by Krissy Kneen
‘So, you’re single?’ asked one of the actors, the latest attempt to woo her away from her little bubble of silence and out into the noisy world of human interaction.
‘No,’ she said and was surprised to find that she really did not see herself as single at all. Aaron Fitzgerald was an odd kind of companion but he was under her skin now, in her blood. Sometimes she found herself using one of his turns of phrase. Once when introducing herself to a new director she said her name was Susie-su and was startled at her own use of the word, his name for her and no one else’s. His Susie-su of the handcuffs and the deserted buildings was striding out with quiet Susanna into the world.
On this night they had abandoned all their partners. Susanna had tired of the endless parade of torsos, Aaron had not even pretended to be interested in them. Instead he settled in to their private chat, a flirty little adventure involving a red strapless dress, a restaurant and no underwear at all. She noticed he was particularly intent on describing each course. The entrée, which was made of foam so light they might be eating nothing but the crest of a wave; the fish, stuffed with herbs and steamed in a delicate sauce of butter, almonds and white wine.
He was moving onto the dessert when she heard the sudden screeching crash, the tinkling clatter of glass shattering onto asphalt, a sound of collision so loud and clear that it might have been her own apartment block assaulted by an angry driver in the car. She forgot the fantasy meal entirely and darted to the window. There was a crowd gathered at the corner of her street and a carpet of glass glittering in the streetlight, but the car or cars involved were around the corner and out of sight. No matter how far she craned her head out of the tiny window she couldn’t see them at all.
It was ghoulish, she knew, but she thought perhaps she might sign out of chat and take the lift down to the foyer to join the crowd. Her curiosity would torment her if she did not placate it. She paused at the window, considering. Just a quick interruption to their evening. She would make an excuse, tell him that she was just popping into the lavish restroom, make it a part of their play. She raced back to the computer, but there was already a message flashing on the screen.
Hang on Susie-su, there has just been some kind of an accident. Back in a sec.
She rested her fingers on the keyboard. Stared at the cursor flashing in the chat window at the bottom of the screen. The wallpaper visible on the screen was the print that still hung on her bedroom wall, Susanna and the Elders, the Gentileschi painting. She stared at the old men leering at the coy young girl, so beautiful and so unsettling. Susanna felt an odd unease rising in her gut.
Crazy accident.
The sudden text at the bottom of the screen startled her. She found herself flinching. Taking a deep breath, lifting her fingers off the keyboard as if they had suddenly grown too hot to touch.
Glass all over the road.
She stood and moved back towards the window. A crowd still gawking, the distant sound of emergency vehicles shrieking towards the scene.
Susie-su?
Susie?
Susanna? Are you still there, my lover?
Susanna centred her fingers on the keyboard. The little raised dots on the F key and the J letting her know that she was in the right place, hands centred, everything in its place.
Sorry, I’m here, Aaron.
Wouldn’t it be awful to crash a car like that? One minute wondering if you remembered to pick up milk, the next— so awful.
Are the police there?
Not yet but I hear sirens.
Susanna could hear sirens.
There are people staring. Why are we so drawn to accidents? A vision of tragedy, schoolyard brawls. I thought about going down for a look.
Down?
Downstairs. I live in an apartment building.
Odd. Susanna told him. I always imagined you lived in a house.
Where would we be without our secrets, Susie-su? I am almost certain that if you knew me in the real world, you would not speak to me anymore and I could not bear the separation. I think it is best like this, don’t you? I don’t understand why people spoil what’s beautiful by meeting up to drink cheap beer in a sordid pub.
Or fine wine in a high-class restaurant.
You would hate me, Susie-su. You would be bored of me in a second. But here we are in a restaurant of our own invention and you are captivated by me just as I am by you. Let’s stay here and drink a toast together. Although I hope you are wearing your panties. I think that gentleman at the table by the window can see up your skirt. Do you see the way he dips his head? And he is sweating uncomfortably.
Don’t you want to wait till the ambulance arrives before continuing our meal?
Not to worry, my dear. They have arrived already.
And they had. Susanna glanced towards the window, the rhythmic flare of lights cutting the darkness of the street, the sound of the sirens snapping off one after another, police, ambulance. Perhaps even the fire brigade. She no longer felt like going down to the street for a look.
Susanna didn’t know her neighbours. It was in her nature to slip quietly home, swiping her pass card outside the sliding glass doors, entering the modest foyer with her face turned resolutely to the floor. Sometimes she was forced to share the lift with one or another of the residents.
There was often a middle-aged woman, downturned mouth, a face that had once been pretty soured by a lifetime of disappointment and regret. Her fingers were yellowed by cigarettes and there was always a long thin rollie twitching between her fingers and a backup lodged securely behind one ear. Her hair was probably grey but seemed brown, nicotinestained. She sometimes had a name tag on her blue pinafore that suggested her name was Carole and wished you a nice day.
Carole always rolled her eyes when stepping into the lift. Susanna never took it personally. If the lift stopped for anyone else Carole would mutter, ‘For Christ’s sake,’ under her breath. Apart from Carole, Susanna knew only the maintenance man who lived on the ground floor, a cheerful emphysemic old soul who went as bright as a beetroot if he had to weed a flowerbed or walk up even a single flight of stairs.
She left for work later than usual. Normally she liked to beat the morning traffic, rising before the other people in her building, her shower water travelling down the rusty old pipes, gently easing the other residents out of their dreams. She liked waiting for the bus alone, or sometimes with a nurse who lived down the road.
Now she delayed her shower, staring down at the waking street, watching the remnants of the shattered glass picking up the colours from the sunrise and turning them to fairy dust on the road. A cyclist rode over the glitter and she leaped at the sound of a tyre popping. The cyclist dismounted, flipped the bike onto its handlebars and crouched, a blaze of yellow lycra illuminated by a ray of morning light.
She ate her breakfast at the bench. The laptop sat beside her, a mute reminder of the night before. Somewhere in the building Aaron would be waking up or sleeping, or stepping naked from the shower. Somewhere within easy reach. She started the oven. Baked eggs and pancetta. She had time now, plenty of time to indulge in a proper weekend breakfast. She set the coffee pot on the stove.
Susanna often heard the next-door neighbour coming and going, and she would wait till she heard his door shut and the sound of the lift chugging away before she left her apartment. She didn’t want the embarrassment of bumping into him in the corridor. But one time she had had her own hand on the door handle, the door a fraction open, preparing to step outside and brave the world. The sound of the neighbour made her pause. She waited. Just the one set of footsteps, light but confident. She caught a glimpse of him passing through the fractionally open door. She thought it was a man at any rate; she could not really be certain. Maybe it was a masculine woman with cropped hair.
Now she bent towards the keyhole of her door, a tiny scrap of light, just enough to confirm what she had suspected. The neighbour was a man. A man in a blue shirt with a leather satchel. That was all she could s
ee—she only had a scrap of torso to work with, but she was used to that. Unlike the other men, her men, there was very little skin to distinguish him at all. He seemed to be of fair complexion, though she had just caught a quick flash of arm, and there was a sizable masculine bulge in the front of his jeans. She rested her hand on the lock, listened for his footsteps till she heard him pause at the lift, the distant rumble of the mechanism trundling down. Only then did she open the door, as quietly as she was able, gently easing the lock free, pulling the heavy length of door towards her cheek.
He was facing the lift. Medium height, medium build, brown hair; she had never seen Aaron’s hair. His hand balanced on the soft laptop case slung over his shoulder. She studied his fingers. Were these Aaron’s fingers, the hands she had seen a hundred times? There were no distinguishing features on them at all, no scars, no tattoos, no hair to speak of. Aaron’s hands were the hands of any man, the hands of this man, perhaps, or of any other man in her building except maybe the wheezing maintenance man, who sported a spread of liver spots all the way up his arms.
The lift doors opened, the man turned suddenly and Susanna quickly pulled the door closed.
Peak hour for the lifts was between 7 and 8 am. Susanna chose her best dress, a butterfly-blue cotton check with a skirt that kicked out playfully over a white petticoat. The neckline was low, or at least lower than her usual skivvies and turtlenecks. The plunge of it rested squarely on her chest: just above her cleavage, but not so far above that there was no hint of what lay below. She tied her hair back with a black velvet ribbon.
Ridiculous, of course, to think he might recognise her. She had never even let him glimpse beyond the drape of her scarf. Sometimes she played brunette for him, sometimes redhead, sometimes blonde. She had even let him rest his hands on the silky waterfall of her dark Japanese bob while she played geisha with one of the anonymous men. Still, Susanna had chosen matching underwear in bright blue silk; lace, with elegant blue cups in shades of cornflower and summer sky. She wore her evening perfume, usually reserved for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the parties at the office that she went to reluctantly and left early, to the disappointment of every heterosexual man and gay woman in the crew.
She took a breath and stepped out of her flat. She dragged the door closed behind her and locked it. Seven doors rose from the faded brown carpet. Seven doors stared morosely at the same flock wallpaper she and Aaron had borrowed for their sexy motel adventure. All the elements of her online chatting were around her at every moment; the pressed metal ceilings that she passed under, the gardenia bushes with their blowsy petals dripping sweetness into the humid air.
She pushed the lift button and waited. The doors opened on a forbidding crowd, doubled in the mirrored walls and partly obscured by patches of rust and scratches and the remnants of spraypaint, the forlorn tag of some lost youth.
There were three women in the lift. Four including herself. She smiled at one of them, and discounted her. Three men, one with a tight belly spilling over his pinstriped pants. Two possible Aarons, one youngish, perhaps twenty-five, the other in his thirties. Both of them trim and well dressed and with equally anonymous fingers clutching a briefcase (the younger man) and a laptop bag (the older).
There was a cocktail of scents, soap, lavender, aftershave and, oddly, the smell of almonds. She tried to match each smell to one of the bodies but it was impossible. The lift stopped at the floor below and everybody shifted against each other. She felt the touch of a hand at her thigh. Her heart leaped. This could be Aaron, brushing against the fabric of her dress. But no. A sidelong graze from a small ginger woman who smiled cheekily and shrugged when Susanna caught her eye. The man who entered the lift was yet another Aaron, sandy-haired this time, hands free. She noticed the bulge of a wallet in his back pocket when he turned around to face the closing doors.
She had brought several of her men to this lift. In one scene the lift had broken down. Susanna and a torso were already taking advantage of the enforced delay when a third participant was introduced, a maintenance man more like Aaron than the old gentleman of the ground floor, carrying nothing but a wrench and a hammer and a large grin to indicate his approval of the activities being performed on his watch. She had never been in the lift with so many people, in real life or in fantasy, and she blushed, wondering what kinds of scenarios might actually occur.
The lift doors opened again, but the woman who stood outside shook her head. ‘Too full,’ she said, ‘I’ll wait for the next one.’
Two floors later they were all expelled into the foyer, three Aarons and a handful of others wandering off towards their day jobs. She had half-planned to follow him. Now she was torn. She stood in the foyer as each of the Aarons walked off in a different direction.
When they were gone she moved out onto the street, turning the corner of the building. There was nothing left from the accident except a scatter of glass and a twisted scrap of metal that might have come off the bumper of the car. No blood, no painted outline of a body, nothing to prove it had ever happened. A critical turning point in her life and nothing for her to souvenir at all. She looked up to the building, thirteen floors, seven doors to a floor. There were ninety-one potential doorways; but she would find him. She was determined to find him. Aaron Fitzgerald, her Aaron, the second love of her life.
She turned and walked towards her bus stop, startling in her blue checked dress. She saw them watching her, saw their heads turn and their eyes caress her calves, noticed this for the first time. For the first time she herself was looking, watching, wondering. Men streamed from her building. She had no idea that so many of them lived so close by.
She stood at the bus stop and four more Aarons joined her in her vigil. Women too, but they were not what she was looking for. A teenager in school uniform asked her for a light and she shook her head. Not what she was looking for at all.
The postman left mail in a row of wooden boxes on the ground floor. They all had locks, a metal clasp and a padlock; each was labelled with the name of a resident, but most of the residents named were long gone. If you were to believe the labels on the boxes you would imagine that Susanna was a Mrs Edith Long. In fact Susanna had toyed with using this name. She liked the juxtaposition: the properness of Edith against the lewdness of the task at hand.
There was mail for her today but nothing to become excited about. A bill, a sale catalogue, a small cheque for some freelance work she had been involved in, a balance of sorts. She took the envelopes out of the little wooden pigeon hole. The box next to hers belonged to her neighbour, her first Aaron, the man of the blue shirt and ordinary hands. The end of an envelope protruded. It was not difficult to pull the letter out of the box and even less difficult to conceal it among her own. This was not something she had ever done before. She felt the sweat spring to her armpits and was grateful for the breezy sleeves of the blue checked dress.
There were other mailboxes. She realised this just as she found herself beside the lift doors. Some of the boxes were locked, of course. But some had letters sticking out and some of them had lost their padlocks over the years. A couple had lost the top of the box altogether.
She let the lift doors slide open and stood, staring back at herself in the mottled mirror. The lift doors closed with a tired old rattle and she was walking back around the corner to where the letterboxes were. A treasure trove of coloured envelopes. Susanna walked the length of them as if she was momentarily unable to find her own. She glanced over her shoulder quickly as she moved from box to box. Speed was important. There were a few that would not yield their multicoloured treasures and she scrambled at the tiny openings, her fingers sweating, her heart a-clatter. Enough envelopes to fill her handbag; more tantalisingly out of reach.
The sound of footsteps and the chatting voices of young women. She turned and walked past them, two spike-haired beauties, and Susanna trembled as she passed, raking the ground with her terrified stare.
She pressed the button for the lift,
clutched the bulging handbag to her waist.
‘…yeah but he doesn’t know what’s good for him.’
‘You’re good for him.’
‘Exactly. Exactly what he doesn’t know.’
The girls had checked their letterbox and stood empty-handed behind her. There were letters peeking out from under Susanna’s elbow. She turned her body to one side, angling her handbag away from the girls.
‘I wish I was gay,’ said one of the girls. Green gelled hair, a band T-shirt, ripped at the neck. ‘I’d show him what he was missing.’
The other girl shushed her and laughed. They were looking at Susanna, she knew they were. She felt the blush rising in her neck. When the lift doors opened she hesitated. Wondered if it would be conspicuous to change her mind suddenly and take the stairs.
The girls pushed past her, she followed. The mirrored walls reflected her handbag, letters pushing at the mouth of it, a name poking out that was not her own. She shifted her elbow but that revealed a different name on a manila envelope, the letters too large to be concealed. As she reached past the girls and pressed the button for her floor, there was an awkward juggle with her satchel and several of the letters spilled out onto the floor.
Susanna rushed to pick them up but the green-haired girl was already on her knees.
‘It’s cool,’ she said and scooped up a bill for Mr A. Lee on 6 and a postcard for Julie McKinnie in 12D.
‘No one writes letters to me,’ green-hair said without seeming to notice that the letters in her hand belonged to several people, none of them Susanna herself. ‘It’s just text me or email me. A valentine’s SMS, can you believe it?’
