A selection of past stories from this page can be read on the story archive pages (Stories 2001-2005 and Stories 2006-2007).

12/08/2007

Two months late

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

She sighed and went back inside the house.

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

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

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

Jane stood on the doorstep and did the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane dead-headed the roses.

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

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

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

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

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

Before she left the house she painted her fingernails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long gone and put behind her.