by Stella Duffy
Outside it is wet, cold after the suffocating recycled warmth of the tube. He shivers in the wind. She turns and laughs, grabs his hand again.
‘Should have brought a coat, shouldn’t you?’
Hers is red. Red wool he thinks, with black velvet collar and cuffs. It looks expensive. But she doesn’t. There is something too sharp about her to look wealthy. And besides, she is leading him through alleyways, down dark streets. These houses are not tall white painted georgians. She is leading him to a council block. Up stairs, dark, lit by broken lights and reflected dirty puddles. She wouldn’t live four floors up in a council block off Old Street if she was wearing a real wool coat. He thinks all this in the time it takes her to grab her keys from the bottom of her overfull bag and let them in. They walk down a short, blue painted passage. She shows him into the sitting room, turns on the light. It is normal. There is a view through the windows, she pulls the curtains against the distant lights of the city and the far more present tower block looming opposite. The room is small now and quiet, except for the remote thump of a too loud bass on a neighbours stereo. There is a rug in front of the gas fire. A tiger skin rug. With head and staring, wide open eyes. The tail and ears are moth eaten.
‘Like my cat?’
He laughs.
‘It looks like it got a bit of a shock.’
‘One of your small surprises?’
‘Maybe. Do tigers deal in journeying uncertainties?’
She shrugs her shoulders.
‘This one did.’
In the shrug, her autumn red hair lifts with the black velvet collar of her coat. He glances at the nape of her neck. Likes the look of it, her pale skin, and then looks back at the rug.
‘It’s cool, I suppose. But it’s a bit old isn’t it? A bit ravaged. You could pick up something nice from Camden Market. There’s those great sun and moon rugs. Everyone’s got them.’
Her smile is compassionate, knowing.
‘Yes. They have. I’ll see. I’ll think about it. Turn on the fire. I’ll make us a nice cup of tea.’
He had thought sex. At the least a quick snog, a fumble. But tea? He didn’t think that women with tiger skin rugs drank tea. Even small women with narrow shoulders and wide hips. He frowns and looks at her.
‘No beer?’
Her smile is still there.
‘Leave it to me. It’ll be a surprise.’
In the kitchen her hands are deft. The tea is to be ginger and honey. Warming with lots of soft brown sugar, lemon and a large dash of whiskey. She is still unclear as to why she has brought him here. Not sure what she means to do with him. Not sure why she did it in the first place. She hears him walking around her sitting room. He will be looking at the books, the pictures, the photos. Her sister, her ex-lover. While the kettle boils she removes her coat and boots. The kettle begins to whistle and in its admiring glance she takes off her dress, tights, Marks and Spencer’s matching knickers and bra. A softer and babier pink than she feels. She pours bubbling water into the pot, a drop breaks out and splashes her naked stomach, she licks her finger and smooths the tiny burn with her own cool saliva. She arranges the tray with heavy mugs and tea-cosied pot, a plate of tiny sweet japanese biscuits and four thin slices of lemon.
She enters the sitting room with her offering.
He is on the floor by the fire. Going through her record collection. She has not yet graduated to cd’s. He had expected to hear her boots return and is surprised by padding feet. He looks up at her. He is surprised.
‘Oh. Yeah. I mean … wow! Great!’
In his exposition on the uncertainties of tube travel she had thought him almost eloquent. It had helped her to take his hand, offer herself. Now, in the face of her flesh, he has lost his words. She hopes he will rediscover the power of speech. She kneels on the rug, pours tea, adds lemon, a little more whiskey. She hands him his drink. She waits for composure to return to him. She had thought that making herself naked in her own home would grant him some of the power he’d thrown away as he came through the door. She had also thought that it might just give her more power. She wasn’t sure which would happen. You never can tell until the clothes are off. Another small uncertainty.
She takes the Joni Mitchell album from him and they drink hot tea with a free man in Paris. He is not sure if he is a free man tonight but the tea has woken and refreshed him, it is whiskey heavy and ginger invigorating like the whiskey macs his father made him when they’d come in late from a cold night on the terraces. His mother clucked her disapproval. The young woman in front of him smiles assent. He leans to kiss her and finds that the soft peck on her mouth is biting back at his lips, cheek, tongue. Their mouths taste of the same bittersweet liquid. His shirt, damp from tube sweat, rain wet and nearly dried by the gas fire is damp again, sweat running from his armpits. He smells like travel and the beginnings of sex. Her nose wrinkles. She is still uncertain. Knows what to do next but not what to do after.
He is quickly naked. There is art in the removal of patent leather DM’s, slowly drawing the shoelace through the silver eyelet holes. There is no art in the removal of thin wet shirt, old trainers, ripped jeans. They kneel opposite each other. The tea things to her left. Her narrow shoulders and wide hips swing towards him. He is not unaware that there is a certain ceremonial touch to all this, he just doesn’t know what the ceremony is for.
In the hot moment of fucking, she looks down at him. His eyes shut tight beneath her kisses. She has done the next thing. The kissing. And done the next thing. The biting. And the next. The tracing of his collarbones under his thin blue veined skin. The kissing of his nipples, the kissing of his cock. They have been polite and quiet, taking it in turns to do the next thing and the next. They have maintained the order and the pattern that is expected even from a fuck picked up on the tube between Camden Town and Euston. And now they are here, in the fuck, the tiger is smiling at her and the young man’s temples are throbbing above tightly shut eyes, all his energy, his life, pitched into doing that next thing. He would call out her name but he doesn’t know it. She nods to the tiger, shakes her head clear of thought and joins this man in the moment of body where the only uncertainty is in when and the smallest surprise is the quiet ‘oh’ of after. Tired and finished he rolls himself into her and she strokes him to sleep.
He sleeps easy and fast.
She leaves him curled on the tiger rug and takes the tray back to the kitchen. On the draining board is the small paring knife she used to cut the lemon slices. The knife cuts sharply into his throat, his eyelids flutter as if they would wake and warn him but it is too late, he feels the acid of the lemon juice as he drowns in the gurgling blood and hiss of escaping air. She is glad she is naked, she would not want to stain the green velvet dress. The tiger is bloodied but that doesn’t matter. The tiger is old. She has needed a new rug for some time. He said so, didn’t he? She is finished in a couple of hours. Goes to the bathroom and showers with the plastic shower attachment. Her father had promised to put in a real shower but died before he had time. She could have done it herself, an easy enough job according to the cute boy in the hardware shop, but she’d never wanted to acknowledge to her father, even in death, that he was expendable. Besides, the shower attachment, in ugly grey plastic has a certain seventies, retro charm.
She goes to bed alone, Joni Mitchell in her head, his kiss on her breath.
In the morning she wakes bright and early. Climbs out of bed and pulls on her gym gear. She must do something to build up these narrow shoulders. Run more, swim more. Be more with her body. The morning is fine and clear, last night’s rain has left a sharp clean city behind it. On her way out of the flat she peeks into the sitting room. He is lying in front of the fire, in a pool of pale winter sunshine. A man skin rug. With a look of surprise on his face.
Stick Figures
THE STICK IS the most glorious signifier. Yes, she has been far more ill than this. Standing on death’s door, suitcase in her hand, a songbook compendium of h
ow close to the very far. Or other times, not physically ill but worse, heartsick. The pumping organ of possibility shattered and bleeding and inexplicably pumping still. Pushing through the life-giving blood regardless, when all she wanted from life-giving was to give it away. She has been far more far gone than this. She has sat in the bright-lit pit of despair and known darkness was never coming back to offer fake-death solace. Today though, she is the victim of average muscle spasm, ordinary back ruination. After weeks of too much fun, at the end-of-joy-times, she walks with a stick.
The stick is useful, last night she used two to climb the stairs. One her own, the other a hand-me-down legacy from her grandmother’s death, the stick turned chalice, its host of heavy memories was so full. Climbing the stairs with those two was a hazardous ascent, suburban K2. Today she uses just the one, her own. A painted walnut stick, straight and solid but light, plastic handle ending in a dragon-head mould, a gift on her thirtieth birthday. Joke gift, comedy present, and yet so useful. Too useful. Too damn necessary. But that is just the background, the how-to of getting here. And it is the point of now that matters, more than the past passing of arrival.
Now, she stands on the threshold of the foyer, helped from the car, the partner-as-driver speeding off to find free parking in time for the drinks and chocolate purchases that are the only way to get through these next hours. And the stick-bearer is left alone for the first time in seven days. She takes a trembling step. The steps are trembling, the pain is real. And she holds the stick before her. It is not noticed at first, the lights are dim at the entrance, the queue for programmes and sweets lengthy, the milling children stand in the way of the dragon’s head she clasps surprisingly comfortably in her right hand. But then with a step-limp-step she moves into the body of the room, the double size ceiling, a mezzanine of watchers ready to look. Just in case, just in case she is someone who matters. She is not. But something about her does. And the stick sweeps all before it. It creates a path. Watchful fathers pull heedless children from before her, teenage girls turn shuffled backs, old ladies offer sympathetic glances. Sympathetic and not a little curious. She is not an old lady. But she is surely ill.
The stick is a wand, conjuring stories in those around her. The old men bless their good fortune and assume the worst. She has been struck down by an incurable disease, she is not long for this world. The women try not to look her in the eye, not to know too much. The teenagers do their best to ignore her. They are out of place anyway in such a theatre foyer, brought along by over-eager godparents or fissured-family obligation, forced here by tickets and purchases proving they are still unaware that while the child is no longer a child, he or she also not ready for the step to adulthood that might make the Christmas treat again a joy. The semi-young and still-young are not yet ready to process the fear that seeing another woman in pain stirs in them. She carries an obvious signifier of bodily decay but she is not that much older than them. Twenty years perhaps, and though those twenty years seem many more decades, even the most callow recognise her clothes are younger than their parents’ dress, her hair is a better cut and colour. And yet she carries that stick. She is a symbol of death in their post-Christmas glitz and it is not right they should have to look at her. The teenage boy passes his friend another bottle of the illegally bought Bacardi Breezer with which his step-father hopes to ingratiate himself and they turn from the dangerous sight the stick-bearer offers. The limping woman is a witch to make them think of these things.
She continues her slow hop march through the room and now there is a teenage girl looking at her. She looks like a teenage girl. That is, she looks with the manner of a teenage girl – half defiant stare, half embarrassed snigger. She cannot help herself, her face simply forms into the sneer of semi-shame. Shame for the woman walking with a stick and shame at her own more than passing interest. This is the look that has not yet perfected itself into a mask of adulthood. It does not entirely understand how to lie, covers itself with squint and sneer and giggle and wide-eyed wonder that a body could do so much damage to its walker. Not that this girl does not fight her own bloody body battles, not that her own skin and flesh and not-enough-bone has not betrayed her often enough – but that a body should do so this publicly. The teenage girl endures agonies both silent and loud-voiced but despite her constant cries – or perhaps because of their very open nature – she is also perfectly aware that most of what makes her cry and lie awake at night is not all that obvious. She has read the books and seen the educational videos they provide at school, she may have anorexic body, but she does not have anorexic head. She is often in pain and at the same time she absolutely knows that in the eyes that look out of other heads, she is perfectly gorgeous and young and fine. There is nothing about her – even with the thin arms and legs – to suggest to the general public that she might be harmed. This girl lives in the real world after all, where a stick-thin teenage girl with jut-out cheekbones and shaded eye sockets is more whole and less obvious than a not-quite middle aged woman walking with a dragon’s head stick. The girl knows the pecking order here. She is not too shy to look.
People the stick-bearer’s own age glance and take care. Their looks contain curiosity too. She should not be here perhaps. She does not have a small child on her arm, a whining teen at her back. Why has this woman come to this foyer alone, for whom is she waiting in obvious pain? Parents drag their careless toddlers back from her wake, pull away little arms and stumpy legs that travel on with no regard, heads turned this way and that, eyes darting distracted from colour to sound and which cannot see that which is directly in front of them. There are assumptions of car crashes and birth defects, cancerous disease and minor ailments. Perhaps this evening out is a last treat. Though the woman appears to have all her own hair – short hair but surely her own. She is not especially grey or wasted, fails to conform to the televisual anti-glamour picture of terminal illness. Maybe then, it is a simple breakage, something that will heal with time. Perhaps the stick she holds is the result of a night out and a fall into the gutter of drunken excess. But there is no certainty. And as long as the reason for the stick is unknown, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-ers are forced to offer her the benefit of the doubt. Yes, maybe the woman did cause this injury to herself. But then again, perhaps she was run over in a horrific hit-and-run accident, losing all her babies and possibility in one fell swoop. Perhaps she is dying slowly and painfully of one of the many degenerative diseases that acronym-swamp our present passing. Perhaps this is the last ballet for one who once danced herself. There are so many possibilities and the stick which offers up each one, confirms none. That being the case, the limping, leaning woman is given a wide berth and safe passage through the thronging crowd. A crowd that opens up to let her pass and then, when she has moved from immediate eye-contact space, turns to look after her, watch her go. They hold their breath and wait. She is ill somehow, they would rather she would go.
She can feel them look after her, knows the sensation, though she has usually been the starer not the stared at. Her grandmother had a stick. The old woman who, in her excessive age, rarely left her dark-furnished room except to shout at the little girl when she was playing the tuneless piano too loudly. The piano was for dance, not music. It was not there for itself, what it alone had to offer, it was an adjunct. Without feet and tempo and time steps the piano might as well be silent. The piano should be silent. At night the woman would climb up, high bedstead, candlewick bedspread, placing her stick carefully by the bedside table, it’s carved marble head leaning against her glass of water, her headache pills, her stomach pills, her back pills. The black head of a trusty Labrador pinned firmly into a rich maple branch, honed and sanded but with three intentional kinks left in to show its true origins, the Labrador’s ears and sensitive snout worn silky smooth by her years of use. This cantankerous grandmother did not have her stick because she was an old woman. To the little girl it seemed astonishing possibility, but she was not always an old woman. Sometimes it c
ame in handy, now that the stairs were sometimes too much, when her rheumatic knee claimed attention, but she’d had this stick since she was just twenty-eight. Fit and healthy then in every way. Though she no longer uses it for its original purpose, she always used a stick for her work.
A dance teacher, she began with a cane and worked her way through several more before this model, old even then, was presented to her as a parting gift from a high-flying student. It is the stick that has pushed in a thousand backsides, turned out a million toes, beaten scores of repeated time steps into the dance hall floor. Glissade, jeté, pas de chat, tournée, glissade, pas de bourrée, but no, stop, not like that, and no! The piano stops, the weekday needle is dragged from the gramophone, the Saturday morning pianist reaches for her knitting, the class of girls pause, mid-step, breathless and flushed, sweaty streaks of hair sneaking from heavy-pinned buns. All wrong, you are all wrong! Turn out and right out and here and easy and hold and now – prepare and face and point. But not like that, not like that – like this girls, how many times must I show you? Do it like this. Like me. Like this. Watch me. And then the moment they wait for in every class comes and she lifts her long skirt so all the girls can see the suspenders and corset she wears, firming and framing her body into the straight sylph she was at nineteen when she too flew high and away only to land back home with a bump and the necessity of a small town teaching career. But they did not know that then. They only saw an older woman and her high stockings, ageing legs, veined thighs, the belly-button giggles catching them before the stick did.