by Helen Slavin
Ambushed, I looked down at the red gash the bike had cut into me. The white rent of skin in the mound of my thumb. The snaggle teeth of that chain chewing me. Oil, like blood. My skirt tearing, as frayed as my temper. My leg prickled and stung as I hobbled towards my door. Trying to turn the key in the lock with my throbbing thumb. Nothing sticks out like a sore thumb, unless it’s that bike. Scarred and battered, I moved into my living room and hitched up the hemline. Sod it, I was going to bruise. And I’d got oil on the skirt too.
So. I occupy the ground floor flat but I don’t have the garden. The back of the house dips a level, so the garden belongs to the basement flat. Looking around, my own place is verging on a state of Zen, but I don’t need coffee tables and rugs and stuff. Just the sofa and the TV, although I’d struggle to remember the last time I switched it on. Books? Well, I work in a library. I painted the place white when I first moved in but I regret it. The damp shows through on the front wall by the blinds.
The bedroom is a bedroom, therefore it contains a bed. There’s a winter coat in the wardrobe but the chest of drawers is empty because all my underwear is drying on the radiator in the hallway.
I unloaded my shopping and put the kettle on, still feeling rattled from the supermarket. I ran the water for a bath, drew the curtains and the blinds and locked my door. I always wedge a chair under it. There have been a lot of break-ins nearby. And of course nowadays there’s also the loon who’s been stealing knickers.
I hoped the bath would settle me but it didn’t. It got worse really, the thinking about things I shouldn’t even be thinking about.
Music doesn’t help either. Apart from the fact that the woman in the basement, the one who owns the garden, complains if you so much as turn the radio on, there’s the added aspect that music is evocative. Music and smells, the most powerful forces in the universe. So I mauled around the flat listening to the night, the creaking of the buildings, the wind in the trees outside. I sat in my aged bathrobe in the window of the kitchen with the blind up.
If you have the lights off no one can see you, and in the middle of the year when the trees are in leaf, the housing that runs at the back of this street is obscured. They can’t see you, you can’t see them. Gradually, as the year turns, the leaves fade and fall and this whole other landscape of strangers is revealed as you bear witness through bedroom and bathroom windows. I switch the lights out and I watch through the binoculars. We are altogether too careless with electric lighting.
It was about three in the morning when I decided I could go into the garden. She was asleep downstairs; I couldn’t see the footprints of light from any of her windows. I opened the kitchen window and looked out over the new pergola. It butted up to my window and I’d been pleased when it went up few weekends ago. It formed a screen which meant I could look into the garden even when she was there. A bonus for me, because she is big on being nude, even in winter. She wanders around in big green wellies and leather gauntlets pruning the shrubs. And there was the memorable Sunday when she was masturbating in that hammock she’s strung up. Didn’t take the gauntlets off. She should have a website.
I stepped out onto the wooden framework, catlike, and felt the coolness of the night air sooth me. I crouched there with that feeling you have when you’re a kid, that uncertain daring of knowing you shouldn’t but doing it anyway. I breathed deeply, easily. It felt as if I hadn’t breathed for years.
Later, I did not remember falling asleep at the kitchen table until someone’s car alarm started to panic at about four and I uncreased my face from the cold melamine table top and wandered towards bed.
I was woken by a different alarm only a few hours later. Third Floor Biker Bloke clattering down the stairs. Every step echoed down to me, a countdown to the bellowing in fury as he saw his bike tyres.
Every day I will do it. I have decided. Every day until he realises it is a message. I am a very patient woman.
Koen ni wa iroiro na tori ga imasu
In the park there are various kinds of birds
I was a week into the scanning process and it was as if Mrs Atkinson had taken her magic gloves and enchanted me. My day started earlier and earlier. I had been coming in at eight when I knew Mrs Atkinson arrived, but I had noticed that the doors were already open then, the lobby polished and smelling of lemon juice and beeswax and linseed.
The caretaker, Mr Machin, arrived at seven and now so did I. I think it perturbed him. The library, which he was proprietorial about at the best of times, had been his sole territory for an hour each day. But I was careful not to impinge. I took the five steps across his freshly buffed floor to the steps and I vanished. It was like a wormhole.
Then I spent just about all day down there. I moved through the townscape, consigning it all to the memory of the scanner and the CDs. The old views of the park when it still had railings, elaborate and curlicued. The railway arriving, everyone in their whitest Sunday shirt, their hat-shadowed faces. The ironwork of the construction of the railway footbridge, moustachioed men working braziers and metal. Schoolchildren scowled from behind ranks of desks; one small boy at the back who had moved his head was blurred for eternity, his small hand, grubby, clutching chalk. The factories, the women standing arms akimbo by vast spinning and weaving machines.
I drank it all in, and at night I arrived back at the flat and fell into a shallow sleep, dreamed of the streets and carnivals, wandered the corridors and halls. Through the parks and gardens, past the fountains, where the leaves shimmered and rustled.
At last I reached the more domestic pictures and was forced to pause. My gaze lingered on the intricate lace of the weddings, the tight-angled bodices of brides, the stern bewhiskered jaws of grooms and grandfathers. The great army of bristles sweeping through history.
And then the laundresses of Kite House looked out at me. They were part way down a stack of portraits of domestic staff commissioned by Viscount Breck. Not for them the stiff formality. Instead, here was a quintet of women in a washhouse yard, bared forearms sinewed with work, the rubbed quality of their hands gripping soap, sheets bannered behind them.
I didn’t know the history that first day I looked at it and then, somehow reluctantly, blinked it into the scanner. That’s how it affected me; I held onto it, then I laid it face down on the desk and scanned in other images first, parks and gardens. The fish market off Wetherspoon Quay.
I just thought those women looked out at me. I’d been involved in other photos. I’d dreamed about walking the streets and buzzing round the roller rink, but this was different. The image spoke to me.
It was the girl at the far end, posed two or even three steps back from the others, by a washtub. Out of place. The girls in the forefront looked out with confidence, the middle girl, hand on hip, managing a hybrid of haughty and naughty. Try me, she seemed to challenge you. But the girl at the far end did not smile. Her face was turned to the camera as if at the last moment she had been instructed by the photographer to look up. She stood, arms at her sides, looking like a stranger, someone who had wandered in on an errand. Someone lost.
Mrs Atkinson found me. I had pushed the wheelie chair away from the desk because a thick splash of tear had fallen without me even realising it was going to. It so nearly splashed the laundresses. I was sitting stranded on the chair and the tears just flowed. Nothing wailing and dramatic, more like a persistently leaking tap where it’s all wastage and you need to get it fixed.
‘Ruby?’ she said in a voice so unlike her Mrs Atkinson, Archivist voice that I was startled. I thought she was one of the laundresses, speaking to me across the space–time continuum.
‘Ruby, whatever is the matter?’ and she moved towards me. I whizzed the chair backward slightly and turned the tap on the tears. Turned it. The washer was clearly gone however, because I couldn’t do it as instantly as I wanted. I used to be very good at that, at being able to turn it off so that I wouldn’t be found out.
‘Have you been down here all day?’
/> I tried to sound busy. ‘I’ve found some good quality photographic images in the files for Kite House.’ I had just about stopped it up now. I turned away from her and busied myself with the file, pulling out the few real beauties that I had found amongst all the work Viscount Breck commissioned. Most were standard set pieces, an interesting social record of the time and the people, but I found a few that had real merit. A different light to them, as if the photographer had taken the images at early morning or twilight, something it would have been quite hard to do in the days before modern lighting and cameras. He wouldn’t have been able to snap away with a different aperture setting or fiddle about with a light meter. He would not have had a silver-lined umbrella to reflect flash back onto them. Even so, he had captured it. Time, snared, to be revisited.
‘I was thinking that I could take them over to the print shop, see if we can have them printed up as posters. Or cards, perhaps. I’ve seen something like it in the museum shop, it would raise a bit of revenue for the library. Or, I don’t know, some other good cause.’
I was relying heavily on Mrs Atkinson’s English reserve now, on the fact that she wasn’t going to push me, that I would be allowed privacy. I was also aware that she would head straight up to the staffroom for her tea break and tell them all about it.
Of course, I’ve already indicated that Mrs Atkinson is a surprising woman. Yes. She allowed me my privacy. Yes, she headed straight up to the staffroom. But she didn’t speak to anyone, she made a cup of tea and brought it down to me. She placed it on the trolley table beside me so that it wouldn’t be knocked over and spoil anything. She said not one word, not even, ‘Do you take sugar?’
Is this kindness? I caught myself thinking that I was so far removed from kindnesses I couldn’t tell.
* * *
Outside, when I surfaced for lunch, it was raining sheet steel. As I made my way through Queens Park the water was washing down my face and into my clothing despite my waterproofs. I thought about taking up my usual seat at the back of the rose garden but the weather drove me further round the curve of the path, past the curry plants and the elephant’s ears to the stone pavilion. They had been repainting some of the benches in there for the winter and they were stacked neatly. I sat on the foremost. The wood warmed beneath me and I was happy to hear the rain pummelling down.
Rain makes me feel better. Or at least it did until I spotted Martha. She was dressed in her spectacular rain cape which is a waxy brown on the outside and a weathered and ancient shiny bronze on the inside. She had just come in through the side gate and I watched as she strode past the wide perennial border. She looked like a seed pod, tossed from one of the taller specimens there. She was moving away from me and I was, in any case, in a forgotten corner. I didn’t wave because I didn’t want company, but I watched to see where she would go.
And a voice inside my head warns, Look away now, but I don’t look away. Instead, I take in the details because life is about the details. It’s the small stuff that’s going to count in the end. You won’t care who was prime minister but you will care what colour her knickers were that day or how her breath smelled of liquorice. You will.
He was waiting for her in the orangery. I had not seen him. I wonder still if he had seen me, if perhaps his secret knowledge that I was there made her more delicious. She hurried in, Tierney holding the door for her and barely able to keep his hands off her long enough to shut it behind her. Then it seemed they were dancing, whirling round each other in perfect synchronisation as they moved further into the orangery. Actually that’s only a couple of feet because the orangery is not exactly a cathedral of space.
Martha flapped up the rain cape then, its bronze lining flashing as if Zeus were transforming in there. Of course, the only thing that transformed was Tierney’s face, burning with greediness, jaw clenching, as Martha was suddenly astride him.
I didn’t finish my sandwich. But I stayed to the end.
* * *
Afterwards of course, back at the library, I couldn’t look her in the face without thinking of the orgasmic O of Tierney’s mouth, of the white marble of her thighs. She hadn’t seen me, of that I was absolutely certain, but I had seen them and that was too much. I could hide in the archive but I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering.
I hadn’t felt that for a long time and I was terrified. That’s how it had to be for me, because I could see the signs above it all, as if someone inside my head was pressing a buzzer, an alarm. You cannot know what you connect with when you plug into each other. It’s the meeting of parts, not of minds. It shook my hands all that afternoon and my mind swirled with a strange brew of images of the laundresses and Martha and Tierney and other images, other memories. The last soggy photos in the bottom of my lifeboat.
I tried to think back to his face, smart and smirking by the photocopier. I wanted to think back and pick out the expression he might have had in his eyes. Not that I think I can decipher anything from that. Everyone, or at least the more philosophical everyones, tell you that the eyes are the window to the soul but I have to disagree. People can disguise themselves. There isn’t anything useful written on flags hanging in the backs of their eyes.
Kotowaza: ‘Saru mo ki kara ochiru’
Japanese Proverb: ‘Even monkeys fall from trees’
As she stood beside me in the staffroom making a cup of tea, Mrs Milligan asked Martha about some university event she was supposed to be going to that evening. More cheese and wine and some arty exhibition at the new gallery they’ve just opened. I forgot the kettle was boiling. I could hear it rattling away but I forgot to switch it off.
My mind was distracted by Martha and the smells that came from her. Something of him was in there, not just his sperm donation. There was the prickling of sweat at the roots of his hair and that certain something, expensively flowery but masculine, that he’d slapped on his face after shaving. The cold damp cobweb whiff of the orangery had brushed off on her, not just on the cobwebs on her hem but something that had soaked itself into her skin. I don’t know what is happening lately. I don’t know why I can’t keep the wrapper on it.
I wiped at my seeping eyes, giving an unconvincing pretence that some foreign body had lodged there. Neither of them said anything. Martha stirred her tea harder, talked about Mac Tierney and how Tripp Tierney Associates, his architecture practice and cultural hub of the town, is sponsoring this exhibition at the uni.
As that topic wound up, so too did Mrs Milligan’s courage and she garbled out, in a nerve-strung squeak, ‘You don’t think you could wangle me a ticket to this Joan of Art event, do you Martha? Only I was at school with Joan.’ The effort of asking for something nearly floored her; she was flushed with relief at having got the words out.
‘Joan?’ Martha’s left eyebrow quizzed.
‘The artist. It’s her exhibition. Joan Twydall.’ Mrs Milligan usually has that high-pitched voice on when she’s put in charge of the story morning for the pre-school borrowers and their stressed out, verging-on-a-breakdown mums.
Martha didn’t hesitate. ‘There aren’t any tickets as far as I know.’
A lie. The curve of her raised left eyebrow was the giveaway. I couldn’t work out why we wouldn’t be allowed to go.
‘Oh. Couldn’t Mac pull a string or something?’ Mrs Milligan queried, her voice wavering with the effort.
‘I’ve been told it’s a private show. Invitation only.’
And then I heard it, the high descant of doubt in Martha’s voice. She, clearly, had not been invited and she, too, couldn’t work out why. The scent of doubt, sappy and green, was what had soaked into her skin
In the end, all I had to do was phone up the university and find out. Setsuke, the Intermediate Japanese tutor, was on a half-term holiday in France this week and it seemed to me that the art show would shave a few hours off the evening, allowing for getting to and from the campus. I thought of telling Mrs Milligan but I assumed that she’d been feigning interest in the exhibition
to avoid my spilling tears.
After a dodgy start I began to enjoy the day, thinking about the journey, possibly a meal in one of the campus cafes. It was a town in itself. It would be an adventure, I thought; but one that was safe and planned and within my limits. And then I caught sight of my reflection in the doors as I left. I had no time to head back to the flat and it would be a pointless trip anyway, there was nothing else there for me to wear. I had the clothes I stood up in and a couple of T-shirts, and the usual wash-through of underwear drying on the radiator in the kitchen.
I had not felt the tug of the shopping precinct for a very long time. It had been shoved under some dusty rug at the back of my head, and now it peeked out. Not frivolous retail therapy. Necessity: I needed new clothing. There was a shop called Norsk that I had walked past several times, stylised in white on a Gustavian blue background. I had always liked the headless dummies in the window, their calico covered torsos and elegant hatstand legs.
As I stood in the curtained cubicle and fumbled my way out of my work jumper, I was ashamed to see it was so worn in places that it looked as if it had been knitted by spiders. I realised that I hadn’t bought anything new to wear for over a year.
Then, with a sudden rush of pleasure, it was dressing-up time. A bronze necklace against skintight bloodblack red top. Amber bangles. There was a rush of remembrance, more potent than heroin, as I pulled on a skirt that wasn’t mine, something new, tight, purple, slinky, revealing.
Which I didn’t buy. Burnt orange, cinnabar, peacock. Which I put back.
