know I was drinking tea) and talk about what I like and who I am and be silent and nervous and reassured all in the space of an hour, and now sit here wishing I smoked so I would be a real writer, and might even be thought of as cool as a result, and still know that it doesn’t matter if I’m cool or not.

Do you know why else I hate snow? Boys wee in the snow. It covers up dog muck, and it makes my knees hurt. Plus I feel stupid walking in it with an umbrella. Even though it’s nothing more than very cold rain.

I’m thinking about him. Wishing I was in work. Or he was here, smoking the cigarette for me. Being cool.

Funny how you can think about someone, and suddenly they pop up and scare you. Funny how you can think you’re in love with the nice guy, and then the bad guy comes back and makes you smile a different way.

My boots leak.

I’m not going to talk to him.

Funny. Some kind of wonderful is melting like the snow.

© J R Hargreaves 2005

Waiting (2)

She lifted her head from the desk, scratched the semi-dried drool from the corner of her mouth, and blinked against the dead white glare of the fluorescent lights. There was no daylight left outside the office window. The yellow of the street lights was oddly depressing. She rubbed her face and tried to wake up properly.

Standing, she almost sat straight back down again. Too quick, the blood rushed to her head, the change in internal pressure causing her to feel dizzy. She steadied herself against the edge of the desk.

Outside, wrapped against the bite of the wind, she huddled and almost charged her way down the street to the bus stop. The bus journey would take at least 40 minutes at this time of night. She knew she would doze, probably invade the space of whatever person was crammed next to her. She didn’t care. This tiredness was almost permanent now, and any snatch of sleep she could get was welcome.

Blank and aching, she walked up the path to her front door. She barely remembered getting on the bus, and had woken seconds before it pulled away again from her stop. Her key slid awkwardly into the lock, jamming slightly and catching as she turned it. It needed seeing to. Like so many things in this house, in her life.

The house was in darkness, and she moved from room to room, leaving a blaze of halogen behind her as she progressed from hall, to lounge, to dining room, to kitchen, shedding layers of clothing as she went.

Sitting at the kitchen table with a freshly brewed mug of tea, she slowly began to thaw. In spite of hat and gloves, her head and hands felt numb. The middle distance was a place she had heard of, and her eyes rested there now. There was nothing to see there, its boundaries blurred, its contents blurrier. Inside her head was a feeling like cottonwool. Blood pounded at her temples, her eyes wanted to close, their lids as heavy as roller shutter doors.

She started. He had let the door bang shut behind him and was even now removing his coat in the hall. Noisy. Unnecessary. Her tea was cold and its surface looked greasy. She decided she would learn to rinse the dishes properly to avoid this in future.

Here he came, rushing and thundering through the house on his legs like treetrunks. Briefcase flung onto a sofa, post scattered across the dining table, followed by keys. A clattering whirl of heat and presence, he arrived in the kitchen, where she still sat at the table, something new and cold resting in her head.

He spoke. Something. She didn’t listen. He stood, hip cocked, arms raised, body leaning, peering, face lit by the ice white light of the open fridge. Slam of the door. Bang of the cupboards, opening, closing, searching, seeking.

Cold metal in her hand, alien yet comforting. Her hand gripped the scored metal, her finger rested against the trigger. Hidden underneath the table. She tested the muscles in her arm. Like sitting on the bus, doing pelvic floor exercises.

She raised her arm. His back was turned. This was the coward’s way. She waited, finger ready to squeeze. She waited.

Waking, she lifted her head from the table and blinked against the humming lights of her kitchen as the front door opened and her husband shouted his arrival.

Next time, she wouldn’t wait.

© J R Hargreaves 2005

Only Human

She’s still in her pyjamas. Pink candystriped bottoms with a drawstring at the waist, and a candyfloss pink top. Still in her pyjamas and starting to stink.

His stomach rolls, or is it hers? Someone’s stomach rolls and gurgles. He hasn’t been able to eat, so it might be his. She’s decomposing, so it might be hers. He has the feeling that it’s his, though, that his stomach wants some food, the digestive acids fighting amongst themselves, breaking down what little they can find.

He wants to move her. He has to really. She’s sitting up in bed, pillows at her back, staring glassily, mouth half open. He stands in the bedroom doorway, looking at her. He’s had to sleep in the spare room the last couple of nights. Obviously. He wonders why she hasn’t fallen forward, why her head at least hasn’t slumped or lolled. Her eyes haven’t rolled back in their sockets, haven’t even closed as though she had fallen asleep. She is upright, glass-eyed, unmoving. Her book has fallen. That’s the only thing that has moved. He can’t remember now whether it was fallen when he found her, or wether it has fallen since. It lies there on the duvet now, though. No longer in her hands. Her hands look as though they should still be holding it.

He has opened the bedroom window. He had to. She isn’t smelling too good. Next door are having a barbecue and the faint smell of beefburgers, sausages, god knows what, is wafting into the room with the chatter of voices. Laughter mixes with music and children screeching as they race in a stew of overexcitement around the garden. Helen caught him yesterday, over the fence, and mentioned it was Dave’s 40th. They were having a bit of a do, and she wanted to know if they wanted to join them. He had muttered something about her not really feeling up to it. Helen has asked if she was still unwell. Unwell was one way of looking at it.

The simplest thing would have been to report it as soon as he’d found her, but he’d panicked, like the fool he was, more worried about how it would look and what people would say. She’s the local GP. Was the local GP, he corrects himself. He knows it doesn’t matter now, what people think or say. He’s in more trouble now than he would have been if he’d reported it straight off.

He needs to move her somehow, needs to get her out of the house. Not today, obviously, but soon. He wonders how long it takes for a body to decompose. Maybe that was something she would have known. Was that the sort of thing a GP would know. He hasn’t a clue, and wishes instead that he had paid more attention to Silent Witness, the scenes where they move the bodies – whether they’re flexible or rigid. He frowns. Of course, they’re actors, still alive. If a body that’s been dead for a couple of days is stiff, an actor who is still alive wouldn’t be able to fake that easily.

You don’t think of these things when you’re watching tv, though. He realises that now. If he’d known he was going to come home on Thursday and find her like this, he would probably have made time to think about it. After all, it’s fairly important now, he thinks. What if he tries to move her and she is stiff, and he can’t unbend her? Will he have to try to bend her more? And what if she isn’t stiff, but is floppy? Has she decomposed enough to be floppy? He hasn’t a clue.

Really he should phone the police, call an ambulance, suffer the consequences. He knows this is technically the right thing to do. It no longer matters, saving face. She’s dead, he’s left her there too long, people are going to talk now, no matter what. People talk anyway.

He decides to put off the decision, and goes downstairs. Perhaps sitting with a nice cold beer will help him work out how to deal with this. No point in ringing the police or anyone else until he’s absolutely sure how this is going to go.

He walks into the kitchen and takes a beer from the fridge. He looks out of the French Windows and sees Dave barbecueing away in the garden next door. Dave raises his tongs to him, so he raises his bottle of beer in response. He walks over to the French Windows and slides them open.

“Happy Birthday, Dave,” he says.
“Cheers, mate,” Dave replies. “Are you sure you won’t join us?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Thanks for asking.”
“Oh come on!” Helen comes to the fence. “Have you eaten?”
“Well, no, actually, I haven’t,” he says, beginning to think that he might be able to eat. Those sausages are smelling good.
“Come over, then,” says Dave, waving a sausage at him.

He steps out into the garden, the fresh air hitting him and reviving his spirits. Through his back gate and over into Dave and Helen’s back garden. Helen hands him a plate and Dave loads it with sausages.

“Burger as well?” he asks, raising one from the grill, adept with his tongs.
“Why not!”
“That’s the spirit!”
“How’s she doing?” Helen nods in the direction of the bedroom window.
“Oh, you know. Still not too clever,” he says through a mouthful of sausage.
“One of the perils of being a GP, I suppose,” says Helen. “She must have the immune system of an ox, not to get ill more often.”

He nods. One of the perils of being a GP isn’t the number of germs you get exposed to, he thinks, it’s the access you have to the drugs cabinet. He bites down into a sausage.

“There are buns around, somewhere,” Dave says.
“Oh yes, and salad and relish over here.” Helen takes hold of his arm and leads him to another table. She introduces him to the gathered friends and family. “This is one of our neighbours. His wife’s a bit poorly. She’s the local GP.” She looks at him. “He’s probably not eaten properly since she fell ill,” she smiles.

He smiles back and helps himself to salad. Amazing how quickly his appetite has come back, now he’s not in the house with that smell.

“What do you do, then?” asks one of Dave’s relatives.
“Teach at the local comp,” he replies, trying to chew and speak at the same time. He’s aware that he looks like a pig, but he’s ravenous. He tries to think when his last meal was. He doesn’t think he ate the day he found her, but he’s no longer sure.
“A teacher and a doctor, eh?” smiles the relative, trying to ignore the half-chewed food that’s on clear view from his mouth as he speaks and chews. “Pillars of the local community.”

He smiles and swallows, takes another bite. Helen pops up again with a cold bottle of beer.

“You haven’t got a drink!” she trills. She’s always been a bit of a triller, has Helen. She’s small and bubbly, and probably more intelligent than she lets on, but she does the stay-at-home-Mum thing really well. He takes the beer from her and drinks. It washes the sausage and bun down perfectly.

“I was just saying,” continues the relative, “how he and his wife are pillars of the local community, being a teacher and a doctor.”
“Oh, you know,” he says, a touch bashfully, “we’re only human, really.”

He wonders if it’s true, that they’re only human. Her up there, dead and decomposing, she’s not human anymore. She’s just a shell. And as for himself, he’s not sure that he’s human either. He suddenly catches a whiff of something unpleasant. He looks around. Nobody else seems to have smelled it. Perhaps it’s just got stuck in his nostrils. He thinks now that maybe he should have had a shower today. He drinks more beer.

The relative is chatting away about something and nothing. He hasn’t been paying attention. He wonders what sort of a relative she is. An aunt, a cousin? She doesn’t look like she’s Dave’s mum. But then, maybe Dave looks like his dad. Families are funny things.

He’ll have to tell her parents. They’ve never really liked him. Now they’ll have more reason not to. Perhaps the police will tell them for him. He takes a bite out of the burger. It’s cooked to perfection, just the way he likes it. He closes his eyes and savours the taste.

When he opens his eyes again, Helen is carrying a birthday cake down the garden to where Dave is still overseeing the food. Everyone starts to follow her down, and they form a crescent around Dave and his self-igniting gas barbecue. Personally, he’s never understood gas barbecues. He smiles to himself. He’s never understood barbecues full stop. Still, the food tastes good. Not all charred and half-cooked like some barbecues he’s been to.

Dave’s blowing out the candles on the cake. Someone makes a joke about being able to use the cake as the barbecue. They all laugh politely.

She would have hated this. She hated living in suburbia. She hated that she was a GP. He was quite enjoying it, though. He liked people, liked meeting new ones. Dave’s family are great, he decides. Very welcoming. Friendly. He raises his bottle of beer in the toast to Dave and his 40 years on the planet, then he takes a deep swig, and smiles at Helen’s sister. He’s half tempted to wink. She smiles back.

Yes, he likes meeting new people.

It’s fun.

Helen’s sister crosses the grass towards him. She’s still smiling, so he broadens his own.

“You live next door, don’t you?” she says.
“I do,” he replies.
“Helen says your wife’s ill.”
“Yes, she is. Been a bit off colour for a couple of days now.”
“It’s a shame she couldn’t come to the barbecue with you.”
“Isn’t it?”

He can’t work out whether she’s flirting with him or not. He’s now on his third bottle of beer, and he thinks the alcohol might be going to his head.

“Helen says you’re a teacher.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What subject?”
“Geography.”

She laughs. “I hated Geography,” she says, and touches him lightly on the arm. He looks down at where she touched him.

“Lots of people do,” he says.
“You don’t look like a Geography teacher,” she says.
“Thanks,” he replies, confused. “What does a Geography teacher look like?”
“Not like you,” she laughs.

He smiles nervously. He wonders whether Helen’s sister might be a bit drunk. He can’t smell anything on her breath, but then all he can smell is barbecue and that faint whiff of unpleasantness, that must be lodged inside his nose. He decides he needs to get away from Helen’s sister. He also needs another beer. And maybe more food.

He heads towards the house. As he walks up the garden, he sees Helen next door in his garden. She’s walking away from the house, with a plate in her hand with cake on it. Her face is white. Like a sheet. Clichés are only clichés because they’re true, he thinks.

He stops. Helen is in his garden. Walking away from the house. She stops. They look at each other across the fence.

“I think you should call an ambulance,” she says, still holding the plate, although it’s at an angle now, and the cake could fall at any second.
“Yes,” he says, “I think you’re probably right.”

© J R Hargreaves, 14 August 2005

The End of Hope

This isn’t the truth, you know. You’re all fools if you think it is. Just like her. Except, deep down, she knows this isn’t the truth. Look at her, turning her head to one side, so she can’t see it.

It’s all she knows, now, this feeling of having to look away, or not look too closely. This avoidance, filling the void with distraction.

In a darkened bar, she talks to a man in a hat. Just a brief exchange of words that shy away from truth, though reality crackles all around them. She says words devoid of meaning, just for the sake of speaking, and he responds with platitudes.

It’s the way of the world.

Inside and outside, she is alone. I watch her, constantly, and still she is alone. Unloved and emotionally bankrupt.

The truth is, there is no truth. No love, no gratitude, no common thread that connects us all. And she knows this, but is afraid to admit it. Because, unless you subscribe to some abstract ideal of truth and beauty, you are devoid of hope. Hope rushes out just as quickly as fools rush in to seek it.

Like her, you’ve probably sat down in a room, low-lit by lamps from IKEA, and listened to some two-bit songwriter singing a love song about being there. Unlike her, you probably find comfort in that song, that expression of love, believing in truth as you do.

She is just acutely aware of how none of it is true.

Once, you see, she would have done anything for love. Believed in it, even.

Because once, there was a man. He had blue eyes and either some sort of problem with his vision or else the appearance that he was looking straight at you was, in fact, a reality. He’s the same man as the one in the hat, except now he has learned to choose carefully who he looks at with his blue eyes, now he knows there is no truth.

There was a woman, too, whose eyes were either blue, or green, or grey, or turquoise, nobody had decided, though all the official forms said grey. She’s the one we’re watching now.

She was born with the knowledge that nothing the world or heaven could offer would ever fill the hole right at the centre of her being. This knowledge somehow never stopped her from trying to fill that hole, though. She threw all sorts of junk in there, believing or maybe merely hoping that, like a jigsaw, the pieces would miraculously fit together to fill the gap. But the spaces between the pieces were enough to let her soul seep out.

Unable to recue herself, then, and believing she could never be loved, she set herself an impossible task: to be a rescuer of others...

He was standing in the corner of the pub, trying to work out how to persuade the cigarette machine to dispense some cigarettes in return for money. But he couldn’t even work out where the money went. His hands were up in the air, his knees were bent, and as she walked past she couldn’t help but stop and ask if he needed any assistance.

“I can’t see where to put the money.”

“Which brand do you want?”

“Marlboro Lights.”

She took the pound coin from where it was gripped between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, and pushed it into the slot above the Marlboro Lights sign. Then she took the remaining money from his open left palm, and fed that into the machine as well. Finally, she pushed the button, pulled out the drawer and handed him the packet of cigarettes.

“Thanks,” he said.

He bought her a drink at the bar, and the conversation flowed, so he bought her another. His blue eyes sought out her suspected grey ones, and she couldn’t quite meet the intensity of his gaze. So she lowered her eyes, and he liked the way her lashes brushed down against the rise of her cheeks. When she raised her eyes again, he was smiling at her.

Now, what many men who believe in truth don’t realise is, when faced with a woman who seems to want to be rescued, they are in fact about to be rescued themselves.

© J R Hargreaves 2004

Right

He chewed his bottom lip and tried to think of all the clichés he could. Storm clouds on the horizon. Trouble was brewing. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. He chewed his bottom lip and whispered mantras to himself inside his head.

She opened her mouth and knives fell out. Pointed daggers like you saw thieves carry in fairy stories. Silver, shiny, bright and sharp. He opened his mouth in response, and set free fat ineffectual duvets.

Under the blanket, where they couldn’t see, where they had forgotten he lay hidden, peering under its edge, under the blanket he couldn’t understand the words that fell or streamed or jerked from their mouths, but he could see the knives and despise the duvets.

He tried not to move. Keeping very, very still was a skill. He treated it as such. He honed it. Barely breathing, eyes like slits so he wouldn’t even blink, he lay under the blanket, waiting.

It was almost like an opera, their daily performance; the same words and phrases said over and over. Her with her knives, him with his duvets. A soap opera, but real. Factual entertainment. Although, he never felt entertained. Just frightened. Sometimes her knives were extra-sharp and shiny.

It was dark under the blanket. Peering under its edge with his eyes half-closed made the room around the blanket seem slightly dark, too; although, he supposed, that could partly be the metaphorical storm clouds having an effect.

A snatch of monologue, recitative; her favourite refrain:

“You always f-ing bring it back to that, don’t you?”

His sighing response lost in a cushion of duvet smothering. Duvets so thick, her knives never seemed to get through. Perhaps that was the point.

He closed his eyes and started humming gently to himself. The room around the blanket went silent. Then his father spoke softly.

“Sh1t.”

He stopped humming. Stupid of him to have started. He heard his father take a couple of steps towards where he lay under the blanket. Please don’t look at me; please don’t pull back the blanket, he whispered in his head.

“It’s okay, son. I’m not going to look at you. I won’t pull back the blanket, promise.”

His father was very near to where he lay. He continued to lie, and let the silence stretch; let his father’s words evaporate. It interested him, lying there in the darkness of the blanket, in the freshness of the silence, that his mother never spoke at this point in the opera. He sensed her, standing behind his father, arms folded; her turn to chew her bottom lip now, with impatience. In her head, he knew, words would be tumbling and fighting, challenging each other to duels. Bright shiny knives clinking and clattering in her head. She must be very tired, he thought.

His father crouched beside where he lay under the blanket. Please don’t look at me. Don’t move the blanket. Even said in his head, the words came through clenched teeth.

“I promise, son. I promise I won’t look at you or move the blanket. But, if you’re okay, will you just nod your head, or something? No-one’s looking, I swear.”

Don’t swear, it’s bad. He nodded his head once, sharp, made himself still again as he heard his mother barely stifle a laugh that had razor blades at the edges. His father patted him through the blanket.

Razor blades from her mouth, not knives this time. You took a shallower cut from a razor blade, but it stung more. His father’s mouth let out steam in response. No duvets this time. Steam like an old-fashioned kettle, or the miniature trains at that place in the mountains they sometimes took him to; always bright and overly cheerful on those trips, brittle pieces of coloured glass fell from their lips, tinkling as they hit the floor, and sparkling as they fell; pieces of glass as cold and lifeless as the fun he knew they were supposed to be having.

But here the hiss of steam under pressure. He pushed his fists into his eye sockets, as though that would stop him seeing, even though it was dark under the blanket and he was no longer peering under its edge.

Then the blanket ripped back with a violence unwarranted. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. Still, his mother accused him:

“Stop howling. Stop it. STOP IT!”

“Leave him be. It’s not his fault. Leave him, Sarah. Please.”

She turned on him, the razor blades skittering at the edges of her words:

“Leave him, Sarah, please. Oh please, please, pretty f-ing please.” She let the blanket drop, but he was uncovered now.

“I’m so f-ing tired of this,” she said to his father. Her words were spoons now, heavy metal spoons, like the ones his gran had in the drawer in her kitchen. Old heavy metal spoons that tasted of metal as you looked at them, the tang wet and sharp against your tongue.

His father stepped towards her, his arms open as though to gather her up, but she was too quick for him, and she stuck her own arms out in front of her, two prongs, a barrier to his comfort.

“No. I don’t want that. I don’t want any of that. Any of this.”

The spoons’ clatter against one another created white noise in his head. He hummed to try to clear it. His mother dropped her arms to her sides and walked out of the room. He listened to her heels clicking on the wooden floor, moving away from him, ticking like a metronome. Softly he clapped his hands together, in time to the beat of her footsteps.

His father stood there looking down on him. Don’t look at me, he said in his head.

“I’m not looking at you,” his father said softly, sadly, daisies and purple clover falling with the words.

And then he was in the garden, beneath his favourite tree. He was watching the pattern of the sunlight through the leaves on his leg, studying one particular patch of light and memorising its shape. The shape was right. He hummed and sat very still so that he wouldn’t miss anything out of the shape as he imprinted it on his memory. A breeze stirred the branches and the shape changed. He hummed louder to let the breeze know he was annoyed. The breeze died down and the shape went back to how it was. He hummed with satisfaction.

His back was against the tree trunk. His t-shirt was thin and red. The redness made the knobbles of the tree trunk more scratchy. He didn’t move, but let the redness move apart so that the knobbly trunk could scratch into his spine. His legs were straight out in front of him, his arms hung loose at the side of his torso, his head was down, his chin resting against his chest. He stared and fixed the feeling of the tree trunk through the redness of his t-shirt with the shape on his leg. They were right. It wasn’t possible now to have one without the other.

His mother came down the garden, towards the tree, towards him. She had a cardigan wrapped tightly around her, as though she was cold. But the cardigan wasn’t green, so he didn’t know why she was cold. He didn’t move as she stood and looked down at him. He just focused on the light pattern on his leg. She moved a centimetre closer, then another, and another. Her shadow lay across his legs. He hummed sharply, hummed and stared at the shadow.

She pulled his arm and the rest of his body followed, upwards, away from the tree. His feet were supposed to find the ground, but he chose not to cooperate. So she pulled harder on his arm, then exasperated, a cry fell from her mouth like a ball of wire wool, it fell to the ground at the same speed as his body. Still his head hadn’t lifted once, and now, instead of staring at his legs, he was staring at the soil beneath the grass. The grass was blurred and icy green, but the soil he could see in minute particular detail. The arm she had pulled was still raised, the other still down by his side, as though he were executing some strange semaphore message to the soil.

She moved, walking back up the garden, hugging herself once more. The cardigan was soft and creamy, he told himself in his head. That stopped her in her tracks. He heard her counting inside her head. Counting to 10 like the chimes of the clock over the fireplace at his gran’s house. Then she stiffened, and her legs were like pegs as she walked back to the house.

He lay there, staring at the soil. It was brown and made the same sound in his head that eating crisps did. He looked up, and the sun was gone, but his father shoes had appeared.

“Come on, sonny Jim. Time to go in,” he said. His words were lilac feathers, floating down, settling gently, forming a carpet that they walked on back up to the house.

And then again, the blanket. He was still, it was dark; had he moved? Was this then again, or another now? He peered under the edge of the blanket, remembering not to hum. But the room around the blanket was empty.

He was sitting on the sofa, staring at the window, memorising the shape. It matched the shape he had memorised before. He hummed with pleasure.

She was there. Suddenly she was there. Don’t look at me, he whispered in his head.

“Okay, here’s the deal. I won’t f-ing look at you if you stop f-ing humming. I have to spend my life trapped in this f-ing house with you. I have nowhere to go to get away from you. I have no f-ing choice. Do you hear me?”

He looked at the fish scales that littered the floor around her feet. They were flat and shiny, and he knew if he touched them they would be hard, would slice into his skin. So he didn’t touch them. But he didn’t hum either.

Don’t swear. It’s bad, he whispered in his head.

That brought her one step closer, walking over the fish scales, crunching them beneath her shoes. She placed her hand gently on his head, ran it down over his hair, down so that it cupped his chin and raised his face towards her. His eyes glided away.

“I’m not looking, I promise,” she said, “And I’m sorry that I swore.”

At his gran’s house now. The heavy metal spoons in the drawer in the kitchen. His mother and his gran talking behind him as he stood, perfectly still in calm repose before the shiny heavy metal spoons. He couldn’t see to know what they said; he couldn’t see what fell from their mouths. He tasted the wet tang of the metal spoons against his tongue as they lay there in the drawer.

One’s missing, he told himself.

Gran. She looked down into the drawer with him.

“How can you tell that, just by looking, little man?” She asked.

“How can he possibly tell that one’s missing just by looking?” she said over her shoulder to his mother.

His mother replied, but he couldn’t see to hear what she said. Couldn’t see the shapes. The spoons were wrong and it was like lightening in his head.

His mother. Looking down now, not into the drawer, though. Looking down at him.

“Stop howling. STOP IT!”

She didn’t touch him, but the wire wool scurfed his skin, and he flinched.

“Leave him, Sarah,” his gran said. “I’ll shut the drawer.”

Nonononononono, he said inside his head. The drawer had closed, now it opened again. Still the spoons were wrong. The lightening was flashing.

“For god’s sake,” hissed his mother. “For god’s bloody f-ing sake, what did I do to f-ing deserve this?”

His dad. Not at Gran’s house. Next to him as he lay under the blanket. His dad and someone else. A different voice. He peered under the edge of the blanket. Her words fell like raindrops with sunlight through them. He watched them fall. He wanted to put out his hand to touch them.

Her hand touched his. He didn’t flinch. Her hand was soft.

“Hello, Jake,” she said.

“How on earth did you do that?” said his dad.

“Who knows,” swam through the sunlit raindrops falling from her lips. Inside, he smiled.

“I’ve never seen him do that before,” said his dad.

Her t-shirt was pale blue and had a bird on it. A bird made up of other, smaller birds. He stared at the birds. They were right. He counted them. There was the right number. He hummed contentedly. It was right.

© J R Hargreaves 1 May 2004

Small Steps in Short Spaces of Time

“That’s what this is going to take, you know. Small steps in short spaces of time. No rush, no hurry. Just small steps and we’ll get there.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. He sighed. This had been going on for days now. He would say something, and she wouldn’t respond. He took a sip of his water and looked at her. It was still her, he knew that it was still her. She was still in there, listening to him. He looked at her lying peacefully in that hospital bed, for all the world as though she were merely sleeping. Sleeping it off. As though she’d had too much to drink.

He looked at her, the way her dark hair fanned out on the pillow, framing her face, which was pale and freckled, clean of make-up. Her lips were pink and full, her chin impish. Her closed eyes were overarched by strong dark brows, neatly shaped but full for a woman. He liked that though. Couldn’t stand those wispy pale affairs.

He took another sip of water and looked at the tubes going in and out of her body. While she was asleep like this, she needed help with all sorts of things, he supposed. At least she didn’t need help with breathing, though. That was one thing. She didn’t seem to be paralysed, as long as she was breathing on her own. Of course, they wouldn’t know until she woke up whether she could move her arms and legs, but breathing on her own, that was a good sign.

She had been here for nine days so far. Nine days since the accident. As soon as he had heard that this was where she had been brought, he had come. He couldn’t not come. He came every night, straight from work, and stayed for as long as the nurses would let him.

He would go home to the empty house and sit quietly before the tv, letting the programmes wash over him, thinking about her alone in that hospital bed. He would sit and think until he felt his eyes grow heavy with sleep, then he would go to bed.

It was good to have a routine, he thought, for him as well as her. So he went to work every day and carried on as though nothing in his life was any different to how it had been 9 days ago,

He took the newspaper with him every night, the Sale and Altrincham Messenger, and sometimes the Metro from the train station. He would read to her, keeping her up to date with the local news and the pick of the day’s national news as chosen by the Metro. He didn’t want her to feel lonely or out of touch while she was having this long sleep.

He started to read to her now, telling her about the opposition to the waste management centre they wanted to build in Partington. A nurse came in.

“You here again, love?” she smiled at him.

He stopped reading and smiled back.

“Oh, you carry on reading, love. I’m sure it’s doing her good. Don’t mind me, I just need to check her IV lines and take a few readings.” The nurse bustled about her work.

He took up the paper again and carried on reading, but more self-consciously now that the nurse was present. He had never been the strongest reader, and hated to have an audience. He didn’t mind so much thinking that she was listening to him, as she lay there in the hospital bed. Reading aloud to her was different.

The nurse finished what she was doing and smiled at him on her way out. He smiled back, then turned further into the newspaper, trying to find something that would interest her.

Every so often, he paused in his reading to look at her, check she was still breathing.

“I’m daft, aren’t I?” he said, smiling indulgently at himself. “Because, those machines they’ve got you hooked up to, they’ll soon let us know if anything’s wrong, won’t they?”

He thought for a moment that she had heard him, because her eyelids fluttered slightly, then he reminded himself that it was probably just muscle spasms.

He could hear talking out in the corridor. He looked up, through the window in the door. The nurse was in the corridor talking to someone who looked official. Not a doctor, probably an administrator. She looked his way a couple of times while she was talking. He frowned to himself, wondering what was being said.

“Ah, who cares what they’re saying, eh?” he asked her, sitting forward slightly in his chair. “We just need to concentrate on getting you better. Small steps in short spaces of time, remember?” He sat back again and looked out through the window in the door, but the corridor was empty. Something and nothing, probably, but he couldn’t help feeling slightly uneasy. The nurse had definitely been talking about him, he could tell.

He looked at his watch. It was almost 9. He would have to be making a move soon.

“Almost time for me to be going again,” he told her. “They kick me out at 9, you know, and it’s almost that now. But I’ll be back tomorrow night, and you’ll have to make do with the staff in the meantime.” He tried to laugh, sound light-hearted, but it was hard with her lying there so still and silent.

He folded up the paper and dropped it into the bin. There was nothing much worth reading in it tonight. He stood up and looked down at her, then pulled on his coat. Opening the door, he stepped out into the corridor. It was deserted. He turned in the doorway and said goodnight to her. He decided to leave tonight before the nurse returned to throw him out, with her “Don’t you have a home to go to?”

He walked steadily down the corridor to the main exit, past other side wards like the one she occupied. He was surprised that there had so far not been any other patients in there with her, but supposed it was probably best to keep her quiet. He walked past the reception desk and said goodnight to the woman who sat there night after night. He supposed a nurse took over for the night shift. You wouldn’t need admin staff to be on duty when there were no visitors.

The automatic doors swooshed apart and he stepped out into the frosty autumnal air. Late October. The seasons were changing. It was dark now when he got to the hospital from work, since the clocks had gone back that weekend.

He walked across the hospital forecourt to the car park. As he approached his car, he was puzzled to see two men standing by it, expectantly. He thought about walking past, afraid of being attacked, then one of them said his name.

“Andrew David Rowbotham?”

“Yes,” he replied, pausing a few steps from his car, keys in hand.

“Is this your vehicle, sir?”

Police. He sighed. Of course.

“Yes, it is,” he said, relaxing slightly.

“Were you driving this vehicle on Sunday 19 October along Wilbraham Road in the Chorlton area of Manchester, Mr Rowbotham?”

He thought for a moment. He never knew why, whether it was for effect, or whether he had genuinely forgotten for one brief moment that he had been on Wilbraham Road just over a week ago.

“Yes,” he finally said.

“Mr Rowbotham, a car matching your vehicle’s description and registration was witnessed to be involved in a hit and run accident at 18.15 on Sunday 19 October on Wilbraham Road, Chorlton. A young woman was seriously injured in that accident.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind accompanying us to the station, Mr Rowbotham, so that we can take some details from you.”

He stayed silent for a moment, looking down at his feet. It was pointless denying anything. Especially with her lying there in the hospital behind him.

“Of course,” he said, moving towards the two policemen. “I’ll be glad to help with your enquiries. Anything at all to help.”

He was assisted into the back of the police car, the way he had seen criminals being assisted in early evening dramas. Hand on top of his head, a slight push down, he wondered whether he ought to hold his hands behind his back, although he hadn’t been cuffed.

As he sat in the back seat of the police car, being driven away from the hospital, he thought about her lying there. He thought about the way her body had crumpled against the front of his car, and the way he had panicked and driven off, not knowing what else he could do. He stared out of the car window, a police officer sitting beside him. He supposed it was normal not to make conversation in situations like this. He wouldn’t know what to say, anyway. He stared at the houses as the car sped along from the hospital to the police station.

The other officer stopped the car outside the building. He wondered whether to open the car door and step out, but then thought that there was probably some sort of locking mechanism that meant the door could only be opened from the outside, like when you had a child in the back of the car. While he was thinking this, the office who had been sitting beside him had got out of the car and come round to his door and was opening it.

“Step outside, please, sir,” he said, not looking at him. He was young. Younger than him. Young and hard and cynical.

He stepped out of the car and the two officers accompanied him into the station. It was all very civil. He felt very meek. He searched for a word, something grand sounding, something that would take away the dry bitterness of fear from his mouth. His mind settled on chagrined, and he was satisfied with that. His mouth still tasted burnt, though. He would have liked a cup of tea.

Inside the station, he was left at the desk with the younger of the officers, who took down all his details. He wondered whether he would be expected to hand over his watch and his wallet and other personal effects. His tie and his shoelaces. That was the sort of thing they did in the tv programmes.

The young officer directed him to a small room, however. He didn’t want his personal effects yet. Maybe that came later, after he had been charged, when they locked him up in a cell. He walked into the room, it was just like the ones on tv. Bare and clinical, with a single table, four chairs and a recording device on one wall. Somehow he felt reassured by this. For all the bizarreness of the situation, it was oddly familiar.

The interview started. A detective and a police officer. Not one of the ones who had brought him to the station. Had he been arrested? He couldn’t remember. He thought not. He thought he had come of his own free will. He rolled the phrase around his head, smiling slightly. Of his own free will. He liked that phrase.

The two police officers were looking at him. He shook himself mentally. What were they expecting him to say, he wondered. He looked back at them blankly.

“What is your name?” the detective asked, coldly.

“Andrew David Rowbotham,” he replied.

And so it began. He answered their questions calmly, mechanically, and described the accident with precision. He had been driving. His phone had gone off. He couldn’t find it. He was scrabbling, trying to find it, one hand on the wheel, one eye on the road ahead, then he had looked away. Had he had a drink? No, he hadn’t been drinking. He didn’t drink during the day. Didn’t drink and drive. He had looked away, because he thought he had felt his phone and just for a split second he needed to look to make sure. He caught hold of it then, once he saw it, and pulled it out of his overcoat pocket, and looked back up at the road. He was at a zebra crossing and a young woman, her, the young woman in the hospital, she was looking at him as he drove towards her. Then, he shuddered, put his head in his hands, covered his eyes as if he thought he could block out the image of her.

“Boof!” he said.

The police officers remained impassive.

“Boof!” he repeated. “Boof against my windscreen. I could see the shock in her eyes. She sort of crumpled against the glass.”

“Could you take your hands away from your face, please sir, so that the tape recorder can catch your words,” the detective said calmly.

He lowered his hands from his face and looked past the two officers, unable to look at them. Ashamed. Chagrined. Meek.

“Could you please repeat your last sentence, for the tape, sir,” the detective said.

He swallowed, his throat dry. He couldn’t bring himself to repeat his last sentence, so he tried to say it a different way, a calmer way.

“I hit her. She sort of sprang up, landed against the windscreen. Her body crumpled. She was looking at me, shocked. Then her body sort of jerked, like a puppet. Her arms. Her legs. They sort of flew out from her body. She was looking at me. Then she sort of slid along the bonnet. I think I was still driving. I don’t remember. I must have hit the brakes. But she slid away and I couldn’t see her any more. She wasn’t looking at me any more.”

He stopped. Not sure what to say, or how to go on. She must have gone under the front wheels of the car. He couldn’t remember whether she slipped sideways or off the front of the bonnet. He stared at his hands.

“That’s it,” he whispered.

“For the tape, please, sir,” said the detective.

He looked up. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s it,” he repeated, more loudly, towards the tape machine. “That’s all I remember. I drove off. I panicked. I drove off. Oh god.”

His head went down again, his hands rising to meet it.

The room was silent.

© J R Hargreaves 2004

Between The Lines

“Do you know what time it is?”

She didn’t even know what day it was, never mind the time. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. She’d plucked her eyebrows last night, dyed her hair this morning, and just used the straightening tongs for the first time.

He came into the bedroom.

“Your hair looks nice,” he said.

She stared at herself some more, not entirely convinced.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I can’t find my watch.” He was rummaging in the top drawer of the chest of drawers, where she kept her knickers.

She picked his watch up off the dressing table, where she was sitting.

“Here,” she said, holding the watch out behind her, flat on the palm of her hand.

“Oh, cheers, love.” He took it from her and she watched him strap it to his wrist through the mirror. It made him look as though he wore it on his right wrist, like her dad.

He looked at the watch, once it was secured to his wrist.

“God! Have you seen the time?” he exclaimed. “Where’s my jacket? I’m going to be late.”

She thought about saying that his jacket would be where he had left it, but he was already shrugging it on by the time the words were ready to fall from her mouth. He approached her swiftly from behind, zooming up close through the mirror. She felt like she was watching him from a distance and his sudden proximity startled her. He kissed her on the top of the head.

“Have a good day, I’ll see you later,” he said, squeezing her shoulders and smiling at her through the mirror.

“Bye,” she said faintly as the door banged shut behind him.

She returned to regarding herself in the mirror. He had said that her hair looked nice. It looked odd to her. It had taken a year for it to grow back to this length. A year since he had come home to find her sitting on the kitchen floor, the big scissors in her hand, and clumps of hair scattered on the laminate flooring around her. He hadn’t said a word, just taken the scissors calmly from her hand, sat down in his suit on the hair-strewn floor beside her, and held her in his arms, cradling her ragged head to his shoulder.

Linda had come round a few days later, when she had been allowed back home from the iron grey hospital with its disinfectant smell and taste of metal in the air. Linda had brought smaller scissors and tried to make her hair look well again. If there was something about her that had to look well, it might as well have been her hair. There wasn’t much Linda could do with any other part of her body.

Linda was a friend, Phil kept telling her. Linda wanted to help.

Linda was a neighbour, not a friend. Linda wanted to come round and look at the nutter and feel smug about herself, was closer to the truth. She could see it in Linda’s eyes, that day, as she snipped with her small, neat scissors. She could hear it in Linda’s voice as she made idle small-talk, snipping away, bright and breezy and harshly blonde beneath the kitchen lights.

“You look like a pixie,” he had told her then, hugging her and kissing her forehead.

“I look like a boy,” she had replied, angry, though she didn’t know why. Linda had laughed. Linda who was still there to see the husband be nice to the loony wife.

The word mad had disappeared from his vocabulary after he had found her in her nest of rejected hair. He used to be in the habit of calling her mad, with a laugh in his voice and a teasing look in his eyes. Mad as this, mad as that, and now she really was mad, he couldn’t even call her daft.

Maybe he thought he had wished the madness on her. He didn’t know that it had always been there, for real, not a joke, not an eccentric little foible he could love her for.

She looked at herself in the mirror, to see if the madness was still there. Sometimes, if she looked from the corner of her eye, she thought she could see it, but the bottle of pink and green tablets made it hide.

She touched her hair. Jaw length now and layered so that the straightening tongs made it kick out. This hadn’t been done by Linda. Linda the friendly neighbour who wanted to help. Linda the friend who had been banging her husband for the past 18 months.

Linda who knew about wanting children, but who couldn’t conceive, she had told her in the kitchen in a hushed voice. Linda who wore this infertility like a badge of kinship when she had miscarried the child she never wanted anyway. She looked again at her reflection, to see if she could see that dead, almost-baby in her eyes. Phil had wept when the doctor told them what had happened. Wept was the word. Not cried, not sobbed, not shed a few tears. Wept. She hadn’t.

And Linda had been the first to visit, with a consolation prize of flowers and chocolates for her, and her soft warm body for Phil. There were few things more attractive to the Lindas of this world than the sight of a grieving man whose wife was pushing him away.

Yes, Linda was a friend. Linda wanted to help.

She picked up the pot of eye shadow and removed its top. She picked up the sponge applicator and began making-up her eyes. She pulled the applicator across each lid, leaving a streak of brown shadow behind. She rubbed and smudged it into the socket, first the right, then the left. She put down the applicator and picked up the mascara. She stroked the brush through her lashes, filling them out with the brown-black gloop. Her grey eyes looked at themselves, framed now with smoky brown, frank eyes that couldn’t lie.

Her heart gave a quiver, the rhythm seeming to reach up to the back of her throat. One of the side-effects of her medication, the doctor had told her, nothing to worry about, just a slight arrhythmia. She liked to say that word, liked the feel of it in her mouth, the sound of it breathing into the atmosphere around her and murmuring in her ears. A slight arrhythmia, a couple of skipped beats, a quiver, a brief moment when she might, potentially, cease to exist.

They had thought she might want to cease existing that day when she had rejected her hair. That was why they had taken her to the iron grey hospital and put her in the starched, metal bed that was narrow and lonely and suited her fine. A few days spent talking to doctors and psychiatric nurses. A few days in which they convinced themselves that she wasn’t a danger to herself or to Phil. She was just a little sad, not quite herself. Depressed. Suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Handy little labels for Phil to apply, pieces of sticking plaster to hold himself together, while she sat there, her life set in plaster of paris. Not unravelling, not losing it, not even lost. Just stationary, inured. Hardened.

She was already numb, but they wanted to numb her more. Just in case she woke up one day and wasn’t numb. They wanted to give her a fake numbness. So she let them.

She wondered what the time was. She never wore a watch now. Time rarely mattered. She got up from the dressing table and passed from the bedroom, down the hall to the living room. She stood in the centre of the open-plan space and wished for more walls, for stairs, for a house with levels and corners and a back door that led out to a garden. She stared through the picture window (a selling point, the estate agent assured them all those years and months and hours ago). She stared out at the building work going on around them, the development of the area around the Deansgate locks and wharves, the shoe-horning of people into ever smaller and more stylish spaces.

Phil used to tell her what an investment this place was. How soon everybody would be clamouring to live in the city centre. This was a prime location.

She stared out of the window and felt her heart skip another couple of beats.

She had wanted to live in a house, in a suburb, with neighbours who were old, and young, and married, and not. She had wanted a home, not a clinical box where clients could be entertained and colleagues impressed. She had wanted a kitchen with a window and a view. She had wanted a home.

She should never have married him. The thought didn’t strike her, didn’t come like a bolt from the blue. The thought had always been there, at the back of her mind. It had been too easy, though. Two high fliers, aspirational, beautiful, just so. They had fitted each other perfectly.

But their lives were suffering from arrhythmia. She was blank within this lifestyle chic existence. The hardness, the coolness, the things that made her good at what she did, only existed because of what she did.

She was hungry. She turned to look at the clock, sleek and brushed-steel cool on the mantelpiece. An hour to lunchtime. An hour for her to get out of this place and head south of the city to the suburbs.

She pulled her John Rocha cardigan tight around her body and walked back into the bedroom. She opened drawers, pulled back the wardrobe’s sliding mirrored door. She pulled her suitcase from the top shelf of the wardrobe and placed it, open, on the bed. She looked at it. Then she began.

She did not ring anyone. She did not have to. She took her suitcase, filled with the things she required, and shut the apartment door behind her. She had thought, briefly, about keeping the keys, just in case. But she knew that there was no just in case, so she left them on the small table in the hallway near the door.

She walked down to the secure designated parking place (another selling point, the words lodged in her brain) and opened the door to her car.

South she drove, away from Knott Mill, down Chorlton Road, through Whalley Range and down to Chorlton. She pulled into Oak Avenue, a stones throw from the Baptist Church. She stopped outside the house with the door painted blue.

He opened the door. She stood and looked at him, suitcase in her hand. He was rumpled. He leaned forward, placing an arm around the back of her shoulders, drawing her upper body towards him. He kissed her. He smelled of warmness.

“Hiya,” he said. “I’d heard you’d been ill.”

She looked at him steadily.

“I was,” she replied, “but that’s in the past.”

He pulled her into the house, took her case from her hand.

“Come in, then,” he said, calmly.

She followed him into the living room. He left her case at the foot of the stairs in the hallway. Her shoe heels clicked on the tiled hall floor, and clicked differently on the stripped pine floor of his living room.

She sat in one of his ancient armchairs, perched on the edge, knees together, nervous for god only knew what reason.

He was standing in the arch that led through to the dining room, and beyond that the kitchen.

“Cup of tea?”

She looked up at him. His blue eyes were fixed on her, gentle and full of grace and mercy. She had a sudden mad image of him dressed like Christ The Bleeding Heart, hand raised in benediction, and she laughed, too high-pitched. Nervous, mad, frightened of what she had just done.

He crossed the room to her and pulled her up from the chair, wrapping her in his arms and stroking his lips against her hair. She closed her eyes and breathed him in.

They must have stood there like that for ten minutes or so, then he pulled slightly away from her and looked into her face.

“Shall I make us that cup of tea, then?”

She nodded and he let her go, turning to walk into the dining room and then the kitchen.

She did not follow, but sat back down in the ancient armchair, more securely this time, but still with her knees together. She listened to the sounds of tea being made. The hiss of water streaming from the tap into the kettle. The clatter of the kettle lid being replaced and the slight slam as he placed the kettle on its base. Then the click of the switch, the rattle of cups being brought down from a cupboard. The paper whisper of the box of teabags being opened, and a different whisper as two teabags were removed and dropped into cups. Then just the dulled half-roar of the kettle beginning to sing. She closed her eyes and imagined him in the kitchen, leaning against the unit by the sink, watching the kettle with eyes unfocused, his arms folded and his right leg angled across his left.

She opened her eyes and stood up, then walked through to the kitchen. He was standing precisely as she had imagined, in some sort of reverie. She walked up to him and pushed her fingers into his short dirty-blonde hair, pulling him towards her so she could kiss him. His arms unfolded and lifted to wrap themselves around her waist. He pulled her closer to him, their lips parted further and their tongues began to say hello.

As she stood there kissing him, she knew that this was what she needed. This warmth, this clutter, this comfiness.

The kettle clicked off, the water boiling and ready. He pulled his mouth from hers, and moved an arm so he could lift the kettle and pour water into the cups. He kept a firm hold on her with his other arm, and she watched his face the entire time.

He stirred the teabags around in the cups, and said, “You’ve left him, then?”

“Yes,” she said, still watching his face. A good face. Attractive, but not in any obvious way. His lashes were longer than hers, his eyes large and blue. The intensity of the blue left her breathless sometimes. His nose in profile was straight and true, long but not big. She lifted a hand and ran her index finger along it. He turned to look at her, grinning. His eyes sparkled, and she pushed his face to the side again, her hand soft against his beard.

She was as tall as him. Taller, in her heels. Any other man would have been bothered by this. Phil liked that she was tall, but only because he was taller. This one, here, in the kitchen, he didn’t mind. Because appearance meant nothing to him.

She sighed, and moved away from him, letting him get on with making the tea. She wandered back into the living room and sat back down. The tension was ebbing from her body and she sat quite relaxed in the ancient armchair.

He came through with the two cups of tea and handed one to her, then sat down in the other ancient armchair in the window. The room was scattered with papers and books, records and cds. She sipped at her tea and drank in the clutter of this home.

He sat there, patiently, while her gaze roved around the room. She had only been here once before, one wet day before she was ill. They had bumped into each other, for only the second time, in Chorlton. The skies had suddenly opened and she didn’t have an umbrella. The rain had turned to hailstones, and her mascara had run down her face, stinging her eyes so that she could not see. He had told her he didn’t live far away, if she wanted to come back to his house to dry off. She hadn’t hesitated.

That was over a year ago, and now here she was again. She looked at him. He was looking at her. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he had just opened his door and let her in, without batting an eyelid.

“Hello,” he smiled. “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you.”

She smiled back at him, thinking about fate and chance encounters, like the way they had met, not long after she had married Phil and they had moved into that clinical apartment. Was it really only 2 years ago?

She had called into Love Saves The Day on her way home from work, to pick up some vegetarian Thai red bean sauce. A man sitting at the table in the window, behind the bicycle, had looked up and smiled at her as she pulled on the door, too hard as usual because it looked heavier than it was. She had laughed at herself, and he had joined in, and instead of leaving she found herself sitting at the table with him. He had a gentleness about him, a confidence that cane from knowing who he was. They talked as if they had known each other all their lives. Not romantic nonsense; fact.

She had gone home to Phil and she had known that the clinical apartment and their abstract marriage was wrong.

The wet day in Chorlton was the only other time she had seen him. She had just been to the doctor’s. She was still registered with a GP in Chorlton. Her period was six weeks late. She didn’t mention it to Phil, just went to the doctor for a test, no messing about with a kit from Boots, not wanting to leave evidence at home. She was leaving the surgery, with the news that she was pregnant and the first of the pills necessary to take it away swimming in her stomach, when the rain started. The rain masked her tears well, the melted hailstones on her face doing the job even better.

He had taken her home, and lent her some too-big jeans and a too-big jumper while her own clothes dried on radiators around his house.

And now she had come here again. It had seemed the logical thing to do. And she had kissed him in his kitchen, and he had kissed her back. That had seemed logical as well.

He was still looking at her. When he saw from her eyes that she had returned from whatever memory she had been visiting, he spoke again.

“Do you need somewhere to stay?”

She nodded. She was sitting on the edge of the ancient armchair again, knees together, her cup of tea balanced in her hands.

“I didn’t know where else to come,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Don’t be daft,” he said. “Of course I don’t mind. I’ve been thinking about you, since I heard you’d been ill. You were a bit shaken last time I saw you, and then you sort of disappeared.”

She smiled.

“Thanks,” she said. “For not being surprised to see me.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” The question unnerved her. It had been enough for her just to have left.

He caught the panic in her voice. “Maybe it’s too soon to think about, then,” he said. “You’re here now, and you can stay for as long as you want to, until you start to sort things out.”

Her head began to whirl, the way it used to whirl when she first got sick. She thought about the pink and green tablets that she had left behind in the bathroom cabinet. She hadn’t thought about long-term. She had just known that she needed to get out of that apartment and that marriage.

“Are you okay?” he said to her from across the room. She couldn’t see him, red fog was swirling in front of her eyes.

“Yes,” she said,. “Yes. I just, I didn’t, I just...”

He was beside her, kneeling on the floor, holding her hands. Her cup of tea was on the floor. She could see again. The red fog had cleared. She looked at him. His blue eyes were filled with concern. She smiled wanly.

“Maybe you need to go and have a rest,” he said.

Her mobile phone began to ring.

He stood up and looked around the room, trying to spot her bag. He found it on the floor by the side of the armchair, and picked it up. He held it out to her.

“Do you want to answer it?” he asked her.

She shook her head, and they waited for the phone to stop ringing. Then she took the bag from him, pulled out the phone and switched it off, without even looking to see who had called.

–—

She checked her appearance in the mirror of her lipstick compact. Her skin looked pretty tired. Not enough water, the weather (there had been a sudden cold snap, bringing autumn five steps closer to winter), lack of sleep; you could blame it on anything. Her hair was standing up to the weather pretty well. She resisted wearing a hat. She didn’t think she could pull it off, not like Louisa with her rainbow felt beanie and her mass of dark Mediterranean curls escaping at the bottom to frame her face. She had hats but they were for ugly days, when no-one would be looking at her anyway.

She looked at her lips in the mirror. They needed filling in. The lipstick compact (a gift from a friend) had a palette of six shades. The clear one at the far right she had never used. She chose the pale pink, three from the left, and dipped the brush into it. She filled her lips in with colour, focusing her attention on them alone. She pressed her lips together, blotting the colour more evenly. Then she checked her hair again. Not once did she actually look at herself. She had no desire to see who she was reflected in a mirror. She looked out of the train window, snapping the compact shut. The guard was standing on the platform, paddle in hand, whistle in mouth. She put the compact away in her bag as the guard raised his paddle to the driver and blew his whistle.

The train was quiet. The drive into the station had been quiet, as well, even though she had left the house late that morning. Her hair was taking longer to dry in the morning, and the minutes added up. She smiled to herself as the train pulled out of the station, remembering when her hair had been short, how quickly she could dry it, how little she cared about her appearance.

She took her book from her bag, The Brothers Karamazov. A good book for train journeys, thick and weighty, but the writing quick and light. She had been making this journey for three weeks now, and she had read two-thirds of the novel. She was pleased with this achievement.

She took her glasses from their case and, putting them on, she began to read. Her glasses were simple, a small oblong frame in dark brown that perched on her nose, giving her an air (she believed) of intellect.

The train pulled into the next station. A man, late and breathing heavily from running, got on and slumped into the seat opposite her. The first stirrings of annoyance furrowed her brow and she looked up from her book, inhaling the air she would need to form a sigh. She stopped inhaling and held the breath, her brow smoothing, when she saw him.

He was dressed in a pinstripe suit. A suit, she could tell, that didn’t come from Burton’s or Marks & Spencer’s. The lining was exquisite, a deep red silk that flashed as he writhed his body into a more comfortable position. His shirt was crisp white and, as he settled into the seat, closing his eyes and folding his arms, she caught a glimpse of the simple silver links holding the cuffs together. A pale blue cashmere scarf was wound round his neck, tucked into the jacket of his suit. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat. On his left wrist was a large gold and steel watch, chunky but without ostentation. She let her eyes roam over him, drinking in his appearance; the shape of his thighs in his pinstripe trousers; the elegance of his hands angled at the wrist and tucked into the bends of his folded arms. She glanced up quickly at his face. His eyes were still closed. She had remembered to start breathing again, and now let her eyes wander over his face. He was dark, swarthy, his morning stubble removed but a shadow remaining to tint his skin. His closed eyes rested behind glasses not dissimilar to her own, and were framed by long dark lashes. His hair was curly but kept short so as not to be unruly. She could imagine that, left to its own devices, it would run wild. She absorbed all this information sanguinely. Something about his face excited her. It was the cruelty of his lip. Even in repose they were thin, clamped together, so thin as to be almost non-existent. But the top lip had a dip that saved his closed mouth from being a slash across his face. She thought about how it would feel to run a finger over the line of his mouth, whether it would feel cold like steel.

He stirred slightly and quickly she shifted her gaze to look out of the window. She looked at the passing streets and houses, frowning at the semantics of that description.

She sighed and returned to her book, bored by the uniformity of suburban Manchester, the endless rows of ex-council housing, 1930s pebble-dashed and blank.

Mitya had just made his way to Mokroye, laden with gifts, desperate to see Grushenka. She immersed herself in reading again.

“Dostoevsky, eh?”

The voice startled her. She looked up from the page, holding her finger to the line she had been reading.

“Don’t think much to him, myself.” The man smiled, his lips becoming even thinner.

She half-smiled back, then continued reading, unwilling to be engaged in conversation with this stranger. Not his fault of course. But he wasn’t willing to let it go.

“Tolstoy. If you’re going to read the Russians, you should read Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Now, there’s a book.”

She glanced at him briefly, half-smiling again, politely, but still not speaking. She carried on reading. His voice was too light, caught in his throat. It didn’t match his appearance. She stared at the page, not following the words any longer but thinking instead about how she would have imagined his voice to sound, based on his appearance. She supposed she would have expected something deep and rich. At the very least smooth. This voice, however, made him sound like the most boring man alive.

He had lapsed into silence, but she could tell that he was still looking at her. She knew that if she looked up he would begin speaking again, taking it as a signal of her interest in the conversation. She tried to focus on the words on the page in front of her, but her concentration had been broken.

The train was becoming busier and busier. People were cramming on and standing in the aisles, their faces frozen into expressions of resignation and annoyance. She glanced around at the people standing in the aisle near her, doing her best not to look at him. Somehow, though, her eyes wandered back to where he was sitting, shoulders back into the seat, feet firmly on the floor, legs apart and hands resting on his knees. She looked at his hands for a moment, for more than a moment, appreciating their appearance. His fingers were long and a good shape. She imagined that they would be deft at any task they undertook.

The train rattled on, further into the outskirts of the city. She found her bookmark, placing it in the book which she then closed and stored securely in her bag. She rummaged in the inside pocket of the bag, searching for her keys. It was better to find them now than to stand in the street outside the door, fumbling with zips and catches.

A mass of people got off at Piccadilly, but the train was still full. She started to think about making her way through the crush to stand by the door before the train even reached Oxford Road. Deansgate station was only a minute down the line, and she hated the rush and push to the door if she left it slightly too late. She pulled on her gloves and held her season pass tightly between her fingers.

The thin-lipped man had closed his eyes again, his face turned to the window, his head slightly at an angle. He had folded his arms again.

She sighed, and stood up, squeezing past the legs of the people sitting to her right, pushing her way up the aisle towards the door. She wanted to check her watch but there wasn’t enough room, and she had too many layers of sleeves and glove to peel back to find it. She could feel that it had swivelled round on her wrist again, anyway.

They were past Oxford Road by the time she reached the door. The train pulled to a stop in Deansgate station, and she squeezed her way past the people with their weary morning expressions. She almost ran down the steps from the station, dodging those who wanted to walk slower than her. She flashed her pass at the ticket inspectors waiting at the bottom of the ramp. It was only a moment’s pause, but to her it was too long. She emerged from the station and turned left along the street that ran past Love Saves The Day, and into Knott Mill.

She arrived at the apartment block. She just had time to do this. She slipped the key into the lock in the outer door and released the catch. When she had left this place two months ago, she had impulsively left her keys on the small table in the hallway of the flat. When she was ready to go back to work and face the world, she had regretted this impulsive act. Fortunately her sister still had a spare set for emergencies. It had been easy to take those back from her, without any need for explanation.

Once inside the building, she went up the stairs, not trusting the lift and not wanting to meet anyone who might vaguely remember her; although she had seldom seen anyone in the two years she had lived there with Phil. She hurried up the stairs, making herself slightly breathless, and emerged on the floor where the apartment was.

She paused outside the door to the flat, listening for signs of life. Once she was certain that there was nothing to be heard from inside the flat, she slipped the second key into the lock and gently turned it. The door swung open away from her, and she stepped over the threshold. Without looking, she closed the door behind her and walked along the hallway to the living room.

She stood in the centre of the room and looked out of the picture window, much as she had on the day she had decided to leave. The newest addition to the housing stock of the area was almost complete now; a high-rise of red brick and green glass. She stared at it for a moment, marvelling at how quickly the contractors had managed to throw it up, then she turned and went back along the hallway and into the bedroom.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking into the room, at the bed and the clothes left scattered on the floor, looking for some clue. But the thing she was expecting to see failed to materialise. It wasn’t a specific thing she was looking for, more some form of evidence, some hint of a woman’s presence. If it was Linda, she would have known instantly, but Linda wasn’t actually Phil’s style. Not long term. Linda was comfort. Phil desired austerity.

She walked into the bedroom and instinctively straightened the bedclothes. Neatness was the mark she had left on the place, which was strange because she wasn’t neat. She thought of the house in Chorlton, with its clutter and scattered homeliness. She had always felt that this place deserved neatness; clinically exact.

She crossed the room to the window and looked out over the city. The canal meandered below and the new bridge carried the ring road over it. The morning traffic was stalled in its tumble around the edges of the city.

She half-turned to look over her shoulder at the clock on the bedside cabinet. She had been here long enough. Time to go.

She let herself out of the flat and went back down the stairs. She hurried through the door onto the street and made her way onto Deansgate, joining the morning rush further into the city centre.

Walking swiftly, head down, hands pushed firmly into the pockets of her Mac, she made her way up through the city, along Peter Street, past the site of the Free Trade Hall, where yet more City Centre Living was about to be accommodated. She crossed St Peter’s Square, along the Metrolink platforms, and made her way up Moseley Street to Piccadilly Gardens.

She reached her office block on the nose of 9 o’clock. Louisa was already at her desk, talking to someone on the phone. She could see that Gavin was in his office.

“She’s here now,” Louisa said into the phone, then offered it to her. She took it from her.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello, love. Trouble with the trains this morning?”

She frowned, puzzled by the question, and tried to pull her glove off her free had with her teeth.

“No,” she said eventually, giving up on the glove. “Not really, why?”

“Oh, I just thought you’re later in the office than I thought you would be. Anyway, you’ve forgotten your mobile. Do you want me to bring it in for you?”

She closed her eyes, exasperated at herself.

“Would you mind?” she asked him, with a slight sigh at her own stupidity.

“Of course not,” he said, distant on the other end of the phone.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He laughed his gentle laugh, the one that made her smile. “It’s okay,” he told her, “I’ve got to come into town at lunchtime anyway. I’ll see you then.”

“See you later,” she replied, and handed the phone back to Louisa.

She went into her office and sat down at her desk, bag on knee, coat still on, her hands holding the straps of her bag. She sat for a moment, thinking about the apartment; wondering why she kept going back there, why she felt the need to stand in that living room and sniff round that bedroom.

Louisa came in with the morning post. Letters from other solicitors, legal opinions, confirmations of court dates. She shook herself out of her daydream and got on with the day ahead.

It was lunchtime before she knew it, and he appeared at her office door with a tap on the glass.

“Louisa said it was okay for me to just come through,” he said, with his sweet smile.

She smiled back at him, glad to see him, glad for the break from her routine. He crossed the room to her desk and held out her phone to her. It was littered with missed calls, texts and voice messages.

“I can’t believe that I left it,” she said with a sigh.

“I still think you came back to work too soon,” he said gently, his blue eyes looking into hers sympathetically. The softness of his voice caused tears to well up in her eyes.

“I know,” she said, “I know.”

“So where did you go this morning?” he asked, sitting down in the chair opposite her desk.

She swallowed guiltily.

“You know I went somewhere,” she eventually forced out.

He laughed and said, “You’re rubbish at hiding things, love.”

She smiled then. She knew it was true, with his anyway. She had to be good at dissemblances at work, but with him she lost all guile.

He looked at her, smiling but frowning, the crease between his eyes deepening slightly.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me. As long as everything’s alright.”

“Oh yes,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Everything’s fine.” The lie symbolised by her choice of anaemic words. “Anyway,” she continued briskly, “I’d best sort out these messages and missed calls, hadn’t I?”

She started to clear the messages she could ignore. As she did so, the messages queuing for entry into her inbox beeped their arrival with comic immediacy. He laughed.

“I suppose this means there’s no chance of lunch, then?” He stood up, putting his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans.

She barely looked at him, trying to make sense of the messages, processing the information, firmly in work mode again.

“Sorry, love,” she said.

He leaned over the desk and kissed her on the top of her head, then straightened up and pulled his ancient beanie hat on.

“I’ll see you later,” he said.

She looked up.

“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a mate.” She meant it. He smiled.

“Ta-ra, then,” he said.

Louisa came into the office after he had left.

“I’m going to the sandwich shop,” she said, holding onto the doorframe and swinging slightly. “Shall I get you something?”

“Oh, would you, please?” she said, reaching down into her bag and removing her purse. She opened it and pulled out a £5 note. “Thanks, Lou. I’ll have tomato and mozzarella on herb ciabatta.”

Louisa crossed the room and took the offered £5 note, then swung back out of the room.

By the end of the day, she had caught up with all her missed calls and texts, made appointments with clients and read through the briefs for the next few days. he switched everything off in her office and went through to where Louisa was finishing up for the day. They left the building together, Louisa heading off to the bus station as she paused to lock the front door. She dropped the keys into her bag, next to the apartment keys and the keys to the house in Chorlton. She turned to step out into the street and almost jumped out of her skin to find Phil standing there.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she replied.

“You okay?” he asked, not quite looking at her.

She looked at him, almost as though she didn’t know him, and frowned slightly.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said, evenly.

“Good.” He passed his hand over his face and looked down the street, away from her. “Look,” he said, “can we talk? We need to talk.”

He smelled familiar. She breathed in the scent of him. He was bundled up in his thick wool overcoat, darkly handsome. Under the coat, she knew, would be one of his Paul Smith suits. She realised she had her eyes closed and opened them, switching off the memory of those times they had undressed each other after work and fallen into bed, more hungry for the other’s body than for food. Or that was how it seemed.

He was looking at her.

“I suppose we do need to talk,” she conceded. “Just not now. It’s not convenient. I’m tired and I’m on my way home.” She spoke calmly, although her heart was banging in her chest.

“Sure, sure,” he said, looking down again at the pavement, or his feet, or both, she couldn’t tell.

“Ring me tomorrow at work,” she said. She placed her hand on his arm and he looked at it as though no-one had ever done that to him before. She hoped he wasn’t going to say that he missed her, or he wanted her back. The air was pregnant with unspoken thought.

“Okay,” he said.

She lingered, not knowing if she felt disappointed by that okay, then she began to walk off, up to Piccadilly Station, leaving him standing outside her office building.

“Have you been to the apartment,” he suddenly blurted out.

She stopped centimetres away from him, her back to him and, eyes closed, she said, “Yes.”

“I thought you had.” He paused. She didn’t move. A tableau there on the street with people rushing past and around them, on their ways home.

“Why?” he asked.

Still she didn’t turn around. She could feel him looking at her, his gaze boring into the back of her neck. She shrugged. It was as though they were the only two people left in the world; as though time had stopped.

“Have you forgotten something? Because, you know, just ask. I’ll find it for you. Bring it to work for you. Just, you see, don’t come round. It’s not right.”

She still couldn’t turn round to look at him.

“Are you really okay?” he asked.

Suddenly she knew. He thought she was still mad. He was worried that she was still unbalanced and might do something crazy. She turned to look at him then.

“I’m really okay,” she said, “and I don’t know why I’ve been round to the apartment. It just happened.”

He nodded. “Well, as long as you’re okay,” he said, starting to move off. “I’ll ring you tomorrow. We’ll sort out a meeting.”

She smiled. He didn’t want her back. And he still thought she was mad. She almost laughed at the thought. He nodded at her again, as she stood there smiling, then he set off in the direction of St Anne’s Square and Deansgate. She watched him leave, then looked at her watch. She had missed a train now. She thought about catching the 42 down to East Didsbury instead. It would probably take as long, crawling down Oxford Road, but at least she wouldn’t have to hang around on Piccadilly Station waiting for the next train down there.

She crossed to the bus station, through the newly landscaped gardens, bland concrete and steel, a triumph of faux-style over substance. striving to turn the city into London-in-the-North. The sun was almost gone, the autumn evening slightly damp. She pulled her scarf closer around her neck and tucked her chin into its warmth. She breathed through her nose and felt the exhaled air condensing on the edge of the scarf, resting cold under her nostrils.

A bus was standing at the stop, but the doors were closed. She stood and waited, looking in through the door glass at the driverless cab. A Magic Bus. She wished now that she did have a hat with her. It was turning colder every day. Who cared what she looked like? Who would notice anyway?

The bus driver returned from wherever he had been and let himself onto the bus. He closed the doors behind him, giving himself time to settle back into his seat before he let them all on and took their money from them. She looked at him. He was one of the younger ones, dressed in t-shirt and jeans. She wondered how he wasn’t cold. Just looking at his bare arms made her want to shiver.

He opened the doors and the queue of people slowly embarked. As soon as she stepped up onto the first step, she realised how the driver wasn’t cold. The heaters were working overtime.

She paid her fare and, unwinding her scarf to remove it, made her way down the bus. She sat on a seat. There wasn’t enough leg-room between it and the one in front and as she sat down she somehow managed to crack her left knee against the edge of the seat back in front. She thought she was going to pass out with the pain. She held her hand over her knee, between it and the seat back, cushioning it from the pressure slightly. She felt sick.

She remained cramped like that for the entire journey to East Didsbury. The heat on the bus was too much, and too dry. She felt like she might go mad with it, as though she wanted to scream. She closed her eyes and tried not to give in to the waves of irritation and pain passing over her. The journey seemed to last forever, with the bus stop-starting its way with repeated jerks along Oxford Road, not running clear until Barlow Moor Road and the route into East Didsbury.

She left the bus at the stop near Tesco, and crossed to the railway station car park, where her car had been waiting all day for her return. She turned the alarm off and listened to the whirr of the central locking opening the doors. Someone had left a flyer tucked under one of the wipers. She pulled it away from the windscreen and glanced at it, reading about a fantastic deal on end-of-line kitchens, then screwed it into a ball and tossed it onto the passenger seat. She sat in the driver’s seat, closed the door and started the engine. Her knee throbbed.

The train she should have waited for at Piccadilly had obviously just come into the station, as people returning from work were making their way from the platform to their cars. She turned on her headlights to combat the evening dark, and a man appeared in them, walking to the car next to hers. She looked at him in his suit, tiredness etched onto his face, weariness weighing down his shoulders.

She let in the clutch, selected first gear, and pulled away. He stood by his door, waiting for her to leave. She looked across at him briefly and their eyes met. She half-smiled and he looked away.

She drove along Barlow Moor Road, back the way the bus had brought her from town, across to Chorlton and down to Oak Avenue. She parked outside the house with the blue door, locked and alarmed the car, and let herself into the house.

Lights were on, the place was warm, and music was playing in the living room. It sounded like Neil Young, Heart of Gold. She smiled, then called, “Hello?” softly. There was no reply. The track changed to Are You Ready For The Country? and she pushed open the door to the living room, expecting to see him slouched in an ancient armchair, nodding along with Neil; but the room was empty.

She put her bag down on the sofa, took off her scarf, gloves and coat, and dropped them next to the bag.

She walked through the archway into the dining room and on into the kitchen. Something was cooking on the stove, but no-one was in there. She lifted the lid off the pan and breathed in the aromas of the stew he was making. Her mouth watered and she was tempted to fetch a spoon from the drawer and have a taste, but she knew that he would be cross with her if she did.

She heard the toilet flush upstairs and the floorboards creak. She opened the back door and went out into the garden. She wandered down the shale pathway towards the fence, pulling her cardigan tightly around her. Her knee was stiffening. She stood in the garden, in the cold, her cardigan barely keeping the cold out.

She shivered lightly, thinking about how the world would be different again in the morning; telling herself that she would be different too, that there would be no more trips to the apartment.

She looked behind her, back up the path to the house, at the lights blazing in the kitchen, and at him, standing at the stove, checking the stew. She looked away again, towards the end of the garden.

Suddenly she was taken by a powerful desire to go down to the bottom of the garden, to the gate that led onto the rough path that ran between the backs of the houses in Oak Avenue and those in Chestnut Avenue, to open that gate and walk away from this house and its safety, away from this life and out of her own existence.

She thought of Virginia Woolf, taking a walk out of the back gate in her Richmond garden, down to the river, pockets full of stones and pebbles.

She thought maybe she would go down to the Water Park later.

She looked over her shoulder again, back at the house. He was standing at the window, watching her. He was a good man. She knew he was. Yet somehow he wasn’t good enough.

She sighed and turned to walk back up to the house, still hugging her cardigan close around her. He opened the back door to let her back in, and she stepped under his raised arm and back into the kitchen.

Tomorrow would be different again, she said to herself. Different for everyone.

© J R Hargreaves 2003