Together

The geisha on the giant electronic billboard gazes off into the near distance, a discreet smile playing on her lips. Kanji spell out her message to the commuters, but I cannot make sense of them. The white background on the advertisement is backlit and surreal. It makes the geisha look as though she has been painted onto enamel.

A train rushes towards the station. The warning jingle plays over the tannoy, letting commuters know that their ride is almost here. The train rushes and then slows, gliding to a stop, precisely lined up with the door markings on the platform. The guard is hanging out of his window, signalling to the driver somehow, letting him know when he is close to the markings. The train stops. The guard is opposite me, in his tiny room in between the ordinary and green cars. He looks at me and smiles. To him, I am a tourist, mesmerised by the precision of Japanese train travel. He must have seen the same expression on countless faces. That he smiles at me humanises him.

This is not my train, though, so I will never find out if he enters and leaves each carriage with the same humanity on show. I sit on the cold metal bench and admire the gleaming white of the train. Shinkansen Nozomi, barred to me with my tourist’s JR Pass, the same shape as the Hikari on which I plan to ride, stopping at fewer stops on its way to the same destination. I have not paid the premium, and so I cannot ride.

Almost imperceptably, the train begins to move. The doors have closed, the electronic clock registers the time shown on the timetable, and this mechanical bullet begins to gather speed. Even before the end carriages have passed me, the train is blurred with the speed of its movement and suddenly gone, leaving the geisha before me again.

School children in their immaculate black uniforms have gathered on the opposite platform. They stand beneath the giant geisha, oblivious to her existence. They pay no attention to her message. It isn’t a message aimed at them. The boys are all dressed in suits, their jackets with Chinese collars. The girls are in pleated skirts, the sailor collars of their blouses lying flat against the backs of their jackets. Hair is cut into different styles, but all is black and gleaming. They stand in groups. Their teacher is nowhere to be seen.

The warning jingle plays again. A man in khaki trousers and a blue windcheater rushes along the platform towards the school children. A woman follows behind him. I grab my camera as another bullet train rushes towards me, from the opposite direction this time. I snap and capture the sense of movement, the speed of the thing appearing cartoonlike in the image. People are sleeping in their seats, their faces at the small aeroplane-style windows. I see the children getting on the train, finding their seats in the green car. School trips must cost a fortune. I wonder how far they are going. Is it a trip to the gilded splendour of Osaka castle, or are they travelling further? To Hiroshima or Miyajima, perhaps?

The train pulls out and once more I face the geisha. The opposite platform is empty again. My platform is filling up once more, and I check my watch, look at the electronic clock, the overhead dot matrix noticeboard. The Hikari which will carry me to Tokyo appears on the noticeboard, first in kanji and then in romaji. I join the queue at the markings for the door to my ordinary car and the warning jingle begins to play. I wonder where he is. He went over to the smoking area further down the platform to sate his desire for nicotine.

The train approaches, snub nosed and brilliantly white, and he runs over carrying a Kiosk bag. He comes to a halt beside me and half pulls a tube of ChipStar from the bag, waggling it at me by way of explanation. He is slightly breathless.

“I wondered where you had got to,” I say.

“I thought I’d get some snacks for the journey,” he replies.

I look into the bag and see rice balls with their nori wrappers next to the ChipStar. There are two Soy Joy bars as well, and bottles of green tea and CC Lemon. I smile into the bag, and he closes it.

The train doors have opened. We get on and find our seats, arranging our bags around us, stretching out our legs and reclining the seat backs. It is still early, although not that early. We will reach Tokyo in the early afternoon.

Announcements begin to play over the in-train message system. The recorded woman’s voice tells us in careful English where we are now and where we will be next, then repeats it all again in Japanese. Messages scroll across the display panel above the door, a mixture of kanji and kana with a sprinkling of English. The internal door slides open and the guard appears. He bows, enters the car, bows again and walks along the aisle towards the rear of the train.

We begin to move. The buildings seem to bend slightly as the train gathers speed. I turn my face to the window and watch the city whizz past, skyscrapers being exchanged for houses and apartment blocks as we move from city to suburb. The suburbs eventually give way to fields, with only a few blue, green and orange roofed houses dotted here and there.

I hear a voice behind me. The guard has returned. He will have bowed twice and now is welcoming us to the train, explaining that he will check our tickets. He makes his way through the car, clipping tickets. He reaches us and does the same, checking our JR Passes too. With each action, he performs a minute bow. His hands are gloved in white cotton. His uniform is dark. He wears a peaked cap.

As he leaves the car, he turns to face us and bows once more. He says something in Japanese, bows again and reverses out through the door. In the connecting passage, he will turn round and then repeat the ritual at the next car.

There is something calming about all this ceremony, even though it seems meaningless to me. A woman pushing a refreshment cart enters the car. Like the guard, she bows and speaks to us, then bows again, before slowly moving her cart along the aisle. The woman is dressed in sugar pink gingham, with a bow in her hair. People buy drinks and snacks from her. Someone buys a bento box. She demonstrates the three different kinds available, and he chooses the long slim one. We let the cart go by. We have enough in our Kiosk bag. I gaze, intrigued, at the bento boxes as the cart makes its way past, wishing I was brave enough to try one out.

Beside me, my companion has begun to doze already. Despite the speed, the movement of the train is minimal. Not too much swaying. Travellers here are quiet, unlike at home. There is no tinny hiss from someone’s mp3 player. There are no loud conversations, no screeching children. He looks tired. We were up late into the night, neither of us able to sleep.

I had suggested that we go to the jazz club round the corner from the apartment, but he thought it too risky. Neither of us speaks Japanese very well, and he was wary of drawing somebody’s, anybody’s, attention. Instead, he had lounged on the bed, reading through the documents again, and I had stood out on the balcony, looking down on the shrine in the walled garden across the street. During the day I had gone down and tried to go in, but a barrier was across the entrance and the gate was locked. I had gone back to the apartment and watched a man arrive on a bicycle, who then swept the steps at the entrance. It looked different at night, lit as it was by the street lights and a few lanterns strung up in the trees. The twin foxes that guarded the shrine itself looked larger in the half light.

Eventually, I had tired of looking, waiting for something to happen. I had gone back into the bedroom to find my companion sleeping, papers scattered across the bed. I had pulled the documents together and put them back into order, scanning them briefly to make sure that I remembered what we were to do, then gone to the other bedroom and fallen asleep myself.

Since he is sleeping, I decide to look through the documents again, even though I am sure I know the sequence things will move in today. I check which subway line we need to take to get to Ginza. I double check which station and which exit we need to use. It will be busy, a working day, people moving around the city. I want to be sure that we will be inconspicuous, even though our very Western-ness makes us obtrusive. I have seen him panic before, when things haven’t gone quite to plan. I want to be ready, to keep him calm, to not screw things up.

We are dressed appropriately. I look every inch the affluent Western woman. He has the distracted look of an eccentric rich man. To all intents and purposes, we are married, and I am as cold and indifferent as any woman who has married for money. Ill-gotten or otherwise.

I am thirsty. I reach for the Kiosk bag. It rustles and he stirs in his sleep. He has combed his hair differently today, but resting his head against the seat has encouraged an attempt to regain its usual style. Dark hair sticks out at strange angles, pulled partly by static, partly by its natural bend. I will have to remind him to straighten it out in the train bathroom when he awakes.

I take a bottle of green tea from the bag. I sip, and it is bitter and not cold enough inside my mouth. It tastes better fresh from a chiller or a vending machine, but I am too thirsty for the fizz of the lemonade. I place the bottle on the window shelf and stare past it at the landscape we are passing through. We have moved towards the coast. Buildings litter the horizon, a higgle-piggle of heights and styles. Orange and white striped pylons poke out from hillsides, carrying electrical current through the wires they support. We cut in and out of tunnels, travelling through hillsides which are almost mountainsides. In the gaps between buildings and hills I catch glimpses of the sea. I would like to get off the train and wander through the streets to the shore, to see if it is like the seaside at home. I imagine something greyer, more granulated, less sandy. I don’t know why. I have never seen a picture of the Japanese south coast between Kyoto and Tokyo.

I remember the trip north we made on one of the days when we were playing tourist. We travelled on a single train, but somewhere along the way it switched allegiance and we had to pay for the last stage of the journey. We arrived at a small station, oddly out of step with the town, and were given a photocopied map showing the way to the shrines and temples that stood alongside the bay. One of the three most beautiful parts of Japan, the bay boasts crystal blue waters and white golden sands and a mile long spit of land that crosses it. We had enjoyed our day as tourists, walking through the pine trees, paddling in the sea. By accident, we had taken the chair lift up the mountain on the station side of the bay. By which I mean I had wanted to take the monorail but, before I knew it, a seat was scooping me off my feet and carrying me unsecured up the mountainside. I remember that I had gripped the pole by which the seat was suspended from the cable until my knuckles had whitened. Coming down again was different. It usually is.

And yet, even though I have seen a Japanese sea and Japanese sand, for some reason I imagine this coast differently. There is no way of knowing, without leaving the train, because the view never affords an actual glimpse of the shore. Just the petrol blue sea stretching away to the horizon.

I take another sip from the bottle of green tea, then turn to select a rice ball from the bag. As I turn I see that he has woken up and is watching me. He has been watching the back of my head, my exposed neck with the tendrils of hair escaping from my chignon. My skin warms at the thought. I say nothing and concentrate on the contents of the bag.

As I unwrap the nori and flip the pyramid of rice onto it, I tell him that he needs to straighten his hair. From the corner of my eye, I see his hand go to his head, trying to smooth the hair down again.

“No,” I say. “You’ll need to use the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror.”

I still haven’t looked at him and I don’t know why. Something in his sleepy regard has chastened me. I try to tell myself, remind myself, that this is business, and that consequently we have no business turning it into something else. He leaves his seat, and I bite into the nori wrapped rice with its heap of crab meat cocooned in the centre. The nori crunches between my teeth, then the rice begins to disintegrate in my mouth and my tongue tastes the sweetness of the crab. I close my eyes and luxuriate in the flavours and the textures. I never feel healthier than when we are in Japan. I am always happy when we are here. As I chew, eyes still closed, I allow myself one small daydream. I dream that we no longer have to do this thing that we do. I dream that we are more than companions on a business trip, that we are the people we were born to be and not the people the world has made us. I dream that we live here.

He returns to his seat and I look at him at last. His hair is smoothed down, slicked into place. He is the same but different. Our eyes meet and I have to look away quickly before I begin to swim. Damn heart, damn emotions, damn everything. I am as cold and indifferent as I need to be. The more I tell myself that this is true, the truer it must surely become.

So why doesn’t it feel true?

We eat in silence. The man across the aisle, who bought the bento box, is wielding chopsticks, expertly moving sushi pieces from box to mouth. He has a can of beer in the cup rest on the flip-down table. I want to call across to him, ask him how his food is. I want to break the rules.

“What is it?” my companion asks.

I realise that I have been sitting with the remains of my rice ball halfway to my mouth for too long. I eat, and shake my head. It is nothing. I don’t know what it is. I have had enough of this life. I want to tell him that I have had enough of this life, but we have a job to do, and if we don’t do it then this life will be over. So what choice do I have but to shake my head at this man that means nothing more to me than money on the table and a roof over my head?

Of all the places to have a change of perspective, after all these years. On a speeding bullet train in the Japanese countryside. I am no Holly Golightly. He is no Paul Varjak. This is no low-level kleptomaniac romp and we will not kiss in the rain.

I pull out the documents, look through them again.

“Memorising them?” he asks.

“Making sure I have everything fixed in my mind,” I reply.

He looks at his watch. “Only an hour before we get there,” he says.

He pulls a box from his pocket. “Here,” he says, “you might as well have this now.”

I don’t open the box, which is small and dark. I know what it contains. I know what I must do with it, in just over an hour’s time. I am not nervous. I have done it before, will probably do it again. A wave of tiredness washes over me, and I know that I never want to do this again.

“Enough,” I whisper to myself.

“I’m sorry?” he says, leaning his head towards mine.

“I’ve had enough,” I whisper into his ear, turning my head just enough to do so.

He moves his head so that he can look at me. His eyes are flinty like the petrol blue sea I glimpsed earlier between buildings. Flecks of hazel in each iris dance around the pupils like flecks of cruelty.

“Pull yourself together,” he says.

I look away. I look out of the window. All romantic notions of giving this up, of having a normal life, dissipate, disappear, dissolve. I close my eyes and sleep.

When I awake, we are pulling into Tokyo station. I turn to face him and find him looking at me, cold and hard.

“You okay?” he asks abruptly.

I nod. He raises an eyebrow, so I nod again.

“Yes,” I say. “It was nothing.”

We leave the train. The small box is safely in my handbag. We have left behind the Kiosk bag for the cleaning staff to remove. I put on my sunglasses and tighten the belt on my coat. We walk side by side, barely touching, just like the married couple we purport to be.

We find the subway line we need to take, buy our tickets and hop onto a train. He has found a tie from somewhere and put it on. His hair is straining against its new restraints, aching to return to normal. I reach across and smooth down a strand that is beginning to snake.

“Thank you, dear,” he says, getting into character.

“You’re welcome, darling,” I reply.

We are the only people speaking on this subway train. Everyone else reads, or stares at the floor, or plays on a handheld computer console. I fold my hands around the strap of my handbag, hold my knees together and stare straight ahead. He has his legs splayed out and his knee keeps threatening to bang into me, but somehow he avoids physical contact and I am at once grateful for it and frustrated.

Another disembodied female voice intones the name of our station. The LCD display tells us on which side of the carriage the doors will be opening. We rise and move towards the doors and wait for the train to stop.

It is a short walk from the station exit to the Wako Department Store. Strange bubbles and metal waves are in the window, interspersed with telescopes. Inside the glass of each telescope is a small image of a person. The display is advertising Seiko watches. We pause and peer through the window at the display. I want to hang back, to delay this for as long as possible. For once it is me that is about to panic.

He takes me by the elbow.

“Come along, dear,” he says firmly, gripping the small bone tightly and digging his fingers into the thin skin at the joint. “Let’s have a look at a few trinkets.”

He walks me into the store and we make our way to the exclusive jewellery boutique that is our target. A lot is riding on this. A lot, but not enough for this to be the last time. Not for him, and not for me either.

He lets go of my elbow, confident that I am calmer now, that I am not going to be any trouble. He relaxes, assumes the air of a rich man out on a shopping trip with his wife. I fall into line and play my part too.

We approach the boutique. A member of staff greets us. We let it be known that we don’t speak Japanese, and he switches to perfect English. My supposed husband talks about wanting to buy his wife a little trifle. The word confuses our host.

“A gift,” my companion explains. “A small trinket, expensive enough to show that I love her, small enough not to shout it.”

The man understands. He busies himself with seeking out baubles and trinkets galore, laying them out on a cloth, stepping back as we inspect them. I affect boredom. It isn’t too difficult.

“I don’t know,” I say slowly, looking away, looking around the shop, casting my eyes this way and that. “Perhaps a necklace.”

“A necklace?” says my companion, a little too crisply.

I decide to play with him a little.

“Yes,” I say. “I think I would like a necklace.”

The item we have brought, hidden in its little box in the depths of my handbag, is not a necklace, could never be a necklace. My companion looks at me, as if to say “What are you playing at?” and I smile at him.

“Don’t you think a necklace would look pretty, Charlie?”

He flushes slightly. Although it isn’t his actual name, he doesn’t like it that I have used it. Not in the middle of a job.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly. “You have plenty of necklaces already. I was thinking more of a ring.”

“Oh, but rings are boring,” I say, moving to another display case and looking down at the diamond and platinum chokers, collars and garlands. “A necklace catches the light so much more pleasantly.” I drum my fingernails against the glass. “There are some real sparklers in here,” I say.

He moves across to stand beside me. Too slow, though. I move away before he has chance to catch hold of any part of me. I move to a third display case. I am aware that the attendant is watching us. Although he does not show it, he would never be so indiscreet, I can tell that he thinks us a little strange.

The third case contains charms to hang from a bracelet.

“Oh, how lovely!” I exclaim. “Charles, dear, come and look! So sweet, so pretty.” I look at him, allowing false tears to prick my eyes. “My mother gave me a charm bracelet when I was sixteen. One of these would look so pretty on it.”

“That old thing?” he says, deciding to play along. “You want to put something exquisite onto that piece of cheap gold plate?” He looks at me. “Darling, you’ve moved up in the world now.”

The attendant relaxes slightly. He has formed an understanding of the situation. Clearly, I am some piece of trash made good. I smile coldly at my companion.

“Don’t be so tacky, darling,” I say. “You are embarrassing the help.”

He crosses the floor and is beside me in seconds. He grips my hand, crushing my knuckles. I try to extricate myself, but he is too strong.

“Don’t make a scene,” he hisses.

“I’m not the one trying to break my wife’s hand,” I hiss back.

My game has gone awry. We are close to failure, and I find myself wondering what the consequences would be if we were to leave this place empty handed. For a split second I think it would be worth the risk. The salesperson is looking anxious, but trying to hide it. I look at my companion, and something in that look persuades him to release my hand. The knuckles are red and will later be purple, bruised by the pressure he has applied. The fingers are too swollen already for me to risk trying on rings. He sees what I see, looks where I am looking. I feel him stiffen as he realises that everything might soon be falling away from him.

But my other hand is fine. He takes a calculated risk that the finger on my left hand is the same size as the one on my right, the one that the ring is measured to.

“How long have we been married now?” he asks, and I think I see where he is going.

“Three years,” I adlib.

“Three years,” he says, putting his arm around me and steering me back to the attendant, who is looking more concerned than confused. Something about us isn’t right, but he can’t quite place it. “Has it really been that long?”

We stand in front of the assistant, and my alleged husband of three years says, “I think I’d like to get my wife a ring, to mark three years of marriage. What do you think?”

The man breathes out and says, “Very good, sir.”

He has put us back on track. He has found a way out of the disaster I almost wrought, and he fills with pride. I feel it puff him up from the inside out. My right hand is throbbing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t broken a few bones on my behalf.

Rings appear. None match the one hidden in the box inside my bag. The one the local jeweller, who is in the pay of someone in the pay of someone else who is in the pay of the man who has commissioned this job, made based on sketches stolen from the designer, copied and returned. That ring doesn’t appear, and I wonder whether it has already been sold.

My companion is murmuring something about a ring that is perhaps a little more unique than the ones we have been shown already. Our man disappears into the back. When he returns he has it. The ring we are here to acquire. My heart flips. I prepare to slip the box from my handbag and, through sleight of hand, while my companion talks cut and carat and exquisite craftsmanship, switch the ring in the box for the one I am handling, trying on, gazing at with awe and wonder.

I have the box in my hand. I slip the ring onto my finger. It is slightly too big. The fingers on my left hand are slimmer than those on my right, but it doesn’t matter. I look at the ring, nestling against my fake wedding and engagement rings. I show it to my supposed husband and the shop attendant. My companion draws the attendant to one side, to talk money, to effect payment. Now is the time for me to work my magic, to fool the cameras that are undoubtedly trained on us, and make the switch just in time to change my mind, remove the ring and leave the shop before cash is handed over. But I can’t do it. I put the ring back onto the baize. My companion looks over at me, to see whether I am done. I give my head the merest shake. He frowns, begins to sweat.

“You stupid bitch,” he says.

The salesperson looks at him, and then at me. I shrug.

“Bitch!” He says it louder this time. I smile, begin to laugh, catch the gleam of metal beneath his jacket and laugh harder.

I am still laughing as I slump against the display case. My outflung hand, grappling for support, pushes the baize askew, scattering rings and baubles and trinkets over the floor of the boutique. I laugh as I feel the searing heat of the bullet enter my body. I maintain consciousness for just long enough to see a security guard strong-arming my alleged husband out of the shop and into a back room.

I wake up in a hospital. I am bandaged around my midriff, and my side aches. A nurse sees that I am awake, and hurries off to find a doctor.

The doctor assures me as best she can that I will be fine, that I will be well enough to leave soon. I thank her, and tell her that I have a flight booked for the next day. She frowns. She doesn’t think I will be able to fly.

“Oh,” I say. “Do I need to recover some more?”

“No,” she says. “Police. They want to talk.”

I nod. Of course. Before I’m allowed to leave I must sing like the bird I suddenly feel I am.

And sing I do. Loud and clear. I turn stool pigeon, telling all. I give names, addresses, dates, events. I claim protection for sharing these secrets and bringing down the people who can hurt me most.

It is over a month before I am allowed to leave, clothed in a new identity, my appearance altered as best it can be without resort to surgery. I leave with the tainted blessing of various law enforcement agencies, and settle myself into the seat of an aeroplane that will take me to a new life and freedom from the old.

In my pocket is a small box. In the box is a small ring. Now that my right hand has healed, it will fit the ring finger well. If I don’t sell it, that is.

Before I boarded the flight, I made a phone call. He will be waiting for me when my plane lands in my future. Finally I will be able to discard cold indifference as my default emotion. Finally I will be free to be the person I was born to be. Too late for us to start a life together in Japan, perhaps, but soon enough for us still to have a life.

(c) J R Hargreaves August 2009

Two months late

The summer finally arrived two months late. She gave it a couple of days, then mowed the lawn. Afterwards, she looked at her handiwork. It looked for all the world as scorched and inhospitable as a desert. Scrubby grass barely covered the greying earth that served as a home to the millions of ants that even now were crawling over her feet and up her legs.

She sighed and went back inside the house.

She had thrown open windows as soon as she got home from work, and now the white nets were billowing out through the glazed eyes of her house, like so many neglected bridal veils.

She drank an entire pint of juice down in one, made thirsty by the work of keeping her garden in order in the heat from the evening sun. Apple and raspberry, sharp and acidic; the juice gulped down her throat and into her stomach, cooling her body from the inside. The cat lay stretched out in a patch of sunlight, like Cleopatra reclining on her couch; her almond eyes were half-closed against the sunlight, every inch of her throbbing with pleasure.

The smells of other people’s cooking wafted on the air, and the cat’s bright pink nose twitched in time with her breathing, drawing the scents in so she could taste and savour vicariously.

Jane stood on the doorstep and did the same.

It sometimes seemed that her life was built around twos and doorsteps.

Her bare toes curled around the plastic lip of the door frame. She felt the hard ridge of plastic bite into the joints where toes met ball of foot. Burgers, sausages, the smells of British summer cooking, married with the exquisite almost-pain of plastic against flesh and she knew that, finally, it was over.

The candy-coloured hearts that sighed and swooned across her pink-strapped vest shivered in a gentle breeze against her skin.

She had expected rage, but what she discovered was pity. She had told herself that closure would feel different to this; would be a great boiling ball of steam that shrieked out of her body and left a blissful silence in its wake. Instead, she felt the merest pop, and all of life seemed to rush back in.

Her fingernails were dirty. The grey-green residue of scraped up grass clippings nestled under the nails of left hand and right. She looked at them, fingers spread out as though she expected to find webbed skin between them. Woman From Atlantis. Going into the kitchen, she rummaged in a cupboard for a cocktail stick.

The sharp end of the slender piece of wood scoured the valley between fingernail and fingertip, pulling out the borrowed vegetation, which she wiped from the stick and then onto her shorts.

Solitude stretched on for hundreds of years, punctured by the ringing of a doorbell here, a visit from the meter reader there, and regular forays out into the world to earn the money that enabled her to live like this.

Jane had thought that she would miss him. At first, she did, but she schooled herself not to and eventually not missing him became unnoticeable among the acres of other people she no longer missed. Seeing him like that, half expected and half curious as to what it would be like, she found it strange that they had ever thought they had anything in common.

She walked through the house and out of the front door, into the garden at the other side of the house. Across the road the recent widow was putting her latest victim through his own recently widowed paces. Coffers filled with money from her dead husband’s life assurance payout, the widow had put a lot of work into re-turfing her lawns and putting up new fences. Furniture went out through the back door into a skip, to make way for fresh through the front.

Jane faked absorption in her own garden so that she could earwig on the conversation. Pat and Eric; she the drunk, he the lonely man; it was ever that way. The widow’s voice was shrill and harsh, pure Mancunian screech. There was no avoiding knowing her business; from the time she set herself on fire lighting a cigarette to the time she idly mused about wanting to move to a terraced house, exactly the sort of house that the widower owned, everyone knew what was happening in her life. Whether they wanted to or not.

Jane dead-headed the roses.

Summer was here, two months late, and looked like it might stay for a while. Sweat trickled down the hollow in the small of her back, and Jane finally turned from spying on her neighbours to return to the house.

Inside, the phone was ringing. She picked the handset up from the base and listened. Her thoughts passed through groves of summer blooms and the twisted branches of trees and shrubs as he gave her the instruction.

The same story. Life defaulting to how it would always be; widows and divorcées passing from one man to the next; people seeking comfort in their supposed similarity with others; killers on the loose; plant pots stolen from gardens.

There was no need to even think about it any more. Her feet followed their own route. Her hands retrieved the tools of her trade from their hiding places. She changed out of vest and shorts and into something more suitable.

She closed the windows and locked the back door. The net curtains ceased to billow, Miss Haversham locked once again in silence and memory.

Before she left the house she painted her fingernails.

With hair pulled back and splashes of crimson at the ends of her fingers, she swung out of the front gate and trod the path long remembered and yet forgotten in its familiarity. Dark hair slashing the air behind her head, whipping from side to side despite the lack of breeze, Jane, single and singular and yet no different to any of the billions of people on the planet, set out to do what she knew best.

There was little to remark upon about her journey through the suburbs on foot and then by train. Her nails flashed red, and maybe some would remember that as a vague recollection days later. Her hair was as dark and glossy as newly mixed chocolate, liquid in its motion, and it could be that others would remember that about her, about this woman they didn’t really notice but were aware of on the edge of their existence.

Unremarkable, challenging no-one, Jane passed alongside the lives of many on her way into town, skirting their edges and unreal to each one of them. Flickers of red, flicks of brown, smudges on their consciousness. She barely noticed herself.

No cherry blossom on the street. Litter and dust and the pale pounded footprints of a hundred thousand shoppers, but spring was long gone and summer two months late. Jane slipped past doorways to shops and restaurants, bars and offices. To have dropped her head, to have appeared hurried, would have been to attract attention. Head high, eyes clear, smiling and focused, she appeared as any brisk-walking shopper would.

A phone call once; a familiar familial voice; not today. No floating, laughing midnight walk from jazz club to bar, either. Just a street and a woman, anonymous in her own skin, drowning in the joy of life. Something that someone walking the opposite way would catch sight of and remember, forcing him as it did to stop and turn and watch the woman with the laughing eyes walking away from him and turning the corner.

He didn’t pause long enough to hear the muffled pop or the crumple of clothes as the body fell to the floor. He wasn’t there to see Jane wrap the pistol once more in the cloth that was its home and drop it back into the bag she carried so casually across her body.

A flick of her phone, the keypad glowing turquoise, she selected a name from the list.

“I’m in town,” she said. “Do you fancy meeting for a drink?”

Summer was two months late and sometimes solitude needed to be disrupted.

She regretted nothing. She hadn’t missed him. She smiled from the top of her head to the tip of her toes.

The body in the alley sat slumped against the wall, blood blooming onto the white shirt from the bullet hole in his chest, as scarlet against the bleached cotton fabric as her nails were against her skin.

Long gone and put behind her.

© J R Hargreaves August 2007

Episode

The rat lay on its side, its fur plastered to the dead, greying skin of its body, bedraggled in the rain. Long dead and beginning to decay, an obscene bloom of blood on its chest marked where its heart had once been. Blood had leaked through broken skin to leave a mark like a carnation, grabbing the attention and reminding anyone who saw it that once this carcass had contained life.

She passed it, walking in the constant drizzle of a Manchester afternoon, and wanted to pause; wanted to look at this pathetic creature; felt sorry for it, even. She slowed as she went past.

The sense of falling backwards, of leaning back on her heels and waiting for the world to stop spinning, left her and everything became silent. She walked past the dead rat in a silent world where she was the only thing that moved; once past, the world rushed back into motion with all the sounds of cars tyres against wet roads and footsteps hurrying along pavements to accompany it.

The grey matted body made her think of the soldier whose remains had been dug up by archaeologists in Ypres. Boy soldiers blown to pieces at the side of the road in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bodies that couldn’t decay. ‘How do you bring such bodies home?’ she asked herself. She could understand the repackaging of a bunch of bones from ninety years ago, but how do you scrape together the remains of someone spattered across a roadway in a dusty, desert land?

Her car was almost the same maroon as the blood that blossomed on the dead rat’s chest. She unlocked it and got behind the wheel. Leaning back on her heels, she waited once more for the world to stop spinning.

“Have you stopped taking your medication?” he had asked her.

Muted by the lack of sleep and the over-indulgence in alcohol, she had set her jaw and refused to answer. She had not stopped taking her medication, and he had no right to ask.

She sat in her car, tilted back on her heels, and thought about his body spattered across a tarmac roadway. She wondered if she would flinch, were his body to spatter against her face.

Once, long ago, in a different place, she had heard the wail of a woman whose face bore the traces of her husband’s flesh and blood and bone. It was almost a different world. She kept it hidden behind a triptych; folding wooden screen, unpainted and unvarnished; she kept it hidden, buried.

She saw a group of women, as she drove home along Plymouth Grove. They were sitting, three of them together, on the pavement; backs to the wall, one of them was smoking; all three wore the fluorescent yellow vests and white hard hats of workers on a building site. The one who smoked had the cigarette in one hand, wrist angled, cocked almost, as though the cigarette should have been in a holder and the woman in a cocktail dress. Sucking on her cancer stick, she said something through the exhaled smoke from her lungs that made the other two laugh.

All that in the brief moment it took to drive past them.

“It puts me in a different place,” he had said, “reading your words like that.”

At a round steel table on a side street near the Town Hall, her chin was in her hand, her elbow on the table, two fingers lay across her lips as though she ought to have been smoking. She had looked past his right ear at nothing.

It was funny, it seemed to her, that he could string a sentence like that together and yet it still meant nothing to her. She presumed he meant to flatter, or to congratulate, or to admire. Something along those lines.

“There’s something about them,” he had said. “Something that makes my head swim.”

“Like you’re leaning back on your heels, trying not to fall, waiting for the world to stop spinning?” she had said to the nothing past his right ear.

“Yes!” he had said, his face brightening with the thrill of being understood. “That’s it exactly!”

“Funny,” she had said.

She saw a white dog running crazily along the patch of rough ground that ran parallel to her route home. He was crazed by the rain and the speed of the traffic, running to keep up with the cars as they made their way home. He had kept up with her for a time, his pink tongue flapping at the side of his open mouth. Gulping in air as he ran, he looked as though he was laughing. A carnival mask on a carnival dog, laughing as he raced against the traffic.

In the supermarket, as she bought organic and collected green points on her clubcard, she smiled at the memory of the dog and thought that she might write something when she got home.

A letter waiting, still stuck in the letterbox like a tongue poking out at her, told her that, with just a few more miles, she could soon be on her way to Vienna. If she didn’t collect more miles, she would stand still.

She was already standing still, and Vienna didn’t appeal, so she tore the letter in two and put it into the wastepaper basket underneath the coffee table.

A letter in an envelope lying fatly and A5 on the floor of the porch invited her to take out a new credit card. She could transfer any outstanding balance on her existing card. The shiny paper, the printed signature, the perky tone, all went into the wastepaper basket.

As the paper fell from her hand, she saw the signature again, briefly. Briefly, she wondered whether people really did write like that; why they didn’t buy a better pen. Scrawled, then digitised and printed with a blackness that didn’t seem real, the signature passed out of sight, joining the other crumpled and torn sheets in the bin.

Red wine leaking from a bottle; that was what the stain on the dead rat’s chest was like. A bloom of claret just beneath the mortified skin. She had wanted to touch it; to press against the claret stain; to see if the flesh was rigid in death, or whether the blood beneath it kept it soft.

The colour of the rat’s skin was the colour of pork chops when they’re cold and unwanted on your dinner plate. Deathly grey and ashen, but still with that hint of pink to let you know that this was once alive.

She closed her eyes and shook the image of the dead rat from her mind.

Behind her, the front door opened again.

“You’re home,” he said.

He closed the door and removed his coat, hanging it with the others on the rail by the door, the coat hangers jangling against the tubular metal that supported them.

She walked away from him, into the kitchen.

Standing at the sink, looking out onto the garden, she allowed him to follow her in there and sit down at the table.

“How was your day?” he asked, removing a shoe and rubbing at the sole of his foot.

His socks were grey. She knew without looking.

“I saw a dead rat on the way home,” she said. She couldn’t look at him while he was rubbing his foot, filling the air around it with the damp warmth it brought from the inside of his shoe.

He removed his other shoe and placed the two shoes neatly side by side at the back of his chair. She heard the twist of his body, the gentle scrape of the chair legs against the floor, the tick of the shoe heels making contact with the lino.

“How was your day?” she said.

He could have told her anything as she moved from the sink to the fridge and began to prepare dinner. Her head was heavy and her eyes wanted to close.

She stopped. Her head came up and she stared at the wall in front of her. She frowned slightly. How could he think she had stopped taking her medication?

She turned to look at him. He stopped what he was saying.

“What?” he asked, his raised eyebrows and round eyes taking up the opposite position to the frown on her face.

She stared at him for a moment, then returned to chopping the onions.

“Do you think it’s cold?” she said.

“Cold?” he replied. She imagined that his eyebrows were higher and his eyes even rounder. “No, I don’t think it’s cold. Why? Do you?”

“I do,” she said. “I think it’s cold.” She chopped onions, then turned slightly towards him, holding the knife towards him. “I feel cold,” she said, with all the emphasis on the verb.

“I feel fine,” he said.

He got up from the table, loosening his tie, unbuttoning his shirt at the collar. He walked through to the living room. She heard him checking the thermostat. It was summer. The heating wasn’t switched on. Checking the thermostat would do no good. She almost told him, but instead chopped harder. The knife blade now bit against the firm bulk of a carrot. The carrot crunched as she cut it, slicing it into circles. The orange, carotene-filled slices looked bright against the white of the chopping board.

The knife in her hand was too obvious.

He came back into the kitchen; opened a bottle of wine. He poured the ruby liquid into two glasses and brought one over to her. He kissed the back of her neck as he leaned across the back of her to put the glass down on the surface to her right.

She thought his lips would freeze to her skin, so arctic did the inside of her body feel, but they just brushed against it and were gone.

Leaning back on her heels, she thought she would fall backwards forever.

“This is wrong,” she said.

“What is?” he said. His voice was muffled and she knew he was turned away from her. She could smell the newsprint from the paper he was now reading; sharp and acrid, inky and disturbing, she could feel the words on the page rising up and floating into her through her nostrils.

“This,” she said, waving the knife around in front of her, indicating the chopped onions, the sliced carrots, the peppers waiting to be chopped.

“What?” he said again, his back still to her, the inky words still rising.

She thought of the rat again; its cold grey body and the bloom of blood. Her hand felt warm with the memory and she closed her eyes to enjoy it.

“Shit,” she heard him say. “Shit. Emmie, what have you done?”

She opened her eyes. She smiled. She looked at where her left hand had wrapped itself around the blade of the knife.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s okay. Look.”

She took her hand from the blade and lifted it up to him. Blood dripped from the cut that lay across the crease of her palm. He grabbed a towel from the rail by the door and brought it to her. He wrapped it around her hand, binding it tightly, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

She was still holding the knife in her right hand.

The knife was too obvious.

A bloom of blood beneath the skin where the heart would have been. A bloom of blood beneath the skin, beneath a shirt. Too obvious.

“I saw a white dog,” she said. “It was running. I thought I might write about it.”

“Yes?” he said, still concentrating on binding up her hand. “How does that feel?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, not registering what he meant, the knife still in her other hand. “It feels fine.”

“Did it go in deep?” he asked the doctor.

The doctor was dressing her hand. He had taken off the towel and was dressing her hand in gauze and a bandage.

“Not too deep,” the doctor said. “No nerve damage. No need for stitches. It’ll just be tender for a few days, and she’ll need to not use her hand, let it heal.”

The doctor turned to her. “If you use your hand, it will crack open the tissue where it is healing and prolong the process.”

“Can I have painkillers?” she asked.

The doctor looked surprised.

“Are you in pain?” he said.

“No. Not really,” she replied. “I’d like some, though.”

“Well, if you feel any pain, paracetamol should help to relieve it.”

“I had codeine once,” she said. “I liked that.”

The doctor took her husband outside the curtain and she listened to them holding a murmured conversation.

He came back in without the doctor. The doctor had gone away, moved on to the next patient.

“You’re all done,” he said. “We can go home.”

“The knife was too obvious,” she said, as he helped her up off the bed.

“I can walk,” she told him, as he took her arm.

“Such a shame that he couldn’t give me codeine,” she said, as they set off back home in his dark blue car.

On the by-pass, as he accelerated up the hill, she opened the passenger door.

“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to look at her and at the road simultaneously; trying to lean across her and to steer at the same time.

“Looking,” she said. “Looking at the road.”

A car horn blared and headlights rushed past them as he veered onto the wrong side of the road.

She closed the door.

“You should concentrate,” she said. “How much wine did you drink?”

“You’re mad,” he said, getting the car back under control, regulating his breathing, trying to be calm.

“Undoubtedly,” she replied. “But you’re stuck with me.”

She smiled.

“I told you the knife was too obvious.”

© J R Hargreaves July 2007

Tea

He traced the bones at her neck; her collar bones. Clavicles. That was the biological term for them. He traced his fingers along their rigid straightness.

She did not react.

His finger rested in the suprasternal notch. He pressed down, lightly at first, then harder. He could feel no definite pulse from her; only his own.

“You’re healthy,” he said.

She continued to read.

“Your blood pressure is fine.”

She turned the page of her newspaper. “Good,” she said.

He flattened his hand against her breastbone. The neckline of her sweater left part of her chest bare, to a point, and his hand revelled in the warmth of her flesh and the firmness of her sternum.

She was more beautiful than anyone deserved to be.

He thought about what the poet had said. About beauty being an ecstasy and not a wish.

She was more beautiful than could be borne.

He removed his hand. She did not move, did not speak, did not pay him the slightest bit of attention. He sat away from her, turning his body so that he was square on with the edges of the sofa; his back firm against the cushion behind it; his knees hard against the edge of the seat; his arms parallel to the sofa’s arms.

He was like an old toy soldier, with its articulated joints positioned so that it seemed to be sitting.

The silence in the room was broken only by the sound of their breathing and the rustle of the pages as she turned them. He was bored. He was restless. He was a coil of nervous energy that had no knowledge of how to expend itself.

She sat, ancient and beautiful, like a posed figure in an oil painting, all sages and browns and yellows and pinks. Her bright gold hair glimmered in the sunlight that shifted across the window. Leaded lights. Mullioned.

He rolled the word mullioned around his head, imagining the feel of it in his mouth.

Her hair had been fixed in a Marcel wave a couple of days ago. He could still smell, faintly, the chemicals applied to that bright golden head to force the shafts to bend against their will.

He looked at her legs. Her stockings were pale, her ankles neat; her shoes were the same sage as her blouse and neatly fastened with a strap and a button. Her narrow skirt stopped just below her knee, constricting her legs so that she had to fold them neatly. Even if she hadn’t been trained to do so from being young, her skirt created its own demands.

Terrance entered the room, carrying the things for tea.

“Lord, Terrance, is it that time already?”

He sprang from the sofa, glad of something to do.

Terrance merely glanced at him before continuing to set out the tea tray on the table.

“Thank you, Terrance,” she said, still engrossed in her newspaper.

“Ma’am. Sir.” The servant left the room with a stiff bow to each of them.

“Do pour me a cup, there’s a dear,” she said without lifting her gaze from the pages open before her.

“What’s so fascinating?” he asked, splashing milk into a teacup and then pouring tea in afterwards.

She did not respond. He felt peeved and, knowing that she did not take sugar, he dropped two lumps into her cup. Without bothering to stir, he carried the cup over to where she sat and placed it on the small table to her left.

He reseated himself beside her, on her right.

She looked up briefly. She looked at him as though she vaguely remembered him from somewhere.

“Are you not having one?” she asked.

The callousness of her indifference was beautiful. He felt intoxicated. He shook his head.

“Odd boy,” she said, turning back to her paper.

He crossed his leg away from her. He tried to convince himself that the view through the window across the lawn was an interesting one, when in fact all that it contained was a stretch of lawn and a mildly diverting rose bush in the centre.

He rested his chin in his hand, his elbow propped against the arm of the sofa. He drummed his fingers gently against his jaw.

“You’re singing,” she said. “Do stop, there’s a good boy.”

“Was I?” he said, turning to face her again. Of course, she was still buried in the news, so he turned away again.

“I wonder what it is that holds her attention so,” he said to the room in general. He was confident that she was not paying the slightest attention to him.

He was right.

He returned to his previous pose; head propped, jaw strummed, eyes scanning the garden for something to entertain his restless mind.

“Oh, won’t you come and play tennis?” he exploded, leaping up from his seat and standing in front of her.

She reached a hand out languidly to her teacup and continued to read in silence.

He paced about in front of her.

“We’re wasting the day, sitting in here. It’s glorious outside.”

“Did you put sugar in this?” she asked, replacing the cup on the table.

The poet was wrong, he decided as he ceased his pacing and looked down on her lovely form, so elegant on the sofa. Beauty wasn’t a lively heart full of fire and soul. Beauty was her. Cold and silent and indifferent to his very existence. A pale pink mouth. A pale white hand.

He flung himself onto his knees before her, gripping her about her knees.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “I put sugar in it, yes! Now say you’ll play tennis. Leave all this senseless reading behind. Tennis! Tennis is the thing!”

She raised one lovely eyebrow, a spark of amusement flashing in, and then out, of her clear blue eyes.

“I don’t have my racquet,” she said, placing a cool hand against his cheek. He turned his face so that his mouth was cupped in her palm, and he kissed that lovely palm.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” she said. “My brother will be back from town in a few minutes.” She restored her gaze to the pages of the newspaper. “I’m sure that he’ll knock a few balls about with you.”

He picked himself up from his kneeling position and slumped back onto the sofa.

“You’re like a sulky puppy,” she said, then yawned.

She picked up her teacup and held it out to him, still without looking.

“Pour me another one,” she said. “There’s a dear.”

He ignored the hovering vessel to his left; the cup that was anchored in time and space only by the fingers of her right hand holding the handle so nonchalantly.

“No,” he said. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His legs were outstretched in front of him. The line of his spine created an empty space between his body and the angle of the sofa. He fixed himself in position with his shoulders and his behind.

Still the teacup hovered, an irritating fly in his peripheral vision.

He was just about to swat it away, and damn the consequences, when her brother strode into the room.

“Hello, chaps!” he called out, making his way straight to the tea tray and cutting himself a thick slice of fruit cake. “How long have you been here, Willows?”

“Dorrie, pour me a fresh cup of tea, dear. This one’s cold and has sugar in it.”

Her brother crossed the room to where she was holding the teacup out to him.

He winked at his friend.

“Willows, you cad, did you put sugar in my sister’s tea?”

He didn’t expect an answer so didn’t wait for one. Willows didn’t offer one, either.

Dorrie took a fresh cup from the tray and filled it with tea for his sister.

“There you go,” he said, carrying it over to her.

“You’re a gent,” she said, accepting the proffered gift as all well-bred young women do; with indifference and cynicism.

“Tuppy here wants to play tennis,” she said.

“I say,” Dorrie exclaimed with a grin. “Willows, have you been trying to court my sister, you old ram?”

Willows maintained his effortful slouch and didn’t speak. His shoulders were beginning to ache, and the tilt of his chin meant that his larynx was beginning to feel uncomfortably compressed.

“You oughtn’t to sit like that, old chap,” Dorrie said, perching himself on his sister’s arm of the sofa. “It’ll do you a mischief. Stop you talking.”

His sister laughed.

“He’s been practising his medical ways on me,” she said.

“Is that so?” her brother replied, fitting the fingers of his right hand into the waves of her hair and squeezing them together.

Willows was consumed by a wave of envy.

Dorrie got up suddenly. “I don’t think I like you practising your medical ways on ma soeur,” he told his friend, walking away from him, his hands tucked into the pockets of his waistcoat. “That’s not quite why I invited you down this weekend.”

He turned on his heel and stood firm across the room from Willows.

“For god’s sake,” Willows exploded, as best he could given his physical position on the sofa. “All I did was press my bloody forefinger against her suprasternal notch.”

“And your hand against my breastbone,” she chipped in.

Willows considered that beauty perhaps was an ecstasy.

“Sternum is the medical term,” he said.

Dorrie laughed. His sister joined in. Willows found it in himself to smile. He was calmer now; now that his pent up attraction had somehow been acknowledged and dismissed. He sat up properly on the sofa.

Dorrie’s sister smiled at him. Her eyes were like sapphires and Willows thought, if he looked long enough and hard enough, he might be able to see to the bottom of them.

“Are you not having tea?” Dorrie asked him, standing once more at the tea tray and pouring a steady stream of golden brown liquid into a cup.

“No,” said Willows, “I’m not.”

They were still gazing at each other, she and he, behind her brother’s turned back.

She broke away first, an intuitive split second before her brother turned around to face the room again.

“Tennis, then?” Dorrie said, beaming down on his poor unrequited friend before raising his teacup to his lips.

“Why not?” Willows replied, leaping once more from the sofa.

As her brother replaced his cup on the tea tray, Willows saw the shadow of a smile curve her lips.

He remembered the feel of his hand against her breast bone.

Dorrie was standing in the doorway, waiting for him.

“Come on then, old chap, before the day’s gone.”

An ecstasy and a wish, then, he told himself. A mouth and a lively heart full of fire and soul.

He followed her brother from the room. Her eyes watched his back.

© J R Hargreaves July 2007