CONQUEST

            “Why do you love that word so much?” she says to me.

I ask her exactly which one she means

            “You know exactly which one. The one you can’t stop using.” She looks at me steadily. “Every other word you say, practically.”

Just now, the way she gazes at me, that strange hardness in her eyes that looks like indifference but is really a lie, I want to do it to her. That word she won’t allow herself to say. That word she hates me saying.

She is old, lately, and critical. When we first met she was majestic. They say that women bloom when they come into their thirties. She must be some exotic flower, then, because that bloom is fading.

She is still looking at me. Her face has lost its softness. It no longer invites the caress I used to want to bestow. She is harder now, in spite of the creams and lotions she pours onto her aging body.

I say the word. All credit to her, she does not blink. I say it again, there is no flicker in her gaze.

            “I hate it,” she says softly.

I smile and get up from the table. I pick up my bowl, my spoon, my cup and take them to the dishwasher. I ignore hers. It’s all part of the petty war. I leave mine on the worktop by the sink. Later, it will make her sigh to see them there.

She looks tired. I don’t know why I love that word so much. For the same reasons I love to wear her down, I suppose. It suits me. I lean against the sink unit and watch her. Her shoulders have begun to sag. She was proud and straight when we met. Now she just looks weary.

I say the word again and laugh.

She stands up and collects her own lunch things, bringing them over to where I stand. She opens the dishwasher and places her things in, then mine. She does not sigh, not audibly, but her whole movement is a reproach. It gratifies me to see it.

I reach out a hand to touch the hardness of her face. She freezes, not expecting tenderness and I am tempted to change the intended caress to a blow. But I don’t. Instead the back of my hand comes to rest gently against the coolness of her cheek.

She remains motionless. I remove my hand. She continues to load the dishwasher. The pan that heated the soup, the spoon that stirred it, the cups, plates, dishes from breakfast. I watch her, knowing she is waiting for something to happen, for the casual blow to land.

Why do I love that word so much?

Then the telephone rings and the moment is lost. I move into the hall to answer it. I am speaking to my mate. He is in the pub. Am I coming, he asks. Maybe later, I tell him. There’s something I need to do first. The match is on the big screen, he tells me. Kick off at three. Two hours away. All the time I am listening to him, I am also listening to her, moving around the kitchen.

I place the handset back on its base. She is humming under her breath. I stand in the doorway. I tell her to shut up.

            “Shut the fuck up,” I say.

Shut the fuck up. The word. The signal. I smile. She looks at me. She knows. But I calm the moment. I tell her that the match is on the big screen and my mate is waiting down the pub.

            “What time?” she asks.

I tell her and watch her work it out for herself. Her body sags in resignation. She looks tired. She nods.

Later, she is limp and refuses to look at me. I am spent, the tension gone, released. I have left her raw. She lies with her face turned away from me, her arms still raised where I pinned them, her legs still apart. I stand by the bed and I want to do it again. The sight of her weary body invites it.

It takes longer this time, and her eyes are closed throughout. She looks as though she is trying not to be here, so I push harder. She flinches then. She flinches because, physically, I have hurt her. Emotionally she is already dead. That is my triumph.

She is crying this time, as I dress. I smile and tell her I’ll see her later, after the match, after a few pints. She is crying and I know that I have won this time.

As I leave the room, I hear her whisper it.

            “Fuck you.”

That word that she hates. I’ll talk to her about that later.

© J R Hargreaves

HAIKU

The cold clung to her as she walked along the frost-sparkled pavement, up to the post box. She and her friend were going through a phase of writing to each other every day in haiku. She had just completed a postcard that she needed to post before the day was out.

She had bundled herself up in coat, scarf, hat and gloves and let herself out of the house. It was only mid-afternoon and already the street lights were glowing. She walked up the street, peeping through the gap between the edge of her woolly hat and the top of her scarf, the postcard clutched in one gloved-hand, the other hand clenched inside her coat pocket. Her jaw ached from trying to stop her teeth chattering. It was so cold, she half wished that global warming would hurry up and happen.

Her thigh muscles ached from the way she was walking, trying not to slip on the frosty ground. She needed some new boots, the soles on these were losing their tread. Cleated soles. She smiled to herself. Why did she like that word so much? She said it three or four times in her head. Cleated, cleated, cleated, cleated. It made her want to laugh.

She and her friend used to play a game where they would choose a word and say it over and over until all the meaning fell out of it and it just became a sound they were making with their mouths.

She was halfway to the post box now. The top of her scarf was beginning to feel damp against her mouth and nose from the condensation of her breathing. She looked down at the two-line haiku she had written on the card. They had begun by sticking rigidly to the 5-7-5 formation, but now she was beginning to free herself from that constraint, trying to condense the essence of a moment into the least number of words and still retain its wholeness.

She had seen the sunset earlier and written:

                    pink sunkissed sky

                    hovers over ice-tipped trees

She felt satisfied with that description and hoped that her friend would like it too. She was almost at the post box now. She checked that she had fixed a stamp to the card. That would be no fun, trying to peel a stamp from its backing without taking her gloves off. She did not like the self-adhesive stamps. She felt cheated by them somehow.

She climbed the step up to the frontage of the Post Office and stopped in front of the post box. She held the postcard in her two gloved hands for a moment, wishing it luck on its journey over the hills to her friend. Then she raised her two hands to the mouth of the box and pushed the postcard in. She tipped her head back slightly, closing her eyes, and breathed in the frosty air. Then she started on her way back to the house.

It was harder to keep her balance on the icy pavement because of the slight downhill slope on the way back. She almost slipped a couple of times, and held onto the hedges and walls of the houses she was passing.

It was quiet, there was hardly any traffic. She supposed everyone was safely tucked up in their nice warm houses. Not like her, out in the cold, posting a haiku to a friend because of some silly challenge they had set themselves.

She stopped on the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the road to make sure there were no cars coming before she crossed.

The blow struck her on the back of her head and she fell forward into the road. She felt hands rummaging in her coat pockets, trying to find a purse or something valuable like a mobile phone, she supposed. Her face was cushioned by the wool of her hat and her scarf. She was glad she had them on. She felt a little frightened but she tried not to move, not to panic. Then a hand grabbed the top of her hat and yanked it off her head. The cold began pounding on her skull and then the hand (the same hand?) began pounding her skull against the ground. She thought she cried out, but she could not be sure, then her head smashed one last time to the ground as her attacker let go his grip (her grip?) and ran off.

The world was muffled and black and finally silent. The blood ran darkly from the broken skin against her skull. She lay at the edge of the road as though she were asleep, as though she had been overtaken by a sudden bout of narcolepsy.

She was in the newspapers and on the local tv bulletins for two days afterwards. The motorist who had eventually stopped and found her became a minor celebrity for less than his Warholian 15 minutes. Later, she was only remembered by those who had known her.

The postcard bearing the haiku to her friend went astray. She had somehow smudged the ink so that the postcode could not be read clearly. When it eventually reached her friend’s house, the postmarks (5 of them) ranged from Swansea to Glasgow.

© J R Hargreaves

Back to Top

SIGNS

A woman looks to her left as a man kisses her right cheek. That will be the signal. Sam watches, looks around. Which woman, which man? No-one knows, just keep watching, it will happen. And then? It will happen.

They’ve chosen a busy place again. Not too far from the last time. It doesn’t bother you. Makes it more interesting this way. Sam wanders off towards the racks of blouses, starts fingering them. You wouldn’t have thought they were Sam’s thing, really, but you never can tell these days. It takes all sorts.

You remember the time you first met them all. Not long off the flight in from Dublin, one of those twin-engined planes that brought you to Blackpool airport of all places. Not even Manchester. Still, the security there wasn’t up to much. Just one over-tanned, over-lacquered blonde in her 20s. The noughties’ version of her sixties’ grandmother and her eighties’ mother.

You’d caught the train from Squire’s Gate straight down to Preston and into The Railway pub. Someone had bought you a pint and a hot steak sandwich with twister fries. Twister fries for god’s sake. It was all in the details.

Sam had been there, the first one you’d noticed. Small and dark and classically Mancunian. Scrawny, sharp-eyed and shrewd with one of those timeless, ageless faces. Either young and careworn or old and not doing too badly.

Sam is heading up the escalator now, into menswear. More Sam’s thing, you believe. T-shirts, jeans, jumpers. But still not quite Sam’s thing. Not here, not this shop. Not over the walkway, either. Certainly not over the walkway.

After that meeting in the pub, you’d spent a week in a safe house in Fulwood, up near the hospital and the college. Leafy Fulwood, with its detached houses set back from the road. Privacy in curtain-twitching suburbia. Houses built for merchants and paid for with the sweat of your people. England’s whores, shipped over for their skills in digging and their willingness to work for next to nothing.

You realise that you ought to follow Sam. The shoppers obstruct your progress. You don’t have Sam’s knack for weaving through the crowds or side-stepping the stalled middle-aged women wondering if that shiny black satin thing is right for the Golf Club Dinner. You ride up the escalator and pause at the top, ignoring the tuts and sighs of the shoppers wanting to get past you. You scan the department for Sam’s whereabouts. Over by the café. Then you realise. Toilet. You loiter by the jackets. It wouldn’t be good form to follow.

A woman, a Doreen or a Barbara or a Brenda, thickening waist, slackening jaw line, squeezes unnecessarily past you. You stand your ground, watching for Sam’s return. The woman sighs, “Excuse me!” She’s desperate to look at the jackets you’re standing by. Let her wait. Won’t be long now before she doesn’t need to worry about whether the sage or the taupe will suit George or Basil or Brian better.

Sam’s heading back, wiping hands on jeans. You nod your head, attracting Sam’s attention. Everything okay? Yeah sure. Bit nervous. Dunno why. Never done one of these before. Yours a statement, not a question. Nah, comes the reply, Sam suddenly, clearly, young and careworn.

You head back down the escalator together. It hasn’t happened yet. You know for sure it hasn’t. No signal, no response.

You wonder who’s going to make the phone call this time, claiming responsibility, giving the police 5 minutes’ warning. Last time it was Michael, but Michael isn’t around this time.

After your week in leafy Fulwood, you’d been moved to your own flat in Northenden, near the Tesco and the dual carriageway up into Manchester. You didn’t see anyone else, but you knew Sam was along Palatine Road in West Didsbury, Niall further up in Withington, Ray at Mauldeth Road by the station, and Franny just outside Chorlton. There were others, but it didn’t do to know too many names, too many locations, just in case.

You spent month after month in Northenden, wandering along Palatine Road, looking in the shops, drinking in the pub on Longley Lane. You managed to find work at the Golf Club, in the bar, chatting up the middle-aged and middle-class, charming them with your Irish accent. Bored out of your head, marking time, biding your time, brooding and waiting.

You’d been given a car. A navy blue Fiesta. You parked it on the street, then on the driveway on special days. Days when they came round to tell you a bit more about the plan.

The months dragged on. You knew Northenden as intimately as your own skin. You knew the Princess Parkway/Princess Road like it was one of your own arteries, Palatine/Wilmslow/Oxford Road as though it were a vein. Manchester the heart, Northenden the lungs, you carrying the stuff the plan needed to survive.

You click back to the present, to the plan in action. Sam is restless, sweating slightly, watching, hand in pocket, ready. Sam’s the one who will trigger this, in a way. Sam has the radio detonator for the semtex packed into the cars parked directly beneath this store. Your navy blue Fiesta, Franny’s white Cherry, Niall’s dark green 205. Three cars parked in a triangle. Three cars waiting to explode.

And you. You have your own surprise. You smile at Sam, your hand in your pocket, like a mirror of Sam’s. Sam smiles back, still nervous. Still no sign, no signal, though Sam keeps watching. Looking for the man, the woman.

You remember the day you made the suggestion, your addition to the plan. You remember their raised eyebrows, their reluctance. You’d explained calmly, all the middle-eastern groups were doing it now. The government over here wouldn’t expect it. They weren’t sure. No-one had ever wanted to before. This was a political war, not a holy one, for all its mask of religion. It wasn’t how they saw the fight being fought. The fight, you’d explained, still calmly, wasn’t working. It was time to try something new. The peace process was a joke. Sinn Fein had lost their balls. People were waiting, hoping, wanting something to happen.

It took you a couple of meetings to persuade them. You’d asked to speak to Sam. Sam was the only other one like you. No family, no ties, no long-term future. The way you’d explained it, Sam didn’t know your secret. Sam just knew you would both be in the building when the semtex exploded. But Sam believed in the fight, understood it had to go this way, understood that lives of the faithful would have to be lost.

Sam is getting agitated now, but it’s too late. The detonator is in Sam’s pocket. Sam has to be here to see the signal. You can see in Sam’s face that reality is dawning. Sam is going to die. Sam doesn’t want to die. You smile, lean towards Sam and kiss her on the right cheek. She is looking to her left, looking for the signal. You whisper in her ear. Press the button now Sam. She looks at you, horror mixed with realisation. Your right hand is in your pocket, ready. She isn’t pressing the detonator, her hand is out of her pocket. You put your left hand into her right pocket, press both buttons at once. The explosives packed around your body go off first, taking out the entire first floor of M&S, then the cars in the underground car park explode.

There is a sort of silence in that corner of central Manchester, underpinning the sound of alarms and the creaking of buckled steel. The sort of silence that tells you, by the absence of weeping, that no human life survived. The people shopping on the other streets haven’t made it down there yet, to gawk at the destruction, to begin the weeping. The police were unprepared. No-one made a phone call. The underpinning silence stretches on, like the cloud of dust still blanketing the rubble.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

LOST ON TIB STREET

She caught the number 42 into town, from the stop by Tesco. She sat next to a window and looked at the cars queuing to leave the Tesco car park, blocked in their escape by the labouring, lingering bus. Closing her eyes, she felt the vibrations of the bus’s clapped out engine pulsing through her body, vibrations that failed to move her.

A man got up from the seat across the aisle from her, leaning over her with his sweat-smelling shirt close to her nose.

            “Excuse me, love, do you mind if I just...?” He reached to open the vent at the top of her window.

            “No, go ahead,” she said, trying not to breathe in his stale odour, turning her head towards the window, away from him.

He sat back down, and she continued to sit looking out of the window. The bus finally pulled away and began its long asthmatic trundle along Wilmslow Road, north to the city centre, past Withington and Fallowfield, Whitworth Park, along Oxford Road and up to the bus station at Piccadilly Gardens. She gazed through the window, but she did not take in the things she was seeing: the mothers pushing prams along the pavement in Withington, gazing through the shop windows at goods they would never buy, their babies enjoying the sunshine; the students hurrying to catch the bus to University and lectures they would not take in; the midday drinkers sitting outside Kro2 in the hot sunshine, shaded by the canopies over the tables.

She left the bus at the bus station and walked across the gardens, past the newly installed fountains. It was a working day, there were no children playing in the water, getting drenched by the spray, just the odd office worker on their lunch, and the usual drunks and homeless sprawled on the concrete steps, idling on the grass, some of them snoring, reminding her of the bus she had just left.

She skirted to the left of the Costa Café and up along Tib Street. It was hot. The sunlight dazzled her, making her squint, bouncing back from buildings, road and pavement. Blossom was falling from the cherry trees by the junction with Church Street. The breeze whipped the blossom and the dust of the day into bouncing eddies, lifting it occasionally to blind her further.

Tib Street. Spring. A hot day in Manchester. She wandered along the pavement, ignoring Lemn Sissay’s words beneath her feet, past the ginnel through to the back of The King.

As she passed it, she had a flash of memory. That place for loiterers, tryst-keepers, deal-makers. That place that stood to the past of her, where he had stolen the last of her and left her hollow and old before her time.

The ceramic birds that nested on the ledges of the buildings watched her as she hurried in the hot spring sun. She was late. She knew what he was like when people kept him waiting. She remembered too well. The bruises on her flesh had faded, but those in her memory had yet to dull.

She turned left into Dorsey Street, west, as the white on blue of the tileware could have told her if she had only raised her eyes, and stopped at Cord Bar. Her phone rang. She pushed her fringe out of her eyes and dug it out of her bag, careful not to disturb the cloth wrapped object she was here to deliver.

            “Hello?”

            “Are you here yet?”

            “Yes, I’m just outside.” She looked in through the window, but as ever the interior was too dark to be able to tell if he was there on the ground floor, or downstairs in the other bar. “I’ll come and find you.”

She rang off before he had chance to answer. She pulled open the door into the bar. She scanned the booth in the window then walked to the back of the upstairs room, looking into each booth along the way. He was not there. The booths were all full of people chattering and laughing, and she wondered why they were not out in the sunshine chattering instead. She wondered why they were not walking the blossom-strewn streets of Manchester, enjoying this rare spring heat.

She went downstairs, feeling her bag bounce against her back, aware of its contents, aware of what she had to do with it. He was sitting on the banquette opposite the stairs. He was staring at her, bouncing his leg, agitated, coiled. She stood at the foot of the stairs. The downstairs bar was quiet, just one member of staff, wiping the counter. She felt as though she had stepped into a scene in East Enders.

            “Have you brought it?” he asked.

She nodded, feeling the weight of it in her bag.

He sat forward, both legs now still, feet planted firmly on the floor, and held out a hand to her.

            “Give us it, then,” he said, calmly, as though it was a book she was lending him, or a pound of potatoes, or something mundane.

She stepped towards him. ‘Give us it, then.’ She heard the echo of his words in her head. ‘Give us it, then.’ She put her hand into the bag, dislodging the piece of cloth it was wrapped in, and curled her fingers around the cool steel of the pistol. A Beretta M92FS 9mm. Almost one kilo of steel, fully loaded, ready to use. The same weight as a bag of sugar. ‘Give us it, then,’ he had said, and she was tempted.

She lifted it carefully from her bag, checking that the bar person was not looking at them. She held it out to him.

            “Jesus, you could have wrapped it or something,” he hissed. “F’fuck’s sake!”

She smiled. Irony, she thought, don’t you love it?

He took it from her hand and inspected it down between his legs, down where the low table would obscure the vision of anyone who might be looking their way or come downstairs and see.

She stood, hovering, uncertain, while he checked the gun.

            “Have you got the money?” she asked.

He grunted and nodded his head.

            “Can I have it please?”

He nodded his head over to where a brown paper bag was sitting on the banquette beside him. This was all so clichéd, she thought. This didn’t happen in Cord Bar. There was a burst of laughter from upstairs. She picked up the paper bag and stashed it in her own bag.

He pushed the pistol into his jacket pocket.

            “So how are you?” he asked, pulling a packet of B&H out of his other pocket.

            “I’m fine,” she said.

            “Yeah, you look it.” He lit up, drawing deeply on the cigarette then eyeing her through his exhaled smoke. “You had much work lately?”

            “Enough.” She was still standing just in front of him. She was remembering the first time, in that ginnel leading to the back door of The King, by the blue plastic dumpster. Sent there by him to close the deal. Sent there by him with the threat of a beating, which she had received anyway. Sixteen years old and petrified of what might happen if she screwed up.

            “You got yourself a bloke?” He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue, not looking at her. She did not reply.

He drained the glass that had been sitting on the table in front of him, then stood up. She took a step backwards to let him pass. He paused at the foot of the stairs.

            “Send my best to your mother, will you?” Then he was gone.

She slung her bag back over her shoulder, feeling the weight of it settle into the small of her back, less heavy now the gun was gone, the strap crossing her body. Then she turned and followed her father up the stairs and out into the bright spring sunshine again.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

PILLS

(Revised October 2003)

The woman took the kettle from its stand and filled it. The shiny chrome tap from IKEA, the shiny steel sink from B&Q, she gazed through the window at a world she could not feel. Her mind did not connect.

She lowered her eyes to the tap head and saw the water in the kettle rushing up, seemingly magnified, like a torrent. Calmly she turned off the flow of water, her hand stretching away from her.

She replaced the kettle on its stand and flicked the switch. The small brown plastic bottle stood next to the cup. She picked it up and unclicked the cap.

The pale green and turquoise capsules tumbled from the bottle mouth into her waiting palm, so slowly and gently and then so suddenly still. She tipped them into her mouth and held them carefully under her tongue, so as not to taste them.

Over by the fridge was a bottle of Evian. The kitchen was not huge but it seemed to take an age to reach it. She unscrewed the cap and took three or four slugs, washing the capsules down.

The water in the kettle began to simmer, making that hissing noise like static on the radio. She looked through the window again, at her car parked in the street.

Suddenly she was in the hall, putting her coat on, pulling her hat onto her head. She wrapped her scarf round her neck and pulled her car keys from the hook. They sat in her hand, where the pills had been moments before. She gazed down at them and tried to remember.

Something wasn’t right, but her thinking was too dull. Her mind had been sublet.

She must have stood there for some minutes. The kettle had boiled and begun to cool when the clatter of the free newspaper coming through the door woke her.

She looked at the keys in her hand, then moved her eyes around the periphery of her vision. She was in the hall with her coat and hat on, her scarf wound round her neck.

Slowly she placed the keys back on the hook and removed her coat, hat and scarf. She went back into the kitchen and flicked the switch on the kettle again.

She saw the brown plastic bottle with its cap removed on the side next to the cup. She touched the rim of the bottle mouth with one finger and tried to remember.

The kettle clicked off. Her face was wet. She poured the boiling water from the kettle into the cup, watching as the brownness of the tea bled into the water, gradually staining it completely. She looked at the bottle again. Her mind was too dull.

She pulled a teaspoon from the cutlery drainer (steel, cylindrical, from IKEA) and stirred the teabag around the cup. She brought milk from the fridge, noting that the Evian bottle did not have its cap on.

She made her tea, watching the open-mouthed pill bottle as she did so. She wished she could remember.

A banging on the window made her jump. It was her neighbour from across the way. The woman waved and smiled at her from the outside looking in, then pointed towards the front door.

She walked through to the hall and opened the door.

            “Hello, love!” her neighbour said.

            “Hello,” she replied, a little dully.

Her neighbour proffered a parcel.

            “Here. The postman delivered this to ours, but it’s for you.”

She took the package and stared down at it.

            “Thanks.”

            “That’s all right, love. Anyway, I’d best be off.”

She looked up. Carole. That was the woman’s name. Carole.

            “Thanks, Carole,” she said.

            “Okay, love, bye!”

Her neighbour was already heading down the path as she spoke. Carole. She was glad that she had remembered her name.

She closed the door and placed the parcel on the arm of the settee just inside the living room.

She went back into the kitchen and saw the cup of tea, steaming on the side. The brown plastic pill bottle was open beside it. She picked it up and shook out two of the pale green and turquoise capsules. She swallowed them down with a mouthful of hot tea which burned her gullet. She turned round and saw the open Evian bottle. She took a few mouthfuls straight from the bottle to cool her angered throat, and felt better for it.

She looked through from the kitchen to the dining room and the french windows. A squirrel was sitting on the fence watching her, frozen. She looked away briefly, thinking of something else, trying to remember, and when she looked back, the squirrel had gone.

She picked up her cup of tea and saw that the pill bottle was uncapped. She put her cup down again, her hand stretching away from her. She took the pill bottle and replaced the cap, then looked at it, trying to remember. Her mind would not connect.

She took her cup of tea and went towards the living room. She saw the package on the arm of the settee and picked it up. It had a central Manchester postmark. She stared at it for a few moments, taking occasional drinks of her tea. There was something in her mind. Some memory. A slow blooming of red and orange and yellow. A blooming that was not flowers. A slow blooming and then blackness.

She took the parcel into the living room and placed it carefully on the coffee table. If John were here he would know what it meant. She drank some tea.

The pills were slowing her mind, she knew that. They were dulling something, some memory. The doctor asked her how she was feeling and then wrote out another prescription. More pills. More pale green and turquoise capsules to stop her feeling life. She felt like she had fallen into a deep hole. Nothing touched her, her mind would not connect. She wished she knew what mattered.

John was gone. She could not remember where. They had been shopping in Manchester. Only to Market Street, the Arndale, M&S. If John would come back, she knew things would make sense again. And she could stop taking those pills.

She looked at the package. It wasn’t very big. About 30 by 20 by 10 centimetres. Wrapped in brown paper, different coloured stamps across the top right corner, a central Manchester postmark. The writing seemed familiar, but her thoughts would not connect.

She could not remember if she had ordered anything recently. At 32, she had the feeling, she ought to be able to do better than this.

She finished her tea. It was 3 o’clock. She put her empty cup in the kitchen and saw the unopened letter on the side by the towel rail. She picked it up, the writing staring her in the face, unrecognised. It was addressed to her. She would open it later. She went into the hall. She took her coat from the rack and shrugged it on. Again she wrapped her scarf round her neck and pulled her hat on, John’s old hat, worn and pilled, then took her car keys from the hook.

She drove. She was on the A34, Kingsway. She passed the familiar turning at the lights onto School Lane, that led over to Northenden. She and John had lived in Northenden when they first married. She wished he would come home. They could go back there, it would all be all right again.

A car horn sounded and she swerved back onto her side of the road. Her mind was dull. She had the feeling that she should not really be driving. The houses, big semi-detached Didsbury houses, where she had always wanted to live, flashed by on either side of her.

The parcel was on the passenger seat, the unopened letter sitting on top of it. She did not remember bringing either out of the house with her. She tried not to think of the red and orange and yellow blooms that filled part of her memory. The writing on the parcel stared at her, familiar but unknown, the writing on the letter next to it unnoticed.

She thought of the green and turquoise capsules in their small brown bottle, thought of the dullness they brought, away from the things that sat at the edge of memory, the things relentless that whispered in the night in codes she did not understand.

She was at the lights near the multiplex. She turned right and into the Tesco car park. The pills weren’t doing her any good, she was sure, but she was scared to stop taking them. She didn’t want to remember.

She knew that she and John had met in Dublin. Had slept together in a room that smelled of cigarettes. She had heard a car alarm going off in the street as he slept beside her, his hair curling into his neck, his fist curled against the pillow. He had made her his sister-confessor. The trouble was she had not known whether to believe what he said. So she had heard his confession and not known what to say.

Six weeks. She didn’t know why she had been in Dublin. Some reason. Six weeks of her life, and him at the centre of it, telling her what she knew she should not believe. He had called her soft, but she was hard. He had called her soft, with his eyes that stretched to the depths of the ocean. She almost remembered. Ghosts from the past that ruled his life as they had ruled her father’s and his father’s and generations of sons and fathers before them.

She remembered that he had come back to Manchester with her, and they had married soon after. They bought a terraced house on Chapel Road, hidden away at the back of Northenden. She remembered them driving round the area for a day, checking out every street until they found the house they wanted. She remembered John telling her it was important to live somewhere with good motorway access and not too far from the airport. She could not remember why.

She remembered these things from before. Remembered them just enough. Anything after that shopping trip into Manchester, though, she could not remember. Just that she had gone into the Corn Exchange, which John hated with its junkshop mentality, and he had gone back to the car. He was going to pick her up on Cross Street. But he never did. She had not seen him again.

She remembered the blooms of red and orange and yellow.

She was in the Tesco café now. Somehow she must have parked and made her way into the store. She had her hands round a cup of tea and was watching the shoppers through the window, collecting their trolleys and making their way to the store entrance. Thursday was obviously pensioner day at East Didsbury Tesco. She drank her tea. The letter was in front of her. She felt she should open it but didn't want to. The hand it had been addressed in looked like a memory she didn't want to disturb.

A car alarm had been going off in the street that morning in Dublin. A car alarm that would not be silent. There was another car alarm once, later, but she could not remember where. The pills kept her from the memory.

She took a basket with her into the store and wandered up and down the aisles, wrapped in her coat, scarf and hat. She knew she must have come for something, but she could not remember what. She passed the fish counter twice, with its display of gaping mouths and glassy eyes. The shelf-stackers milled around, smart in their uniform of blue checked shirt and dark trousers.

Her basket was empty and she decided to leave. She drove calmly onto the M60 and home.

Her unopened letter lay on top of the Tesco café table. The forgotten package lay unnoticed beneath the chair, where it detonated at 6.15 p.m. The café had closed for the evening, but the destruction of the store was complete.

She watched the story on the news. Her mind would not connect, but she knew that she had been there only hours earlier. She shook two pale green and turquoise capsules from the brown plastic bottle, to help submerge the memory of the red and orange and yellow blossoms.

She wished she could find what mattered.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

(Revised version)

SNOWSTORM

Rain. Always fucking rain. The rain had lashed down since she got up that morning. The air was sticky and oppressive, making it a hot, miserable wet day. She pushed her sodden fringe out of her eyes and hefted the last box out of the car boot. That was it. The last of the things from her house.

She carried the box up the path to Steve’s house. Her house. He appeared in the doorway.

            “Here, give me that,” he said, taking the box from her. Immediately her arms felt as light as air, as though they were rising away from her body. She followed him into the house. Boxes were stacked everywhere, from the front room to the dining room to the kitchen. She placed her hands at the back of her waist and stretched, looking through to the back garden. She loved these old semis and the way the ground floor seemed to stretch on forever.

Steve put the box down on top of another, causing the bottom one to crumple slightly from the accumulated weight.

            “Oi! Watch it!” she said, scooping the top box up and looking round for somewhere else to put it. There was nowhere else, of course, so she put it back down where Steve had placed it. Steve laughed.

            “Look at you,” he said, “you’re soaking.”

He took her hand.

            “Come upstairs a minute,” he said, pulling her towards the hall. She pulled back against him.

            “There isn’t time,” she said.

He pulled her again and reluctantly she began to follow him. His eyes were full of mischief and electricity.

            “Come upstairs, I’ll find you a towel. We’ll dry you off,” he told her.

She sighed. They were climbing the stairs now, Steve still holding her hand. She looked at the back of his head. His hair was getting long, but she liked it. It softened him somehow. She wanted to stand up close to him and breathe in the scent of his cleanness.

At the top of the stairs they paused. Steve looked at her, trying not to smile.

            “You go in the bedroom. Get your wet things off,” he said, turning to open the door to the airing cupboard. “I’ll bring you a towel.”

She walked to the bedroom and pushed open the door. Her whole body was weary from carrying boxes from house to car to house. The hot sticky day had left her drained of energy. The door swung open and she heard a faint click then a low whirring. The room was in darkness, the curtains drawn.

            “What are you up to?” she asked, standing on the threshold of the room.

            “Just go in,” Steve said from behind her, his voice muffled, his head inside the airing cupboard.

She stepped into the room. The lights on the central spot system clicked on. Suddenly she was standing inside one of those toy snowstorms, the ones with the plastic dome and the unnaturally blue skies. She stopped breathing for a moment. Sparkles of light danced against the walls and ceiling and played across her body like falling glitter. It was magical. Her eyes could not take in the dancing patches of light quickly enough, compelled to follow their scatter around the room.

Steve stood in the doorway behind her. “Well?” he said softly.

She could not speak. Her whole being was consumed with looking, trying to drink it in. She looked down to watch the light speckle and shimmer across her hands, her torso. She looked up to see where this space dust was coming from.

            “Well?” said Steve again from the doorway.

They made love under the glitter of the snowstorm, her bones melting, her eyes leaking. Later, they sat among the half-unpacked boxes in the kitchen.

Steve sat to her left, his strong hands wrapped around his mug of tea, talking. She did not listen, replaying the snowstorm in her mind. She stretched out her hand and traced the pattern of veins and bones on the back of his hands with her forefinger.

Mentally, she listed the things she loved him for. The first time their eyes had met in that dingy club where he was the resident dj, how she had not wanted to look away, ever. The first time they held hands, walking down Wilbraham Road past Safeways. He had just taken her hand. No conversation, just a calm action. He had gripped her hand just right, his fingers locking naturally with hers as though they belonged. The way he seemed to complete her, without her knowing why.

Stupid little things like that signify, she thought, still tracing her forefinger over his veins. She looked up. He was gazing off into the distance, through to the front room. His eyes were wintry hard, almost flinty. Then he closed his eyes slowly, and opened them again to look at her, and the warmth returned.

He gazed at her, smiling. Suddenly, he stood up and turned on the radio. Turning to face her he said, “Let’s dance.”

She sat and looked at him. “I’m not dancing,” she laughed.

He held out a hand to her, palm up. “Dance with me. Please?”

She shook her head, still laughing. The music on the radio was some girl band, the rhythm angular. She couldn’t dance to this. She couldn’t really dance full stop. Steve began to jig about, singing along in a falsetto voice.

            “I should maybe play this tomorrow night,” he said, as he stood with his back to her, shaking his bum. She grabbed it with both hands, squeezing it tightly.

            ”Oi, oi!” he said over his shoulder. “That’s a bit personal. I barely know you, missus.”

She put her hands on his waist and pulled him down onto her lap.

            “I’ll crush you,” he warned.

She didn’t speak, just buried her face into his shirt, breathing in the smell of him. He tolerated it for 30 seconds, then stood up.

            “Your legs have gone flat,” he said, casually. Then he drew a box towards him along the table. “Come on, let’s get cracking with these.”

There was so much stuff, she wasn’t sure what they were going to do with it. His stuff and her stuff, two households merging. She unwrapped a teapot. Her mind wandered. She unwrapped another teapot. She thought of how quickly this had happened. She unwrapped another teapot.

            “How many teapots have you got?” Steve was looking at her incredulously.

She smiled guiltily. “Five,” she said.

Steve shook his head. “I won’t ask why,” he told her. “But you know you’re not right, don’t you?”

She reached across to him, lashing out with her outstretched arm. He danced away from her.

            “Careful,” he laughed. “There’s crockery here. Teapots, you know.”

She grabbed a tea towel from the towel rail by the sink and chased him, trying to flick the towel against his legs. But his legs were longer than hers and he was able to stay out of her reach. He ran into the living room. She stood in the doorway, panting slightly from the exertion, the tea towel hanging from her hand. She let it drop to the floor, looking at him the whole time as he stood there, laughing at her and beautiful.

The telephone rang, making her jump. Neither of them moved.

            “It’ll be your mother,” he said.

            “I know,” she replied, maintaining eye contact.

            “Don’t you think you should answer it?”

            “No.”

            “Okay.”

The phone rang on. They stood staring at each other.

            “So,” Steve said, eventually, not moving. “You’ve moved in then.”

She smiled. “Yes,” she whispered. “I have.”

There was a loud crack of thunder. Steve looked past her and through the kitchen window to the sky outside.

            “Thank god for that,” he said. “Maybe the heat will lift a bit now.”

She yawned.

            “You’re tired,” he said.

She looked at him sleepily, and he carried her up the stairs to bed.

The next day dawned bright and hot. She stretched luxuriously in the bed they now shared. She could see half mirror-balls dotted around the room, the source of last night’s snowstorm. Steve slumbered on beside her. The sun was leaking into the room round the edges of the curtains. The window had a halo of light. She lay with her arms above her head, her hands holding the bars of the headboard, remembering.

She looked at the clock. It was 9.30. She got up out of the bed. Steve stirred and muttered then settled back into sleep. She went slowly downstairs, savouring the silence.

In the kitchen, she lifted the blind and looked out at the back garden. One of the neighbours was already up, out in the garden, mowing the lawn. It was all so suburban.

She filled the kettle and set it to boil, then placed the coffee grounds in the cafetière. She loved coffee in the morning, its sharp bitterness, the sensation of it hitting her stomach, the wake-up buzz it gave her.

She unlocked and opened the back door to let some air circulate through the house. It was still hot. Even though she was naked, she went out into the garden. Sod whether the neighbours could see her. It would give them a suburban frisson to see her lardy arse on a Sunday morning.

The grass was cool beneath her feet. She didn’t know how Steve managed to keep his lawn so nice. At home (she smiled) – at her old house – the lawn was a nightmare. Full of weeds and moss, boggy and poorly drained. Every spring and autumn since she had lived there, she had thrown fivers, otherwise known as lawn feed, at it.

The morning sun was warm on her skin. She stood in the middle of the lawn, head thrown back to receive the full warmth of the sun on her face, worshipping. There was only the slightest breeze.

She heard Steve walk out of the house. She turned to face him. He was grinning at her, his face lit up by his mega-watt smile. He held out a cup of coffee to her.

            “Morning, missus,” he said. She took the cup and grinned back at him. “Enjoying yourself?” he added.

She took a mouthful of coffee and looked at him over the top of the cup, before lowering it and smiling. She did not reply. He reached out a hand and brushed it against her body. Electricity shot through her.

            “What do you want to do today?” he asked.

She thought for a moment, then replied, “Let’s go for a wander round, get some breakfast at Battery Park, or something.”

            “Deal,” he said. “Think you’ll be able to manage clothes, you naturist?”

She laughed and looked down at her naked body.

            “It’s very nice,” he told her, “but what must the neighbours think?”

While Steve showered, she got ready, dancing craply around the bedroom to the radio, pulling on pants, vest top and linen trousers. She ruffled her hair up, then regarded herself in the mirror. For her age, she wasn’t doing too badly.

Steve emerged from his shower, a towel round his waist.

            “So coy, Mr Brenner,” she teased.

He grinned. “You look nice.”

            “Thanks,” she replied, turning back to the mirror to apply some lip gloss. “I feel nice.”

He stood behind her and nuzzled his face into her neck. “Mmm. You smell nice, too. All outdoorsy. You should go naked into the garden more often.”

She laughed, then turned to face him. “Come on. Get dressed. I’m ready. I want my breakfast.”

            “Can we go to Barbakan?” Steve started to get dressed. “I’m in the mood for a spicy sausage sizzler.”

She sat cross-legged on the bed, looking at his behind while he rummaged in the drawer for clean underwear.

            “Sounds good to me,” she said languidly. Then she sighed. “I love your bum,” she told him.

The door bell rang.

            “Jesus! On a Sunday?” Steve said, frowning. “Will you go?”

She went downstairs, could see the shape of a man through the glass in the front door.

She opened the door to see Sean, one of Steve’s friends from the club. He was looking down the road and turned to face her as the door opened.

            “Hiya! You over for the weekend again?” he asked.

            “Nah, Sean. Moved in last night. I’m a resident too, now.”

He nodded once. “Steve in?” He looked over her shoulder.

            “Yeah, getting dressed.” She opened the door wider and stood back. “You coming in?”

            “Cheers.” Sean stepped into the house and went through into the living room.

Steve came downstairs, pulling a t-shirt over his head.

            “Who is it?” he asked her, seemingly reluctant to go into the living room.

            “Sean,” she said.

            “Ah.”

He went into the living room, holding out his hand and saying, “Seany-boy!”

            “Alright, Stevo?” Sean replied.

She followed Steve into the living room and sat in the armchair. Sean had taken his rizlas and stash out of his pocket and was rolling.

            “It was fucking rare last night, man. You should have been there. Errol surpassed himself. The floor was packed, you could just about move your arse out there. I stood up on the balcony with a couple of the lads most of the night, necking shit and just watching them all. Some really fit birds in, as well.” He lit up, took a couple of healthy drags, then offered round.

            “Not for me, mate,” Steve said. “I’m trying to lay off for a bit.”

            “Liar,” said Sean, holding the spliff in front of Steve’s face.

            “Ah well, if you insist,” he said, taking it from his friend’s fingers and toking on it. He offered it to her, but she just shook her head, so he handed it back to Sean. She breathed in the sweet smoke, enjoying the dope vicariously.

Steve looked at her. “Will you make us a cup of coffee, love?” he asked. Sean was looking at the carpet, one leg bouncing, taking occasional tokes on his spliff.

She stood up and went through to the kitchen. She could hear them talking, voices lowered, the rhythm too urgent to be just a friendly chat. She went and stood in the doorway, intending to ask how Sean liked his coffee. As she reached the door, she saw Sean slip something to Steve. She coughed. They jumped guiltily.

            “I won’t ask,” she said. “Sean, how do you like your coffee?”

            “Oh, you know. Milk. Sugar. Ta,” he replied, not looking at her, leg still bouncing.

            “Actually,” Steve said. “Sean was just about to go.” He turned to his friend. “Weren’t you mate?”

            “Aye, yeah, I was,” Sean mumbled, standing up. He shook hands with Steve. “See you later then, mate.”

            “Yeah, see you later. Let me see you to the door.”

She went back into the kitchen and turned off the kettle. She could hear them talking again at the door, low and urgent once more.

Steve came towards the kitchen from the front door, then leaned in the doorway.

            “Are we nearly ready to go, then?” he asked.

She turned to him and smiled. “Yeah, we’re ready.”

He picked up the car keys from the side by the microwave.

            “I’ll drive,” he said.

            “Okay,” she said.

They looked at each other. She wondered briefly what he was thinking. He was smiling, but he seemed distant. Something about Sean’s visit had changed his demeanour. She smiled back, then he pushed himself away from the doorframe with his shoulder and walked down the hall to the front door.

He opened the door to two police officers. That stalled him. She stalled too, in the hallway behind him.

            “Good morning sir. Could we come in a moment, please?”

Steve stood back from the door, frowning slightly. She smiled guiltily at the officers. Why did she feel guilty? It was probably something and nothing.

            “Is there somewhere we can sit down and have a chat, sir?” one of the officers said to Steve.

            “Yeah, through there,” Steve indicated the living room. “What’s all this about?”

            “We’ve had a complaint from one of your neighbours, sir. Apparently a naked woman was seen in your back garden this morning, and they called to complain.”

Steve laughed. “But it’s our back garden. Surely my girlfriend can go out there naked if she wants to.”

The police officer smiled, but without any warmth. “Of course, sir. However, we have also had other complaints about people visiting your house at strange hours of the night, one of whom answers the description of a known drug-dealer operating in this area.”

Steve stayed quiet. She spoke from the doorway from the living room to the kitchen where she had gone to stand unobtrusively.

            “Would either of you like a cup of coffee?”

The other police officer looked up. “Not for me, thanks, love,” she smiled.

The first officer continued. “As we were driving up, we saw the same man leaving your house. A Mr.,” he paused to check his notepad, “Sean Whelan?”

He looked up at Steve. “Do you know this man?”

Steve smiled.

            “Yes, of course I do. We’re djs together at a club in town. I know him well. He’s a mate.”

            “Did he come here to do a deal, sir?”

Steve laughed. “No, but if he did, do you really think I would tell you so?”

            “Maybe not, sir, but if he did come here to do a deal with you, you are advised that informing us of the fact now may work in your favour later in proceedings.”

She stood in the doorway, coldness beginning to fill the pit of her stomach. She knew Sean and Steve were dope heads, few people in Manchester and in their circle weren’t, but this was more serious. The police wouldn’t be after Sean for a bit of dope dealing. She remembered the package that Sean had been passing to Steve when she came into the room to ask him about his coffee. She hoped to god it wasn’t what she suspected.

            “So when Mr Whelan came to your house this morning, it was a purely social visit?” the officer asked Steve.

            “That’s right. He’s a mate.”

            “And the purpose of his visit was not to supply you with any illegal substances?”

            “No.”

            “Then you won’t mind if we have a look round, see what we can find?”

            “Yes, I will mind, actually. Do you have a warrant?”

            “No, sir. We don’t have a warrant, but we can easily come back with one. If you have nothing to hide, however, then there’s no harm in us looking now, is there? Unless there is anything you would like to inform us of now?”

She spoke up. “Steve?”

He looked at her, his eyes icy. “What?”

She lowered her gaze. “Nothing,” she mumbled. “I just wanted to remind you we’re going to be late.”

Steve stared at her. “Late?” He looked back to the police officer. “Oh yeah, we’re supposed to be meeting people for lunch in Chorlton. It’s not really convenient for you to look round now. But if you want to come back, that would be fine.”

The police officer looked at Steve with an inscrutable expression on his face. Looked at him for a long time. Steve looked right back at him, unflinching, smiling his mega-watt smile. The icy feeling in the pit of her stomach grew. This was bad.

Eventually the first officer stood up, followed by his colleague.

            “Alright, Mr?”

            “Brenner. Steve Brenner. I think you should have asked me that at the start of your questioning, shouldn’t you? To check you had the right man? Because I’m sure you know my name.” Steve was still smiling, but his voice was hard.

            “Yes, Mr Brenner, I probably should. Thank you for your time, and please know that we will be back later today.”

Steve showed them to the door. When he returned, she had begun to shake.

            “Tell me what’s going on,” she said, her heart beat slowing as she hardly dared to breathe. “What was that package Sean passed to you earlier? What’s in it?”

            “Sparkle dust, darling. Coke. Charlie. A little bit of magic. A snowstorm more exciting than the one upstairs last night,” Steve replied, looking straight at her, into her eyes, deep into her eyes and menacing.

The ice in the pit of her stomach froze solid. She did not know how she would get out of this one. But she knew that she must. She knew it as she knew that her happiness was draining away before her eyes, as a third snowstorm danced before her eyes, as she fell to the floor in a faint of panic, as the blood rushed to her head.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

SURVEILLANCE

The shakes begin. You’re thinking about what we just did. I see it there in your face, in the bleak, staring blankness in your eyes. You shake in the seat beside me. You shake and stare straight ahead, seeing not the road, not the streetlights, not the houses drifting past as I carefully drive at the speed limit. You’re seeing again what we just did.

I won’t speak. It’s dangerous to speak to a sleepwalker. Dangerous to touch someone who has just fitted. Dangerous to encroach on the private staring horror of someone shaking in the seat beside you. So I look, then look away again.

I am slowing for traffic lights, drawing the car to a halt. You suddenly lurch and grapple frantically with the controls for the car radio. You press buttons, desperate to fill the car with noise, to block out the visions you are seeing of what we just did. The lights are changing, I let out the clutch, smoothly and controlled. You sit hunched forward beside me staring at the red glow from the buttons on the stereo. I did not know when I bought it that it would glow red. It’s a small thing, but irritating all the same. You sit there, hunched and trembling, the shakes have subsided, but you are not still.

I am thinking of the straightness of the road as we drive up through the suburbs, of the flicker of the streetlights up the centre of the windscreen, of the way they briefly bring our faces out of the dark, revealing to me the expression on your face as you sit there beside me trembling. I am thinking of the taste of metal in my mouth when I bit into the KitKat which had a piece of foil melted into the chocolate, and of how you laughed at my attempts to remove it from my tongue. It was a tiny piece of foil, but the taste of it filled my mouth.

The static of the radio begins to grate on me, low level white noise, so I tune in to some local radio station playing big band music, like the sort your dad listens to. I think of him whistling along. I think of him at home, your mum and dad’s house, his home, listening to big band music. I wonder whether you will tell him what we just did.

More lights turn to red, and this time when they change I will turn left, down another straight road, crossing other roads equally straight, until I bring the car to a stop outside your flat. My guess is that we will sit for a while in silence and then you will get out of the car without a word and I will not follow you.

The lights change and I turn the car into School Lane. You start to weep noiselessly, the only sign is the jerk of your body with each gulping, silent sob. I admire this quality in you, to cry so silently and yet so physically. No roar of grief, no wail of misery, no catch in your throat like a cough that will not come. Just shaking gulps of silently drawn breath, and tears wetting your cheeks and falling plumply to your lap.

You know what we have done in a way I somehow don’t. You know it physically. To me it is abstract.

It has rained. The road is still shiny and slightly slick. The air is freshened, the taste of the rain still there. I open the window to let the air into the car and I taste the rain on the edge of my tongue, sharply biting. It brings with it a smell of earth, this rain-freshened air. A smell of earth in a city suburb, like a memory of fields, and suddenly I am tired and want a warm summer evening and a field and to lie down and stare at the sky.

You shiver slightly as the breeze coming in through my window plays across your bare arms, your hands clasped tightly together sitting on top of your knees pressed tightly together. Your tears have finished and the bleak staring blankness is back in your eyes, making them dully black like coat buttons fixed in your face. Your face is set rigid, the skin stretched over it making it seem like marble, or waxed paper like that you used to get on Warburton’s loaves, that you used to use to make the slide slippy down the park.

We have driven down another straight road, across other roads equally straight, and I am turning right now into a leafy street where the large detached houses have been converted into flats, and I am pulling up outside the one containing your flat, beneath the streetlight to the left of the driveway.

My guess earlier was right. We sit for a while in silence, beneath our own yellow-sulphur glowing moon of light, your face made bleaker still by its harsh artificiality. We sit. I have turned the engine off, removed the keys from the ignition, so the radio has finally stopped as well. No more big band music like that your dad listens to.

You fumble with the door release, you can’t get it to work. I lean across you and pull the lever, springing the door open with a dull clunk, or is it a click? Your strong left hand pushes at the door, widening the opening. Your feet are on the still-wet road and your body angles itself out of my car, your large frame unfolding itself. Absently you push the door shut, your back to the car, your arm extended behind you, pushing the door shut as though you are pushing away some memory. You stand there, paused for a moment, then you turn and walk in front of the car so I can watch you through the windscreen. You do not look my way. I watch you walk up the driveway to the house that contains your flat, walking as though in a dream, walking like a somnambulist.

You know what it is we have done. You feel it. To me it is clinical. Hyperreal, and so therefore surreal. I know the theory, you know the fact.

I watch you walk up the driveway and pause at the door while you search out your key then slide it into the lock. The door opens and you pass through it, into your private world. I sit and look at the door after it has closed behind you and I can no longer see you.

The instant you are gone I wish that I had spoken, because now in this instant I know what we have done, and I am frightened. Your quivering bleak realisation next to me in the car as we drove kept me sane, and now I fear madness.

This killing, this rupture, this rending asunder. This is what we have done. You know it, and so do I.

And now four days later, we are here. I have seen you. I can see you now. I am looking, but not looking. I am looking away, away from where you are standing, your face set as you half-listen to the woman in blue with the too bright lipstick. I am looking away and looking at the same time. Are you listening to her words? Are you observing her, that half-smile on your face? Storing her up for future reference? I am looking away, scanning the room without seeing, because all the time I am looking at you, my eyes keep flicking back to check you are not looking my way.

This room is too crowded, all of us here to see the celebrated writer, home again to be fêted by the people he rejected. And here he is now, entering the room in his Nicole Farhi shirt, his Dolce & Gabbana trousers, his DKNY wool jacket. Softly tailored, smoothly confident, smiling his way through the room. All eyes follow him and if he walks near me your eyes will follow too closely and I mustn’t look to see if they do.

The celebrated writer is stepping up onto the podium, is taking his seat. The representative from his publisher’s is fussing around him and smoothly, suavely he is letting it happen. I am looking at him intently, not looking, not seeing, but definite in my attempt not to look at you. I look at him and I can feel myself go almost cross-eyed with concentration, staring impersonally at the slight fleck of grey in his close-cropped hair.

I am listening, but not listening, as he begins to speak about his latest work that will surely be as celebrated as all the rest. I can’t see him losing his touch. He has not lost his conviction. I am listening to the sound of his voice, not listening to his words, trying hard not to think or wonder about what you might be thinking. Whether you are listening but not listening also. Whether you are cataloguing his flaws, his foibles, his fallacies. Whether your guts churn at the thought of what we did.

I look. I can’t resist it. I can’t see you. The woman in blue is still there, over by Authors G-I, leaning against the book shelves, a glass of something in her right hand, elbow resting on her left arm, crossed over the front of her stomach, beneath her chest. I have looked at her just long enough to absorb this, but now too long because she has felt me looking at her and now is looking my way. As her eyes find mine, I flick mine away, too late for comfort, too late for her not to know that I was looking. I look along the shelves of books by authors among whose names mine will not be found. Nor yours either. My eyes scan the half-turned heads of the people listening to the celebrated writer speak.

I can’t locate you. Panic half-rises in my throat. I need to know where you are. I need to avoid your presence. I should not have come here tonight. Not alone. I should have known. We had the same thought.

I decide to leave and then I will not have to think about the possibility of you seeing me. I decide to slip out unobtrusively, hoping my rudeness goes unnoticed by the celebrated writer I came here to see.

He is standing now, the celebrated writer, speaking to his audience, reading selected passages from the book he hopes we will buy, the book people here hope he will sign, wishing to look into his sad hang-dog eyes as he does so.

I want to look into his eyes and tell him it is done.

I am turning, making my way through the people packed into this room behind me. I am cutting my way through, right hand, right arm raised and preceding me, parting the way. I am making my way to the door, to the staircase, to the ground floor and out to the covered courtyard in the centre of the building where news used to be created. I am making my way out and here I am at the door, and there you are just to the left of it. I baulk. I lower my gaze, my head, and walk towards the door, casting a side-ways glance your way. I must look like my neck does not work.

Having pressed my way through the tight-packed people, here only to see the celebrated writer, and withstood their distracted huffs and tuts, having offered up muttered apologies, alluding to a sorrow I do not feel, I am here at the door with you just to the left of it. So near. I begin to push the door, push it, pushing and it is resisting. I push and I see the sign that tells me to pull, so I push once more, then someone else’s hand pulls at the handle and the door is opening, obscuring you, covering you up, and I slip through and out and down the stairs.

I pause halfway down the stairs. I think I have heard someone else leave that tightly packed room. So why do I pause? Why not carry on my rush and hurry down the stairs? It is to allow him, because I believe it is you, to catch me there on the stairs. So I pause. There is silence. Because no-one else has left that room, no-one else is making their way down the stairs.

I am paused but no longer know whether the resumption of motion will take me down and out of the building or up and back into that room where you will be standing to the right of the door, though you will not have moved. It is me who has moved.

I am paused, facing the handrail, now looking up, back to where I have just come from. How long have I been paused here? I do not know. I should not have come. I should have known you would be there.

Suddenly I am no longer paused. I am making my way downstairs and outside. I came to a decision without knowing it. I am leaving. I feel like a coward. I should go back. I walk down the fake cobbled street and out into the warm August evening. Exchange Square is before me, with its BBC screen and its giant windmills. I should not have left that room. You must have seen me. This should not bother me. I am making my way to the nearest Metrolink platform, up Shudehill. I will catch the tram to Piccadilly. I will not walk. You are in that room. The celebrated writer will see you and know that it is done.

He will know that it is done, and that will be an end to it.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

BIRD

Bird. That’s what they called her. That’s what the voice said now, when she answered the phone.

            “Bird.”

            “Yes?”

            “You okay? You sound different.”

She was different. She felt different. Funny how he could tell it just from the way she said yes.

She listened to him talking into her ear, a disembodied voice, as she sat on the back doorstep, skirt hitched up so her legs could catch the sun. The floor was silvered by the long wings of fat flying ants. She peered at them, their black shiny bodies. Hard bodies that surprised her with their impact when they flew into her, crashing against her arms, her legs. Bird. If she really were a bird, she would want to eat these fat black shiny things. One crawled slowly up her leg. Maybe she should eat it. She wondered if its shell, its carapace, would crack audibly when she bit into it.

The voice in her ear burbled on. Her distracted, ant-inspecting silence apparently didn’t matter. She placed a finger in front of the ant. It paused, then clambered up onto the digit. She could raise her hand to her mouth now, she could place her finger and the ant inside her mouth. The wings were so long and sleek. The wings put her off. She thought they would tickle on the way down. She opened her mouth and blew. The ant suddenly found itself airborne.

She looked up into the sky, squinting, one eye closed against the brightness of the sun. She felt the warmth of it against her face and remembered another day like this. Warm sun on face, sitting on a back doorstep. She had tipped off her shoes that day and stretched out her legs. She did the same again today.

His voice was still pouring words into her ear. She looked at her feet, the whiteness of the skin, the blueness of the veins, so close to the surface, so fat and full of blood. She thought of the blood they held, thick and red and metallic. It would taste good in her mouth, that blood. Thick and round. The veins in her wrists were fat and blue today, too, just beneath the covering of skin that seemed paper thin.

She found suddenly that she wanted to say something. She waited for a moment, to be sure. She did not want to waste any of her words. She knew it didn’t pay to be profligate. Then the sun hid behind a cloud and the moment passed.

He, however, was still thriftlessly pouring words into her ear. This was what he liked about her, she knew. That she sat silent and let him talk. It was like the sea washing over her, the same tidal flow, back and forth, back and forth. She sat there, sometimes seditiously, sometimes passive, hardly ever listening. Like a member of a junta, happy to be there, patiently waiting.

            “Bird?”

            “Yes.”

            “Oh, you are still there then.”

            “Yes.”

Bird. Such a name. Such a strange choice, and yet it suited her. It was what they all called her. Most of them had forgotten her real name, a turn of events that it suited her not to change.

Bird. Big Bird. Baby Bird. Ladybird. The sun peeped around the cloud, then went back in again. Bye bye Blackbird. Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Bird singing in the sycamore tree. Say nightie night and kiss me.

That was where this began, in the middle of a kiss. A kiss goodbye, a see-you-later, see-you-again, see-you-soon kiss that lingered on the edge of luscious before hurtling down to say nightie night and kiss me again. A standing kiss, like a standing order, a kiss to be paid same time, same place, but then that kiss hurtled them down. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip at the memory. 32 days ago, more than a month ago, but maybe that meant nothing.

The sun came out again. She squinted at the sky and saw, as though it were a lesson newly learned, that the sun did not come out at all. The clouds withdrew their comfort.

She looked down. Fat black shiny bodies, long iridescent wings. One day the bugs would inherit the earth.

            “When will you be home?”

She spoke almost without realising it, broke into his monologue, a tiny eddy in his ceaseless torrent of words.

            “Another week yet, darling, why?”

            “No reason.”

32 days ago, more than a month ago, a meeting, a greeting, a morning of more words, more talking, but not a river, not an unabashed outpouring from the mouth of one into the mind of another.

A meeting on Bridgewater Street. A walk to a pub where she used to go with a violinist from the Hallé when she was 17 and he old enough to know better. A lunchtime drink, a kiss goodbye, a change of plan. A drive in a car not her own to a back doorstep not her own. Hot afternoon sun, her shoes tipped off, her skirt hitched up, a cold ice-filled glass pressed into the back of her neck, making her shudder with illicit pleasure, his hand holding her hair away, and a kiss that led to this by way of that. Her skirt hitched up, accommodating little minx. Her skirt hitched up and him, unlike all the rest, a surprise, calling her by her name, speaking it into her ear in rhythms as hot as the sun beating down on his back.

Birds singing in the sycamore tree and kiss me again.

Sun-kissed. That’s what she was. Sun-kissed and 32 days older. There were tiny freckles on her shoulders, but they were not what made her different. The cold ice-filled glass pressed into the back of her neck was what made her different. That shudder of illicit pleasure and him, unlike all the others, calling her by name.

Mr Chatterbox, him, this one here, did not even notice that she came home smelling of him. She could smell him, warm all over her body, tangy where her skirt hitched up. She could smell him and did not want him to go away.

32 days older, and now he knew she was different. The city knew she was different too. The city claimed her as its own. She walked along the streets and knew herself to be in the pavements, the bricks, the glass, the steel.

She had closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and he had been looking at her, his eyes looking directly into hers. He had been a revelation that day. A waking dream, a glimpse of the future.

She okayed-to-end and sat on the back doorstep, skirt hitched up, silent phone in hand, the words that had flowed into her ear now ebbing from her head, leaving nothing behind. She smiled.

32 days older. A bird who had all but flown from her cage.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

TONIGHT

He is in the bathroom. She is in the kitchen, at the sink. He is in the bathroom and this can mean only one thing. There is no way out of tonight.

She stands at the sink, beneath the kitchen’s fluorescent light that gives off a low-level hum, an electrical white-noise hum. She stands still, hands plunged into red hot water, turning puce with the heat, but she is frozen, staring out into the dim twilit garden.

A light goes on in one of the terraced houses across the backs from where her house stands. Jim & Annie’s house. The light seems out of place, somehow, like the light in a Magritte painting seen once in a gallery far away from this kitchen, this suspended animation. Jim is moving around in the kitchen across from her. A new light goes on upstairs and her head moves instinctively to find its source: Annie in the bedroom. She stands there in her kitchen, beneath the fluorescent light, motionless, illuminated.

He is in the bathroom. She knows what he is doing. She doesn’t need a light to go on, doesn’t need to see.

She looks down at her hands, red and burning in the water, but she can’t summon the energy to move them. She simply stares at them.

Annie leaves the bedroom in darkness and there is a brief moment when she cannot be seen. Then she reappears as if by some conjuring trick, in the kitchen with Jim.

Jim and Annie. 45 years married. She stares across at them, thinking of the number. A 4 and a 5, side by side.

            “She’s just standing at the sink, Annie. Do you suppose she’s alright?” Jim is trying not to watch Jane framed in brilliant light at her kitchen window. He has been worrying about her for weeks now. Been watching her slowly diminish.

Here she is, suspended in time, in her kitchen, 5 years in, waiting for the inevitable. She hears him in the bathroom overhead, the heavy tread of his footstep across the floorboards, the creak of the loose board by the door.

Her mouth is dry and tastes of metal. She wants to spit that taste out, that taste of dry blood and fear. She takes one hand from the soapy water and slowly pulls down the blind at the kitchen window.

            “She’s pulling the blind, Annie. There’s something not right in that house, you know, love.” Jim moves from where he hopes he has been observing Jane unobserved and crosses to the window, looking out across the yard to the house where the kitchen is obscured by a pale cream blind. Annie, behind him, opens and closes cupboard doors, going through the evening rituals she has been performing for almost 45 years of marriage. She lets Jim’s mutterings wash over her. He’s always fretting about something and nothing. Jim leans against the sink unit, his arms braced, supporting his upper body’s weight. He leans and peers out across to the other house, unknowingly mirroring the posture of a young woman on the other side of a blind awaiting the inevitable.

She is standing now, her hands out of the water and positioned on the sink unit, either side of the sink, her arms braced and taking the weight of her upper body. Her head is bowed, her eyes are closed.

He is in the bedroom now, looking for something.

She has been in this kitchen forever, it seems. She doesn’t remember arriving there, or ever having left. She only remembers this interminable waiting.

He possesses her now, has branded her with the rose-print tattoo from his too-strong grip. It grasps her arm and holds her there, permanently bound.

She straightens up and continues with the washing up, losing herself in the mindless monotony of lifting some item, a glass, a plate, from the suds, and rubbing at it with the ineffectual brush. She places a glass onto the drainer, not looking at what she is doing, judging things by feel, and the glass misses and falls to the floor.

Jim sighs and pushes back from the sink unit, standing upright, shaking his head. The drawn blind across the way worries him, he doesn’t know why. The blank way she seemed to pull it down, he thinks. Not as though she had thought “Oh, the blind needs drawing.” Annie is still fidgeting in cupboards behind him. He turns and watches her. “Shall we watch the news a bit, love?” he asks her bent back.

She has been living this ageless waiting moment every Friday for the last 18 months. A sudden change in the way the wind was blowing. Abuse starting with his own body and spreading indirectly to hers. Abuse starting in the bathroom, sneaky and insidious. Abuse culminating in the bedroom, having crossed the kitchen floor in red rage and white fury. Abuse masked by words of love and desire, so that she no longer knows what love means.

Her hand closes round another item in the soapy water. She stands there holding it, her head facing the window as though she is looking at something, but her eyes are closed.

He is taking too long to come down the stairs. He is taking too long. The agony and the ecstasy of waiting becomes almost more than she can bear. But she knows now that she can bear anything, and it is only a matter of time. Tonight is as inevitable as every other night like it. No more, no less. There is nothing special about tonight.

Her hand is still gripping the thing it has found beneath the suds floating on the hot soapy water. Her hand is making a bid for independence.

Jim sits in his armchair, Annie in hers, one slightly to the left of the tv, the other slightly to the right. Annie takes up her knitting. Jim holds the tv remote in his left hand and stares at the screen. He is not watching. He is thinking. Annie is knitting, not watching either, but her eyes make no pretence of it. Jim has a bad feeling in his stomach, but he doesn’t know how to express it, so he ignores it as best he can.

She washes the knife she has been holding for an age now. She finally lifts it from the water and passes the brush over its blade, rubbing the worn nylon bristles over the flat surface of the blade, first one side, then the other. Her hand has been subdued and now places the knife onto the draining board, flat and reflecting dully on its side, one edge shining keenly beneath the fluorescent light.

Her hand dips in and out of the water now, selecting items at random, without feeling or thought, working through the things used during the day that now need to be cleaned. Cleansed.

She is standing there at the sink, head slightly bowed, the light catching the different shades of brown in her hair, when he comes to stand in the kitchen doorway.

She carries on with her task, giving no sign that she is aware of his presence. She wills her body not to become rigid, compels it to remain in as natural a pose as possible.

She is thinking of autumn 5 years ago. She is drowning out the clamour of now with memories of the past. She hears him walk across the kitchen towards her.

Autumn 5 years ago is in her head. Playing like a film she might watch. She contemplates it from the inside of her mind, lets it play on the screen that she can pull down just behind the focus of her eyes.

Jim has dozed off in front of the tv. Annie knits on, trying not to mind that Jim’s hand is clenched strongly around the tv remote, stopping her from changing the channel. Annie knits on and tries not to think about what might be going on in the house across the backs from theirs. She is knitting a cardigan for their Julie’s littlest. She thinks what a shame it is that there are no children in that house across the backs, then shakes her head. She knows that whatever is wrong in that house won’t be solved by children being there. Jim snores, rumbling like a poorly tuned engine in the distance. Annie clicks her tongue in time with the click of her needles

He rubs the back of his hand underneath his nose, grinning and swagger-swaying before her. She is facing him now, her back to the blinded window. He strokes the back of that same hand against her cheek, grinning the while. His hand falls palm down against her shoulder, moves across, his thumb finding the notch below her throat, his index finger her collar bone. He pushes the palm of his hand against her sternum. She feels her heartbeat too high in her chest, feels her lungs constrict. He maintains the pressure as he pulls his hand down against the bone, down between her breasts, his hand cupping, then passing down over her belly and finally catching his fingers in the belt loop of her jeans, pulling her towards him.

His mouth finds hers, she tilts her head to one side, closing her eyes, autumn 5 years ago playing in her head. She tries not to notice the residue clinging to his nostrils. Her lips move with his, he bites gently on her lower lip. Gently then harder, and then harder still and the taste of metal returns.

Autumn 5 years ago, and a place where the kiss was gentle and whispered a promise.

He is tugging at her clothes now, and she does not resist him. She knows better than to say no. Knows where no will get her. She leans back into the sink unit, lets her hands rest against its surface, lets her fingers remind her that she placed a knife on the draining board moments earlier. Lets her fingers move away from that temptation.

He has lifted her t-shirt so that his hands are touching her flesh. Autumn 5 years ago and the time when his feverish hands against her skin were an intensity she almost could not bear. He is unfastening her jeans and she is trying not to tell him no with every fibre of her being. He tugs and pulls, and fumbles then with his own fly and she thinks she might get off lightly tonight if she can just stay liquid enough to seep around his edges.

And there, the searing roughness, heat and white light in her head chasing autumn 5 years ago away and she begs him no, please god no. But he is on a roll now and she knows she has been a fool to implore.

His hand finds her hair, pulls her head back so that she stares up into the fluorescent light and she doesn’t know if it is the light that is blinding her or the pain.

Annie snoozes over her knitting, Jim sleeps on in his armchair, the tv’s blue-ish light flickering over them both.

He grunts. Her head is still forced backwards by his hand pulling on her hair. Her eyes are closed now. Her throat is snapped too far back for her to make a sound. Her hand finds the knife again somehow and closes around it. He is never going to stop tonight. He lets go of her hair and her head slumps forward. She tries to swallow.

Annie snorts and wakes herself up. She tuts to herself and looks at Jim deep asleep across from her. She packs up her knitting then stiffly gets up from her own chair. She switches the tv off and Jim stirs slightly, muttering, then settles back into sleep. Annie goes upstairs for a blanket, brings it back and tucks it around her husband. 45 years. She looks at him and smiles, shaking her head.

He is putting himself away. She is sticky, damp silvering her inner thigh.

There will be more later. For now he has finished. But there is always more later.

She fastens her jeans and pulls her clothes straight. She opens cupboard doors and drawers, drying and putting away the things she has washed up. Her mind is blank.

He is in the living room now. The tv is on. He is laughing inappropriately at something. Canned laughter seeps through to the kitchen. Canned laughter so false, rubbing it in, adding the insult to the injury he brought her, downstairs from the bathroom.

She waits a heartbeat or two, then joins him in the living room.

There is no way out of tonight.

© J R Hargreaves 2003

MISSING

“Regret nothing,” you told me. But I am full of regret, and the wish that I could somehow have done things differently. This regret seduces me, is irresisitible and relentless in its persuasion.

I run things round my head daily, hourly, minute by minute by second by infinitely small fragments of time. I turn it and look at it from every angle, but it never comes out any different.

“What are you waiting for?” was another thing you used to say. What was I waiting for? For the moment that never came? The moment it would be right? The moment I could speak the truth? What was it that I was waiting for, that never arrived? The thing that would have let me say, “I love you.”

I’m walking across the grass in Piccadilly Gardens, walking from Portland Street, past the concrete wall, the crush of my feet causing the scent of the grass to rise up and fill my nostrils. I’m walking down Moseley Street, past fast food outlets with the waft of hot scorched cardboard, past the banks, the closed sandwich shop with its pickled fruit in the window, past the uniform shop, the Art Gallery; the smell of the street is metallic, dry and dusty, but the scent of the grass stays with me, reminding me.

I reach the library, the vents at street level by the Town Hall extension pumping out the old musty smell of books, of leather bindings slowly being eaten away, the sweet acidic tang of decay. I feel it bite against my tongue, the taste of the smell, a pillow of air, fat in my mouth.

I skirt round the library and stop, facing Oxford Road, looking towards The Cornerhouse. I can’t move, people surge around me like water dividing round a rock, flowing on, pouring away. I’m looking towards The Cornerhouse and half expecting to see you walking in my direction, checking your watch, phone in your hand, your other hand firmly in the pocket of your blue chinos.

Is that how you were that day? I will never know. I didn’t stand here on that day hoping to see how it was you walked up from The Cornerhouse.

I was sitting in the park, looking at the sun through the rippling cover of a tree. I remember how the sun made coronas round the leaves as they moved in the breeze, now a bright spot, now a darkened patch. I remember the smell of the grass, freshly cut, crushed beneath the feet of passing people, as I sat with my back to the tree trunk, looking up at the sun through the rippling cover of its branches.

I wasn’t there to see you walk up from The Cornerhouse towards The Midland Hotel, heading for Peter Street. I didn’t see if you held your phone in your hand as you turned your wrist to check your watch, if your other hand was in its familiar place in the pocket of your blue chinos.

I was somewhere else. Always somewhere else. “What are you waiting for?” you said.

I came home late that afternoon, after my day spent lazing in the park with my walkman on, my copy of City Life, my book because you can never take too much to read. I came home and then it was your turn to be somewhere else.

I’m standing here now, looking at the place you were. Thoughts tripping through my head. Still wondering, like Nick Cook on Crimewatch UK, my questions run dispssionately through my mind. Did you meet someone that day, as you walked up from The Cornerhouse, one hand in the pocket of your chinos, the other hand holding your phone, as you checked your watch in that familiar movement? Did someone greet you there in the street? Did you go somewhere together? Some pub down a side street, somewhere we used to go together? Were you tempted to stray, so strongly you could not resist, so strongly you missed the meeting you were supposed to have? Did you meet someone else and leave me behind?

I didn’t know to wonder those things as you continued to be somewhere else that night. What was I waiting for? I have wondered them many times since, though. Just as I have wondered whether you simply started to walk and kept on walking. I wondered briefly whether you stayed on the train from the Crescent and down to the airport, until I saw the cctv at Oxford Road Station. You walked, hand in pocket, it had to be you, you walking, down Station Approach to The Cornerhouse.

What happened to you then, as I sat not so very far away in Peel Park, turning the pages of my book? Did you turn right instead of left? Away from Peter Street and your meeting with a client in the Life Café? Did you instead walk down Oxford Road, catch a bus, go south of the city? Were you not walking at all, one hand in your pocket, the other holding your phone as you checked the time on your watch?

This is worse than a death. I grieve without a body. I mourn the lack of your presence without a grave.

I was somewhere else that day. Regretting nothing, not even aware that I was waiting for something. Not even aware that you had gone.

© J R Hargreaves

RIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

A snatch of monologue, recitative; her favourite refrain:

            “You always fucking bring it back to that, don’t you?”

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

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

            “Shit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Stop howling. Stop it. STOP IT!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One’s missing, he told himself.

Gran. She looked down into the drawer with him.

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

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

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

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

            “Stop howling. STOP IT!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Hello, Jake,” she said.

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

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

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

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

© J R Hargreaves 2004

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WAITING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time, she wouldn’t wait.

© J R Hargreaves 2005

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