i guess there’s someone like you
always,
paraded at parties and made to feel
all arms and limbs,
as if i’d never kissed them.
the collapse of your body
into the wallpaper, the pattern
of your laughing skin, all
seems irrelevant now,
as everyone is leaving and we
have no-one to
perform our love to.
The smell of warm concrete signalled the arrival of a storm, turning its great heaving shoulders to the sky, casting a shadow over Sophie who had left the cover of a record store minutes before. Her father had just died, and the great loneliness of the eldest child had begun quickly and obsessively, and she had found herself organising her life around the ritual of death. She didn’t like to think about the coffin, or the flowers, but had spent hours on the order and frequency of the music. At first she didn’t want any at all, she didn’t want to be caught in a shopping centre, or a pub, with the stale breath of a memory lurking above her, pulled from the speakers like cobwebs. She had almost decided upon a few, and felt the temporary grief of this temporary closure, a rehearsal for the real thing.
Sophie took shelter underneath the stone arches of a church, pulling her belongings closer to her, forming a cocoon that was weak and penetrable, and soon her feet were wet. She noticed the irony in her surroundings, stubbing her toe on the ivory step as she edged toward further sanctuary. Sophie had stopped going to church when she was 17. It wasn’t that it didn’t suit her; in fact she would secretly yearn for the comfort of a congregation, or the silence of a high ceiling. It was more that she had noticed her part in a modernity that didn’t ask for confirmation. That didn’t ask if you were doing it right, for the right reason. For the right person, rather than an endless string of wrong persons that you could touch, and fuck, and know the reality of. When she had ended her last relationship, Sophie felt all of that immeasurable feeling sitting in the bottom of her stomach as if it were a place where emotions are felt, like the heart is always claimed to be. The grief that had bred from the death of her father had chewed its way into her lungs, a dull ache that throbbed along with her irregular heartbeat. Her body had become a system of objects that begged to be recognised as emotions, like a Valentines card, or sympathy note, and her denial was deliberate. She had become a slave to the feeling of grief, and how she was supposed to feel under the weight of a dead body.
Sophie felt ashamed that she still sought the comfort of religion and the comfort of her father, because both had become invisible. However, what was real was unimaginable to her, and her obsessions into the logistics of ritual had become vital to the resurrection of these myths. Sophie entered the church in the midst of a storm.
They had woken up fully dressed, after drinking too much and falling asleep beside one another. They were still new to each other, and seeing the other grey with sleep still surprised them. He reached over and felt the bones in her elbow, sharp at the front, and then cushioned where her pillowy arms flushed pink, and yellow, and white. He kissed her, and then pulled her towards him delicately, as if she would bruise.
They undressed where they lay, unceremoniously and with difficulty. Once naked, Rachel found his eyes unforgiving of her flaws, uneasy under his gaze, and suddenly she felt stale, inedible. They had met in various disguises, at first she was with someone else, someone she was used to, and to Richard she was a prize that he had finally won. She had won him too, because it was all about winning then, as it always is, eventually. A game of impatience, drink, and long looks followed, stumbling half-blind at each other in the half-light of street, touching each other occasionally and deliberately. She had hidden her nakedness from him well, given him an exterior she could defend and he couldn’t argue with. Now she was defenceless, and he had looked away.
Rachel could feel her limbs collapsing in on her body as she attempted to hide the parts of her that she had been told were special. She begged for darkness, and found herself creating shadows, eventually hiding her eyes, like children do. He rubbed his eyes and sat up. After a while she followed, taking his hand and placing it softly in her lap.
They sat in silence as they realised that this wasn’t what they wanted at all, and that it never had been. It had been some wonderful dream that they had salivated over, they had kissed each other to bring it to life and now it sat between them uncomfortably like a divorce. He pulled his T-shirt back over his head and reached for his rolling tobacco. As he made a cigarette Rachel could see his socks peel back onto his ankles, his trousers run back up his legs. She felt her clothes return to her, prodigal in their homecoming. He handed her the tobacco and watched her as she placed it by her side and ran her hands over her shoulders and the curve of her neck. It was a ghostly motion, a retracing of old footsteps once made on her skin.
He stood up and looked out at the window; his car, unlocked, looked lifeless in the mid afternoon sun. He didn’t know what he was looking at beyond that, but he felt like it was the right thing to be doing, or so he’d been told. Behind him he heard occasional, smooth movements, and then a thump as her head hit the mattress. He didn’t turn around for a long time.
Rachel stroked her sides, and remembered how those lines had been followed once by hands that she’d understood to know everything about her. Those hands that made her familiar with her body, pulling at her thick thighs and full hips with insatiable energy, the flash of teeth and nail. She turned away from the window and fell asleep.
Andrew slid her glass across the table and took her hand. They had been like this for weeks, afternoons of pregnant pauses and long looks that made Alice sick, she had never looked for movies in her life, so she was angered when she saw parts of their relationship bordering the scripted. Andrew had come to life when her relationship with James became a series of non-events, struggling for warmth against the great weight of apparent expectation. The cracks had become large and deep, and although she sensed this doubt was temporary, it was still doubt all the same. So she let another life overlap the one she had with James, and learnt to lie quickly and convincingly. Andrew had become the root of her understanding to what emptiness felt like, and when he had begun to introduce himself to her she was overwhelmed.
When he smiled, his head leaned slightly to the left, and dipped into his chest in a shy swoop. The transformation of his smile, from post-orgasm to post-sleep, had become one of the cementing memories that shadowed any true thought of what he had become to her. The intimacy of the traffic outside her window, left open to air their smoke from the room, became so telling of the times that would no longer exist that a dull ache had formed within her, beating away laboriously under the weight of her own chest.
His glasses had steamed up from the heat of the room. For a moment she couldn’t see his eyes and wondered where he was looking. She had the terrible feeling he was looking at the floor, because looking at anything else offered the promise of an answer that she wasn’t prepared to give. To look at her hands, her bare shoulder, or the tips of her hair was unbearable.
‘I can’t do this.’ She said.
‘I know. I was beginning to wonder when you would say that, I was close to saying it myself.’ He knotted him fingers firmly into hers. ‘I didn’t want to say it though.’
‘You don’t have to because I am.’ She tightened her grip. ‘It was always for me to say.’
‘So what do we do?’
Her phone rang, and rang. Alice didn’t reach for her pocket. She didn’t know what to say if she’d answered.
At the funeral for his brother, Great-Uncle Seamus became the only gay member of the family. This surprised Gail, the eldest of the aunts, because there were so many of them, and she supposed that it might be obvious. She wasn’t to know that in the coming years, one granddaughter and one uncle would follow suit, and that only one would end happily. He had always been known affectionately as an eccentric, who dyed his white hair a luminous shade of orange, and wore three piece suits that smelled of Patchouli and Stout. His nephew, Robert, would tell his wife that he had always known, and didn’t think he was homophobic at all to say that they all looked the same, more or less. The funeral had been short, and with quiet judgement they had come together to eat, exercising their keen ability to avoid eye contact and compete in their grief.
After dinner, Seamus, with much fragility, spoke about his wife. Bridget was a small woman with the constitution of an ox, and bore the labour of her husband’s sins the way a secretary covers for her boss. Seamus had finally been honest two years into their marriage, and rather than attempt to somehow correct him, she let him live his life under the cover of immense and impenetrable darkness. Throughout their long marriage she had left her love for him like a table ornament, regularly refreshed and eternal, without judgement and with quiet hope for a return. She had become heavy with the guilt of her role, and what that meant for someone like him. Her status as wife had always been presented as a requirement, not a choice, a fact that she had become coldly ashamed of.
To punish herself for the secret he had been forced to hide within her, she forbid herself from love while he was discovering the meaning of his. Bridget let herself ache at the smell of his coat at the rack – heavy with cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, among other, vaguely familiar smells. She made herself presentable for the neighbours, and attended church regularly, where she gossiped about Seamus with the other wives. Her mythology had become intricate, not really lies but invention, the life she was secretly having when he was away – a man-shaped shadow at the kitchen table. She had been taught to love a certain way, and she would not reveal to herself the life that she would lead without it.
The rest of the family had learned how upon hearing about the death of her brother-in-law, the closest immediate family, she had told Seamus that she was leaving him. Seamus was not so cold as not to cry, for Bridget was his wife, and once her stable, unconditional love was gone, he would be alone. Seamus told his more tolerant grandchildren the stories of his other companions, the Sailors in Dublin and the perfumed boys of the Quartier Pigalle, but they never seemed real. The nature of a secret is that it never materialises fully, and therefore Bridget was all he could hold on to in the winter of his life. Bridget died that year, and he mourned for her love in the arms of the man who had become her replacement. His nephew Robert would tell his girlfriend that this was typical of his sort, and that some people are just greedy.
Sarah rebuttoned the coat she’d had since she was a teenager, and struggled to remember who she had bought it for, and why. She hated to consider herself as younger, to use the mortal phrase ‘When I was younger’ to introduce a sentence. It made her feel that it was no part of her making, that it was a chapter detached and deleted like a computer file with a particularly embarrassing photograph in it. Her youth was rather embarrassing, but so was her evolving adulthood, and she took the shame as a sign of growing. Sarah remembered the first man she slept with, and the error of falling into bed with another man who shared his name, never noticing the coincidence at the time. She could remember her errors easily, as they became more monumental than the right decisions she had tried to be proud of.
This particular afternoon Sarah had decided to leave her partner of two years, after he had failed to notice that she had given up smoking. He had offered her a cigarette after lunch, without looking up from the television set, shaking the box impatiently at her. Sarah had stood up, taken her coat from the rack and told him she’d be back for her things. Three hours had passed since she’d walked out of his flat, and she wasn’t sure that he’d even heard her. It’s a terrible feeling, to know that you will not be missed when your absence is noticed, and Sarah had felt that for a long time whilst being with him. She had lay awake next to him at night and wondered if it ever surprised him to find her on the other side of the bed in the morning. He had never noticed any change in her, and it made her doubt her kindness and the strength of her will. Every haircut was thrown at him during sex in an effort to awaken the boyish part in him that loved to look at her, every piece of clothing carefully shed in his direction. She had become a beast of herself, and he didn’t seem to mind.
Sarah had given up smoking a couple of months ago, partly because she had forgotten why she had ever started, partly because she had stopped trying to impress anyone lately. Smoking had become a part of her that dreamt of something else, late nights listening to music she didn’t really care for with someone she thought would care for her. It had always been a sentence within a covert conversation, and reminded her of what she, Sarah, was not. Her teenage self had spent hours in the company of men and women that impressed her and insulted her without upset, a cigarette all part of that machine she had built to keep herself functioning. The boys she had fallen for all smoked, and spoke like Kerouac, a beat poet or an intellectual, and she had always been too drunk to remember that they were none of these things. Her partner had been an evolution of these boys, who had forgotten to try any longer, and blamed that loss of hope on anyone but themselves.
Sarah stopped thinking about him, as if it was easy to do so. The afternoon sun had turned everything on her walk home into a dull bronze lull, and she was tired of looking for things to romanticise her situation. She had come to learn that love was not framed, or boxed like an extraordinary gift, and that she should stop looking for the frame, or the box.
At the end of a bench an old woman sat smoking; her hat held on with her other hand as the breeze repetitively pulled at it with long, warmth breaths. Sarah walked towards her, stopped, and opened her mouth slightly. She noticed the woman’s chest rising softly under layers of wool, her hands pulling at the corners of her sleeves like a bored child. Sarah stepped forward and sat beside her, inspecting her own sleeves. She was disappointed to find that no fraying or biting graced the edges of her coat. All at once Sarah felt incredibly old, and felt for tears, though none were coming.
‘Would you like a cigarette?’ The woman took a cigarette from her pocket and placed it on Sarah’s left knee. Symmetrically opposite she placed the lighter. Sarah picked up the cigarette and cradled it softly in her hands for a moment before placing it between her lips. She didn’t light it, it felt inappropriate after the day’s event – she wanted to know if she really meant it, and whether it was realistic to have done so. She wondered why everyone else’s love seemed different to her experiences of it, why she had always been left wanting. She felt sad that her stubbornness would always be different, and would always be difficult, because she had been taught that in order for a rock to change, it must be hit many, many times.
The old woman took the lighter from Sarah’s hand and quietly lit her own cigarette. She took a few quick puffs before opening Sarah’s limp hand, closing the lighter under the slight weight of her fingers. Sarah’s hand barely moved beyond a loose and impenetrable fist.
‘Here he is! Here’s your boy.’ The midwife beamed at her, cloaked in sweat that had come from a sense of unique achievement. She was handed her son, as delicate as a box of eggs, his yolk-wide eyes singing at her. As if exorcised of some necessary evil, a gasp of fright had flown from her mouth as he was born. She could pretend this was as a result of overwhelming pride, as was expected, but the long hours that followed did nothing but empty her. It was not a matter of not being in love with her newborn son, it was not a matter of love at all. It was the shrinking that she felt as she realised that there was less of her, and that she recognised no part of herself in him. Something had become lost, and as much as she could consider the conversations that would no longer occur, or the movements she was never to replicate, it was not that at all.
In the corner of the room, her partner sat in the warm lull of exhaustion, occasionally eyeing her from behind his glasses. These were looks of love, and he was safe within his satisfaction. Earlier he had congratulated himself, told his mother that he was complete; that the mechanics of his body could now function without interruption. He had kissed her, and listened for the whirring of cogs.
She would love to say that there was hope, and joy, and eventually she would get over it, but she couldn’t. He had become a great obstacle, the boulder at the mouth of the cave. We like to believe that when we are born, our parents are great gods that gave us life so that they could adore us, and remark upon how mortal we are. Their immortality comes from us, as is the case with Gods, and she could not imagine having to live forever for anyone.
She waited until they had fallen asleep, when she could slip out from under their gaze, safe in the knowledge that there would be excuses that she could make if she accidentally woke them. The halogen lights made them look already dead, and as she looked down, she sensed something of a corpse in her too. From underneath the bed, she pulled out her clothes and silently slipped her feet into her shoes; slowly she took her first steps onto the floor that held her so sceptically. There was no drama or theatrics in these movements, just the oiling of bones as she prepared herself to walk from the room unnoticed.
She looked back once; not to remember, but to make sure she hadn’t been seen. She left the hospital without the curiosity of the guilty, without observing those in other rooms who had done it right. She did not turn her head sideways to cross the road, as if she was proving her certainty to the world that she could belong to again, because a woman who is whole does not understand the concept of doubt.
He had arrived home at a sensible time, and let himself rot into the sofa while cars occasionally illuminated the lines in his face. He let himself fold into the silence, slowly turning his head to find movement in the darkness. The night was deep and still, and his eyelids slowly sank into his head, drunk and swollen with an empty pride. He became aware of each and every one of his furry teeth, running his tongue across them blindly before settling near his molars. Above him, a floorboard moaned.
The feeling of not being alone sobered him suddenly. He had heard her walking in, and raised his eyes to meet her. She wasn’t graceful, her movements were childish and sudden, and her bare shoulders caught and dropped the light from the street like it was she who was drunk, not him. It wasn’t until a bus passed by that he noticed that she was half naked. He wanted to check the time, to see if this was acceptable, but it required giving his position away. He didn’t want to look at her like this; he didn’t want to see the side of her reserved for someone else. He didn’t want this from her, but he had it now and had to be careful with what he did with it. Reluctantly, he closed his eyes and stopped describing the scene to himself, creating another instead where she discovered him and he felt the satisfaction of shame. But she remained ignorant, and passed by him noisily, up the staircase and away from him.
- From Quiet, Skeleton.
