MRS. BLUE HAS A DREAM
On the couch Mrs. Blue opened her eyes. She’d had a dream about Gracie. Mrs. Blue sat up on the couch. The moon shone through the blue curtains.
“I know where the N5 is,” she said. “That is near the airport.”
She pulled her legs over the edge of the couch and stood up. She almost fell over because her hip was still hurt.
“Not important,” Mrs. Blue said to her hip as she dragged herself to her wardrobe. “We need to get to Gracie.”
She tried to pull her stockings up over her feet, but she could not bend down far enough because of her hip. The stockings were necessary to keep her ankles from swelling up.
Mrs. Blue stepped into her sandals and put on her coat over her nightgown. Leaning on her walker, she went into the hallway with the stockings in her hand. She knocked on her neighbor’s door.
“Laura,” she said to the closed door. “I need you to put on my stockings.”
She knocked again. The light in the hallway flickered.
“Laura. Come out for a moment.”
No one answered.
Mrs. Blue looked at the other closed doors in the dark hallway. Then she turned around and walked into the elevator, out the sliding doors, and into the cold night.
ASHRAF AT THE POLICE STATION
Ashraf was in the waiting room of the police station, waiting to get his passport and his keys back. They had asked him questions about the parcels and about him sleeping in the van. He said he’d worked until late and he could not return the packages since the Royal Mail Centre was closed. He said he slept in his van for reasons that were not anyone’s business and that he didn’t know he could not park there. He explained it to them several times, and they explained to him several times how he should have stopped working when the Memorial Service began, and how people cannot live in cars, because if everyone started living in their cars, who knew what would happen. It had ended with an hour in the cell where someone had written MR. LI IS IN EAST on the wall, and some reprimands about parking in places where it was restricted (“We don’t just restrict things—things are restricted for a reason”). Then they’d given him a fine for parking in a restricted area and let him off the hook for not having his Royal Mail pass yet.
Ashraf sat down on one of the green plastic chairs in the waiting room. Behind the counter the policemen on duty were talking about their shifts in prison. “Hoodie-wearing big-mouthed little shits,” one said, “you just want to smack them at some point, but you can’t.” Ashraf looked at the clock in the hall. It was a quarter past four. His head was thumping and he was nauseated with lack of sleep. He tried to determine whether it was better to sleep a little before going to work or to stay awake. The hand of the clock quivered each time it pushed forward one second. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ashraf stared at it in silence. The quivering of the hand somehow resembled how he felt, trying to resist the inevitable. Tick. Tick. He felt like he had to brace himself against everything.
“Go with the stream,” the lady at the counter said, smiling as she gave him his things back. “Don’t be irreverent.”
If he could really go with the stream, he thought as he steered his van away from the police station’s parking lot, he would be back at City Statistics next week and he would be married in a year.
He counted the money he had left on his dashboard. Fifty. Only half aware of where he was going, he drove the van onto Canal Street. He found himself looking up at the building where he’d dropped the office girl off.
He’d just decided to go to sleep for a bit when one window in the building lit up. A few moments later, he saw an old lady coming out of the sliding doors, leaning on a rolling walker. She was wearing sandals and what looked like a nightgown under her coat. She turned the corner at the end of the street.
Ashraf waited for a few seconds to process the image. Then he turned the ignition and drove slowly after her.
MRS. BLUE WALKING THROUGH THE NIGHT
It was early, night still, as Mrs. Blue walked down Low Street. Most houses were still dark, except for one where a yellow light was burning and a man was eating his breakfast standing up, flicking through a newspaper. Somewhere a baby cried. The wind blew straight through Mrs. Blue’s nightgown. She felt small in the street, now that it was so empty.
“I’m coming, Gracie,” she murmured to herself. “Wait, wait.”
The wind blew the words away from her mouth. The bus stop timetable said the first bus in the direction of the airport would come at five thirty. Mrs. Blue looked at the clock above the bus stop. It was four o’clock.
At the end of the street she saw a woman turn the corner. Her hair was pinned up and she was tugging a suitcase behind her. It was a flight attendant. A taxi pulled up to the curb.
“Hello,” Mrs. Blue said, “I need a taxi too.” She pushed the walker forward, trying to run, but her legs were going slower than she wanted. “Go on,” she said to her legs, “forward, forward,” but when she turned the corner, the taxi was gone.
Mrs. Blue stood still. She had to hold on to the rolling walker. It felt as if sharp pins were piercing her ankles. Without looking down she knew her ankles had swollen up.
Mrs. Blue sat down on the walker. The wind was cold and she was tired. She shivered and got up again. Two lampposts farther down the street she had to rest again, leaning forward on the walker. A van drove slowly past her. At the end of the street the van turned and came back toward her.
ASHRAF AND MRS. BLUE
The old lady in her nightgown was standing a little away from Ashraf. The sun was starting to come up. Ashraf had parked the van by an abandoned service station building near the airport, after they’d driven up and down the N5 endlessly, the old lady pressing her face against the glass. She was very old, the lady, and she made small wobbling movements with her head. She said she had to meet someone here, a girl she knew from a television show who was stranded along the road.
“And don’t you dare take me to the hospital,” she said when he lifted her rolling walker into the back of the van. “I’ll jump out.” Now she was standing at the far side of the parking lot, looking out over the highway and across the dark pastures.
Ashraf stared at the fields behind the building, the ditches and the long, narrow lanes. He would miss this if he left; he would miss the flat horizon, the different shades of green. Although people sometimes suggested this was not his country, it was. He could feel it, and if they could open his mind they would find green, yellow, and red rectangles; black ditches; and a bluish-gray mist that filled the air and lay down between the houses in the mornings. He closed his eyes and rested his head back against the seat. “I feel alone,” he said suddenly.
Ashraf looked up. His voice had been loud in the van. He knew he felt alone, but he’d never accidentally said it out loud like that. When he was a child he had always looked forward to growing up, but so far it had been a bit of a downward spiral.
He wished he had something to believe in, something to hold on to.
“There are at least two sides to every story,” he remembered his teacher saying in history class, “but often even more. There are no absolute truths. Everything that happens becomes a story, nothing more.”
He looked at the lady standing in her nightgown in the parking lot. Her quivering voice traveled all the way to the van.
“Grace. Gra-cie.”
The words disappeared into the dark fields. No one responded.
MR. WHEELBARROW
Mr. Wheelbarrow pushed the gas pedal of the car down with his cane. The car jolted forward. His good leg he used for the brake. He hadn’t driven a car in a long time—Freddy always drove him—and he’d been taking a taxi to the hospital.
Mr. Wheelbarrow smiled. He could see the funny side of it as the car jerked on the empty highway, slowing down, then lurching forward.
“Grace,” he said as he drove along the highway, “where did you go, sweetie? Everything is all right now. We need to get the show
started again. For Freddy.”
NAMES ON THE DOOR
“Maybe she could not make it,” the boy said to Mrs. Blue. He was standing next to her.
Mrs. Blue did not look at him. She looked at the flat horizon from the parking lot and the landing lights that made a web in the dark landscape. A plane came down to land but went up again as if someone were pulling it by a string. She held her hand over her eyes. The feeling that someone was looming over her, the feeling that something or someone was steering everything came over her again. The sky was getting lighter, and the stars were almost invisible now.
The boy looked up too. “They say that if the universe is infinite, every single thing you can think of will exist somewhere. That means that in the end, everything can be true.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Blue said. She was silent for a while. She felt very tired suddenly. Then she said, “I don’t think she is coming.”
For the first time since she buried Harold she felt like she was going to cry. A lump came up in her throat and her lips were shaking.
“Excuse me,” she said. She turned away from the boy and walked to the service station building, taking small, careful steps. She wished she hadn’t refused when the boy offered to take her rolling walker out of the van. “If I walk slowly, I can go without.” Now she felt his eyes burn her back with pity as she shuffled foot by foot to the bathroom. She felt how old she was, how old her bones were, and she hated that she could not walk faster, she hated that she would fall over if she did not hold her hands out to the sides as she walked, and she hated that she was scared to fall.
In the toilet she sat down. She took her handkerchief out of her purse. She did not want to cry in front of the boy. She brought the handkerchief to her nose to suppress the sound when she saw the name written on the toilet door.
GRACE WAS HERE, it read.
Underneath it, in curlier, old-fashioned letters: AND MRS. BLUE.
DRIVING MRS. BLUE
Mrs. Blue looked out the window of the van as they drove down the highway. The sun was coming up and the sky was turning orange. She remembered it all now; she remembered how it all happened to her before and how it was happening over and over again. She remembered everything that was going to happen to her when she got back to her apartment, she even remembered what the boy in the driver’s seat was going to ask her in a minute or so.
She closed her eyes in the backseat. There was the pain in her hip, and there was the tiredness, but she did not care for any of it now. A lightness had come over her, making the pain tolerable. This is the feeling a runner must have when he is close to the finish, she thought.
Outside the window the ring road was filling up with cars, the first traffic jams were forming.
The boy cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he said hesitantly, “do you think life used to be nicer when you were younger? Was it really better than it is now?” His voice was nervous.
“No,” Mrs. Blue said resolutely. “It was not better, not worse.”
The van stopped in front of her flat on Canal Street. Mrs. Blue looked up at her apartment on the fourth floor. She knew what was going to happen at home, but she did not feel scared at all.
ALL PEOPLE WANT
Ashraf sat down on a bench near the canal. The old lady had insisted on walking to her house by herself. He had planned to try to take her to the hospital on the way back, but she had seemed so content and calm all of a sudden that he chose not to. He hoped that by the time he was her age, people would let him make his own decisions too. It was just before seven o’clock now. He still had some time to rest before work. He felt light with tiredness and pulled his knees up to his chest.
A man sat down next to him on the bench. “The whole world is going to hell nowadays,” he said. “And it is only getting worse.”
Ashraf looked sideways at the man. He was around forty and wearing a corduroy jacket and glasses. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” Ashraf wanted to say, but it only reminded him that he had nothing better to do himself. He looked at his shoes in the mud, the dawn light in front of him, the houses with the closed windows.
He thought of the text message his mother had sent him earlier. It had question marks instead of spaces between the words, because she never used her mobile phone.
Please?come?home?
“All people want is things,” the man next to him said. “And sex and violence. Clothes only last one month nowadays. Kids as young as four learn how to shoot guns on the computer. It is getting worse every day, and the politicians just talk and do nothing.”
“How does this help anyone?” Ashraf said to the man. “What good does this do?”
He did not wait for the answer. He got up from the bench and started to walk away.
“You are a spoiled generation,” the man shouted after him. “You don’t know how good you have it. In my day you were thankful.”
Ashraf covered his face with his hands and breathed in deeply. He walked to the apartment building and stopped in front of the entrance. He had remembered the office girl’s apartment number without realizing it. Four hundred twenty-four.
GRACE IN THE STORY
Grace looked over her shoulder. The car was driving along the hard shoulder, slowing down and jolting forward, but coming straight toward her. She left the asphalt and walked into the dark fields, away from the road. Her feet got slippery in her sandals from running through the wet grass, the straps cutting into her heels.
Two beams of light illuminated the field in front of her. He had gone off the road and followed her.
Grace stopped. She crouched down and closed her eyes. She wished she were far, far away from here. She wished she were with Rick again, lying in his arms in the bedroom under the silk rose-colored sheets.
A car door opened behind her. She kneeled deeper down in the grass and bent her head between her knees. She knew what it meant to be alone by the side of the road, with footsteps that were getting closer and closer.
“I’m going to die,” she cried. “Just like in the movies.”
NEW PERSON
“How dare you? How dare you do this to me!”
The secretary opened her eyes under the blanket. It was morning. The lawyer was on her answering machine. His voice was shouting through her apartment.
“My filing system!”
The lawyer stopped talking. She only heard him breathing for a while.
“How dare you do this to me!”
She pulled the blanket off. The ceiling was gray with dusty white stripes drawn on it by the sun that shone through the curtains. She got up out of the bed and pressed the mute button on the machine.
She walked to the window. Bright white light shone into her eyes; the sun was hanging low in the sky. The secretary squinted at the sun.
“Yellow,” she said to the sun. “Yellow.”
The sun was hanging still above the hardware store.
“Yellow,” the secretary said again. The sun shone back at her. Slowly the white rays piercing her eyes colored yellow.
The secretary smiled. She did not know if her mind was coloring the sun yellow or if the sun was sending its yellow into her eyes, but she didn’t care. She saw the dusty yellow stripes moving over the floor when she opened the curtain farther, she saw the yellow edge glowing around the Halfords on the horizon, the yellow of the buttercups along the canal, the yellow of the streetlights—the light shade of yellow the sun gave all things.
The secretary closed the window and turned around in her living room. For the first time since she’d lived there, her doorbell rang.
YOU CAN COME UP
Ashraf pressed his hands to his face and took a big gulp of air, and another one, and another one. He stood there for minutes, in front of the apartment building of the office girl, his head thrown back. He could not utter a word when he heard her say hello through the speakers; he did not even know what he was doing there. He was just so tired. He had never felt alone like this before. The air did
not want to get into his lungs, and he had to gasp for it every few seconds, like a fish.
He pressed his hands to his forehead.
“You get ten seconds of pity,” he heard his father say. That was what he always said when one of them fell and was crying. While they were crying he would count down from ten, and when he reached one they were calm again. Ashraf counted down from ten as he looked up to the sky. When he reached one, he would go on again. Seven, six, five . . . He tried to slow his breathing down.
“I can see you from my window,” a voice behind him said. It came from the speaker next to the doorbell of the office girl’s building.
Ashraf stopped counting.
“You don’t look so good.”
Ashraf looked up. The office girl was looking down out the window with the telephone in her hand.
“I’ve had a bad night,” he said. “I slept in a police cell. I haven’t showered in three days.” His face flushed immediately as he heard himself say this. He sounded like some kind of homeless criminal, he thought. He wanted to turn away before she could politely tell him to go, but then the door made a buzzing sound behind him.
“Please, come up.”
THE SHOWER
The secretary watched the package boy walk into her hallway. He nervously searched the hallway for a place to hang his coat. When he saw there wasn’t one, he carefully put it on the floor next to hers. He looked nervous, she thought, but mostly he looked tired. There was nowhere to sit, so he stood.
The secretary did not know what to say. She cleared her throat, but no words came out. It was silent in the apartment. Then her phone started ringing again.
“Not only will I get you fired,” the voice of the lawyer shouted through the apartment, “I will make sure you will never work in any other office again!”
Rus Like Everyone Else Page 19
