What kind of fool?

“I want to kill all your friends.  All those bands that you like.  I want to kill every last one of them.”

He doesn’t, of course.  It’s me he wants to kill.  That fine line, that double-edged passion.  He wants to kill me and everything I stand for because I’m not the thing he expected.

He wants everything.  That’s all.

I stand and look at him.  I do not speak.  He could reduce the whole world to rubble and I still would not speak.  He knows that it is only me and him already.  Everything else is pretence.  It took one moment for that to be true.  One moment of silence, decreed by him; his decree ignored by me.  The silence was already in place; it needed no decreeing.  The silence fell with those first few notes, and the river that followed them.

He wants to kill me, in killing those bands, those friends, everything with which I surround myself to convince the world that I am normal.  He wants to kill me, but he won’t.  He can’t.

They are dead already.

We adopt our battle positions.  Mine is the head half-turned, arms folded, one hip cocked position.  The position we learn in our teens.  Create a good line, an elegant silhouette.  If you’re going to have to stand in a battle position, you might as well do it with style.  His is bullish.  Legs braced, hands in pockets.  I imagine he’s clenching his fists.

I want to laugh at the stupidity of it all, but I enjoy it too much.  I enjoy the bristle his words create at the back of my neck.  I enjoy the clench of my jaw, and the narrowing of my eyes.  I even like the waspish buzz of all the words I will not say flying through my mind.

I want to laugh.  To make him laugh.  I want to hug him to me and whisper, “Let’s fuck...”  Because all of this is just fucking in mid-air, with our clothes on, and people in attendance.

High above the trees, two Chinese warriors fly, mid battle.  One a young girl, the other a grown man.  They fly and outwit and their power is jealousy, their power is rage.  Their power is that fine line of passion.

This is what it’s all about.  In every age, in every mythology.  From the crouching tiger and the hidden dragon, to Rapunzel in her tower.  From the crackles of electricity in the air, to the desire to die rather than live alone.

The double-edged passion that brings him to hate, that leaves me in love; incapable of hating, because this brings me to life after all the years of deadness, and all the thinking that there was nothing inside.

You can tell your life as a story.  You can weave truths into fiction, that creep among the lies and burrow into the subconscious of your reader, setting off lights, creating synapses, making the connections real.  You can tell your life to a point, and then comes the question.  Why?

Why this hole?  Why this falsehood?  Why this thing that isn’t quite right?

And the story teller, the bard answers, “Because.”

Fit the piece to the hole, tell the truth, make the edges of the story and its centre align; what have you then?

Nothing.

And that is why he wants to kill my friends, all the bands that I like.  That is why he wants to bring the world to rubble.

Because.  He can’t bear the thought of being cheated.  That my smoke and mirrors hid the truth.

He wanted everything and was disappointed.  And now he must rip to shreds the mynah bird who did not speak, because she wasn’t a mynah bird at all.  Her glossy black feathers and her yellow beak make her as common as the blackbird, and as speechless.

So let him kill, until there is only me and him still standing.  Let him do that.  It makes no odds.  It will just be me and him, as it always was, right from the start.  The mute and the fighter.  The everything and nothing.

The two Chinese warriors resting on the bending boughs of separate trees.  The young woman and the grown man, breathless with exertion, unwilling to submit.  The wire of steel that runs through each and connects them both like electricity.

I do not speak.  Only, let him kill me now.

Seachange

Towards the moon

Full moon, caught up in the trees behind the houses, lodged in the topmost branches, a perfect circle with a silver halo.  René Magritte could not have painted a moon more perfect.

She is lying naked on the bed, staring out of the window at the moon.  Her hair is loose and blown by the breeze from the fan which is skimming along her body.  She is stretched out and milky in the half light from the moon and the lights in the street outside the window.

Moonbathing at midnight.  I would have her naked in the grass in front of the house for everyone to see.  She lies there on the bed, close enough to touch but beyond my reach.  In love with the moon; in thrall to it.  She lies, with a look to the side, her hand pressed to her lips, or maybe her lips pressed to her hand.  I can’t see her face but I know that her eyes will be large and round.  They will match the moon in their perfection.  Lee Miller could not have photographed a nude more lovely.

The air from the fan ripples across her body.  Its curves are like desert dunes, sculpted by the wind, smooth and feminine.  Her skin is pale; I know its softness; I know its taste; I know its scent at different points.

I move my hand and let it brush the curve of her lower back, and she sighs.  Her eyes never leave the moon, but she sighs.

We have spent the whole day in the garden, the six of us.  Franny wanted a barbecue.  The street was filled with the smell of burning, of indiscriminate meat products combusting gently.  Michael said it was carcinogenic.  Funny how we’re concerned with our own personal causes of death.  The potential ones, anyway.

She said it was risky, being outside to plan things.  Suburbia is small; we encroach on each other daily.  She has a point, but we have spent the day in the garden all the same, and now we know what it is that we have to do.  Every step, every action has been planned and reviewed and revised and gone over until we know the sequence inside out.  We know that the plan is watertight.  She would say if she wasn’t happy, and all this revolves around her.  I trust her judgement.

Terry has questioned her repeatedly, but, languid in the heat, she has said nothing all day to suggest that this is anything less than perfect, and now she lies in the moonlight, looking at that perfect circle with its halo of silver light.

She is finalising details in her head.  She is running through scenarios; all the things that could go wrong, and all the solutions to resolve them.  She carries everything in her head.

I withdraw my hand and carry on writing.  I’m drawing the scene repeatedly, positioning people and equipment and calculating angles and trajectories.  The floor beside the bed is littered with paper, balled up and flung aside each time I think I’m struck by a new configuration.

Unball those sheets, though, and place them side by side and you will see that none of them differs in any material detail from any other.  I’m drawing the same scene over and again.  I’m marking our positions with pinpoint accuracy.  She is doing the same in her head.  Mine is a freeze frame photographic still; a stop-motion animation that would only make sense if all the pictures were run together.  Hers is the entire thing played out in glorious Technicolor inside her mind.

I can see that her breathing has changed.  She is flat on her stomach now, her head still turned to the side, away from me, towards the moon.  Her breathing is deep and resting.  I put the pen and paper down and pull the bedsheet over us.

In a week, this will be over.  In a week, this will be done.  Neither of us knows it yet, but it will be ten years before we’ll see each other again.  Once the dust has settled, I will be gone.  Terry will see she’s alright.

I wrap an arm around her, underneath the bedsheet.  The air from the fan blows gently across us both.  She sleeps, stirring only slightly.  I feel the softness of her skin, and start to miss it already.

I lie too easily.  Too glibly.  I feed information to people; information I think they want to hear.

“Are you happy?" they ask me, and I tell them, yes, I’m happy.  I’m fine.  Everything is fine.

Fine is like the weather.  Fine is a grade of wire, a grade of cotton.  Fine is a higher plane of art, better than your average art.  Everything is fine, and I am happy.

I lost my page because I told someone the truth and it fell onto deaf ears.  Call and response.  His call, my response.  Even filtered through hours of holding back, I still responded, in a fashion.  I told him the truth and it fell into silence.

Silence is like a vacuum.  It sucks everything else into it at the speed of light.  That’s faster than the speed of sound.  You open up the box where silence is hiding, and it sucks everything in.

Silence is as wide and unending as space, sometimes.  Silence is critical.  It’s a critical mass; the minimum requirement to set off the chain reaction that constitutes my personal nuclear explosion.

You bore me, I told him.  This bores me.  I wrote it down on the virgin white page, unmarked, unblemished.  I wrote it down for him to read later, knowing he wouldn’t care.

I love you, I told him, but it isn’t enough.  False sentiment.  Lying too glibly again.  Because, what is love but a different nuclear reaction requiring a different critical mass?  My reaction is anger and hatred, not love.  But I love you is what I said, because that’s what you always say when you’re about to leave.

I sit here now on the train and watch as we speed past the towns and the countryside that I have never known, beyond their role as View From Train Window in the film of my life.  I left that white page, marked by my ballpoint indentations, filled with the bic black ink, lying flat on the dining room table, in full view, for him to see as he came in through the door, all briefcase and heavy overcoat.  I left it, knowing he will not care when he reads it.  He will never care, and that’s why I will only ever lie to him.  Have only ever lied.

And now I am on my way to the one who called, whose deaf ears I let my truth fall upon.  I am taking a risk.  I am travelling the country on a whim.  I am leaving behind my carefully constructed lie, the life I have built and shored up and sustained for so long now that it feels like a second skin.  I am shedding that skin like a snake.  Slithering away over grains of sand made up of the disintegrating, eroding lies of the past.

I am not fine, I told him.  I am not happy.  I am crazed and wired and wild and raving.  I am everything that is beyond the reach of fine.  I am everything that won’t be constrained by happy.

I am Virginia Woolf, trapped in her madness, trapped in the countryside.  I am Virginia Woolf filling her pockets with stones wading out into the river because nobody will let her thrive.  I begin to hear voices, I should have written.  I know that I am spoiling your life.  Words that would have been lost on him, in his suit and his striped shirt and his tasteful sombre blue tie, in his disinterest and soullessness.

I answered his call and it fell into silence, and now I am on a train, travelling quickly, too quickly, to an ending I can’t predict.  An ending I hardly know that I have begun.

I did not speak;  I did not ring;  I could not bear to hear his voice.  I could not bear to hear that hesitance, the knowledge that this was not what should be done, even though it could be done, imbuing each word with no, and stop, and please.  I did not answer with my own voice.  I answered with words that had no meaning, that gave no clue, that did not hint that Virginia had strode out into the river and everything that had been before was over.

And the madness?  The madness.  The falling, echoing, tumult of voices.  The sticky heat of summer’s finally falling night and darkness and humidity.  The drift of consciousness.  The trivial, self-centred introspection of my being.

The madness pushes out.  The web, the tissue, the cotton wool ball of lies, soaked in formaldehyde, that will numb and seduce his brain into slumber.  The lies I have delivered as truths, because I did not know him any more than he knew me.  You bore me, I said.  This bores me.  I love you, but it isn’t enough.

Virginia Woolf.  Skirt pockets, coat pockets, life pockets filled with stones and wading out into the river.  I will drown myself in his indifference.  I will throw myself under the waters of his panic and confusion.  He will open his door to me, to the unexpected appearance of me, and I will know then that I am drowning and a lung’s gasp of water away from death.

But better a death at my own hand, of my own volition, than a death that eats away slowly, in a suburban bell jar.

Better that my words fall on deaf ears, than that I utter another lie.

The notion was an improbable one.

She left the curtains open, even though she had the lights on.  It was evening, the sky was darkening.  Having the curtains open with the lights on went against the grain.

He could see her moving around in the living room, her net curtains no defence from prying eyes with the lights on and the curtains open.  It was almost like being at a peep show.

He had the curtains open, but he didn’t have the lights on.  That would be foolish, and he almost marched straight across the street to tell her so.  But that would be more foolish.

The notion was ridiculous.

She had sat down on the sofa now, and all he could see was the very top of her head, with its dark brown hair.  He had spoken to her once, in the street, and the sun had made her hair glow bronze.  He didn’t usually like brunettes.

Inside the house, in the brightly lit room with its curtains flung open to the world, she was talking on the phone.

She was listening and talking.

It was madness to think that this plan would work.  They had no evidence.  There was no cause to think that he would fall into the trap.

They needed him to fall into the trap.

She leaned forward as she listened to what was being said to her over the phone.  She leaned forward to type something into the search engine on her laptop.  She leaned forward in obedience to the instruction she had just been given.

She was thinking about something else, all the time that this half baked plan was being put into action.  She was thinking about another house, and another room.  There were no curtains where her mind was wandering.  The lights were dim and the garden filled with trees that strove to keep the daylight out of the rooms.  No need for curtains, no need for blinds.  The neighbours might want to look, but there was no opportunity.

That was the house she wanted to be inside, trying to understand the man who chose to live that way.  When she’d been growing up, when there had been five in that house, and there had been curtains and no trees and daylight at the appropriate times and lights at the appropriate times, the curtains would have been drawn when the lights went on.

She picked up the nail clippers and trimmed her nails.  It didn’t do to let them grow too long.  She spent all of her time worrying about breaking one, once they reached a certain length.  So she kept them neat and square.

When this job was over, and everything tidied up, she was going to go back to that house.  She was going to sit down with him in the kitchen and drink, and she would ask him all the questions she never had before, so that she wouldn’t wake up one day and realise that it was too late.

There was a crackle of static from the garden.

None of this made sense.

In the house across the street, he was thinking the same thing.  It didn’t make sense to him for her to have her lights on and the curtains open.  He was becoming agitated.  He didn’t like to be agitated.  He wished she would just close the curtains, and then he wouldn’t have to look.  He wouldn’t have to be agitated.  He could feel the pressure rising in his head.  He could feel the blood pounding through his arteries, the swell of it at his temples.

He could see her occasionally leaning forward on the sofa.  She was looking at her hands.  It made him look down at his own.  When he looked back up, a red dot was trained on the centre of his forehead.  He couldn’t feel it.  He didn’t know that it was there.

She glanced across the road, out of the window, into his living room.  She couldn’t see anything but darkness and a red dot.  She understood what that meant.  Although, understood was a strange choice of word.  She didn’t understand what any of this was about, but she accepted that this was the way things had to be.

She saw that kitchen in her mind.  The plates never used so they would never have to be washed up.  Food eaten from pieces of paper towel.  Disposable.  Transient.  A life that had been put on hold for more years than she cared to think about.

She kept her eyes fixed on the red dot and she knew that it would be positioned in the centre of his forehead.  She knew that she mustn’t move now.  Anything that fouled up the operation would be like a red dot in the middle of her own forehead.

The crack was barely audible.  The bullet had been chosen well, passing through the window pane as though the glass were nothing more than a sheet of water.  She imagined that the result was instantaneous.  Death in all its colours, combining together to form white light.  And then the absence of colour crashing down into black.

She would go to the other house tomorrow.  She would sit at the kitchen table and listen to him talk, asking him the questions she never had before.  It would be different this time.

The notion was a sweet one, but unlikely.

It was never anything other than what it was.

“Job well done” came the voice over the radio, the preceding burst of static alerting her to the incoming message.  “Stand down.”

She closed her eyes.  In a moment, she would get up and close the curtains.  In a moment she would choose to change her life.

She picked up the phone and dialled a number.

“Dad?” she said.  “How are you fixed if I call round tomorrow?”

A burst of static across the years.  A huge hand that used to drown hers as a child.

The notion was an improbable one.

“Don’t you care?  Doesn’t it matter to you?”

I shrug.  I have no idea what is going through her mind right now.  I am clueless as to what it is I’m supposed to care about.

If it’s her, then the answer is yes.  Of course.  I care about her.  She’s my wife.  I love her.

If she’s asking about anything else, then I don’t know how to answer, because I don’t know what else there is.  By default, then, it doesn’t matter to me.  She could be talking about the price of cabbage for all I know.  It doesn’t matter.

There are shoes littered all over the house.  Clusters of them in the hall, under the stairs, tumbling out from the shoe racks she has pushed them onto in haste and disarray.  Clumps of them underneath the coffee table in the living room, crawling out across the rug and into the doorway, like a chain of giant footwear ants trying to join the rest of the battalion in the hallway.

There are stray ones upstairs in the bedroom, lying gauchely knock-kneed where she has pushed them from her feet, lazy in her haste to take them off, too lazy to untie laces or unfasten buckles.

I pick my way through them daily, like I’m picking my way through her questioning now.  She has moved on, left “Don’t you care and doesn’t it matter” behind.  Now the questions have taken a different tack.

What do I think about it?  She seeks an opinion, and now I have to seem as though I have been listening, as though I am interested in whatever itch she is asking me to scratch.  My words could be the calamine lotion to the chicken pox irritation of today’s obsession.

I try to distract her.  “Are those shoes new?” I ask, looking at her feet.  Not even a heartbeat’s break in her drive.  She doesn’t even pause.

It’s too late to fall back on that other trusty diversion.  “Have you had your hair done?” won’t wash now.

She saves me, in a way, with her next query, which is actually a statement.

“You haven’t been listening.”

“No,” I agree, “I haven’t.”

This is where she surprises me.  I have come to expect that my lapses in concentration will be met with one of two responses.  Anger or sadness.  Fury or tears.  Rage or withdrawal.

Today she laughs.  A proper laugh, nothing false, nothing intended to signify “I’m laughing for now, but this isn’t over.”  She laughs and it’s also in her eyes, which dance and sparkle with amusement.  Her giggle makes me smile, even though I don’t quite understand why it’s there.

She starts to pick up shoes and pair them up.  She takes them into the hall and carries out the same exercise on the abandoned and wantonly jettisoned items that range across the floor.  I follow her and stand to watch as she brings together shoes long separated and stows them neatly away on the shoe rack.  I see the bend of her spine, its curve as she kneels and crouches and leans her way around the footwear she is imposing order on.  Her skirt waistband gapes a little as she leans forward and across.  It stands proud of her back so that I can see the creamy smoothness of the skin and the tiny freckle that lodges at the base of her spine.

She straightens and the waistband fits back to her body.  She kneels on the floor and looks at me over her shoulder.  She is still smiling, half laughing.

“That’s better,” she says.  “And yes, these shoes are new.”

I laugh, too, then spoil the moment by asking the wrong question, grinning all the while like the fool that I am.

“So what is it I’m supposed to care about?” I ask, and her eyes darken.

She looks away, still kneeling on the floor in the hall, in front of the now full shoe rack.  Her hair falls forward with the movement of her head, and it covers her face, obscuring it from my view.

“It’s nothing,” she murmurs.  “It doesn’t matter.”

I walk closer, then crouch down beside her, trying to see her face, raising a hand to pull back the hair that covers it, and tuck it behind her ear.  But she stands before I have the chance, and walks past me, smooth legs and new shoes all that I can see.

I’m still crouching but I turn slightly to watch as she opens the front door and walks out into the garden, down the path and through the gate.  Her skirt sways as she walks, and those new shoes make her legs look good.  As she knows they do.  I’m struck by the sudden realisation that we have been having a row without me even knowing it.  Now she has walked out and is striding down the street in her new shoes.  She will make it to the corner and turn and I have no idea where she is going, or whether I’m expected to follow.

I get up from where I’m crouching and shut the front door.  When I turn back to walk through the hall into the living room, the hallway seems an alien place.  The clutter of shoes, now tidied away; the space and expanse of floor that seems to stretch on forever into the distance; it throws me for a moment.

It takes forty minutes to walk from this house up to the shops and back down again, whichever way you walk the circuit.  She is wearing new shoes, so I decide to give her an hour to stomp the anger out of her system without crippling herself.

I sit on the sofa and take a couple of the red and white mints she brought back from New York from the glass dish on the coffee table.  I pick up the photography book she’s been reading, intending to flick through it until she comes back, and that’s when I see what we have been talking about, hidden underneath the book, scattered then pushed back together in haste.  I sit and look at them and somewhere out of a filter in my brain, where the words I haven’t been listening to get caught up like hairs in a plughole, the thing I am supposed to care about, that is supposed to matter, falls free.

I pick them up, these photographs that do not depict my finest hour, and hold them in my hands like foreign currency I’m about to use to buy my way out of jail.  There are at least a dozen, and are smaller than I thought surveillance photographs would be.  They are more like holiday snaps in size, and the images on some are as badly framed and blurry.

I am still holding them and staring at them when she returns.  She hasn’t been gone long.  At least, it doesn’t feel like she has.

“It doesn’t matter to you, then?” she asks, “You don’t care?”

“I wasn’t listening,” is all I can say, as I sit there staring in disbelief at the photographs I’m holding in my hands.  “I didn’t realise this was what we were talking about.”

I look at her, and her face is blank.  There is no anger there, no pain, no sign that she feels betrayed.

The silence stretches on until I say, “I don’t know what to say,” after which the silence continues, uncluttered by sounds, or shoes, or any sense of reality.

She takes a mint from the dish and unwraps it.  The rustle of the cellophane becomes the only sound in the room.  She pauses, before she puts the mint into her mouth, and addresses me.

“I thought you said that you were a country boy.”

I look at her, unable to fathom what that has to do with these pictures, with what I’m suppose, or not supposed, to care about.  I grew up in what might be called the countryside, the commuter belt version of it.  Son of a solicitor and a teacher.  Brought up in relative affluence in the sanitised country on the edge of the town where she was raised.  A sticking point that I have never understood.  A thing that is always flung at me in arguments, this accusation that I come from the country and yet am so useless.

“Daddy didn’t teach you how to skin a rabbit, then?” she says, the mint still between her fingers, suspended, waiting.

There’s more than one way, I almost tell her.  There’s always more than one way.  We can go on like this, talking in riddles, edging around the subject, or we can be straight and to the point.

She smiles and puts the mint into her mouth, pursing her lips into a pout as she begins to suck.  She is still smiling and the curve of her pursed lips makes me smile too.  I begin to think I know what she is thinking.

“Why don’t you teach me how to do it, then?” I say.

Her eyes are filled suddenly with wicked glee and she has to look away.  She crunches into the mint; one, two, three, four bites, a swallow, and it’s gone.

She looks at me.  She’s trying not to laugh; trying to suppress a giggle; a wave of laughter and relief and excitement filling her from her toes up to the top of her head.

“I thought you were having an affair,” she says.

I look down at the photographs that are still in my hands.  The trick, apparently, is to use a really sharp knife and to take your time.  You’re also supposed to keep them alive.  It makes it easier.  I read about it in a novel.  The Manchurians were experts at skinning a man alive.  In the novel, a Russian Army Officer captures a Japanese spy and his Manchurian War Lord ally skins the man alive.  Murakami wrote the description well.  I shivered when I read it, repulsed but at the same time excited by the idea.

We do it now because if the body turns up afterwards, it’s better that there is no skin on it.  It makes it harder to identify.  No fingerprints.  No blemishes.  Birthmarks harder to discover.  It’s a practical thing.  We’re not sick, and we’re not trophy hunters.  We’re just paid to do a job.

She isn’t offended by the act in itself, I realise.  She’s offended that I don’t take care to do it well.  Consideration of style and appearance.  Even when you are meting out a violent death, a death that is a crime, even when the death is deserved, reparation and revenge.  Under her rules of play, you have the right to have your skin peeled from your body with skill and with care.

Doesn’t it matter to me, don’t I care?  The fact of her asking, the realisation that her concern is an aesthetic and not a moral one repulses me and I feel the bile rising from my stomach into my throat.

I can’t look at the photographs any longer.  Somehow I had managed to separate my mind from my body when I was carrying out the task.  It was a job.  Her excitement about it makes me see things differently.  I can’t hold the vomit in any longer, and I run to the kitchen and empty the contents of my stomach into the sink.

She stands in the kitchen doorway as I splash my face with water and wash the puke away down the plughole.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

I look at her.  She means it.  I look at her and I realise that I do not know this woman at all, and I probably never have.

Through the open window, as you lie, tumbled into sleep and immobile, I can hear a child, crying in the street.  An argument with a friend, or with a sister; hard to tell.  Their voices are raised in anger; they shout sentences to each other, at each other, as though miles separate them, instead of inches.

You do not stir, but lie curled beside me, lost in the depths of sleep, troubled only by whatever scenes are playing out in your dreaming mind.

I listen as a weary parent calls the children in, her Sunday peace shattered by her children’s inability to get along.  All is silent for a while.  No voices, raised or otherwise, just the distant rush of traffic swishing along the motorway, and the occasional rasp of the curtain hem as it blows in and out of the open window.

I close my eyes and begin to drift too, only to be woken again by the angry shouting of a man, distant inside a house somewhere.

“Get out!” he shouts.  “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

They have taken their argument indoors, and the father can’t cope.  I’m assuming he’s the father.  My mind is conventional on these things, because I only have my own experience to draw upon.  Lucky, or not so lucky, but lucky in many ways to have had both my parents, unchanging in their relationship, and colouring my view of how others’ families work.

The children come tumbling back out into the street, yelling at each other still.  The crying has stopped.  It is just argument now.

One of them runs off.  “I just want to get my ball,” he shouts, and the peace descends again.  Just the bark of a dog in the distance and a snatch of music as a car drives past the top of the street.

You open your eyes and look at me.  You’re thick with it, all sleep and relaxed muscle.

“Aaron!” the man yells.  “Aaron!”

“Yeah?” shouts the boy.

“Shut up!” shouts the man, though Aaron has been quiet for a while now.

The boy’s voice is soft and piping, almost like a girl’s, but there is something there that tells you he’s a boy.  Not just the name shouted by his father.  Something in his voice, the way he speaks, the way he was crying earlier.  Something in the edge he puts into his shouts.

The argument between father and son rages off into the distance, moving away from our house, becoming harder to hear.  Their voices cease to carry words, and start to sound like short barks.

I look at the clock, and see that it is almost four.  We have been in bed all day.  You have slept for most of it.  Your mind is tired, you need this rest, I know that, but I miss you.  Your eyes are closed again, but I know you are not sleeping.

“My head hurts,” you murmur.

I stroke your hair, gently.

“Will you get me some paracetamol?” you ask.

Sitting up and moving out of bed, I leave you curled there, soft and drifting, a world away from where I am.  I look back at you, as I leave the room, lying there in your pink pyjamas, and I hope for your survival.  This girl I see, with her languid touch and her kisses so soft they are like a pillow, she is not you.  You are lost somewhere inside her, and I hope for your return.

The fuchsia in the back garden has died.  There has been no green on it, no hint of life.  It’s just a stick, dry and hollow, poking up from the ground.  Those pink and purple bells that should hang from its branches haven’t appeared this year.  The garden is neglected.

I bring you paracetamol and a glass of water.  You sit up, swallow the tablets, drink them down.  Above the bed, on the wall behind you, is a postcard in a frame with two others.  The card I’m looking at is the Lowry picture, the man lying flat on a wall, cigarette burning between his lips, and I wonder where he is, inside his head.  Lying there on the wall, his hat resting on his belly, staring up at the sky, I wonder what his thoughts are.  Beside it is a photograph of the waves crashing against the pier at Whitby, and at the end a card showing a Frenchman selling oranges, a young couple just behind him, the girl clinched by the man.  It has fallen slightly, slipped at one side, this card by a photographer whose name I have forgotten.

This frantic world that heaves and thunders is drifting now, you tell me.  You don’t speak the words, but I know.

“I’m hungry,” is what you say, so I go to cook you food.

You follow me into the kitchen.

“I was looking at my hands,” you say.  “How they’re aging.”

“You still have good skin,” I tell you.  “You’re not aging.”

You smile, and it’s a smile that says I’m wrong, and that you know I’m only flattering.  But I’m not flattering.  It’s true that your skin is good and that you seem to me exactly the same as you ever were, in appearance.  In this quietness of your mind, you seem more distant, and I can’t say that I understand who you are, but when I look at you, you are the same, for all of that.  I should put that into words and tell you, but you would only smile again.

Your smile is the thing that seems older.  Your smile, and the look in your eyes.  Wide and ancient, as though there’s nothing left to see.  A tranquillity that seems to accept that this is how life is.

I miss the wildness, and the anger.  I miss the burning hope that this isn’t it.  I miss the girl I used to know, who would drink all night, and laugh all night, and swear and crash through life.  But we wore her out, didn’t we?  And any number of moonlit nights won’t bring her back.

Aurelian did not weep for the death of John

Incurable diseases become part of your life.  When you rid yourself of them, what do you do?  Do you find some new weakness in which to immerse yourself?  Or do you step forth into the world, free of all incumbrance, free of all limits?

Sukie doesn’t know the answer.  Sukie has wiped her life clean of an incurable disease.  She has washed her hands of all contamination, and yet she feels a terrible void in her life.  She feels an emptiness that she doesn’t understand.  All the battling is over.  The war has ended.  Sukie knows she needs to re-educate herself, to compose for herself a new way of living.

In the late summer evening, sitting in her garden, Sukie Meredith contemplates the future, now that the past has been swept away.  She has her life ahead of her, and her mind is a blank.

She is not completely immune, she knows this.  Not yet.  She is still in remission.

In the kitchen are the remains of a meal, the sauce congealing on the plates and in the pan.  A last supper of sorts, eaten early.  The sun is slowly going down.  Somewhere in another garden, someone turns on the radio and a familiar tune plays in the background as Sukie sits and thinks.

Music by numbers.  Death by misadventure.  Sukie smiles to herself and congratulates herself on her success.  To rid yourself of an incurable illness sometimes takes drastic measures, and although she isn’t out of the woods yet, Sukie feels she has the right to celebrate.  She sips on her drink, the clink of the ice cubes against the glass a pleasant sound.

Thoughts that pass through her head say that she is alone again.  Thoughts tell her that the wound is tender but it will heal.  She has not wept for the passing.  She has kept her sunglasses on.  She sips on her drink and smiles, watching as the day’s light slowly fades.

In the darkness, beneath the trapdoor that is hidden by the sofa in the living room, the one underneath the stairs, he sits alone and unaware.  A cancer cut from her life; a wasting disease halted in its progress.  He sits in boxes, the remnants of their life together.  Letters and books, photographs, records and cds.  He sits in boxes, alone in the cellar.  He sits wrapped in plastic, and when she leaves, when she quits the lease on this house, he will stay there, alone in the darkness.

Aurelian did not weep for the death of John, and she will not weep for this passing.

Sukie Meredith is a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

Half way across town could be half way across the world, and another life is emptying, draining out in a sea of tears and regret.  Fanning the flames of desire, reality consumed in the heat of jealousy, Richard waits to hear what will happen next.  He is her slave, her prisoner, shackled and chained, bound to her by a single act of violence.  The surgery that removed that sickness from her life, that brought this sickness into his.  Heresy that to her is orthodoxy.  Murder to him, cleansing to her.

Claire is in the kitchen, washing up the dishes.  How do you explain something like this to someone like her?  How do you live with this, day in and day out?  He knows he has to live with this, that he will get nothing more from Sukie.  He stands in the kitchen doorway.  The light is almost gone from the sky, and Claire’s hair shines under the kitchen lights, brown and glossy.  He watches her, hands plunged into the soapy water, pulling plates and bowls and cutlery from the suds and rinsing them off under the tap.  She washes the glasses from which they have both drunk tonight.  The wine a ruby red, staining their lips with its tannins.  He walks to her in guilt and holds her from behind.  She laughs and submits to his embrace.  He embraces her in guilt.  He will never be free of it.  His hands will never be clean again.

In boxes and bags under the stairs, under the trapdoor, in the cellar of her house are the remains of a life.  In bags at different waste disposal sites across the city are other remains of that same life.  Her hands are clean.  Sukie Meredith is without guilt.

It was a hot, high, early summer day when they met.  Over a year ago now.  That was when it started.  She knew him.  A brief conversation, and she knew him.  She reeled him in and enveloped him, drove him to distraction, until he was defenceless in the face of her powers.

And now here they are.  He has carried out her will.  He has removed the incurable disease from her life, and now he is redundant.  Surplus to requirements.  He is here, with his wife whom he loves but is not intoxicated by, and she is there.  Free from all incumbrances and disinterested in him.

He has killed for nothing.

He releases Claire, and she smiles at him through her reflection in the kitchen window, then continues washing up.  He steps away from her and walks from the kitchen into the living room.  He goes on, into the hall, and takes his jacket from its coat hook.  The weight of it is still in one of the pockets.  He shrugs his jacket on, takes the car keys from another pocket, and leaves the house.

Sukie Meredith has taken up a similar position at her kitchen sink.  She washes away the congealing sauce from her plate and from the pan.  She cleans up the remains of her meal.  Her last supper.  She smiles.  She knows him.  She knows his weakness, his inability to keep this to himself without going mad.  She knows that Richard will be here soon, playing Romeo, and she is expected to be Juliet.  A tragic love story that holds no love.

She is empty.  She has no war any more.  She has nothing around which to base her existence.  The thing that defined her for so long is gone and she has been sitting all evening in the garden trying to find something to replace it.

Richard holds the key to her future.

A car pulls up outside her house.  Someone comes in through the front door.  He kept his key.  Sukie dries her hands on a towel and walks through the house to meet him.  They stand and face each other.  Richard puts his hand into his jacket pocket.  The same hand, the same pocket.  He pulls out the same gun.  Sukie stands and waits.  Richard holds the gun in his hands.  He’s looking down at it, as though it’s something he’s never seen before.  Then he looks up at her and she braces herself.

For an age she stands there, waiting, and then she realises.  He’s holding the gun out towards her.

“I can’t stand it, Suke,” he says.  “I can’t stand the guilt.”

She takes the gun from him and looks at it.

“I’ve never used one before,” she says.

“It’s easy,” he tells her.  “Easier than you think.”

And then he watches as she turns it on herself.

It

She rustles another chew from its wrapper and puts it in her mouth.  Martin can hear her saliva as her teeth work into the square of red sugar and her tongue and jaws roll the disintegrating confection around her mouth.  The bed is littered with pieces of paper torn from the outer wrapping.  She’s doing a sudoku.  He’s trying to read, trying not to say anything about her eating habits or the mess she’s making.  He’s trying to relax.

Sally has been at home all day and is now like a bored teenager, eating sweets in bed, lying on her stomach, kicking her legs in the air, bent as they are at the knee.  Her spine is twisted.  It looks uncomfortable, but she holds her position, chewing noisily and concentrating on her puzzle.

“What if this is it, Mart?” she says without looking up from the puzzle, her legs crossing and uncrossing then crossing again in mid-air.

Martin doesn’t know what she means, “if”.  As far as he can tell, this is it.  There’s nothing before or after.  The universe might be infinite, but for each living thing there is only now, with memories of before and hopes for what might come.  Memories and hopes book-ended by a beginning and an end.

He hasn’t answered her question.  She unwraps another sweet and looks at him.

“You think this is it, don’t you?” she asks.

Martin turns a page in his book and breathes out through his nose.  He can feel Sally’s eyes still on him.  She’s chewing the latest in the chain of sweets more thoughtfully. She stares at him for a long time, but when he finally looks over at her, she has gone back to concentrating on her puzzle.

He’d like to leave.  He’s had enough of being here, the lack of meaning in their relationship.  It’s just a groove in the road that they’ve both become stuck in, walking forwards with no chance of diversion.  She doesn’t seem to mind.  She asks questions like, “What if this is it?” because she doesn’t have a clue.  She can’t see beyond the ground a few feet in front of her.  She’s never raised her eyes to the horizon to see what other opportunities there might be out there.

He’d like to leave, but he never does.  This isn’t a recent thing.  Martin has spent most of his time with Sally trying to convince himself that he cared, that she was special to him, that he loved her.  The truth is that she drives him mad.  She’s the living, breathing equivalent of an antimacassar.  Something that sits there on the furniture and you don’t know why.

She’s finished her sweets and put her puzzle and pen on the floor by the bed.  She’s lying on her side, facing away from him.  He can tell by her breathing that she’s already falling asleep.  Martin puts his own book down and turns out the light.  He lies in the darkness and waits for morning.

The new day dawns and he realises that he hasn’t slept.  He closed his eyes once or twice, but for most of the night he has been staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing in the darkness.  His tongue has been pressing against the roof of his mouth, the ridged bit just behind his teeth, probing the skin there that is peeling free because he burnt his mouth on the pizza they had for tea.

Martin realises that he hasn’t moved all night.  He could be dead and imagining that he’s still alive, imagining the sensation of peeling skin on the roof of his mouth.  He hasn’t even moved his head to see what Sally is doing.  He can tell that she isn’t moving.  Perhaps, he thinks, they are both dead.  Some freak coincidence in the night that stopped their hearts and left them frozen in the positions they lay down in.  It could happen.  He flexes his fingers, then remembers that this means nothing.  When you’re dead you can hallucinate that your illusory body parts still move.

Sally really isn’t moving, though, and Martin finally sits up to look at her.  He tries to see if she’s breathing without getting too close and inadvertently inviting a hug.  He moves in slow motion and the distance between them across the bed seems immense.  He looks up at the window, sees the curtains are pulled back, sees a black crow sitting on the outside sill looking in at him.

He wakes up with a jump.  The bedroom is still in darkness.  Sally has moved slightly and her breathing is deep.  Martin tries to judge where the ceiling is, above him, how far away.  His night eyes can’t work it out.  He presses the light button on the alarm clock and sees that only twenty minutes have passed.  Martin puts one arm behind his head and stares into the darkness.

It’s hot and sticky and he can’t sleep.  Martin gets out of bed and Sally stirs.

“What is it?” she says sleepily.

“Too hot,” Martin replies.  “Can’t sleep.  Going downstairs for a cold drink.”

“Turn the fan on,” Sally says, as she falls back into sleep.

The fan is on her side of the bed, and that’s not the point.  Martin goes downstairs and gets a glass of water.  He sits on the sofa and holds the glass with both his hands.  He stares straight ahead, seeing nothing.  The living room curtains are open and the living room is lit by the street lights outside.  It’s an insufficient light, but it suits Martin’s needs.  He sits and feels shabby and unkempt.  He can’t remember the last time he had a haircut.  He hasn’t shaved for a couple of days.  He’s sitting here, naked, at almost midnight on a Wednesday night, uncertain what has happened to his life.

Martin sits on the sofa for an hour.  The street lights go out and he sees the moon.  He gets up and walks to the front door, opening it and walking out into the garden.  He stands there naked in the moonlight and throws open his arms.  He bellows at the sky, at the moon, at the madness that is growing in his head.  His body is white in the moonlight, with dark patches at his armpits and his groin.  He bellows until the breath has left his body.

Sally opens the bedroom window.

“Martin? What the fuck are you doing?” she asks him.

His arms have dropped to his sides, his shoulders are stooped, bent forward, his neck bent, his head bowed.  Lights are coming on in bedroom windows up and down the street.

“Come back inside,” Sally hisses.  “People will see you.”

Martin ignores her.

“Shut up woman,” he mutters to himself.

Lights go on and then go off again as people look through their curtains to see what is happening at number 36 and then go back to bed.

Sally bangs the bedroom window shut again, and Martin stands on in the garden.  He’s bang in the middle of the lawn.  The rose bushes are all in bloom.  They look eerie in the moonlight.

This is it.  He knows it.  This is it and there is no going back.

“It starts with a simple act of violence.”

“What happens?”

“There are two women; girls, really.  They’re standing at a quiz machine in a bar on a hot summer evening.  Just behind them and to their right, over their shoulders' right, three people sit at a table.  Dropped down a level from the rest of the bar, nobody can see what is going on.  Two of the people at the table are women, the other is a man.  He eyes the girls on the quiz machine with malice.  He wants to play the quiz machine himself.  It’s a compulsion with him, never stronger than when other people are playing the machine in his sight.”

We are sitting on a bench in a park, side by side, staring straight ahead.  The tops of our arms are touching, the sides of our thighs.  That is the only way we ever touch.

“Go on.”

“One of the women at the table looks at the man, and says, ‘Burn them.’  The man looks at her.  He hasn’t heard her properly.  ‘Bone them?’ he asks.  ‘No,’ she repeats, ‘burn them.’  She pauses, then continues, ‘They don’t deserve to be boned.’  The man looks at her for a moment, then laughs.  He thinks she’s joking.  The second woman is looking off to the side, away into the distance.  She isn’t part of the conversation.  She is thinking about other things.  The first woman speaks again, pushing a glass jar that holds a tea light towards the man.  ‘There’s a candle here.  The rim of this jar will be hot.  You could get some nice rings going on their skin.’  The second woman comes out of her reverie.  ‘Ring of fire,’ she says.  They all laugh.  The man is looking from the jar to the girls on the quiz machine.  He’s no longer sure that the first woman is joking.  He’s no longer sure that burning the girls wouldn’t be a good thing to do.  Ends justify means, after all.  The second woman changes the subject of the conversation.  She starts to talk about being an extra in the new film about Ian Curtis.  The burning of the girls is forgotten.”

“So it doesn’t start with a simple act of violence at all.”

He looks at me.

“The violence never happens.  It’s just talked about.”

He doesn’t understand.

“What’s the difference?  In a film, to understand that the man is thinking about the violence, how it would play out, you’d have to show it.  It’s going to start with that simple act, that moment where he takes the jar and pushes it against the bare skin of one of the women, searing her flesh, leaving a ring on her arm, or her shoulder, or somewhere.”

“You should say that, then.  Don’t say that it starts with an act of violence and then talk about what the scene is like.”

“Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?”

I look straight ahead.  There is grass and a few trees in front of me.  There are people walking dogs along paths that go round the grass and the trees.  There are other benches, but they are empty.

“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand.  I’m just saying.  If you want to make a statement, if you think you’re going to shock them into listening by telling them it starts with a simple act of violence, you’d better describe the act of violence straight away.  That’s all.”

He is silent.  I am silent.  It’s an argument that isn’t an argument, because we won’t ever let ourselves become heated about it.  It’s an exchange of views.  An interesting conversation.  In all likelihood, he will go away from this bench sitting chat and he will think about what I have said.  He will revise it and make it his own and I will have no acknowledgement for my work.  The revision of history is there to make the reviser seem more glorious.

He revises everything after a point.  In his own world view, where he is king, he is noble and upright and strong.  I know him as something else.  But I let him go on thinking that he is the king.  I have no choice.

“And is there more to this film?”

“It’s a short.”

“A sting?”

“No.  It’s just a short.  I’m not trying to sell anything.  It’s not a piece of advertising.”

“It’s advertising you.”

“No it isn’t.  It’s art.  It’s not commercial.  It’s art.”

He says this in a low voice, and I have to look away; properly away, over my other shoulder, my line of vision moved to the line of the path this bench sits on.  I look away and I try not to laugh.  I smirk into my shoulder.  If I laugh he will feel the shake of my mockery.

“It’s art,” he says again.  “It’s a short and I’m submitting it as a short.  They show shorts on that channel.”

“They show them at obscure times.”

I’m not being helpful, I know, but I’m bored.  We all need to be bored.  It pushes things along.  It allows us to play with our victims.  I feel like a cat playing with a mouse.  I know that he is indulging me.  I know that he has the ability to devour me.  He’s not a mouse.  He’s a black hole, a shape-shifter, a dragon.  But I am bored, and I will take this risk for a few moments.  My boredom demands that I see how far I can take it.

He is silent now.  He knows what I am doing.  I can feel the sulk building up inside him.  I use him for these feelings.  I use him for my boredom, for my antagonism, my frustration.  Sitting at a table in a bar right now, with a candle in a jar in front of me, I would burn him.  I wouldn’t talk about it.  I wouldn’t declare that this begins with a simple act of violence.  I would just burn him.

Sado-masochism.  I want to hurt him so that he will hurt me later.  I need his antagonism, too.  I need him to reject me, to repel me, so that I can come crawling back.  It’s a sick dance, but we both need it.  I need to feel forgiven for my bad behaviour.  He needs to feel that I need his approval.

A man with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail is rollerblading along the path.  I follow his movement with my eyes, and it pulls my head back around so that I am once again looking at him.  He is resolute.  He is staring straight ahead.  He is plotting his response.  I will pay for this later.  It fills me with a sick kind of glee.

I sugar my voice and patronise him.

“It sounds really good, darling.  I’m sure they’ll love it.”

He wants to believe that I am sincere.  He needs to believe that, because the sarcasm doesn’t sit with his internal view of his own abilities.  He needs to hear what he wants me to say.  I give him the words, but not the meaning.  It’s up to him to choose his meaning.

In a flicker of an instant he chooses.  His sulk evaporates, and he turns to me and smiles.

“Thanks, baby,” he says.

We kiss.  It is light and airy, a quick brush of lips and acres of air in between, like an arid desert with a momentary breeze.  It’s like two snooker balls glancing off each other.

We turn our heads, we face the landscape in front of us.  He has chosen to let it pass this time.  There will be nothing for me later, and I am now too bored to try again.

“I think I might walk.”

He doesn’t respond.

I get up and walk along the path, leaving him to sit in silence on the bench.  Thinking.  I pull my scarf closer around my face, and bury my jaw and mouth in it.  Just my nose peeks over the top.  My hat is pulled down tight against my brow.  I push my hands firmly into my coat pockets.  The winter trees are showing the first signs that spring will soon be here.  The frost has gone.  It ended weeks ago.  I walk and follow the path around the piece of grass we were gazing out over minutes ago.

I am directly opposite where he is still sitting.  I can see his form through the corner of my eye.  He is a dark mass of denim and wool and leather.  I walk straight ahead.  I don’t follow the bend back to him.  I walk on, out of the park and away.

The buildings I walk between are tall and dark and imposing.  I feel dwarfed by them.  My stomach rolls.  I would look at my watch, but it is buried with my wrist under sleeves and in my pocket, so I trust my instinct and listen to my body, obey its need for food.

I go into a café and order tea and toast.  The toast comes brown and golden with the butter melted right into the surface. The tea looks muddy.  It is warm and wet, though.  I have peeled off some of my layers and sit at a table with my back to the window.  I don’t want to look out at the world on the street outside.  I want to be alone with my tea and my toast and my thoughts.

There’s a blandness to his arrogance that I hate and also like.  There’s an arrogance to his blandness that frustrates me.  The violence in our interactions is pent up and distorted by the civility with which we communicate.  He makes me seethe and weep and rage and whimper.

I eat my toast, and the tea is still too hot.  My phone begins to ring in a pocket of my coat, and I let it.  I need to change the locks soon.  I need to redecorate.  I sip on the still hot tea.

My phone rings like a doorbell to tell me I have a voicemail message.  I will listen to it later.  I blow on the tea and suck it into my mouth, in the hope that the air will help to cool it.  When you drink hot tea this fast, it’s impossible to finish it.  It seems to expand in your stomach.  I leave it, three quarters drunk, and pull my layers back on.

The city is quiet today, and I walk onto the main street where shops are having sales of clothes it will soon be too warm for people to wear.  There are trousers that I like, and skirts; boots and jeans and jewellery.  No cloaks of invisibility, though.  And that is what I would like.  I’m wearing too many layers to be trying things on today, so I just look into windows and stay on the street.

I think of that kiss and how it might be our last.  I think of the boredom, the yawn of our continued play, and the loss of inspiration each time we follow the script.  Improvisation and free association has become its own pattern.  We set off down the path and make the usual stops along the way.  He has cast the players in this drama, and I have accepted my role, like always.  But now I want to shake him and say that I am not the woman he has cast me as.  I want a new role to play.

But I can’t be bothered.  Boredom is sucking the marrow from my bones.

I answer the phone when it rings this time.

“Where are you?”

“Shopping.”

“Shopping isn’t a location.”

“Here, there, everywhere.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Whose home?”

There is a pause while he thinks about this.

“What do you mean?”

“Who pays the mortgage on the building you’re in right now?”

“Oh.”

I look through the window into Hobbs, at all the winter clothes I couldn’t afford in season and I still can’t afford now.  The silence at the other end of the phone stretches on for a while.  He breaks it eventually.

“Are you going to come round later?”

Come round from a knock out.  Come round from an operation.  Come round to a new way of thinking.  Am I ever going to come round?

“I don’t know,” I say.  “I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.”

That kiss was probably our last.  In its own way, it was a simple act of violence.  Its lack of meaning ripped something apart; made some kind of tear in the fabric of life.  Not betrayal, but not love either.  A nothing, floating in the winter air on a park bench with nobody there to witness it.  An everything, that bore its own witness to the end.

I move on up the street.  The city is quiet, and the day not halfway old.

She is leaning, bright and smiling, out of the window.  There is nothing she can explain to him any more.  She’s laughing; a young woman filled with sudden knowledge.  She’s reached a final point, and he stands awkwardly, half naked in the garden, clad in combat trousers and no shirt.  His torso is tanned, his skin shiny in the sunlight.  Her teeth are white, her lips a perfect pink, peeled back in a laugh to expose those clean bright teeth.  He doesn’t understand why she’s laughing, but he knows that it doesn’t bode well for him.

She’s like a painting of a woman leaning from a window, laughing at the scene in the garden before her.  She is paused in a moment of her life, relishing her awareness, drinking in the feeling it gives her.  That moment when a bubble bursts within you, and everything you have been burdened with is set free to float away, leaving you clean and breathing in new air.  She is paused and enjoying that feeling.

Across the road, Desi’s wife leaves the house, all bent and crumpled in the sticky heat of the day.  She’s off to the corner shop for cans and papers.  Desi will be out the back, smoking in the garden, thinking about getting the barbecue started.  Waiting for his cans.

Mike takes a step towards the open window.  She stops laughing, drops it down to a giggle.  Her eyes dance with amusement behind her sunglasses.  He can see them faintly through the smoky glass of the lenses.

She’s leaning out of the window, and he’s walking up the slight rise of the garden towards her.  Mike thinks it’s like the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, except this window is a ground floor window, and she’s laughing, not sighing with pangs of teenage love.

He starts to scale the patch of ground beneath the window.

“Get out of the flower bed, you idiot.  You’ll crush the lobelia.”

She’s still laughing.  He stops just at the edge of the flowers and looks down at his feet.

“Size of your feet, the poor buggers don’t stand a chance, Charlie.”

He looks up at her, and thinks he sees a flicker of annoyance cross her face, but she smiles and he lets it pass.

“What are you after anyway?” she says.

Mike is suddenly shy of her, as though they are back at school, all those years ago, when the unwritten law stated that she and he must be boyfriend and girlfriend.  There was always reluctance to commit to honest expression of feeling.  Hers was subtly different to his.  He was just a lad.  She had something else about her.

The unwritten law meant that he didn’t need to question his right to hold her hand, or his right to kiss her with tongues round the back of the annexe while everyone else, their group of friends, stood around and watched, or yawned, or kicked their heels during break time.  The unwritten law said that it had to be that way.

She was always smiling then.  It unsettled him.

He can’t answer her question.  “Ah, nothing,” he says, grinning and hopeful.  Hopeful for what, he couldn’t tell you if you asked him.  Hopeful all the same.

She retreats from the window, that madeleine, shell-like and sweet.  She disappears inside, into the shadow of the living room.

She’ll be sharpening her knives, he thinks.  She’ll sit there later, all demure, sticking forks into the backs of her hands, thinking the thoughts that he’s never privy to.

She has nothing left to say to him.  He will never understand what goes on inside her.  He might think that he has prior knowledge, but he knows and understands nothing of who she is.  She is rich with it, richer than he could ever stomach.  Sweet and rich and capable of giving you a stomach ache.

She smiles as she moves across the room and through the doorway, into the kitchen.  The backdoor is open to let air into the house.  She opens the door to the washing machine and pulls out the tangle of sheets, towels and pillowcases.  She pulls them, knotted and confused, into the washing basket, and then takes the basket outside.

She methodically pegs out the clean washing.  She has perfected the half stare that enables her to avoid making eye contact with the neighbours.  She has only had conversations with either of them when they have had a piece of mail to hand over the fence.  She has gone out of her way to be friendly in only the politest of terms.

So much hatred of the world around her.  So much boredom with the way things are.  What unwritten law was it that said she would have to live a life like this?

She kicks at the pile of dust that the ants have churned up around a dandelion.  It’s reddish brown, like brickdust, or soil mixed with sand.  This house was built on a school playground, and the soil in the gardens isn’t deep.  It amazes her that anything manages to grow in such shallow earth.

She is leaving him tomorrow.  While he is at work.  She hasn’t yet decided whether she will leave the wedding ring on the bedside table, or whether she will take it and pawn it for cash.  She isn’t short of cash.  She smiles.  Leaving it would leave him in no doubt.  Pawning it would be funny.

The sunflowers in the back garden are lined up against the garage wall, slowly turning their yellow heads with the chocolate centres to follow the path of the sun.

This house is in his name.  He pays the mortgage.  Every month, though, she has put exactly the same amount from her salary into an account.  Ten years of savings.  Almost £45,000.

He comes marching through the house.  Michael.  Charlie.  The bane of her existence.  Tomorrow, she will be somewhere else.  There is nothing she can explain.  No reason she can give.

Mike looks at her from the open back door.  She is as beautiful as any of the flowers that grow in the garden.  She is as mysterious, as well.  Her petals furl when the light isn’t on her.  He doesn’t understand.

A magpie sits on top of the garage.  It chatters something to its mate.  Magpies come in pairs, that’s why it’s one for sorrow.  She looks up at the roof, but her position on the lawn means she can’t see where the magpie is sitting.  She can only hear it.  She looks back at Mike, over her shoulder, and smiles her enigmatic smile.  Her grey eyes are smoky and bright, hidden behind her sunglasses.  Mike knows what they are like, knows what expression will be in them.  He knows that he can see so far into them, and then it’s as though shutters come down, and he isn’t permitted to see any further.

He has the feeling that she will leave.

She turns away from him and looks up at the garage roof again.  She wills the magpie to appear at the edge of the roof, so that she can see it.  In her mind, she can see herself, charged with violence, running at him as he stands there in the doorway, running to attack, to rid herself of this non-existence in her life.  If someone asked her to describe him, she would say that he was beige.  His eyes, his hair, his clothing.  It’s all beige.  Non-descript.  He is slight and inconsequential and life, she now knows, is too short.

He is carob, when she wants chocolate.

Tomorrow, she will leave it all behind.  She will take no photographs from this life, no reminders.  She will take clothes, her hi-fi and the cat.  Everything else she will rebuild from scratch.  Start over.  Her own personal beginning.

She submits one last time to the inevitable, and regains entry to the house by the giving and receiving of a hug.  By the giving and receiving of a ring, was how this all began.  By taking the inevitable and running with it.  A marathon that went on too long.  She is followed by him up the stairs, and she submits again to the sowing of seed that will find no fertile ground.  She disengages with practised ease.  She raises her legs, accommodates him.  There is no eye contact.  When he kisses her, she closes her eyes, but not in surrender to pleasure.  In avoidance of being seen.  He thrusts himself in and out, in and out, sweating in the summer afternoon heat, and her mind cuts free.  She hears him, she feels him, but her mind thinks through all the most mundane things she can call into being.  Where her nearest supermarket will be when she moves into the new house.  How soon she’ll be able to get a cat flap fitted.  She makes no noise.

He finishes.  He withdraws.  She wipes herself clean, goes to the bathroom and showers, washes away as much of him from her body as she can.

Mike lies on the bed, breathing heavily, recovering.  He listens to her going through her usual ritual in the bathroom.  She was more disengaged than ever today.  She comes back into the bedroom, smelling clean and fresh.  She dresses.  She smiles at him, pink lips pressed together, hiding those bright white teeth.  She leaves the room and goes back downstairs.

Mike lies on the bed and wonders what the inevitable will bring next.

A dance around the kitchen, a meal made and eaten together, a curl together on the sofa, watching Silent Witness.  Comfortable companionship with no spark of passion.  She is incomplete in this environment.

The smile on her face is like an ache.

The hollow in her belly won’t be filled.

She looks up at him, from where she is curled, her head in his lap.  She looks up and smiles and knows that tomorrow all of this will be torn asunder.  He has dozed off, his head nodding forward.  The light from the tv casts shadows over his face and she traces the shape of his jaw, of his lips, of his nose with her eyes.  She wonders what it would be like to have loved him.  She is dead, though.  Hard and cold and solitary.  Her passion still, after all this time, unopened.  The knot of it rigid at her centre, its denial as hard as a cancer, eating her away.

And this will not end with her new beginning, but at least she will no longer be lying.

In the crushing half light of this bedroom, where you can see bones through skin, she thinks of the plates draining in the kitchen; the way you can see your hand through them when you hold them to the light.  Bone china, as thin and delicate as the bones in your hand.  As translucent as the skin in this half light.  She thinks of anything but him, keeping her eyes on the ceiling above and beyond his head.

Rachel thinks of the other one.  The one who she will never be with.  He offers her more and less than Richard ever could.  She suffers Richard’s failure to be the thing she needs.  The other one will never be the thing she needs, either, but he offers her far more and far less in the way of promise than Richard ever could.

She waits for this ritual to be over.  She hopes for some semblance of passion, some sign of anger and hatred that will lift her above the banality of expression that is found in their love making.

That she has to refer to it as love making sums up, for her, the suburban quality of its disappointment.  Rachel stares at the ceiling and feels Richard’s muscles moving beneath her fingers.  Her hands are spread across his back, and his muscles ripple as he moves in and out of her.  She thinks of swimmers, swimming the butterfly stroke, swimming the breast stroke, bobbing up and down.  She thinks of swimmers, swimming the channel, a feat of endurance.  She thinks of the sea, cold and grey and relentless, stretching on as far as the eye can see.  No end to it, just a beginning on a shore, and a distant horizon over which she’ll never pass.

Rachel thinks of Steve’s hand in her hair, the way it pulled and the snap of her neck as her head was forced back.  She thinks of the way that he pulled her top down and pulled her breasts out of her bra.  She thinks of the way he left her gasping, panting for more, when he had done nothing, just threatened her with violence and hurt and indescribable pleasure.  She feels her body heat rise.  She feels herself become wet with desire.  She knows it because Richard slips slightly, loses his grip, almost falls out of her.  She grips with her vagina, with her thighs; she holds him in there and hates him, pushing herself forward into climax.  She can’t look at him, bending her head back, arching her neck, her back, burrowing backwards into the pillow, looking at the wall behind the bed.  Her shudders are silent.  It isn’t enough, but it’s all that she will get tonight.  All she will ever get from colluding in this pretence.

Richard strokes her hair, and Rachel pushes him off her, carrying traces of him with her into the bathroom, where she showers and washes herself clean of him.  She imagines him lying in the half darkness, the half light, the summer darkness not fit for purpose, not creating a shield for what they have just done.  Rachel waits in the bathroom until she is sure he will have fallen asleep, then she dresses and leaves the house.

There is no way of knowing what time it is, once she is outside.  Her watch is on the bedside table.  The clock in the car hasn’t worked for months, telling the correct time only twice a day, and never when she expected it to.  She starts the car and drives away from the house.  There is no purpose in her mind, all that she seeks is freedom from the prison of her life.  She is sober, she is awake, she is no danger to anyone else on the roads at whatever hour this is.

Across town, she knows, he will be awake, smoking and drinking himself to death in a dark kitchen.  He is scared of what he wants, and so pretends he doesn’t want it.  He is scared of what she represents.  She felt it in him, she tasted it on his breath.  She has seen the look in his eyes, the way he searched her eyes for that same feeling, and when he saw it, he withdrew.

Scared little boy, hiding behind the notion that he is in control, that this is a nothing.  Arrogant arsehole who pretends that she was just a diversion that he doesn’t need any more.

Rachel drives, barely noticing the roads she is travelling along.  She drives away from the city, away from Richard, away from the other one.  The sun is already coming up.  There has barely been an hour of darkness, and it was a poor excuse for darkness anyway.  Nights spent in twilight for two months of the year, either side of the 21st of June.

She pulls into the car park of a roadside caff, one that has been open all night.  She orders tea and pours it, dribbling, from the spout of the stainless steel teapot.  It is dark and strong already.  She can smell the tannins coming off it.  The milk is thick and oily, UHT.  It leaves a swirl of creaminess after she has poured it into the tea.  She stirs it round, and the swirl disappears, but the oily film doesn’t.

Staring ahead into nothing, Rachel waits for the tea to cool so that she can drink it.  She waits for an idea to come into her head, as well.  Everything is tight around her, but there is also too much space.  She can feel every molecule of air against her skin, and it seems like she is floating in a void.

She sips the tea, which is bitter.  Too strong.  Too stewed.  She considers going back to the counter and asking for a pot of hot water, but she knows it will make no difference.  Red label tea bags from the nearest supermarket, no doubt.  Dust left over from the quality blends, scraped together to fill teabags that make tea that tastes like the end of time.

She has brought nothing with her except house keys and purse.  Her phone is still at home, in her handbag, at the bottom of the stairs.  She knows that she could leave her house keys here, that she has all that she needs, and enough in the bank, for her to leave and never come back.  Rachel doesn’t know how far she has driven so far, but she senses that it’s far enough to be a point where she carries on moving and doesn’t turn back.

Richard had ceased to matter long ago, and the other one only frustrates.  Rachel leaves him behind every day, and with every day the thoughts of him grow less.  It is a kind of love that she feels for him, this recognition of someone like her, someone who could offer her precisely more and infinitely less than anything she has received or wanted before.  It is a kind of love that borders on hate.  The surprising sentence “I could fuck his brains out” had fallen into her head not long after they met.  The surprising thing was not that she thought it, but that she meant it literally and with violence.  She had wanted to be the man, so that she could deliver great pain and physical tearing on him.  She had wanted to draw blood, to rip him open, to spear him, castrate him, hang him on her wall as a trophy.  She had wanted to subdue him, curtail him; he needed to feel what it was like; she needed to be the one who made him feel it.

He knew this, because he felt the same.  It delighted her to understand this.  It shocked her that it felt so normal.

Her tea is cold now, and the liquid in the pot stewed beyond recognition.  She leaves it at the table and goes back out to her car.

A decision has to be made.  Rachel knows that she can’t go back to Richard.  To return to that life, to that stultifying existence, would be the end of her sanity.  Her violence is better contained in other actions, not in the killing of her husband.

Rachel also knows that she couldn’t go to the other.  It isn’t an option; he isn’t her future.  He was a blind; an opportunity that opened her mind and her eyes to other opportunities.  Even though he could have delivered more than Richard could even contemplate, he was too weak and unwilling.  Rachel needs something more than him.  Rachel needs something she will never have.  She already knows that each encounter will only disappoint, the way all previous encounters, even before she understood what it was she was looking for, had disappointed.

Something stops her from driving on.  Something makes her turn back, and head for the city she was thinking of leaving.  Something more than the people that it contains.

She drives back, and arrives at the dark green door of a friend.  She rings the bell.  It is morning now.  People are up and ready for work.  Her friend answers the door, surprise the main expression on her face.

“I’ve left Richard,” Rachel tells her.

“Come in,” her friend says.  As Rachel passes her in the doorway and walks down the hallway to the kitchen, her friend closes the door on the world outside.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” she asks.

Mullane had been handsome once, in his younger, slimmer days, before his love affair with red wine had taken him over.  There were echoes of that youthful beauty still there in the curve of his lips and the shape of his nose, but he was barrel-chested now and paunchy.  His eyebrows had gone the way of Denis Healy’s.

Mullane had been a pin-up poster boy, years before I knew him.  I learned his secret past from photographs passed round at parties by the people who had known him longest.  The man in the pictures was only a glimmer of the Mullane I knew, and it had given me a secret pleasure to think that the Mullane they held onto was not the same man.

Mullane had sought me out as one in a chain of diversions.  My mother had warned me that it would never last.

As I rush through the rain now, my umbrella no barrier against the seeping wetness that sprays under its edge, my mother’s warning echoes in my head.  Right as always.  Mother knows best.  I hurry along the street, avoiding the edge of the pavement with its proximity to puddles and the wheels of passing cars, listening to my mother’s voice, knowing she was right.

Somewhere, once, I’d thought there was a place for us, for me and him to prove my mother wrong.  Somewhere hidden deep in darkest night.  Somewhere her words and our own instincts couldn’t touch us.

We should have listened to our instincts.  Maybe.  But if we had, none of this could have happened.  Our instincts weren’t wrong, you see.  It didn’t last.  But, with all the weight of history and my mother’s divination behind it, how did it stand a chance?

I ate toast without jam this morning, alone at my dining table.  There are two ulcers on the underside of my tongue, and they kept catching on the edge of a molar at the back of my mouth.  I chewed heavily on the other side to compensate.  That is an ancient habit.

I thought of nothing.  I just stared at the yellow-painted wall, with the window looking out on the garden to my left and the archway through to the living room on my right.  The blankness of the painted plaster drew my eyes and held them in a no man’s land of vision.  I thought of nothing and I saw nothing.  When I finished eating my toast, I looked down and saw a scattering of crumbs across my chest.  I brushed them onto the plate, and took the plate to the kitchen sink.

And now I am sitting damply in the Central Library, remembering Mullane.

Mullane first saw me with purpose and deliberate intent.  He had heard of me from friends.  He had come instinctively to the opening, knowing he would be able to view me, as a potential buyer views a piece of art.  I was a collectable for him.

I was the assistant at the opening.  The curator who blended in to the background, facilitating the needs of the artist, directing the invited guests to their seats, to the wine, to the art.

I wasn’t the focus of attention for anyone but Mullane.

Mullane wasn’t interested in art.  He was interested in people; people as creations, formed by society, by parenting, by childhood memories and fears.  Mullane wasn’t interested in anyone who would try to compete with him intellectually, although his pretence was to find everything you said minutely interesting.  He would listen to me, for example, just long enough to make me believe he was taking me seriously, and then he would destroy me.  It was nothing I understood.  It didn’t appear to make him feel better.  It just served to make us both miserable; me with wounded pride, and him with disappointment that the world had let him down again.

He claimed it was because he felt passionate about certain things, but he didn’t feel passionate about anything.  He had borrowed that sentiment from a book, because it had seemed the sort of thing a man like him ought to feel.  Passion.

What Mullane felt most of all was boredom.  He was always waiting for something to happen.  He didn’t know what, but he waited for it all the same.  He tried out new things at every opportunity, building a chain of diversions that trailed behind him, linked together with clumsy welds of forced social interaction.

That was why I was present at gatherings.  That was how I saw pictures of him in his prime.

I was introduced as a friend.  I was his secret, an unknown quantity among his social group.  They knew me from various events.  They were the ones, after all, who had brought me to his attention, although none of them knew that had been their role.

I was, in public, his source of entertainment.  The centre-piece of some Victorian debauch, stood in the middle of the gathering while he wrapped clever words around me, like a corset, pulling the laces tighter and tighter until I could no longer breathe.

And afterwards, I would rage at him for his disrespect and his arrogance.  Loving him all the time.  Those were the nights when passion would overspill into hatred, and we would damage each other, physically and emotionally, between his unlaundered sheets.

It couldn’t last.  There was nowhere for it to go but the point of destruction.  And how could it go anywhere from there?

The library is warm and smells of damp coats and drying out umbrellas.  That faint sickly smell, like clothes that haven’t dried properly before being put away in the wardrobe or in a drawer.  People are browsing the shelves and, seated here in a corner, unobserved by anyone, I am browsing people.

It is months now since I last saw Mullane.  That final night when he tipped me over the edge into something from which I thought I would never recover.

I did recover, though.  I am sitting here now, two maybe three months later.  Alive and missing him.  Hence the path my thoughts are taking.  Hence my mother’s voice in my head.

I would ache for him, those months we were together, peppered with sporadic meetings, when he or I, one or other or both, would pick a fight and raise our blood until it pounded in our ears and through our veins, and could only be calmed by fucking.  I would ache, in the core of me, behind my pubic bone, and my pelvis would tilt at the thought of him and the hatred I felt.

He would lecture me for hours, and badger me with questions.  He would reduce me to tears of exasperation.  He would mockingly say, “I so enjoy these moments we spend together, don’t you?” to which my frustration could only reply, “No, I fucking don’t.”

I have no idea if he treated me that way in spite of himself, because I let him, or if he even thought he was doing harm.

The trouble with Mullane was, I had to keep going back for more.

Deviation is the only thing you can allow yourself when you are filled with loathing for yourself and the world.  I needed a sickness in my life; I needed something I could wrap around myself to distract me from everything else.  Mullane was more than willing to comply, to satisfy that need.

My mother, when she made her statement of fact, didn’t know who I was seeing, didn’t know the details.  She only knew that there was someone, and that it wasn’t the thing she wanted for her daughter.  I think she recognised something in me, at that time, that reminded her of herself.

The cushion of time doesn’t make these memories of him any easier.  Mullane worked his way too effectively into my blood.  He’s there, like a virus, underneath my skin, waiting for the opportunity, for conditions to be right for him to flare up again.

Remission is a long way off.

I have seen Mullane abandoned in thought.  The hardness of his public face let go.  I have seen the tiredness there; the deadness.  The good in me still wants to console the sorrow that I saw.  The opportunity to take that boy in my arms was never on offer, though.  The hardness maintained a fence, arms-length, around him.  All attempts to cross over, past the defence of his last name, were rejected by a swift return to detachment.  To call him by his first name was to ensure being pushed out into the cold.

I felt tenderness from him once.  Two of my fingers gripped in his hand across a table in sympathy and comfort.

I cling to the belief that it was genuine.  Even now.

Remission, you see.  It’s such a long way off.

That’s the trouble with Mullane.  That’s why it couldn’t last, and why it will probably never end.

The last time that I saw him he had already decided.  He carried out his plan of action.  He pulled back.  He didn’t touch me once.  We spoke of nothing consequential.  But he pressed me until I broke.  He reversed his own strange addiction and placed it onto me.  But I wasn’t willing for that to happen.

So now I eat toast without jam on my own at my dining table.  I sit in the library and observe.  I walk in the rain.  I hear my mother’s voice.

Mullane and I, we couldn’t last the course.

Her hair is brown, like chocolate.

“Where does the expression ‘Mickey Finn’ come from?” she asked him at breakfast as she spread margarine on her toast.

He tried to ignore the scrape of her knife against the bread’s charred surface.  He didn’t even lower the newspaper to look at her when he answered.

“Why would I know?”

“So you don’t know?”  The scrape of her knife stopped.  Not, he realised, out of shock at his supposed revelation, but because she had finished distributing the poor substitute for butter around the anguished bread.

“Nope.”

“I’ll have to look it up on the internet when I get to work, then.”

“You do that.”

There was a pause as she took a bite from her toast and munched noisily through the lull in conversation.  Then, mouth still partially filled with masticated bread and margarine, “Don’t you want to know why I’m interested?”

“Not particularly.  I’m trying to read the paper.”

She had stopped speaking, then, and gone back to reading her book.

He thought of how death was the end of all desire.  Everything you wish for and covet, that is structured to disappoint and disillusion; the flesh you long for; the hair that shines with reds and golds within that chocolate brown lustre.  Death is the end of all that.  Your body returned to dust, your mind snuffed out.

He understood that we, people, only long for the things we see and know.  Having once seen them, their disappearance doesn’t reduce desire or blot it out.  Only death, a person’s own death, his own death, could do that.

He thought about all those things as he sat hidden behind his newspaper.  Her hair was brown like chocolate, and he desired it.  He desired the cool depths of her eyes.  He coveted the way those eyes looked at someone else, the way her hands touched another man’s body.  He wanted to be the one seen, the one touched.  Desire is structured to disappoint and disillusion.

“He was a bar tender in Chicago,” he said, still not moving the newspaper.

“Who was?” she asked, not looking up from her book, his indifference to her presence deflating her.

“Mickey Finn.  He ran a bar in Chicago and would spike his customers’ drinks, then rob them.”

She smiled triumphantly, although nobody saw her do it.  “I knew you would know,” she said, mostly to herself.  Then, under her breath, entirely to herself, “I knew he would know.”

He lowered his paper at last and drank his coffee, ate his toast.  “What book are you reading anyway?” he asked.

“A not very good one,” she said, looking at him shyly, pleased he was at last taking an interest.

She trusted him; loved him, even.  It made him sick to his stomach to see the way she looked at him.  So guileless in her desire to please and be pleased.  She didn’t deserve the way he was treating her.  It was worse, somehow, because she didn’t even know how he was treating her.  She only had the barest concept.

She put it down to those weeks stretching into months that he had been in the hospital.  The accident had been a bad one.  The doctors all considered him lucky to have survived.

She knew there was something different about him; that something hadn’t survived.  That was the thing about cheating death.  It made you realise how short life was, and how futile.  Everything that he had lived so far in his thirty eight years was no more and no less than a three year old child or a three hundred year old man might have lived.  Time stretched to infinity on either side of everything.  Death was the individual end.

You were born, and then you died, and when everyone who knew you had also finally died, you weren’t even remembered in passing.  Everything after death was forgetting.

That night, the bedclothes were cold against their skin as they crawled into bed.  Huddled together for warmth, he pressed himself close to her, enfolding her in his arms.  She responded so gently to his presence, and in his head she was someone else.  Her hair was chocolate brown and lustrous.  He could smell it, the scent of her shampoo.  She turned in his arms, wrapped her legs around him, feeling him stir.  She moved so gently against him, this one who was not the other, only ever the other inside his head.  She drew him into her and he submitted gratefully to her willingness.  The tension of living needed release.

In the darkness, while she slept, he heard the rain lashing the window.  Lashing was the wrong word, though.  There was no whip crack, just the repeated sound of small stones rattling, being trickled down the window’s surface.  His desire knew no end.  He lay, flat and still, with her curved and breathing form beside him, a million or more miles from him.

She had been visiting someone else.  She had stopped beside his bed, thinking he was asleep, or comatose, or some other kind of oblivious.  She had whispered something like, “Poor thing” and he had opened his eyes and told her, without speaking, that he was far from impoverished by the state he was in.

That had been the start.

There would be no end now, until death.

Each day that she visited her husband (he learned from her very quickly that her husband was seriously ill, not expected to make a recovery – and she had pitied him for his temporarily broken body!), she stopped by his bed for a few minutes.  Five at first, growing longer, until it became half an hour.  As he regained his speech, they would talk.  He coveted her dark glossy hair.  He luxuriated in the coolness of her gaze.  He felt it take the heat from his wounds, because it didn’t contain pity or sympathy.

She came at strange times of the day.  Never at night.  Never in the evening.  He was glad.  He didn’t want to have to explain her presence to his wife.  He had claimed her as his own, and didn’t want to share her with anyone.

When he began to take his first steps again, she would walk with him, along corridors, to the hospital shop, sometimes outside to where the ambulances came to a halt and spewed out the bodies of the sick and dying for repair or death.  They were present at a number of final moments.  They witnessed the howling grief of wives, parents, boyfriends, lovers.  Through it all, she was cool and distant.

“I don’t love my husband,” she told him, one day as they watched another person relinquish desire and cease to be.

“Oh, really?” he said.

“Really,” she replied, and walked back inside.

They kissed in the privacy of her dying husband’s room.  He knew that he was still alive, then, because he felt something ache deep within his groin.  He felt life stirring, the same life that filled his blood cells, that replaced the hairs that fell from his head, that tasted like metal in his mouth.

“We shouldn’t,” he had said.

“Why not?” she had answered.

And so they had.  Or rather, she had, because he didn’t have the energy.  So she took him in her mouth and swallowed the life that came out of him.  And then she drank the orange juice that had been sitting at the side of her husband’s bed, looking at him coolly the whole time.

He had been moved from his private room out onto one of the wards, now that he could walk and talk and wasn’t a wrecked shell any more.  He spent more time with her in her husband’s room, while her husband lay connected to drips and machines and the thinnest edge of life.  As her husband lay there, considering whether desire was worth the effort, they would fuck.

She wasn’t soft, which made him desire her more.  She was bones, and angles, and ice so cold that it burned him.

He lay there in the darkness as his wife slept on beside him and remembered all this.  Death would be the only way to start forgetting.

Once he left the hospital and returned to his life, with pieces of him missing, he had no way of finding her again without returning to the hospital.

So he did.

One lunchtime, he left work and drove out to the hospital.  He paid the parking fee and walked back into the place that had poured life and desire back into him.  She was standing outside the shop, drinking coffee from a plastic cup.

“Hello,” she said.

“I need to see you,” he told her.

Her husband was improving, she told him.  They had changed the drugs and he seemed to be responding.  It would give him a few more months, maybe a year, they thought.  She would be taking him home at the end of the week.

“I work in town.  Near the Malmaison.  We could meet.”

She smiled at the suggestion.  He handed her his phone.  She smiled again, taking it, entering her number, handing it back to him.  Smiling all the time, that smile that bore no warmth.

It continued.

He had met her that day, after the breakfast conversation about Mickey Finn.  They were working through a set of variations.  Every third time, she let him take control.  The other variations were hers.  He was the one who brought tenderness, if only because he insisted that they kiss and it have meaning.  She laughed at him for it, but the laughter had a warmth to it, was almost girlish.

Every third time, he explored her body, took his time, caressed her and kissed her in secret places.  He learned the map of her sensuality.  He knew where to touch, how to reduce her to softness.  As the weeks went on, he learned to turn her into liquid, so that the cool of her eyes became a languid, latent heat.  At times, he almost thought that she desired him.

And in between times, she would be cold and hard and fuck him with a mixture of hatred and contempt; her eyes open all the time, staring down into his, challenging him.  Angry.  If he tried to look away, she wouldn’t let him; would slap his face back to face her.

He liked it.

And back at home, the screwing of his wife continued, drilling down into her, hoping one day to hit oil, rediscover what it was that she had meant to him once.  Tender, and trusting, and full of love for him, he despised her.

This would not end until there was no alternative.

“Why are you still awake?”

The sudden loudness of her voice surprised him.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“I was.  You weren’t, though.”  She didn’t move, but lay there with her back to him, curled away from him.  Her usual post-coital pose.

“I’m just thinking,” he said.

“What about?”

“Oh, nothing.  It doesn’t matter.”

Nothing mattered.  Only desire.

“That’s all there is to the story.”  A pause.  A prick of the ears from me.  All that there was to the story.  And yet not.  “I’ll tell you this for nothing, though.  Nobody else has a key to that room.  Those cat rugs are heavy, and they were FLUNG across the room.  Plus, the dustpan and brush that hangs on the wall?  They – were – in – the – cat – basket…”

His listener was silent, struck dumb by this revelation.  With my back to them, I couldn’t see if this was because he’d been gripped by the story the same way I, as a disinterested listener, had been.  A tale ideal for Hallowe’en.  The mysterious movement of heavy rugs across a cellar room.  The swapping of position with a dustpan and brush.

The speaker hadn’t finished, though.

“That was to draw my attention, when I went in.  Nobody else could have gone in.  Only I have a key.  And even if a cat had got in there and I’d not noticed, it’s not the sort of thing a cat would do.  A dog, maybe.  But not a cat.”

Another pause.  I found that I was waiting with bated breath.  What would come next?

A reiteration.  “That dustpan and brush was moved to draw my attention to it.”

That’s where his story ended.  His companion went to the gents.  He waited a couple of minutes, long enough to finish his coffee that must have cooled enough to drink down in one go.  Then he made his own way to the gents, crossing paths with his friend.

I paid and left the café.  Outside, it was drizzling and I regretted not having brought an umbrella.  I hurried back to the car, abandoning my plan to wander around this small Yorkshire town made famous by a tv show.  For a moment, I wondered if the two men talking in the ice cream parlour were from that show.  They were the right age.  But they were too real and besides, there hadn’t been any cameras in sight.  Nobody was filming them.

I drove back over the moors, enjoying the autumn colours of the trees and the bracken, gold and orange against the green of the grass.  Sheep were wandering freely across the trunk road that takes you across the back of Saddleworth, past the derelict Horse and Jockey pub and down a steep hill into Delph.

I am another year older now.  I have carried my bones through twelve more months.  And I am alone again.

No amount of trying can bridge the gap that has grown up between us.  People do what they have to do.  He does what he must and now so do I.  It was never the same thing, and contortions of will could never make it so.  It never even came close.

When I was younger, I would dream about falling down the stairs.  When awake, I would fantasise about it, wondering how it would feel, wondering if I would die.  I considered how each step would feel, banging into neck, into spine, into legs and skull as I fell.  I would wake up from dreams where I was tangled in a heap, twisted and confused, looking up at the place where I had started.

When I was with him, the daydreams and the nightmares stopped.

Last night I dreamed of stairs again.  I dreamed that we lived in a mansion and there were staircases everywhere, hidden ones and open ones, leading from one room to another in a labyrinth of ascension and descent.  I was rushing from room to room so that he wouldn’t find me.  And suddenly I broke free of the house and into a field that was full of rotting carcasses being pecked at by magpies.  I was in a village populated by brothers married to sisters and where I knew that, if I stayed, I would be killed.

No falling down the stairs, but no comfort or cheer either.

Today, I drove and missed his voice.  I didn’t miss anything else.  I might have felt sorrow that we were so different in the end, too different, but it didn’t last long.  When a decision is made, you must stick to it, no matter how sad, no matter how hollow it makes you feel.

From racing through midnight streets with only the moon as your witness, to driving across moors knowing there will be no more.  It only takes a short time to move a million miles like that.  Less time than it takes to fall down the stairs.

There’s a cure for everything.

This cure comes from within.  It tells me that everything will be alright.  I trust myself on this.

In silence, then, I listen to the words of others.  I hear the echoes from their hidden cellars; the places where things move without assistance, to draw their attention to some mysterious fact.  No mystery at all, if they just think about it.  Nothing strange, just something to learn.

A jolt of recognition, maybe.  A jolt that jars the spine and bangs the head, that feels like the edges of steps biting into your body as you fall, and at the bottom you look up and see the place you once were standing.  The place you threw yourself off from, trusting yourself to the fall, trusting yourself to the landing, not caring if it snapped your neck, but knowing that it wouldn’t.

He’s a stranger to me.  More than he ever was before.  In suddenly recognising that all the things I’d told myself were true were lies, he became unknown.  He turned into someone I don’t want to know.  Face and hands and body all familiar to me.  Everything I loved burnt into the core of me.  And one sour conversation.  One weary admission of defeat.

“Find someone else,” he said.  “Find someone else to play this part.  I’m tired of this shit.”

Freedom is found in the strangest of places.  I was set free not, as I thought, from falling down the stairs, but from one man’s weariness of everything this had become.  Not even that.  Everything it had always been, by his destructive will.

Nobody else has a key to that room.  Nobody else could get in to move things around, and yet suddenly the whole world was rearranged.  Turned upside down; things on the inside now the outer layer.

I drove back to the place I used to call home.  I collected belongings I’d forgotten were in my possession.  I packed them into my car and drove to the place I now call home, with its warm painted walls lined with books that stand upright and lie across the tops of each other.  Six rooms, all mine.  Doors front and rear with locks to which only I have the keys.  Nobody else.  Just me.

Twelve more months added to my bones.  Twelve more months of filth and dreams, everything I feel locked inside where nobody can touch it.

He smiled so sweetly.  I don’t need to remember or forget.

The captured words of another mind lay on the page before her.  A virtual page, illuminated from behind a screen; pixellated and whirring, a gentle flicker of electrons bouncing from the flat surface of the screen to her retina and into her brain.

The words that edged into each other and expanded, chasing away the crowded sense of a New York afternoon to reveal a corn field dream of Ohio.

Paused in her aimless, rushing oblivion of connection and connectivity; reminded of the existence of other minds, other voices; she sits and stares at the screen, at this page blundered on so blindly in her search for someone other.  The noise of the internet café burbles on around her and she doesn’t hear the crash of coffee cups or the laughter of friends.  She is paused in the chaos of her life, made still by the words of a stranger.

She thinks back and remembers; that sense of wonder the first time she looked on the Manhattan skyline; the craning of her neck to look up and up and up, beyond the usual eyeline of shop frontages and pavement and other people’s screwed up faces, hurrying and cursing past the curiosity of this tourist.  She remembers how that sense of awe, that spine-tingling joy and disbelief that a fairytale could be real, faded with familiarity.  The words on the page, flickering on the screen, remind her of how it felt the first time.

“I never look up,” he said to her.

“You miss so much,” was her reply.

You miss so much with your hurry and your pavement dwelling eyeline.  You raise your eyes only to check whether it is safe to cross; if the hand is red or the man a white diamond-encrusted outline.

A pair of shoes, palely pretty, cross-buckled with a kitten heel.  His eyes had come to rest on them one day, seated at a café table in the Village.  She had paused to check a street sign.  He was reading a newspaper, his eyes were lowered, always lowered, but then they rose; up from the shoes, along the line of her leg and past the hemline of her skirt.  His eyes rose up to cross the landscape of her body and come to rest on her face.

Outside on the sidewalk at Caffe Reggio, McDougal Street.  A mid-morning cappuccino, monk-like habit, and a pair of shoes.

“I’m lost,” she had said, matter of fact, unabashed, unashamed, illiterate in this new language she was struggling through.

He had reached out and taken the scribbled directions from her hand.  He had read them, frowning slightly as he tried to decipher what her friend had written.

“No,” he said eventually.  “You’re not lost.  This is McDougal Street.  Minetta Tavern is on a little way from here.  Keep going.  You’ll see it eventually.”

“Thanks,” she said, taking the crumpled scrap back from him.  The paper was beginning to wilt from the fervent clutching of her hand; it resembled the leaf of a plant that saw water a few days ago, but was beginning to feel the need for more.

He, tall with hair that couldn’t decide between dark blonde and light brown, almost let her go but then remembered the sight of her shoes and the pull of her legs up to that face that only vaguely seemed to fit.

“Joe Gould fan, huh?”

She had begun to move off, her attention already returned to the scrap of paper and the route through this unfamiliar landscape to the rendezvous she was minutes away from missing.

She halted.  She looked back at him with a smile part nervous, part hoping to disarm whatever conflict might suddenly be arising.

“Pardon?”

“Little Joe Gould.  He used to drink there, eat soup there.  Thought you must be a literary type.”

“Oh.  No.  Well, I am, but that’s not the reason.  I didn’t know that.  I don’t know who he is.  I mean…”

“You’re a literary type and you don’t know Little Joe Gould?”

“I’m not from round here.”

She was awkward now.  Whatever assurance that normally held her bones in alignment was gone, leaving her gawky and angular like a teenager.  The clothes, especially the shoes, indicated that her usual demeanour was assured.  Poised, even.  He smiled.

“It’s okay.  He’s a little known literary celeb.”

She smiled back and started to return to the job in hand, namely meeting her friend at the Minetta Tavern for some kind of lunch or cocktail, he suspected.

“He was a friend of Cummings’,” he offered, looking back at his newspaper, but hoping she would linger again.

The trick worked.  He glanced up and saw the sunshine behind her light up the stray wisps of her hair like a halo.  He smiled again, pushed at the other chair at his table with his foot, and indicated that she could sit if she wanted.

The gesture, his confidence, something; suddenly everything that made her who she was in her own environment flooded back, and the clothes became one more disguise meant to trick people into false impressions.  Her eyes glittered with mischief and her face cracked open into a grin that was at once childlike in its amusement and wicked in its potential.

She sat.  He waved for a waiter.  She ordered a hot tea, with milk, no sugar.  He listened to her British vowels and imagined her dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

“You’ll be late for your meeting,” he said.

“I’ll say that I got lost.”

“You could always ring and ask for directions.”

“My phone doesn’t work over here.”

“Are you in the habit of drinking tea with strange men?”

“It depends on the man.  Which poets he knows.”

“Cummings does it for you, then?”

“Cummings and enough cheek to proposition an unknown woman in the street.”

“Welcome to New York.  You might not have heard, but we’re all predators round these parts.”

Her tea arrived.  They both looked at it, the conversation stalled by the intrusion of the waiter.  She placed both hands around it, staring down into the surface of the liquid, suddenly uncertain again.

“Here on vacation?”

She looked up as though surprised he was sitting there, as though she had forgotten.

“Yes.  Visiting a friend.  Just for a few days.”

“Never been before?”

“You can tell?”  She laughed, and looked sideways, away from him.  Her profile was pretty.  He liked the curve of her cheek and the way her eyelashes curled up towards her brows.  He liked the straight line of her nose and its tilt at the end.

She looked back at him; caught him staring.  She laughed and blushed; picked up the cup of tea and, holding the edge of the cup to her lip, blew across its surface.

She took the barest sip and put the cup down again.

“Too hot,” she said.  “Needs to cool.”

She kept her eyes downcast for a moment and allowed him to soak up her appearance.  He appreciated the effort she was making to feign shyness on his behalf.  He had seen the mischief in her eyes, however.  He wasn’t going to be fooled.

She remembers all of this reading those words on another person’s webpages, lost to their spell, to the cadence of sweet memory.  Propped up by circumstance, she allows herself the luxury of fading out of her surroundings until –

“Are you going to be much longer, lady?”

Startled, she looks round from the terminal to see a teenager boring holes in the back of her head with his stare.  She checks her watch.  She has two more minutes.  She composes herself to return his stare.

“Two minutes,” she says.

Grumbling, the boy moves off, hunting for another terminal that might come free sooner than in two minutes; sooner than that whole lifetime of wasted opportunity that comes in packets of one hundred and twenty seconds.

She abandons the page that paused her life for a moment and sent her tumbling back to the meeting that would change her life.  She’s forgotten what she came in to search for, though, so she abandons the session altogether, remembering to log out of different sites and wipe her history from that electronic memory bank.

The youth who woke her from her reverie is far off across the café from her; his back is to her and he doesn’t notice that she has left.

She leaves the building, out onto 8^th Avenue and the bustle of people going about their lives.  She is one of them now, no longer a tourist, no longer filled with the awe that the internet poet spoke of.  She lost her enchantment long ago, became one of the oblivious, hurrying through the days to cover up the fact that life can be achingly slow.

She crosses Times Square from west to east, heading for 5^th Avenue, aching now to do something with her day that will recapture something of the enchantment of New York.

The Public Library, across from the bookshop where he worked, alongside the park where they would meet, huddled in the autumn air, those first few months after she moved to the city; buildings looming over them, peering down through the branches of trees beginning to lose their leaves.  She had just begun to understand that bravery is a form of deception.

That first meeting in the Village, she had taken him along with her to lunch at the Minetta.  He had cried off work.  She later learned what that meant to him; a day without food, his usual grocery money spent on lunch with her in a place he couldn’t afford, his income cut by an afternoon’s pay.

She had taken him home with her.  A snack, her friend termed it.  Something about the falling away of circumstance and preconception, being someone other than herself in someone else’s land, made it an okay thing to do.  She had snacked and then, months later, she had found herself a job over there.

His bravery in picking her up that day, in allowing himself to be picked up, was a sham.  Circumstance and preconception can be different things even on your own turf.  He was cut loose by the thought that he would never need to see her again; and although she hadn’t returned for his benefit, her presence in the city became for him some sort of habit.  Like a once a month cappuccino at Caffe Reggio on his half day, when he was working for money instead of art.

The Public Library, where they would spend damp afternoons and early evenings listening to talks and wandering through the divisions and reading rooms, getting to know each other’s surfaces.

They had gone through winter months wrapped in each other’s warmth; knowing and needing only the other’s body; skating wide rings around the darker places of psyche and emotion.  Nights spent in foreign beds with morning’s ritual of not knowing where to look until clothes were reassembled and breakfast, if there was time for breakfast, had been negotiated.  A tumbling of limbs and pretence at still being a tourist in another’s land brought her one spring day to a day without spots of blood at the time they should have appeared.

Courageous and brave, he told her to get rid of it, then shipped out of town on a twelve month tour of Shakespearean theatre.  Something, he claimed, he had always wanted to do.  Something, she suspected, he needed the correct impetus to commit to.

Her belly swollen, she now sits at a table in the Public Library, reading books about the Renaissance.  Van Eyck, Raphael, Holbein, DaVinci all float before her eyes; the influence of the Medici; Guttenberg and Caxton; Shakespeare.  Always, somewhere, Shakespeare.

Her belly swollen, she curses Shakespeare and the camaraderie of players.  Roommates in a dormitory of poetic invention.  She curses Cummings too and shies away from remembering the words mumbled across a sleep indented pillow.  Since feeling was first, attention to syntax seemed unnecessary; redundant.  The study of rules and patterns had no part to play in their loose ritual.

Since feeling was first, the gut did away with rules and six months on, her belly swollen, she knows she will not see him again.

The poem that she found earlier that day; the poem that haunts her now and reminds her of a time when wonderment and awe were all that mattered in her life; the poem reminds her that there is death again in the trees and life passes achingly slow at times.  Twelve months have passed that could have been twelve years or twelve generations, it seems so long since she first stepped foot on this island as a resident.

The richness of new life stirs in her swollen belly.  Like the Arnolfini bride in the picture in front of her.

Knots

Instinct said to let go.  Sitting there in the light from the desk lamp, wrapped in the thick black cardigan that always meant “Leave me alone, I’m thinking,” the veins on her hands standing out from the skin like knotted cords, her instinct told her to untie the bindings, let loose the triple strand of raffia that held this thing together.

Instinct told her.  Her head told her.  Somewhere in her stubborn will she heard the voice say no.  Not yet.  Not defeat just yet.

The fear that came to grip her with “What if?” curled its fingers round the resolution of her mind.  Lifting up her hair, twisting it into a thick rope at the back of her head, the fear breathed a long and gentle “No” against her neck and she longed to stretch her arms out wide and answer “Alright, then.  No.”

She liked to sit and look out on the night-time street, lit poorly by street lights.  Quiet enough by day, in these long slow hours between midnight and the dawn, the street was paralysed in rest.  The only sounds would be the whirr of the fan in her laptop and the drip of the cistern in the bathroom.  On odd occasions, she would have music playing to keep her company while she could not sleep.  Piano pieces.  Scales, chords, harmonies.  Counterpoint.  Howard Goodall at the back of her mind telling her things she already knew instinctively, and him not that good a pianist or even musician.

These times in the silence, with her hair falling forward, and the veins in her hands standing up proud and swollen with the blood that carried too much sugar, too much alcohol to sleep, she emptied out her mind, typing words on the keypad as though she were wringing notes out of a keyboard.

A street light directly opposite, across the road, between twin windows in the terrace that faced her; the blackness of the sky, not even stars visible; the pool of light from the desk lamp falling onto the white surface of her desk; she submerged herself in this aquatic night existence like a fish that lurks at the bottom of the ocean.  Blind and prehistoric, surviving on instinct, unknown.

Knots that pulled things after her, like the tail of a kite, were slowly coming undone beneath the movement of her fingers.  Deftly, she was working out the snags and loops, freeing coils of string or rope, not looking behind her to see the trail she left.  Working along, she still had no idea if this was an ordinary knot or if, one day, she would reach the point at which she began; whether this was a series of flukes with no connection, or whether the braid was infinite, a loop embedded in her DNA.

At times like this, with silence in the night sky and no interruptions from beyond the enclosure of her cardigan, she would cease the unknotting for a moment and stare into space.  The anaglypta on the wall in front of her, left behind by a previous occupant, painted cream and, within the small patch visible to her, apparently random in its pattern of splodges and swirls embossed onto the paper, would draw her eyes to lose their focus.  Stepping back as far as she could go and still be able to see the definition on the wall, she knew that this pattern would occur too regularly to be random; put there by a machine programmed to repeat in carefully measured segments.  Edge to edge, separate pieces cut from the same roll could even be lined up to match; to keep the pattern endlessly repeating.

Staring at the wall, her instinct told her to close her eyes, to leave behind the patterns and the knots, to keep tight hold of the rope of her life and not unravel the braid too much.

Instinct told her to let it go.

The tangled web of deceit and inaccuracy; the sliding truths that served to hide the absolute truth of her life; the desire to maintain privacy; all were easier to manage in daylight, with the world as an audience, an army of detectives prying into her business.  An excess of knots, stretching behind her, circling around her, camouflaged reality.  She did not want the unknot of herself to be seen.  Not until she was ready.

If a person took the loop of their life, if they took that double helix twist of their DNA, it could seem that every time they tried to unravel the snags, they would come in at some new beginning.  Every new beginning, as the saying goes, is some other beginning’s end.  Each new beginning was where you came in; every other beginning’s end could only be the place you left.

Wrapped in her cardigan in the silence of the middle of the night, listening to her instinct telling her to let it go, she picked up pen and paper again; she opened up a long-neglected file of words strung together into sentences, paragraphs and chapters; the rope of her life stabbed through each page in the middle, holding them all together.  She understood that she had unknotted enough to continue, for a while at least.  She could shuffle the pages, make a new story from the old.

Her hands still smelled of garlic, from making the lasagne for dinner.  She had rubbed lemon juice onto them, she had washed them in antibacterial hand wash, but the smell of garlic was still there.

Downstairs, in the dining room and in the kitchen, were the traces of that meal.  The plates with tomato sauce and cheese sauce slowly congealing, growing hard; the dish with the last remains of the lasagne waiting to be heated up for lunch, but destined now to be thrown away; the wine glasses with the pool of red at the bottom, the last dregs that couldn’t be drained.

In the bedroom to the back of her, in the silence, he slept.

In the morning came daylight and she was curled, still in the black cardigan, resting from the untying of knots, on the small sofa in the corner of the office.  Car doors slammed and ignitions sparked in the street beyond her window.  People leaving for work while she sat on in this house.

In the kitchen, he had cleared away last night’s debris and stacked dishes in the dishwasher.  He had left a note on the whiteboard by the back door.

“Please write something today.”

Knots tightening in her stomach, she stood at the fridge, holding the door open, waiting for inspiration.  Knots tightening in her knuckles, she held the door in a fist too tight for the job.  Knots of resentment building in her throat, she fought the urge to scream.

Presumption.  Instruction.  The unknot of herself curling and entwining, looping and strangling as it crossed over and around itself to build a knot of such complexity that she might never work it loose.

She closed the door to the refrigerator and went upstairs.

She undressed and stepped into the shower.  Water flowed in rivulets down her skin.  She watched it as it flowed over the backs of her hands and down her fingers.  The same fingers untangled her hair, rinsing out shampoo, working conditioner through the strands.  The jets of water from the shower head pounded her shoulders and her back and washed away the soap.

Cleansed and purified, dressed in the trappings of daytime, she sat back down at the desk.  Sunlight streamed through the window and her fingers danced across the keypad.

Presumption.  Instruction.  Writing to order.  “Please write something today.”  The knots pulled tighter; the moments of her life on the quantum loop of time crossing and recrossing to bring up memories and actions; fodder for the something she would write.

Boredom sat flat across the top of her head.  The words spilled out of her mind, through her dancing fingers, to lie across the electronic page.

Tall tales and rumours; molestations of fact; these were the tools of her trade, while he walked out into the world and regenerated urban decay.

She hated the knots of herself.  She envied her own talent.  She resented his calm acceptance of what she was, what she had to do.  It hid behind the knots while she poured out words through the sieve-like web the knots created.  Macramé of the mind.

Regenerating the decay of her life, she populated her stories with 30-something couples at endless dinner parties, worrying about their children’s schooling, enjoying the benefits of their high-powered careers.  Mocking his colleagues, who were too flattered to find themselves in there to risk acknowledging what lay behind the words.

He wanted her to be famous.  He wanted to be the one who had encouraged her.  His investment had been to support her, to be the one who made the money in the traditional rat race way.  He wanted some return in the imagined glamour of a literary soiree, an award ceremony, a book signing.  He wanted the cachet of having his wife’s work discussed on the Newsnight Review.  Maybe even for his wife to be on the panel discussing someone else’s work.  Unpicking the knots of somebody else’s psyche.

The knots of his own web had her entombed, like a fly he was waiting to devour.

She wrote.  She was already a month behind deadline.  Writing to order, to reach the post beyond which she could dictate her own terms and conditions.  Five novels in, and then she would be able to write.

The detail of petty lives; the everyman quality to her novels; five novels in and she would be able to do away with all that clutter.  The unknot of her was waiting to be reformed into a different pattern of loops and crossings.

Piles of papers surrounded the laptop, filling the desk with notes and timelines.  The deconstructed lives of each of the people she was manipulating on the page.  The build-up of detritus to create a civilisation.  She loathed and resented every moment of this creativity.

The unknot of her was the risk.  The mania that denied the fear of baring all and failing.

He would never understand that, with his “Please write something today.”  As though that was all there was to it.  Write something, anything, satisfy my vicarious need for fame and glory.  Live the life I never had the guts to.

She stopped.  All the time she wrote, she barely thought of what she was doing, her mind filled with rants and screeds of vitriol against the life he had ordained for her; the life she had complied with.  She stopped at the words “Live the life I never had the guts to.”  She stopped because she was living his idea of a dangerous life, full of the risk of failure, beyond his understanding of stability and responsibility.

Behind all the knots, between the loops and crossings of her life’s eternal cord, there was a life she wanted to live but didn’t have the guts to.  She heard it, there in those words directed at her from him; directed at herself by herself.

It was safer for her to live someone else’s idea of a life of danger.  It was safer to play this game of writer from behind the tangle of frustration and rage that kept her from living her own idea of risk.

She was tired of knots.  She was tired of knot theory.  She was tired of the mathematics of life and the rage of not living.

She deleted everything she had written; the manuscript that was a month behind deadline, that was almost at the point of completion, disappeared.  She picked up the sheets of paper with character sketches, biographies, timelines; she neatened their edges and fed them into the shredder.  She destroyed the fake world she had been creating; the one which resembled all the others she had ever written.  There was nothing she could do now about them.  They were on bookshelves and in people’s minds; it was too late to erase them.

The naked page before her, its cursor blinking in the top left corner, waited to be clothed in different words.  Sick to the stomach with the poison of her life, she began to construct another reality.

She would write something today, and the words would create a different kind of knot.  Packed fibres from earlier branches that she would now cover over with other material.  Imperfections and weaknesses that might splinter under stress, but that also might give her life a veneer closer to the truth.

The naked page was before her.  Its cursor was blinking in the top left corner.  Without the structure of acceptable fiction, she didn’t know what to write.

Her hands still smelled of garlic.

She listened to her instinct and let go.

I followed her into the house.  The smell of hospital met my nose and I listened to the gasp and pump of the machinery that was keeping the old man alive in the room that was now his final resting place.

She was in the kitchen.  The kettle was singing.  It was one of those white plastic rapid-boil things, shaped like a jug, perched on a base that allowed it to swivel.  Through the plastic window in the side, I could see the beginnings of bubbles forming on the element at the bottom.

I put my bags down on the floor.

She was putting teabags into mugs; one for me and one for her.

“I can do that,” I said.

“No,” she replied, “it’s fine.”

She moved past me to the fridge and as she opened the door I said, “Let me,” but she ignored me.

I stood waiting to feel welcome.  I knew it wasn’t likely to happen, but all the same I waited.

The mugs were white and wide.  The shape of them reminded me of the red and white plastic mugs in the picnic hamper that our parents had had since the early ‘60s.  The mugs were made from cheap porcelain and the white was almost grey, the glaze poor.  The kettle boiled and snapped itself off.  She poured the boiling water into the mugs.  I was still standing, my bags at my feet.

“So how long does he have?” I asked.

She stirred and lifted out the teabags, one by one, depositing them on a small dish kept specifically for that purpose.

“Not long.  A week.  A month at most.”

“And the doctor is happy with him being here?”

“Yes.  It’s what dad wanted.  The Macmillan nurse comes every day.”

“So you have help, then.”

She had put milk into each of the mugs and now handed one to me.  She didn’t have to reply, I knew it was the wrong thing to say as I said it.  Her expression was blankly hostile.

She sat on one of the wooden chairs.  She didn’t invite me to sit, so I remained where I was, standing in the kitchen like a child summoned to see the head teacher.

She sat with her legs crossed away from me, her shoulders curving her round so that her back was beginning to show.  She stared through the kitchen window at the snow that lay on the garden.

“Is it alright if I sit?” I asked.

“Suit yourself,” her shoulder said to me.

I pulled out the chair closest to me.  The legs scraped on the tiled floor with a sound that was the big brother of fingernails scraping down a blackboard.  I sat.

I watched steam rise from the surface of my tea.  There was an oily film floating on top, as though the mug hadn’t been washed properly, or washed in dirty water.  She was taking the hospital-at-home theme too literally.  I blew against the liquid, causing a mini tsunami to rise up and then subside repeatedly with each exhalation through my pursed lips.

I took a sip and scalded the roof of my mouth.

The room where Dad now lay was just down the hallway from where we were sitting.  I imagined him propped up on pillows, linked up to machines by tubes and wires.  She had probably set the room up so that he was facing the window; so that he could look out on the street.

I remembered him sitting in his chair, one hand clamped around the remote, newspaper dangling from the other, sleeping as the news droned on.  That same room, with the green draylon suite and the coffee table inlaid with tiles.  Back when it used to be a living room.

“His stomach looks like a beach ball,” she said, still not looking at me.  “The tumour is so big that it looks just like someone stuck a beach ball under his skin.”

“Can’t they cut it out?” I asked.

She looked at me then.  “No,” she said.  “They can’t.”

I looked down at the mug of tea sitting on the table in front of me.  She got up abruptly and opened one of the drawers.  She pulled out a coaster and slapped it onto the table, catching the side of the mug and making the copper brown liquid slosh from side to side.

“Don’t put your mug on the table,” she told me, “it’ll leave a ring.”

I lifted the mug and slid the coaster under it.

I thought about asking if I should go in to see him.  It felt like I ought to go in there.  The thought of it made me feel sick.  I wanted sleep.  It had taken four hours to get there, driving non-stop along the motorways in the snow and the dark.  Fat flakes had drifted into the beam of my headlights like cartoon ghosts wearing startled expressions.

I knew I should go in to see him, even though he would be sleeping, or drugged, or comatose.  It was my filial duty to stand by his bedside and let him know I was there.  Just in case he decided enough was enough in the night, and died thinking I hadn’t cared.

I looked at the mug sitting on its coaster.  When I looked up, she was staring at it too.  She looked small and deflated.  Crumpled, even.  The instinct that told me to go into the death room also wanted me to get up and go to her, give her a hug, tell her lies like “It will be alright,” but I resisted it.

I remembered when we were younger, playing in the back yard; some adventure that had gone wrong, because she had fallen and grazed her knee.  She had cried without wanting to and I had let her.  With her hair tied back, she looked like that same child.  Her face in its sleepless grief was falling backwards in time and she seemed to be that same child trying to be brave but crying all the same.

“I’ll go and unpack,” I said.

I stood up and picked up my bags, taking them upstairs, refusing to look at the closed door that separated the living from the good-as dead.

I took my bags into the spare room.  The covers were turned down on one of the beds and clean towels were laid out on the other one.

I put my bags beside the towels and left them there.  It was too soon to unpack.  He might go in the night and then there would have been no point in unpacking.  I wanted to deny my presence in this house for as long as I could manage it.

My sister sat silently downstairs.  I lay on the bed still in my overcoat and shoes, on top of the turned down covers.  I wondered if she slept at the kitchen table.  If she did, it would be sitting upright.  No laying your head on your arms leaning over the table for our Karen.

My eyes closed and I could feel sleep threatening to overwhelm me.

I forced my eyes open wide, like I used to as a child.  The lightbulb was an energy saver and I could hear its faint electrical crackle as I lay under its weary light.  I kept my eyes open as wide as I could until they began to hurt.  I blinked, feeling the dryness of my over-exposed eyeballs drag against the inside of my eyelids.

I didn’t want to go downstairs, but I knew that I had to.  It was two in the morning.  The house was silent but for the hiss and click of the respirator and the crackle of the lightbulb.

She was still sitting where I’d left her, but the cups had been rinsed out and left to dry on the draining board.  I rested my hands on the back of the wooden chair and looked at her.  She seemed a long way below me as I stood there wondering how to speak to this woman; this stranger.  My sister sat and stared at the coaster where my mug used to be.

It was wooden and round with a cork inlay.  The lip, I remembered, made your drink spill if you put it down the wrong way.

“These used to have a special stand,” I said, picking it up.  “It had three rods poking up from the base to hold them in place.”

I was looking at the coaster as if it was a miracle of modern science.

Karen said nothing.  Just kept staring at the table.

I sat down.

“So,” I said.  “I suppose we’d better talk.”

She sort of laughed through her nose; a single derisive snort.

“Do you need any more money?” I asked.

“Does he have everything he needs?” I asked.

“I’ve got money,” I said.  “I can help out.”

She sat silently staring at the surface of the table.  She was smiling cynically, her lips twisted slightly at the corners.  Only the balance of her top lip stopped it becoming a sneer.

“He doesn’t need to suffer,” I said.  “We can make sure he’s comfortable right up until the end.”

I felt like I was talking about a pet, some dumb animal, not my father.

“Honestly, Kaz,” I told her.  “If there’s anything he needs, anything I can get, just say.”

She looked at me and her eyes were black and hollow like distant storms brewing on the horizon.

“Is that how you sleep?” she said.  “You buy yourself peace of mind?”

I didn’t need to answer.  There was nothing I could say.  I knew what she meant.  I’ve always had this knack of coming in right at the last minute, just as the final scene is being played out, and mopping up the credit for things not my due.  And I do sleep easy.

All of my deals turn on a well-timed injection of cash.

“Better get some sleep,” she said.  “The nurse gets here at eight.”

“I think I’m too tired to sleep,” I replied.  “I’d rather sit up and talk.”

“Not you,” she said.  “Me.”

“Oh.  Of course.  Yes.”  I paused.  “We can talk in the morning.”

She left the room without another word.

I carried on sitting at the table, playing with the coaster.  I listened to her footsteps on the way up the stairs and the creaks of floorboards as she moved around her room.  Our parents’ old room.

After a while her movements ceased and all I was left with was the hiss and click of the respirator again.  I found myself wanting a drink, but not knowing what drink I wanted.  I thought about tea, and then thought about fruit juice.  The smallest drop of water fell from the lip of the tap into the sink, and the noise made me wonder if it was water that I wanted to drink.

I didn’t want to think about what was behind the door of the living room.  I had stopped thinking about my dad as a who.  He was already a what to me by that point.  A shell of a man being eaten from the inside out by tumours.  For all I knew, underneath that thin covering of skin, there might have been nothing left of the man who had raised me.  His body might have been taken over by an alien life form using his body as a host, waiting to conquer the world.

Somewhere far away was a whole other existence in which he was still him.  Still that tall man with the big hands who relied on the youthful me to hand him a spanner at just the right point, telling me that I could read his mind.

I spun the coaster on its edge, hoping to make it twirl like a coin, but the edge was too thick and it just clattered down back onto the surface of the table.

Soon, I thought, I would be an orphan.

Years ago, I remembered, I had made an orphan of myself.

The house was different in almost unnoticeable ways.  When I drove through the streets towards it, I expected to feel the same as I always did the first moment I stepped back through the door.  But it wasn’t the same house.

It wasn’t just the addition of the hospital smells and the whirring machinery.  It was in the colours of the walls, the lightness of the carpet, the new cabinets in the kitchen.

My sister had emasculated the place.  The house that I remembered in shades of green and brown had become a paean to blond wood and vanilla tones.  The reek of quick sale hung about the place.

And why wouldn’t she want to sell up as soon as he was gone?  Who would want to carry on living in a place with memories such as were contained here?  Even without the shadow of death clothing it in sadness, this was not a happy home.

I let the coaster fall to the table one more time, then stood up and began opening cupboard doors.  I knew what I was after when I saw the bottle of rum.  I pulled it down and poured a measure into a glass.  In the fridge I found cola that made the sugar in the rum froth up and leave a scum on the surface of the drink.

I took a large gulp still standing at the fridge, then turned and sat back down at the table, taking both bottles with me.

Yes.  This house was not a happy home.  Her choice to stay was something my brain refused to comprehend.  I had fled these walls as soon as I was able.  I took my fortunes elsewhere and wrestled them into a life that, if it didn’t bring me total joy, at least didn’t wrack me with pain.  The echoes of childhood were stored in a tin box at the back of my memory.

The man who lay dying in the room down the hall once roared through this kitchen, wearing my sister’s cardboard witch’s hat.  It had been Christmas, the time of year we all loved to hate, or hated to love, or something that wasn’t enjoyment.  He had downed almost a pint of whiskey; the bottle bought surreptitiously from the off-licence up the road; he had left the house to buy cigarettes.  He had downed half the bottle on his walk back home.

His hat, he thought, was a set of horns.  He imagined he was a bull.  He charged at the wall and the cardboard point crumpled on impact.  He bellowed and my mother wept silently, seated at the table where Karen had been sitting before.  My sister, ten years old, had stood in her nightgown in the doorway.  She had come downstairs to see what the noise was.

Our father had flung the hat at her.

“It’s crumpled,” he had slurred.  “Sorry.”

My mother had gone to my sister and taken her upstairs, one arm wrapped around her to protect her.  When I asked her, later, as adults, if she remembered that night, she had said no.

The hat had been left on the floor where it fell and I, fifteen and at the beginning of my adult strength, had been left to face my father.  He had staggered towards the hat, but his balance was poor and he stumbled forward.  I jerked forward to catch him and he had raised his arm, beginning to swing his fist as though to hit me.  His reactions were too slow, and pinning his arms within mine had been easy.  Dragging him to the living room and putting him onto the couch had been harder.

In the morning, he hadn’t remembered a thing.

That same man was lying a short walk away from me.  I could hear the artificial breathing of the machine that was keeping him alive.

I finished the first drink and poured myself another.

In a lot of ways, there was little difference between us.  I had no wife or children to bully, but I had the same sense of a life unfulfilled.  I had the same taste for liquor that switched on and then off again as frustration rose.  I had the same need to withdraw from the world by whatever means possible.

Sitting at the table, I thought about my own kitchen four hours away.  The empty house and the privacy of my life on pause until my return.  I swirled the booze in the glass and drank some more.  God knew when I would be back in my own place, at the centre of my own life again.

From what Karen had said on the phone, it wouldn’t be that long; but I knew what a stubborn bastard the old man could be, and I didn’t count on being out of there much before a week was up.

It was cold.  I was still in my overcoat, but the warmth from the central heating was fading.  I stood and went over to the boiler, searching for the control.  It was on the wall beside it, and I pushed the button that would bring the heating system to life again.

I stood in front of the boiler, listening to the rush of the gas and the sound of the burner, my posture that of a man standing before a log fire warming his hands.  The noise of the gas burning covered over the sound of my dying father’s mechanised lungs.

I listened as the radiator in the kitchen began to tick, the fluid inside it heating up, the metal expanding slightly, unnoticeably, radiating heat into the room.

The ticking of the radiator speeded up, and it seemed to me as though it were ticking my life away.  I shuddered.  I had the feeling that I had grown so cold that I would never be warm again.

I remembered my sister at fifteen lying on her bed sobbing because our father had rubbed the make-up she was wearing from her face with a face cloth soaked in scalding hot water.  I had been home for the vacation, still teenage enough to feel disaffected by sudden proximity to my family again, but adult enough to know that I didn’t have to choose this as my life.  I was wrapped in pseud’s clothing and too disdainful of suburban family life to offer any sort of comfort to my sister.

I was beginning the process of becoming an orphan.

Mum dying a year later helped me on my way.  Karen passed all her O-levels, trying to make her dead mother and her absent father proud; proving to herself that I was not the only genius in the family.

I wasn’t anyway.  Our family doesn’t possess any geniuses.  I think, though, that in not choosing the same career as Dad, I was supposed to be something better than what I am.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting to become warm again, I listened to the sounds of fake living in the room down the hall, and I wondered whether, even in death, he still felt disappointment.

I wondered if he even knew that I was there.

My sister slept on upstairs while I drank my way through her rum.  The man I had never wanted to be and yet seemed incapable of avoiding lay dying only a few metres away from me.

If there was one thing that I knew I could do, it was beat him at his own game.

It took my whole life to walk those few metres from the kitchen down the hall, past the room that contained the swollen body of the man I had already killed years ago.

I stood in front of the fuse box, high up on the wall by the front door.  I was tall enough to reach up and pull the clear plastic cover down on its hinges.  I flicked the switches methodically, breaking each circuit in turn until I found the one that silenced the machinery up the hall.

It took only a few seconds to end it.

I left the switch flicked down.

I left my bags on the bed in the spare room.

I left five hundred pounds in cash on the kitchen table.

I left my sister with a life she was free to live as she wished.

I left the house a legitimate orphan.

It’s what Dad would have wanted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had apparently gone up to Manchester two days before.

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

He didn’t remember any of this.

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

She probably wouldn’t be there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the one after that?”

“12.38.”

“A return on that one, then.”

“Coming back when?”

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

“15.47.”

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

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

“Coming back today then.”

“Same day return.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A staff member walked past his seat.

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

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

“Thank you,” Joe said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You look clean,” she joked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do I know you?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello,” she said, slightly surprised.

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

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

”But you’re Ms O’Deigh?” Joe said.

“Yes, that’s me.”

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

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

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

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

Joe sank gratefully onto the chair.

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

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

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

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

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

“Left what?” the woman asked.

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Lee,” O’Deigh said.

She sat back down alongside him.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“O’Deigh,” she said.

“No, I mean your first name.”

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

Joe fell silent again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please.”

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

She sat down, then spoke again.

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

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

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

“No,” she said.  “Nothing.”

Joe nodded despondently.

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

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

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

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

Lee had left the room again.

“I don’t understand this,” said Joe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ben, Ben, Ben,” he said wearily.

“My name’s not Ben,” said Joe.

“Of course not, Ben.  Of course not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am Joe Benson,” Joe said.

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexei Andreyevich sat at his desk.  It wasn’t a desk at all.  It was a table.  A table in a kitchen.  He sat at the table, alone and unwilling.  To his left sat a glass of vodka.  Before him was a plate of bread and cheese.  He sat at the table and remembered her.

He remembered the way he had held his hand across her eyes, like a blindfold.  The notches of her spine had pressed into the knots of the carpet.  He lay over her, his dick now hard, now soft as he battled his conscience and tried to convince himself that she was nothing more than a whore.  Another prostitute in a long line.

Her hips were narrow; her hair was blonde and long.  He had taken hold of it, moving his hand from where it blindfolded her eyes so that it stroked back the luxurious length of it, gripping it firmly at the nape of her neck.  He had snapped her head back so that her throat was too taut to make a sound.  He had held himself above her, his dick now hard, now soft.

“If I carry on drinking,” he said to his wife, now present in the room, “it will be the end.”

The glass of vodka sat just to his left.

“And if you stop?” she asked.

“I will remember her,” he thought but did not say.

He picked up the glass and threw the contents down his throat.

“Vodka,” he said, staring at the glass in his hand, but his wife was gone from the room again, as suddenly as she had appeared.

The bottle sat to his right, and he poured himself another glass, setting it down to his left.  The table returned to its original pose.  A still life, with a man in the middle, breathing alone.

He remembered his fingers, hard up within her.  He remembered with determination the way in which he had bitten her nipples, trying to draw blood.

She had been angry.  It spat from her, even when she did not speak.  It was the thing which attracted him to her.  The physicality of her anger, the way she seethed in public, the coldness of her indifference and the white heat of her fury.  His pursuit had been inevitable.

He drank down the vodka.  Its flame as it passed through his gullet reminded him of the searing heat of her ire.

Transgression is more appealing when desire has a purer goal.  His lust for her wayward anger was as pure as refined gold.  He had known her before he met her.  Rumour and reportage were enough to seal his desire.

He had not stopped drinking; nor had he stopped remembering.

The room had been hot and stuffy.  The crowds of people there to see the playwright had crammed themselves into the salon.  His wife had been one of the throng, but he was there to see her.

The gold of her hair was like a beacon for him.  It illuminated the room.  He had taken two small glasses of vodka from a tray being carried through the room by a servant and crossed the salon to where she stood.

Rumours abounded that she was the playwright’s muse.  He barely left her side at soirees such as this one, even though he was the one who was there to be celebrated.  She stood, cool and aloof, letting the circus pass her by.

Every so often, she was known to speak her mind; anger and vitriol poured from her; scorn for her lover’s work, disgust with the establishment, hatred for the men and women crowded into salons across the land simply to fawn over the words of the man who called her Muse.

She was, he had decided, exactly like him.  She drank vodka neat from a tumbler.  She did not bind herself in the corsets and girdles that fashion dictated.  She went her own way.

These were the ideas about her with which he comforted himself as he crossed the salon to deliver up the glass of vodka he carried in his left hand.  He did not acknowledge the playwright, but instead handed the vodka to her, his eyes fixed upon her face.

She met his gaze and accepted the glass, then turned her face away from him.  The boredom in her posture deepened the thrill that had already begun to build in him.

They did not speak.  He kept his gazed fixed on her face as he sipped at his vodka; she kept her face turned away as she sipped on hers.  It was enough.

The playwright moved away, the swell of the crowd carrying him to another part of the salon, leaving her behind, still in that awful pose of bored indifference.  He did not change position either, but he could sense the playwright’s panic as the tide of people carried him further out to sea, his anchor and his shoreline receding into the distance.

“You should not have come tonight,” she said, her face still turned away.

“I had to,” he replied.  “There was nothing else for it.”

“You have spoiled everything,” she said.

He sipped his vodka and did not reply.

Suddenly, she lifted the glass to her lips and tilted it; she tilted her head to the same angle.  She swallowed the vodka in one fiery whole and threw the glass to the floor before stalking away from him.

He was left in the vacuum her absence created, soaking in the anger that negated all other matter.  It was at that moment that he decided; he had to have her.

He threw back his own glass of vodka and left the room.

Sitting at his kitchen table, listening to the sounds his wife made in the rooms upstairs as she readied herself for sleep, he took up a different glass of vodka and tossed that one back as well.  He took up a lump of cheese and broke it into smaller pieces.  He ate one of the pieces.  He left the bread on the plate.  It was hard and grey and needed softening in milk or tea or something.

He chewed on the cheese and remembered not to chew hard on the left side of his mouth.  His teeth were bad on that side.  They were beginning to crumble and fragment; if he pressed one in particular too hard with his tongue, it released a foul taste and odour into his mouth.

He sat, as on most nights now, alone and unwilling at his kitchen table, trying not to remember as his wife settled into sleep in a room somewhere above his head.

He poured more vodka into the glass.  The night was growing darker.  It was ink-like in its blackness.  Not even the stars peeped out in the velvet sky that showed itself in the window.  As night drew on, the shadowy trees that closed in around the house from twilight until dawn took on the same hue as the sky, until it was impossible to tell sky from trees or any other part of the garden.

On the only chair in the kitchen that was cushioned, positioned by the damped down range, a cat lay grumbling in its sleep.  Its paws and muzzle, ears and eyes, even the skin along its spine, twitched as it dreamed, tiny electrical currents running through its body, forcing the muscles to spasm.

He thought of the ripple of the muscles around her abdomen when he ran his fingers gently over her flesh.  He thought of her naked form, there on the carpet in the drawing room, and him above her, bearing down, his dick now hard, now soft.  He thought of his fingers buried inside her, warm and moist and sticky.  He thought of the way her head was turned away, so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, of his other hand holding on to her hair and pulling it back so that she couldn’t move her head if she wanted to.

He thought of her complicity, her submissiveness, her absence from the physicality of the present.

She had not turned out to be the woman he had thought she was.

He tried to cut the bread, but it was too hard.  It needed to be soaked.  He would not waste the vodka on it.  He drank down the glass he had poured himself and then topped it up again.  This could, and probably would, go on all night.

If he carried on, it would be the end.  If he stopped, the memories would overwhelm him.

He had sent a card to her apartments, a few days after the soiree, inviting her to drinks with himself and a few of his acquaintances.  The intimation was that his wife would also attend.

To his surprise, she had agreed.  A card had been sent by return to his office in town bearing the name of a drinking hall, a time and a date.  He made no arrangements with anyone else; that had never been his intention.  He told his wife he was meeting friends for dinner at his club.  There were no questions asked.

She sat with him in that drinking hall as the bar man brought over a carafe of vodka and some water in a jug.  She was the one who poured the drinks.

“You don’t want water, do you?” she said, the question filled with derision.

He presented her with a book.  “This is my favourite author,” he said.

She looked at it, then looked away.

“I’ve read it,” she said.

He withdrew it from the table and took up his glass of vodka.  He sipped it at first, watching the elegant line of her neck and throat as she tilted her head back and swallowed the contents of her own glass in one.  She refilled her glass and looked at him.

“Why are you with him?” he asked; blurted like a schoolboy ejaculating with excitement at the proximity of his first woman.

“Drink,” was her answer; a command delivered with a glance at his glass.

He obeyed.

“That isn’t the question,” she said.

“Then what is?” he asked her, trying to appear suave and knowing.

She laughed.  It was a short laugh, brittle and full of scorn.  She looked away from him again and an uncomfortable silence descended.  He felt ashamed and searched his mind for the question he should have asked.

She drank more vodka and refilled both their glasses.

“You need to keep up,” she said.

“I don’t understand why it is that you are with him,” he replied, trying to work the question another way.

“You don’t understand anything,” she said, looking at him again briefly before finishing off her third glass.  “Come on,” she laughed, tapping her glass against his.  “You must keep up.”

He drank and felt afraid.  It was as though she was possessed.  It thrilled and scared him.

“The question,” she said, leaning towards him across the table, “is what he is doing with me?”

She filled their glasses.

“And what is the answer?” he asked.

She paused, smiling innocently.  The innocence of her lips lent a new aspect to her face.  Even her eyes had lost their cloud of anger, and she appeared almost bashful.

“He is not the playwright,” she said.  “I am.”

He drank, she drank, and this time he was the one to refill the glasses.  He did not comment on her revelation.  He did not know how to.

“You don’t believe me,” she said, the smile changing from innocence to gently mockery.  He saw the subtle alteration in the way her lips curved happen.

“Why should you?” she sighed, looking away from him again, one hand resting lightly on the glass that sat on the table in front of her, her opposite arm thrown behind her, over the chair back.  Her posture was open.  He drank while she disappeared, who knows where, into the hidden avenues of her mind.

Silent moments passed before she turned her attention back to him.

“Are we equal now?” she asked, indicating his empty vodka glass.  He silently refilled it.

They drank again.

“I am the writer,” she said.  “But who in this society would accept the words of a woman in the printed press?  He was a struggling playwright whom my father thought it would be amusing to introduce to his ambitious daughter.”  She paused and sipped from her glass.  “I think he wanted to make the point that there were plenty of average writers, male writers, in the world, and that a woman had no place trying to compete with them.”

She sat silently for a moment, not talking, not drinking, not looking anywhere but straight ahead, studying the grain of the wood that made up the table’s form.  As he was not about to break that silence, she raised her eyes to the ceiling and continued, her voice low and lovely, sending thrills through him.

“The playwright read my work and was astounded.  He literally threw himself at my feet.”  She looked down at her lap with a cruel expression on her face.  “It was pathetic.”  Another pause and then she looked up at her companion again.  “You’re not drinking,” she said.

He spoke, at last.  “I’m listening,” he said.

“Do you believe me?” she asked him, her eyes burning like coals, her anger with the injustice of the world rising again.

“Yes,” he said.

She dampened the coals slightly.  “Good,” she said.  “It’s important that you believe me.”

She did not need to continue with her story.  He was able to work it out for himself; the plot hatched that her writing would be presented under his name; the success that followed; the reason he was so lost in public without her by his side; the reason she was so disdainful of the people who fawned over him.

She kept him out until three in the morning.  He was too drunk to walk straight, while she somehow retained her composure.  She hailed a cab and took him to his house.  He tried to give her money, but she refused.

“Go home,” she said.  “Sleep it off.”

He stood on the street and watched the cab carry her away, wishing he had had the courage to go with her.

He had lost track of the number of glasses of vodka he had drunk while remembering that first meeting.  The bottle was almost empty, and he rose from the table to find another.  The cat stirred in its sleep.

His wife was sleeping upstairs, just as she had been on that night, when he had returned at three in the morning.  He wondered what the time was now, but did not check his pocket watch.

“Alexei Andreyevich, you are an old fool,” he said to himself.  The cat opened one eye at the sound of his voice, then, seeing that it was only him, quickly settled back into sleep.

He found more vodka in one of the cupboards and took it back to the table.  He poured himself another glass but did not drink it.

He was remembering again the night she had lain naked on his drawing room floor, the harsh weave of the carpet biting into the flesh of her back, rubbing raw the skin that barely covered the notches of her spine.  His hand over her eyes like  blindfold so that he would not have to witness their emptiness.  The stillness of her body.  Her absence from the physical moment.

He had taken her to dinner with some friends.  His wife was away, visiting some cousin or aunt or friend in the country.  These were the times when he socialised with the people she did not approve, or did not understand his liking for.  Intellectuals, musicians, poets and performers.

He had announced, as they were eating, although he had noticed that she did not eat very much, preferring to drink instead, that he knew a secret about one of the company around the table.

She had flashed him a warning glance, full of ice and fire and steel and sapphires.  He had disregarded this warning, choosing to believe that she would forgive him once her secret had been accepted by this enlightened group of bohemians.

“One of us here is the secret power behind our celebrated playwright Sergey Mikhailovitch Drozny!” he proclaimed, his cheeks red with food and wine and the excitement of knowing this fact and revealing it to the others.

She downed a glass of vodka and pushed her food around the plate.

The other diners looked at each other with amusement.

“Well, I know that it isn’t me,” said a poet.  “I would keep those words for myself, damn his talent!”

“No, no!” Alexei Andreyevich said.  “It isn’t you.”

“Then who?” asked one of the dancers from the vaudeville theatre.

“It is our silent and mysterious friend who does not eat, just silently and angrily drinks vodka in our midst!” he exclaimed.

The others were silent and turned as one to stare at her.

“His muse?” said the poet.  “His muse writes his plays for him?”

His tone was one of incredulity.  She sat rigidly in her seat, eyes blazing, looking straight ahead of her as the poet led the laughter that could be their only response to something they did not understand.

“No, don’t laugh,” Alexei Andreyevich said.  “It’s the truth.  Don’t laugh, I tell you.”

It was too late.  Laughter had taken hold of the gathering to the extent that tears were falling from their eyes.

She, meanwhile, with an angry grace, had risen from the table and left the room.

He pulled some roubles from his pocket and flung them onto the table.  He followed her hurriedly from the room, almost colliding with a waiter as he tried to catch her up.

He caught her in the vestibule, fastening her wrap.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Her answer was to slap him.  Twice.

He fell upon her then, taking her into his arms and kissing her passionately.  She struggled in his arms for a moment and then went dead.

He released her.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

“What?” he answered, drunk and confused.

“To have your friends mock me and then to fuck me?  Is that how you mean to subjugate me?”

He tried to kiss her again, but she pushed him away.

“You’re drunk and you stink,” she said, and stepped out into the street.

He followed her and got into the cab with her.  He gave the driver directions to his own home, not hers.

Within the darkened confines of the cab, she could not escape from his amorous attentions.  He took her in his arms and kissed her, again with passion.  Again, she did not respond; nor did she struggle.  He stopped.

She turned to him, her face full of hate and mockery.

“So this really is what you want,” she said, her lips curling into a sneer that bruised the prettiness of her face.

“Yes,” he said.  “This is what I want.”

The cab drew up alongside his house.

“Well, then,” she said.

Exiting the cab, she led the way to his front door.  They were barely inside and he had just closed the door against the prying eyes of the cab driver and any people who were passing on the street, when she fell upon him, wrenching his coat from his body, pulling her own clothing awry so that her breasts were exposed, pulling his head down towards her so that he could take one breast with his rosy pink nipple into his mouth like a suckling child.

As he sucked on her breast, she continued to remove as much of his clothing as she could manage.  At the back of his drink addled mind he was aware that she was being too clinical in the way she was masterminding this encounter, but her breasts were warm and soft and distracting.

She slipped the loose gown from her body, stepping out of it.  He saw that she wore no undergarments at all.  Her body was lithe like that of a young girl and the sight of it made his passions rise even further.

“Where?” she asked him.

He began to walk her into the drawing room, removing more of his own clothing as they went.

This, to him, was more exciting than being with a prostitute.  This had the edge of spontaneity to it and, for all that she was the muse of a famous playwright, she was a respectable woman.

He grew stiff and when they had finally conspired, sitting on the floor of the drawing room, to remove his boots and trousers, he had taken his hardness into her mouth.  He closed his eyes the better to enjoy the sensation of her tongue against his shaft.  She rolled her tongue around it like an expert, or like a child sucking on an ice.  Her tongue flattened over the head of his penis, then the tip pushed into it, and he groaned with the painful ecstasy of it.  He pushed her away, not wanting to come too soon, and he laid her back on the floor.  He entered her, hard, and she bucked against the floor.  He held her around her back, his fingers stroking the exposed notches of her spine.

He looked at her and saw that her face was turned away from him.  He realised that it was only her body that was reacting to his presence; her mind was far away.

He stopped, his penis softening.  He told himself it was his conscience reminding him that he was married and that this was a betrayal.  He knew that it was wounded pride, that she could not bring herself to pretend; that he was nothing to her but another man who wanted to reduce her to an object of lust.

To punish her, he bent his head to her breast and took the nipple between his teeth.  He bit down.  She did not even wince.  Not a flicker of reaction came.  Her face was still turned away from him.  He held himself above her, his dick now hard, now soft, and placed one hand over her eyes, blindfolding her; although he knew that whatever she was looking at was not in the room with them, he needed to try to prevent her from seeing it.  He pulled her head so that she was looking up at him, her eyes still hidden behind his hand.  Her hair had fallen loose as they had struggled together in the hallway of the house, and now lay like cloth of gold on the carpet.  He moved his hand up from her eyes, across the crown of her head and down to the nape of her neck, where he gripped the length of her hair and used it to snap her neck back.

He was hard again, and she was silent and remote.  He did not enter her again, however.  He rolled onto his side, next to her on the floor, and entered her with his fingers instead.  He placed them inside her like the bud of a flower, then unfurled them like petals, pulling against her flesh, expanding the entrance to her fecundity, wanting to hurt her, wanting to draw blood.  He continued to pull back her head so that her throat was too taut to make a sound, so that her face was forced to look straight ahead.

There was no reaction in her eyes.  She had withdrawn deep inside herself, to a place where he could not touch her.

He bent forward and kissed her.  He tasted vodka on her lips.

“You’re not who I thought you were,” he whispered into her ear.

Somehow, her lack of response to his brutality had helped to keep him stiff.  He changed position again, releasing her hair, removing his fingers, so warm and sticky and moist with her.  He entered her and they fucked for a while, all physical checks and balances correct.

He felt himself about to come.  He placed his hands around her neck.  His thumbs pressed against her throat, against the hardness of her trachea, protruding as is did.  As he came his grip around her neck tightened.  She did not fight it, she did not claw at his hands, trying to remove them.

The light in her eyes was snuffed out like a candle.  Her emotional deadness was married to her physical death.

He dressed and bundled up her clothes, throwing them over her body.  He rang for his valet and explained the situation.

Alexei Andreyevich was a powerful man in the city.  When the strangled body of the playwright’s muse was found in the drawing room of the playwright’s house, there was no suspicion that Alexei Andreyevich had had a hand in her death.

And now, months later, he sat at his kitchen table, his desk, the place he did his thinking and his work, with a bottle of vodka to his right and a glass to his left.  He sat like this every night, with his wife sleeping in a room above his head, and he knew that if he continued drinking, it would be the end.

But to stop would bring disaster.

She was old.  Nothing else to be said; Gran was old.

Lying there on the floor of the book shop, her limbs bent under her, her frail bones covered by papery skin, she looked old.

“It’s not the booze, darling,” she said, looking up at me with her chocolate button eyes.

“No,” I said.  “Of course not.”

Nobody came to help her up.  The people who had come to see her tonight, on this book tour for which she was too old, just stood and stared at the drunken old woman who had lost her footing on the slippery laminate floor.

I bent down and gripped an arm.  I tried to manoeuvre her, to find her other arm, but she lay there, helpless.

“Have you broken anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so, darling.  I landed quite softly.  I slipped, you know.  It isn’t the booze.”

Her best friend had died the night before.  Another author, someone the reading world had already forgotten, long before she even hit her 60s.

“Don’t let me go the way she went,” she had begged me, earlier that evening.  “It’s disgusting to die that way,” she said.

I had promised to smother her with a pillow if she ever fell victim to a stroke.

“I wouldn’t want to go on, darling,” she told me.

“I know, Gran,” I said.  “I know.”

She was small and frail on the floor beneath me, and I couldn’t find a way to lift her up.

I straightened, looked round for someone to help, caught the eye of one of the shop assistants.  She might have been a manager.

“Can you help me?” I asked.  “She’s fallen.”

“Of course,” she said, coming out of her gallows curiosity.

Together we lifted my grandmother from the floor.

“I’m fine, darling, I’m fine,” she assured us both.  “So kind of you to help,” she said to the shop assistant.

The woman blushed.  “It’s not a problem,” she said.

I hoped that the blush was one of embarrassment for having left my grandmother so long in her indignity.

“Come on, Gran,” I said, tucking a hand under her elbow.  “I’ll get us a cab.”

“It wasn’t the drink, Charlie,” she told me again.

“I know,” I replied.  “Walk carefully on the stairs here.”

Slowly we made our way down the stairs to the shop entrance.  The London evening was sticky with heat.  I saw a cab pull around the corner, a hundred yards away.  Still holding onto Gran beneath her elbow, I raised my other hand.  The cab drove towards us.

I helped her in and settled her back into a seat.  She pulled the seatbelt across her shoulder and buckled herself in.  Not many people do that in a cab.  Not many people have had an accident in a cab that catapulted them through a window, either.  Cautious to the last, apart from when drunk, that was my grandmother.

“You see, dear, Sofia was my oldest friend.  I had to have a little drink.”

“Where to?” the cab driver asked.  I gave him directions.

I sat alongside my grandmother and held her hand and she rambled on about her friend.  She was one of the few survivors.  All three of her husbands had predeceased her.  She still lived in the same ramshackle house, peopled and littered with skeletons and carnival masks.  She still climbed the three flights of stairs to the room that housed her ancient computer.

“I couldn’t live anywhere else, darling,” she said, to anyone who asked or dared to suggest that she move to live with one of her daughters.

My mother would heave a sigh of relief when she heard her say it.

“The house is a death trap,” I would say.

“Then let her live with you, Charlie,” was her reply.

The cab stopped outside her house.  She had pointed out to me the place on the corner where the van had run into the cab she was in, that night she went through the window.

“I still have the glass in my lip, darling,” she told me.  “The next book I write,” she said, “there will be an accident in a taxi cab.”

She had given up smoking, though, and writing was suffering.  There would be no next book.  Like any writer, she needed the thing that was killing her to spur on the creative flow.  Without the suck and drag, without the flick of ash, she was nothing.

We were out of the cab and I was helping her up the steps to her front door when she gripped my arm.

“You won’t tell your mother, Charlie?” she said, her face close to mine, looking up at me.

“Won’t tell her what?” I asked, playing along.

She frowned.  She didn’t get it.

“You won’t tell her that I fell,” she said.

“Oh, that?” I said, feigning surprise.  “No, of course not.”

She seemed to start breathing again, as though she had been holding her breath while waiting for my answer.  She said nothing, just turned from me and pushed her key into the lock.

I saw her in.

“Do you want tea, darling?” she asked me, filling the ancient aluminium kettle at the tap; a tap that was connected to an ancient lead pipe.  It was a wonder that she wasn’t dead a long time ago.  Or pensioned off in a nursing home for the senile.

“No thanks, Gran,” I said.

“Something stronger, then?” she asked.

“No.  Nothing for me, thanks.”

It was late and, although I knew that she never went to bed before midnight, I wanted to see her settled.  I wanted to know that she wouldn’t sit at the table, drinking more, trying to piece together the book that would never come.

I wanted her to be a grandmother like anyone else’s; not this driven creative force that had lost its way and was drifting through its last days.  I wanted her to stop being Beryl, but I knew it would never happen, and that I would hate her if it did.

She made tea in an equally ancient aluminium teapot.

“You should get rid of that, Gran,” I said.  “The kettle too.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Charlie.  I’ve been using these for years.  All that nonsense.  Do I have Alzheimer’s?  Am I senile?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then.”

She sat at the table and removed her watch, scratching her wrist.

“I think I need a new strap, Charlie, darling,” she said, inspecting the grooves and redness where the strap had been resting against her too warm skin.

“I’ll call for you in the morning,” I said.  “We’ll get you one tomorrow.”

I was spending a couple of months with her.  I was between projects and she had got it into her head that she might not be much longer in this world, so she wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren.

The other grandchildren came along later than me, but she treated us all the same, answering Jo and Beth’s 3 and 5-year old questions with the same abstract clarity as she used when speaking to me about the past or about her writing.  With Simon she explained the principles of making arrows and the importance of a well trimmed flight to encourage speed and distance when released from the bow.  It was a moot point whether Simon wanted to know this information, but Gran persisted nonetheless.

My mother said she had been the same when she and her sisters were growing up.  She was this force who thought that everyone, no matter what their age, was on the same plane as her.

She was right to think that way, as well.  There was something childlike in her approach to the world that sat well with adults and children alike.  Some might view it as an eccentricity, but to us it was just Beryl.

“Where does one get a watchstrap these days?” she asked.  She was looking at the offending item in question.  “I must have had this one for twenty years.  I can’t remember where I got it from.”

“From a jeweller's,” I said.  “Or a watch repair shop.”

“Oh, of course,” she said.  “You are clever, Charlie, dear.”

The tea was still stewing in the pot, no doubt filled with aluminium that had leached into the water.

“Are you having tea?” I asked.

She sighed.

“I don’t think so, Charlie, no.”

“Well, I think I’ll be off then,” I said, rising from the table.  “Don’t be up too late.  I’m coming round for you at nine.”

“Oh, I only need six hours these days, darling,” she replied, breezily.  “It’s one of the advantages of getting old.”

She saw me to the door.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?” she said, as I stood on the doorstep, bending down to kiss her soft, dry cheek.

“This is London,” I said.  “I’ll pick one up on the main road.  Besides, the tube will still be running at this time.”

“You’re such a good boy, Charlie,” she said, pulling me into an embrace.  There was untold strength in those arms.  I would have bet my life that she would live until she was a hundred.

At 3 a.m., tucked safely into a deep sleep, I was woken by the phone ringing.

“Charlie?”

It was mum.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice still sludgy with the sediment of sleep.

“It’s your Gran.  She’s been taken ill.  We need to get her to A&E.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”  I was awake now, standing at the window to my flat, stark naked and not caring if anyone could see me.

“She says she has pains in her legs that won’t go away.”

“Well, she did fall after the reading tonight,” I admitted, feeling like a traitor for having broken my earlier promise.

“I know.  She told me.”  My mother’s tone was flat with suppressed exasperation.  “Are you fit to drive?”

“I don’t have a car,” I said.

“Oh.  I forgot.”

”I’ll call a cab.  I can be at Gran’s in ten minutes.”

“Good.  I’ll meet you there.”

At the house, my grandmother was sanguine.

“It’s nothing, really, darling.  I feel fine.  It’s just when I walk up and down those stairs, or if I spend too much time on my feet.”

We took her to A&E.  My mother unashamedly told them who my grandmother was, told them how old she was, explained that she couldn’t really be expected to sit in a waiting room full of drunks with cut heads until a doctor was free.

The triage nurse asked Gran some questions.  In the end, it wasn’t who she was or her age that helped her to jump the queue; it was the severity of her condition.

“I told you I wasn’t long for this world, Charlie,” she told me triumphantly as she was wheeled into a cubicle to be seen by a doctor.

There were tests.  There were hushed conversations.  There was a period of waiting.  Then my grandmother was returned to us.

“Are you her daughter?” the doctor asked my mother.

“One of them,” my mother replied.

“Then please tell her to stop smoking completely and to cut down on the alcohol she consumes.”

“They told me if I don’t stop, I’ll have to lose a leg, darling,” she told me cheerfully as I helped her into another cab, one that would take her home.

“Well, then, perhaps you better had,” I said.

“I will stop,” she replied, “but I suppose this is the end of my career.”

Neither mum nor I knew what to say.

“It’s not such a bad thing,” she said, looking at us with her chocolate button eyes.  “I’ve had a good run, after all.”

“You never know,” my mother said.  “You might still be able to write.”

“Without the booze and fags?” my grandmother exclaimed.  “Not likely!”

We stayed the night, both worried that she might not make it through.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

In the morning, I took her for her watch strap.  She chose one made of fake snakeskin.

“It has a certain shabby chic to it, darling,” she said, admiring it against her wrist.  “Don’t you think?”

She held it up to me, so that I could admire it.

“Do you know,” I said, “I think you’re right.”

She grinned at me like a girl still in the first flush of youth.

In the afternoon, she sat at her computer, waiting for inspiration to strike.

“I don’t know if I can do this, darling,” she told me, when I took her up a cup of tea.

She sipped at the tea.

“Is this made with a tea bag, dear?” she asked.

“Yes, Gran,” I said.

She set it down gently on a coaster at the side of the keyboard, alongside a now empty ashtray.

“I need a ciggie in my hand!” she cried, and thumped her hands down onto the keyboard.

“It will come, Gran,” I said, knowing instantly that it was the wrong thing.

“Oh, you.  You know nothing!”

She was up and pacing from the room.  I followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen and watched her pour herself a glass of wine.

“The sun’s over the yard arm, darling,” she said as she saw me looking at her.

“The doctor said you should cut down.”

“I am cutting down, Charlie.  I’d have had three by now if I wasn’t.”

She held the bottle out to me and I took it from her.  I poured myself a glass and we drank together like naughty children.

“You’ve got to have some fun, Charlie,” she said to me with a wink from her button eyes.

I laughed.

“Gran,” I said, “you’re not wrong.”