A Well Proportioned House

She was standing at the bedroom window, wearing only a pair of black knickers. The type that look like gym shorts. Her hair had frizzed on the walk from the train station to the house. The air was damp. There was a haze to the day that the sun wasn’t strong enough to burn off. She had smelled of outside when he opened the door to her.

Her hair was still frizzed, but now it was mussed up, too. He had pushed her body against the sheets as he moved in and out of her. Her head had moved against the pillow. In the moments of her ecstasy, as she tried to rise away from the excruciating pleasure, before he had pinned her and her body had become taut, like a bow extended, curving backwards, in those moments, her head had moved from side to side, pulling her hair in its wake.

And now she stood at the window, wearing only her knickers, staring down at the street.

“They’re taking their time fixing that broken pipe, aren’t they?”

He sat on the end of the bed, almost fully clothed again, pulling on socks, drawing his shoes towards him, then slipping his feet in and lacing them up.

She crossed the room; the short distance from the window to where he is sitting. She straddles him, across his lap. She loosens his tie again.

“It must put people off, when they see that outside at the front gate.”

She means the hole, surrounded by blue plastic barriers. It was dug five days ago, the water meter exposed like a tooth, the ground around it like a receding gum.

He doesn’t get the chance to respond, because her mouth is over his, kissing him, hot and wet, their tongues fighting and moving over and around each other.

She grinds herself against his groin, and he feels himself harden again. She feels it too, and she’s off his lap and down on her knees in an instant. She unzips his fly and gently draws him out with her fingers, guiding him gently into her mouth, which is just as hot and wet as when she was kissing him.

She comes out of the bathroom dressed in her business clothes, hair pinned up, and looks down at him.

“Are you wanking?” she asks, although it’s clear that he is.

The fantasy dissolves and he opens his eyes, still lying there with his dick in his hand.

“I don’t look appealing right now, do I?” he says. More of a statement than a question.

She ignores it anyway and walks across the room from the doorway to the window.

“You look a bit daft, actually, love,” she says, pulling aside the net curtain to look down at the street. “That bloody cab’s late again. Third time this week.”

“Come back to bed,” he says, reluctant to lose his waning erection entirely.

She turns to look at him over her shoulder and smiles, then turns back to look out of the window.

“I can’t. You know I can’t, Jon. I’ve got to be at this meeting. It’s important.”

She’s fiddling with the cuff of her left sleeve. “Can’t get this bloody button fastened properly,” she mutters to herself.

“Let me,” he says. He half sits up, angling his naked body towards her.

“It’s alright,” she replies, head down, worrying at the button and the way it won’t go through the hole properly. “I’ll get it. It’s just a bit tight that’s all.”

She looks up from her sleeve and back out through the window.

“Where is that fucking cab?”

Her impatience is rising. Frustration at the button on her blouse, panic at the thought of being late for her meeting. He can’t remember what this meeting is about, although he’s sure she’s told him in one of her work-related monologues recently.

“Take the car,” he tells her. “I can use the cab when it gets here.”

She looks at him, frowning, weighing up what his offer might mean. Suspicious of his motives.

“Are you sure?” she asks eventually.

“Yes, I’m sure. All my appointments are local today. I can walk to them from the office.”

“Well then, I will,” she says, looking out of the window again, but less urgently now. “Thanks,” she adds, without looking at him.

She’s fastening the button at the cuff of her left sleeve as she walks back across the room. She manages it at last, now she is less panicked about the lack of cab and the impending lateness of her arrival at the meeting. She picks up her suit jacket from where she had placed it on the chair.

“I’ll see you for dinner,” she tells him and leaves the room.

He sinks back onto the bed. His dick flopped long ago, as soon as he realised that trying to persuade her to have a quick one was pointless. He draws in his breath, thinks about giving his fantasy another try, but his purpose has flopped just like his tired prick.

The cab arrives just as his wife drives out of the garage. He hears her faintly through the window. She is telling the cab driver that he is late, that he might as well go, forgetting about him still lying naked on the bed. Or maybe realising that he won’t be ready in time to make use of this cab without running up a huge waiting bill.

He hears the cab drive off, followed by her; both of them leaving the cul-de-sac as quickly as they can; the cab driver in anger, his wife in panic.

He gets up slowly, showers slowly, he even dresses slowly. Meticulously. He can catch the bus to his office, or he can walk. His clients like the fact that he lives in the same area, that he has knowledge of amenities to pass on to prospective buyers. He has a manner that is different from the other agents. He seems not to be all about the sell. He gives the impression that he cares about finding the right house for buyers and the right buyers for his clients.

It has taken him years to perfect the act.

He makes it to the office on foot with twenty minutes to spare before his first appointment. The house is just around the corner. He picks up the details, checks the name of the viewer, collects the keys and signs them out. He walks out of the office and into the fine morning. It is bright and sunny and the air smells fresh like spring, even though the year is at the beginning of autumn now.

He walks along the street to the house. The leaking water main still hasn’t been fixed. The blue plastic barriers are still around the hole, forming a triangle with the garden wall as the base.

He opens the gate and squeezes through. The house is unoccupied. The property of the bridal half of a recently hitched couple. There’s no urgency to sell, he hasn’t been marketing this one as aggressively.

This viewer has been back a couple of times, though. They’re becoming quite relaxed in each other’s company. Quite intimate.

He thinks of her breasts as he unlocks the door to the porch. He thinks of their firmness and the hardness of her nipples as he fucks her.

He puts his jacket over the back of one of the sofas. The sunlight is streaming into the living room, casting shadows of the furniture across the floor. He walks through to the dining room that creates a corner between living room and kitchen.

A well proportioned house.

A well proportioned body.

She rings the bell at the front door. He has left the porch door open. The front door is unlocked. She tries the handle and comes in.

“Hello?”

He emerges from the dining room, into the living room, where she can see him from the hallway.

“I didn’t know if you were here,” she says. “Your car isn’t outside.”

“I walked,” he explains. “Would you like me to show you round, or are you happy just to wander through on your own?”

She smiles. He remembers the heat that her mouth contains. She walks towards him.

“Jon,” she admonishes, still smiling, “we don’t need to play that game any more.”

She stands before him, close. He can smell her perfume; it surrounds him like an anaesthetic ether, drawing him under; the mixture of designer scent and body’s musk. She loosens his tie. It’s all part of the ritual they have established. This time she unfastens his tie completely and draws it away from under his collar. She pulls it slowly and he listens to the rasp of its fabric against the underside of his collar.

His hands come up and push her jacket off her shoulders. It falls to the floor slowly, with a crump. His hands find the buttons of her blouse just as hers find the buttons of his shirt, just as their mouths find each other.

She unfastens his trousers and they break from kissing so that he can step out of them, and so that she can divest herself of her skirt. He pulls his shirt off hurriedly and she shrugs her blouse away from her body, then tosses it onto the sofa.

They stand facing each other in underwear. In his jacket pocket, his blackberry starts to beep.

She grabs him to her and kisses him. “Leave it,” she instructs, and he is more than willing.

With one hand curled around his neck, with her mouth still over his, she pulls him back towards the hallway. Her other hand is unfastening her bra, and she removes it deftly. They come to a halt when her back makes contact with one of the walls, at the foot of the stairs.

He pulls away from her slightly, so that he can see her eyes, her face.

“Aren’t we going upstairs?” he asks, gauche for a moment like a schoolboy unable to believe his luck.

“I don’t think so, Jon. Do you?”

She pulls his cock out from his shorts and works it with her hand for a while. She isn’t gentle. She wants him to know that she is in control. He submits to her willingly. He doesn’t touch her. He stands with eyes closed as she masturbates him. Then she pulls him towards her, hooking one leg around his hip, and he slides into her easily.

They fuck against the wall. They are not quiet. It turns him on to think of the neighbours, a retired couple who never seem to go out, listening to them grunt and moan; listening to her body bumping against the wall each time he bangs his cock into her.

He comes, and she bites him on the neck.

“Fuck!” he yells. “What did you do that for?”

He withdrew as soon as he felt her teeth bite in. He pulled back. He stands now, looking at her with a mixture of panic and confusion.

She grins wickedly.

“Didn’t you like it?” she asks.

He puts a hand up to his neck, where she bit him. He sprints up the stairs to the bathroom, to look in the mirror at the damage she has done.

There is no disguising the angry red and purple suction mark, or the teeth marks that surround it. There is no way he will be able to hide that from Kay when she sees it tonight.

He stands at the top of the stairs.

“You fucking bitch,” he says quietly, with menace.

She looks up at him, unconcerned; laughing and icy.

“Don’t fucking laugh,” he says. He starts to walk slowly down the stairs, keeping his eyes fixed on her. “Don’t fucking laugh about this.”

She stops, but her eyes continue. They are scornful.

“Don’t be such a baby,” she says. “It was only a little nip.”

He’s standing in front of her again now. His hands go up. They brush the hair away from her shoulders, almost tenderly. Her eyes go dead, like flint. He takes his time, clearing the hair from her shoulders; the wisps and tendrils of copper bright hair; the cream of her skin. She never takes her eyes from him, he raises his from looking at her shoulders and her breasts.

Her eyes grow wider as his hands strengthen their grip around her neck. His thumbs press firmly against her windpipe and her breath begins to rattle in her lungs and in her throat.

“Don’t ever fucking bite me again,” he says, watching the life flow out of her, feeling her crumpling beneath his touch. Her knees buckle first, and he has to support the weight of her body with his arms, as his hands and thumbs maintain their grip.

She fights against him at first, her hands clawing at his arms, her fingernails scratching the bare skin. He’s going to have a lot of explaining to do to Kay tonight.

She goes. Finally she goes. She put up a good fight. He lets her body drop to the floor at the foot of the stairs. She was a beautiful woman. Expensive, but still beautiful.

He dresses again and locks the house up on his way out.

As he walks back to the office, he pulls his blackberry from his jacket pocket. Alex from the office. Someone else wanting to see that particular house.

He rings Alex back, stopping at the end of the street.

“Alex, hi. There’s been a problem. You know how they’ve been fixing the water main outside? Yeah, there’s been a bit of a leak in the house. I’m going to call out a plumber, get it sorted. Can you rearrange my other viewings for today? Cheers, mate. I owe you one.”

He hangs up on Alex and dials again. Calls in a favour. A plumber to fix the leak. A cleaner to tidy up the mess. A couple of scratches to be explained away.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

She Is Not Soft

“It’s all about you. You know that.”

She lies there, face down on the bed, in her turquoise underwear and he strokes her hair, lazy beside her, wondering how that piece of string she’s wearing doesn’t cut her in two.

The evening is close. Too warm. She is drowsy and her body slackens as she submits to the stroking of his hand.

She mutters something, deep into the mattress underneath where her head rests, supported by the well-walls of her arms.

Everything is a circle with her. He never knows which point he’s at. He doesn’t even know at which point he came in. He only knows it’s all about her.

“What did you say?” he asks her.

She raises her head from the crook of her arms.

“I think Jordan’s had something done to her face,” she repeats, then returns to her previous position.

Sisters and brothers who mourn their siblings. Parents who grieve for the loss of a child. Children suddenly orphaned in a split second of time. As long as it takes for the red glowing numbers to count down from one to zero. That’s how long it takes to create devastation.

She knows the consequences of such actions, but she is not soft. She does not weep.

She gets up suddenly, without a word, and goes into the bathroom. He listens to the sound of bottles opening, plastic bags rustling, something dropping into the metal bin.

When she returns, her face is clean, all trace of make-up gone. Her eyes are big, her cheekbones high and rounded, her face narrows to its impish chin. She wears her hair loose at the back, caught up at the sides. She’s like a dark haired colleen from the old country, transported here through time. She could be a selkie for all he knows.

She’s looking at him now, chin on shoulder, right hand playing with a strand of hair. Her lips are curved, the corners slowly creeping upwards until she smiles fully and looks away, as though she has guessed the things he was thinking.

She has lain further away from him, and he has to lean over to touch her skin. Her shoulder is like marble, but warmer.

“It’s always been about you,” he says.

She laughs. “Oh, fuck off,” she says. She has picked up a magazine from the floor by the bed and is reading and flicking and refusing to look at him.

But it’s true, and he knows it more than ever now. He knows it with every last drop of blood in his body. It is all about her, always has been, always will. She is not soft, and she will not have it, but he thinks she knows he’s right.

Her eyes in certain lights show more green than grey, in others they are dark, all pupil, pushing out the iris to its dark-rimmed edge of blue and grey. The inner ring of pale gold is like a corona round the moon when it passes between earth and sun. It fires and flares and makes the colours in her eyes mix and separate. Now blue, now green, now grey.

She is reading, and he cannot see her eyes. The room is too ill-lit for there to be much to see, anyway. Her pupils will be devouring the irises whole.

The countdown of red numbers. Devices fitted to cars. Packages sent through the post. Vans packed full of explosive left in the middle of a busy shopping street. Buttons pushed. Pins pulled. Signals sent. Any number of permutations to cause chaos, to inspire grief, to crown loss queen of random kingdoms.

And it is all about her.

In breaks of time he rests here. He drinks her in and stores her up. She is not soft, but when she breaks and crumbles in his arms, he knows. He understands. It’s all pretence and she is still as hard as she ever was, playing the game, acting out the part as though she understands it.

Sisters who mourn brothers. Daughters who grieve for dads. She doesn’t understand the meaning of love or compassion. She only knows hard. She doesn’t know fear. She did away with that the year she replaced it with anger. Not the flame hot fire of passion, but the coldly calculated ice of the malcontent, the betrayed, the avenging spirit come down to visit terror.

He looks at her, flicking through a glossy magazine, clad only in the sheerest turquoise gauze, through which tonight he has seen her skin, the dark circles of her nipples, the darker whorls of her pubic hair. He looks at her, and she feels it. Eyes snapped to darkest black, she looks back at him, feral for an instant before composure is regained. It whispers dark within him, and he unsnaps the back of her bra. He pulls the strap nearest to him from her shoulder. He straddles her and pulls the other strap away.

He works his hands along her sides, his thumbs pressing on the dip and ridge of her spine. He moves down her body and pulls aside that flimsy piece of stuff she chooses to call her knickers. She shifts position. Her backside swells then comes to a point at the small of her back, at the place where her waist dips in. It looks like a heart. An upside-down heart.

He enters her and they fuck.

The countdown of red numbers and a swell of explosions, personal and intense. She is not soft, and her cries are no softer. There are no tears, there is no gratitude. When it is finished, she falls instantly asleep, the stain of his semen between her legs.

It is all about her, this prickly cactus, desert rose. Her spines decorate his skin like ritual piercings; her blood, and spit, and anger tattoo his body.

In five hours, six, in seven, she will wake him, tell him he must go. He will pull on clothes, he will tie the laces on his shoes. She will go back to sleep as he goes down the stairs and lets himself out of the house, onto the street in those first moments of daylight.

But for now, she is there, marked by him, sleeping. He will not close his eyes for an hour or so yet. He will lie and stare at the ceiling. He will calculate the possibilities. It’s all for her, and for moments with her like this. It is all for the hardness of her anger bound tightly in her cunt. It is all for the hatred of the nation that she lives among, and the causes of that anger. It is all because he knows that she will never be soft, and he has nothing to fear. He need never worry about softness again.

Softness is a mug’s game. The countdown of red numbers and the swell of explosions, impersonal and intense, tell him so.

In the morning, he wakes up. He makes his rendezvous. She sleeps through two more hours after his departure, then waits to see it on the news.

The sister who grieves. The daughter who mourns. She is not soft, and never will be.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

The Thud Of It

Halfway through September and the back door still open at nine. Warm, too warm for the time of year. And why do we call this an Indian Summer?

I can feel it coming. That same need. That same desire; to flee; to fly.

I kill the Daddy Longlegs that has come floating through the door. I chase it with the washing up brush, swiping at it, creating a draft that it rides, taking it away from me. It lands flat on the floor, its legs splayed, like someone’s skeletal hand. I pick up one of my many shoes that happens to be lying close by. I squash it. And I feel the desire return.

I have to get away from here. Even though he is gone. This isn’t about avoidance. This is about sorrow and failure, disappointment and memory. This is about denying that I am the same girl, still.

If I leave; if I flee and ride the draft created by my own swipes of panic; if I land in some other place, I can almost convince myself it will be better. But how many times have I done this now? How many times have I run because the horror of the truth was too much to bear?

The ring on my finger is slippery with the water that lies trapped between its smooth inner curve and my finger. I pull it off and wipe my finger dry, then rub the tip of my index finger inside the ring. It slides back onto my ring finger gracefully, smooth and heavy and familiar.

Am I? The same girl. Am I? I do not know her, this one who stands in the bright kitchen light, underneath the square panels of the light fittings, with their four halogen bulbs causing light and shadows to mottle the yellow-painted walls and plucking the lights of redness from her hair. I do not know her at all, it seems. What she is capable of; what lengths she will go to; what depths she will plumb.

If I sit on this doorstep, one half of me is inside the house in the bright light of the kitchen. My legs, all 32-inch inside leg of them, two inches short of being half of me, are on the outside, in the dark. My bare feet on the concrete paving stones, hoping in their nervous way that there will be no slugs, no beetles, no more Daddy Longlegs to slip or creep or crawl across their surface. My hands gripping the edge of the doorstep, anchoring me down to earth.

It seems as if, as when younger when I would lie in the swimming baths with my arms hooked around the rail, holding myself back against the side of the baths, it seems as if my legs could float free, suspended in this ocean of nothing. It seems as if my whole life could do that, and that it is only my hands gripping the doorstep that prevents it from happening.

If, at sea, you lie and let the salt water catch you; if you bob out on the current and allow yourself to drift; if you stare up at the sky, at the sun reaching its zenith; how long would it take you to choose to go under? How long before the endless drift and the blinding light of the sun would drive you mad and you would let the burning saltwater into your mouth, your stomach, your lungs?

Doors are open, and I hear the shout of “Leonard” from the mouth of Pat. I hear the voices of children, begging to be allowed to stay up, whiny with the heat. I hear the sound of my home, the place I have settled in. I hear the stillness and the calm, the life that carries on regardless. There are people on this street who have lived here their whole adult lives, and I am not ready to leave. I am unwilling to leave.

But the desire sends electric impulses along the nerves in my legs. It stirs my blood; adrenalin telling me to choose flight.

If I sit here and close my eyes, I can see the sea. I can take myself away from here, with its cooling memories of hope and disjointed emotion. But it doesn’t last and the peace is shattered by my own murderous intent. My blood runs thick and dark, and flight secedes, replaced by fight.

That he is not here makes no odds. He is anywhere I want him to be, near or far. He is in my memory, in waves of anger, in pressure points on my skin. Battered and bruised, face livid with the marks of my fists. The pulse of my anger is the thud of cock against cunt. His cock, her cunt; my fists fucking up his face.

The guttural curse of my mother tongue is all I have to define this.

Sitting here, I remember the hiss and slap of conversation. I remember the toxic narrowing of veins and arteries, and the way my nails felt against my palms. I call up the fizz of life in my bones, the love and the hatred, the salty taste of it; tears and sweat; the metal of blood in mouth; the sourness of bile in stomach. Hope and disjointed emotion are far away now. I have remembered the pulse of my anger, and what caused it.

The sting of flesh against flesh. The pinch of skin caught between fingers. The friction of my hand forming a fist around his dick. Teeth and lips in tender places. Turned aside, banged away. Cut off, cut out, deselected by committee.

Side by side on a sofa somewhere, legs stretched out, feet resting on a table. Silent with contentment. Familiar and comfortable. How would anyone guess the storm waiting round the corner?

Clink of ice cubes in a glass; black straw abandoned in the ashtray. Twin mobile phones lying on the table. A summer beer garden, the football on the telly. His cock, her cunt; the thud of fist against cheekbone.

I was so quiet then, so dozy. I was serene in my naivety. Slow pressure hissed out from time to time, and hate was all the pleasure there could be had. Hate and its twisted sister, love.

He gave nothing away. Nothing. Hayfever sneezes in pub gardens. Shirt sleeves rolled up to not quite the elbow. Side on view of that face I loved; that head so full of life’s mysteries. That I should think that I could learn what it contained, when he gave nothing away.

I blunder through these days at times, since his departure. It was slow and sudden. A gradual disappearance, and then a physical absence. Truth rushing past me like air from a decompressing cabin.

My hands still grip the doorstep. Knuckles white with grief and disbelief, I hold myself tightly, fix myself to this place.

Face to face, so close that all we could see was eyes, I asked him once to kiss me, and he did. But he was absent, and I closed my eyes so I would not have to see.

My bare feet on the concrete are cold. The only sounds beyond this garden and this street are the whine of planes in the sky and the rumble of traffic on the roads. The high-pitched squeak of someone’s brake discs. I listen to my pulse, and I forget.

I let go of the doorstep but do not float off into the night. I am fixed here now. He is gone, and this place is my castle.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

Grand Gestures

She stood just inside the doorway of the pub. The rain dripped from her hair and clothes onto the tiled floor that said this pub used to be a bank.

She could hear Dusty Springfield on the juke box, her voice coming through the inner doors over the swirl of muddled voices from the bar within. A hundred different conversations from across time landing simultaneously in this pub.

First instincts. They are there to be listened to. It was drawing to a close, now, this thing she couldn’t put a name to. She felt it.

The door through to the bar was pushed open, outwards, towards her, and two laughing men exited the pub in their acrylic football shirts. The man in front was laughing over his shoulder at something his friend had said. He walked into her.

“Sorry, love,” he said, holding her by the shoulders, still smiling, still laughing. “Are you drying off?”

His acrylic shirt would be no protection against the rain, and there was no sign of a coat or jacket. His friend was the same. They squeezed past her, still laughing and joking. The closest she had been to another human body in weeks.

How could she have guaranteed the things he had asked of her then? She had always known that trust would be broken eventually and the dam would have to break. How could she have promised not to breathe a word of any of it to anyone? She couldn’t, and so she didn’t.

She held a brown envelope. His name was written on it in thick black marker. The envelope was wet at the edges. She had protected most of it from the rain by holding it underneath her coat as she ran to the nearest place she could shelter.

Twice today she had walked up his path to his front door. The first time she knocked. She always intended to hand his things back to him, so that he would know this wasn’t some petulant action. You can’t keep gifts when the meaning has been wrenched from them. You can’t keep them when the meaning was always a lie.

She had even been going to return the most precious thing he gave to her. The thing that carved its way into her. The thing that carried twists and turns along paths through gardens that spoke to her of him and her.

Nobody had answered when she knocked at the door, so she had left the envelope on the front step; face up, positioned so that his name would face him when he opened the door.

As she walked back along the street, beneath the trees, she sent him a message, telling him that the envelope was there; telling him what was in it.

‘You just missed me’ said his reply. ‘Currently stuck in traffic near Northampton. A sad fate for such a fine book, to be left on a doorstep.’

She had made it as far as the centre of the village. She turned around and walked the fifteen minutes back to his house. He had known that she would. He had understood that she couldn’t leave the book lying there for anyone to take.

So she had retrieved it and, as she walked back once again to the centre of the village, she had protected it from the rain by holding it beneath her coat.

There she stood, in the pub doorway, unable to move. Unable to think what to do. More people emerged from the bar, some walking into her, others acting as though she didn’t exist. She could have been a statue. She stood in her dripping coat, with her hair plastered to her forehead and the brown envelope in her hand.

She was lost. In that moment she had known it, when she read his text. She was lost and her compass was gone from her. It was as though someone had reversed the planet’s polarity, or held a giant magnet above her head, so that her inner needle spun uncontrollably. Now this way, now that, searching for true north; searching for home.

She had found the first place of shelter she could think of. The pub where he had first identified her species. The pub where he learned that, catlike, she only responded to movement. She was paralysed in the doorway, dripping rainwater onto the tiles, buffeted by the passage of drinkers entering and leaving the bar.

Eventually, the bar manager came out. Someone must have mentioned the strange woman standing beyond the doors.

“You alright, love?” he asked, wary and on the defensive. He didn’t understand her behaviour, she could tell. He was wary of it, didn’t trust it.

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice surprised her. That it still existed. For a while she had thought that she would never be able to speak again, because she felt that she no longer knew how. The world had pulled away from under her in the moment that she realised that he was gone and it was over. Finally, irreversibly over.

“Can I help you at all? Only, you’re blocking the doorway and if you’re not meeting anyone or coming in for a drink, I think you’d better move on.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure.”

The bar manager looked at her. “Can I call you a cab or anything?” he suggested.

“A cab. Yes, a cab.”

“Where are you going to?”

“Home, I suppose,” she said. She looked down at the envelope, at his name written in black marker, permanent ink, untouched by the rain.

“And home is?”

She told him. He went back into the bar and she followed him, not knowing what else to do, now that her paralysis had left her. Now that she had been acknowledged as existing.

She stood at the bar.

“Can I help you, love?”

That same question. Can I help you? She looked at the barmaid blankly.

“Drink?” she asked, gesturing to the pumps in front of her.

“Oh. No. Thank you. Your boss is just ringing for a cab for me.”

The barmaid looked at her as though she was a born again christian, and shuffled off further down the bar to where a group of young men were huddled over their pints. She leaned on the bar to chat with them, every so often looking back towards the woman with the dripping coat and the brown envelope.

“Be ten minutes,” said the bar manager, putting the receiver down on the phone behind the bar. “Do you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. No.”

“Perhaps you’d like to wait over by the door, then.”

She realised that he meant that she was stopping his customers from getting to the bar, even though the pub wasn’t that busy.

Dusty Springfield had finished singing long ago, and the juke box was working its way through a batch of Northern Soul classics. She went to stand by the door and leaned against one of the wooden pillars.

Two songs came and went, and from the outside world she heard the beep of a car horn.

“That’ll be you, love,” said the bar manager, nodding his head towards the door. “Mind how you go, now.”

“Thank you,” she said, and left the pub.

The cab driver was waiting with the door open, in spite of the rain.

“Hello, love,” he said as she got into the car. “Where am I taking you?”

She told him. As they set off, he tried to talk to her, to engage her in some sort of conversation, but she couldn’t think of any answers to his questions. She stared out of the window at the shops and the trees and the houses they drove past on their way to her house.

The meter ticked up and up, the red glowing numbers flicking higher. She held the brown envelope to her, as though it were a teddy bear, or some childhood treasure meant to comfort her.

Her grand gesture, her last goodbye, gone wrong and back in her arms again. He was one hundred and thirty miles or more away. He was a lifetime away already, her grand gesture missed by a matter of hours. She had been saved that particular embarrassment at least, then.

The meter continued its upward motion, the numbers growing larger, like the waxing moon.

The real moon was waning. She had seen it last night as she drove home for the last time from his house. The full moon had passed two nights ago, and now it was giving away slices of itself to the shadow of the earth.

She thought of him, sitting in a different car, one hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred miles away from her now. Maybe even in another house by now. A lifetime away, and her forgotten.

She pulled out her phone from her pocket. She looked at its sleekness, at its metallic sheen. She almost rang him, to say some pointless words to him, knowing that he was in a car or in a house with someone else. Knowing that she would get his voicemail and her message would be heard by him in the solitude of a different kitchen that she didn’t know the geography of.

She almost rang to tell him that next time he was back up this way he should ring her and they could go for a drink, as friends, knowing that she wouldn’t mean it, knowing as well that he would say “Yeah” and “Of course” and “I will” and that he wouldn’t mean it either.

He had said to her once that she could ring him anytime and that, if he was busy, he would ring her back. He had said many things to her once. She had learned in the days leading up to this one that none of them had gone any further than surface deep. All of them were floating on the surface of the moment. All of them forgotten when his attention had drifted elsewhere.

And if she did ring him to tell him that they should go for a drink in the realm of never-never, and if he did say “Yeah” and “Of course” and “I will”, she would say “No you won’t. You’ll forget me.”

And that was where her story ended, because she wouldn’t allow herself to second guess his response. She didn’t want to acknowledge to herself just how unconvincing his “I won’t forget you” would be. She didn’t want to hear it put into words, the fact that this was really over and she would never see him again.

She realised with a jolt that he would have left town without ever telling her so, if she hadn’t decided to make her failed grand gesture. Even when she had tried to say goodbye, he had managed to leave things dangling. Finished without being completed.

The driver pulled up outside her house and read out the numbers from his meter. She pulled notes from her purse and handed them to him. He scrabbled for change in some hidden pocket and the transaction was completed. The circle of service closed.

She got out of the cab and walked up her front path, the brown envelope dangling from her hand.

She placed it on the sofa, next to her handbag; the one she had left behind when she rushed out on her spur of the moment sally forth, riding the bus across town to her failed denouement.

It would stay sealed, with his name written across it, and it would be hidden away from view. The other things didn’t matter. The cds and such. It was the book that mattered. A sadder fate than doorstep abandonment for such a fine book. Hidden away in a sealed brown envelope; locked away from view.

The tears began to fall at last. The crash of the world falling away from her again. The knowledge that this was what it all came down to. A book sealed away forever.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006

Perfect Binding

I couldn’t wake up this morning. The past was too far behind me to make any sense. I applied my mascara in the bathroom and looked at my mouth in the mirror. The freckles around it made me look as though I had the Black Death. Ring A Ring O Roses, and all that.

What did I think would happen? Nothing. It couldn’t have been any other way.

The roads weren’t as busy as I was expecting today. At 8.30 I had done 100 miles exactly since I last filled up with petrol. I was level with the last red car on that stretch of road, just past the newsagent’s. It was a perfect moment. I looked down at the trip mileage reading and it sat plumply at 100.0

Simple pleasures.

The past is too far gone now to be able to tell me what’s what.

The past has been trying to tell me something all week, shouting something to me that comes over all jumbled because the distance is too great. I don’t listen. I never have. I’m like any historian. I document what happens, but I never learn.

I was clenching my jaw in my sleep last night. Some erstwhile tension seeking release. Now it feels as though my teeth are loose and might fall out.

I am falling apart.

I’m reading a book. It’s called Hope. When you take the red dust jacket off, the book cover is someone's mouth in the process of saying the word. "Hope". It's a pair of lips, a mouth if you will, in sepia. The inside of the mouth is perfectly black, shaped like a diamond. The word Hope is written in red capitals in the middle of the black diamond. I'm looking at the book on the coffee table, and the cover is lifting up slightly at the bottom right hand corner. It makes the person look as though they are falling to their right. Maybe falling backwards. Maybe the word Hope is coming out of their mouth as their body falls away, so that it sounds as though their voice is falling too, but not as quickly as their body.

That's how I feel today. Falling backwards, with hope coming out of my mouth.

I’m forgetful today. I left the tv on standby when I left for work this morning. I left my purse on the sofa under the window. I left my mobile phone on the coffee table, next to the laptop. I carried a story with me, in my head, as I drove and the trip mileage reading went past 100.

There have been books to catalogue today. They are books that I’m supposed to be trying to get rid of. Before, when I hadn’t even looked at them, when all I was bothered about was how much space they take up in that tiny library room, I just wanted to be rid of them. Today, I sat down with them, and looked through them, checking the titles and the pages. There are books there made from Chinese and Japanese hand made papers, printed with kanji characters and woodblock illustrations, too beautiful to discard. There are books over 300 and 400 years old, in Latin and in German, the type heavy on the whisper thin pages. And now I want to keep them. Even though I know they’ll never be used, I want to keep them because they are beautiful, worked with skill in the bindings and in the leaves between the bindings. They would be like poetry if they had nothing written in them at all. Russian books printed in Cyrillic that my ill-used knowledge struggles to translate.

There are dregs, of course. Modern publications it is an insult to place on the same shelves as these masterpieces.

Not that any of it matters. Nobody comes to look at them. Nobody comes to learn from them. Those Nobodies who make loud noises when you tell them that you’re getting rid of things. Even though they don’t use them, they like to know that things are there, in the place they should be.

Much better to not say anything. Nobody needs to know.

I’m a book on a shelf. It has suddenly come to me that that’s what I am. A book on a shelf in a library where people seldom trespass. I’ve been pulled out from the line of inconsequential reads. My spine has been creased; bent back, the better to see what’s in my middle. He has creased me for all time. My perfect binding threatens to fragment. Pages of me are beginning to scatter.

That’s why I couldn’t wake up this morning. Pages of me have gone missing. The past is too far behind me to make any sense.

And what if the pages turn up again? They can be stuck back in using invisible tape that pulls too tightly across the paper’s weave and leaves it buckled along the inner edge. Pages stuck back into a book leave the outside untidy; ugly, almost. Scarred like a weal left behind by a burn.

My jaw is clenched again. My teeth feel like they might crumble any minute, as though they were made from Edinburgh Rock.

If I’m a book, then where has he left me? Let’s follow this analogy to its logical conclusion. He has left me on a bus, a train, at the bottom of a bag, slipped between the cushions on a sofa, lost down the back of the bed. He has forgotten to take me back, and now the fine is too much. He could buy a new one for what it would cost him to take me back.

But this book didn’t come from a lending library. So technically, it was theft. He stole me. Slipped me out when nobody was looking. Hid me beneath his jacket. I was his guilty pleasure, taken so that nobody else could read, and then forgotten when his curiosity was sated.

More fool me for not being tagged, then. More fool me for being so tightly bound that no tattle tape tag could be placed at my middle. So tightly bound that he needed to crack my spine to see what was buried within.

Hardly worth the effort, though. It was hardly worth the effort.

And now I sleep so deeply, and I dream such terrible things, and I can’t wake up in the morning because the past…

The past lies too far behind me to ever make sense again.

The mouth on the cover of that book I’m reading. It might not be saying Hope. It might be sucking Hope in, swallowing it, choking on it. With all that rush of air that sounds when someone sucks in the air and whatever is floating on it; whether it’s Hope or Lust or Please or Leave Me.

Maybe that mouth is sucking Hope in.

A lingerie catalogue arrived today, while I was at work, reading the spines of books, checking their title pages, loving the feel of their pages beneath my fingers. I have clean underwear in the washing basket on the floor in the kitchen. It has been there for weeks. It came out of the washing machine and went onto the line, but the wind was too cold and it came back in damp. It never did make it upstairs to the clothes airer. It just sat there, damply, in the washing basket on the floor in the kitchen in front of the yawning mouth of the tumble drier. And I let it.

I wonder if his fingers loved the feel of my pages beneath them.

I expect that the underwear and the skirts and the tops that are too flimsy to be dried in the tumble drier, too prone to shrinking, I expect that they smell musty now. Damp and slightly mouldy. As though I’m a student who can’t spare the 50p for the drier.

But I’m not a student. I’m just lost. I’m falling apart. Falling backwards. Hope coming out of my mouth, or maybe being sucked back in.

© J R Hargreaves September 2006