Do You Love Me or What?

by Sue Woolfe

  I usually eat sandwiches from home on a little strip of lawn outside the office, for there’s no knowing what city shops mean by butter. ‘Butter on your bread?’ and then they reach their knife into yellow fat. I feed my crusts to an edgy group of seagulls who eye me with the friendliness of snakes. My bench was donated by someone whose blackened name on a brass plate is now illegible, but I like you, unknown person, bequeathing a park bench so even when you’ve become illegible, you still give pleasure. Today I need a café out of the rain and slosh my way to one I’ve seen from the bus a street or so away from the office. I pass a dress shop – and despite the downpour, I admire a lace dress on the mannequin in the window but decide it would make me more vulnerable, a hardware shop where I’m tempted by a set of wooden spoons with little dolls on the handles but decide I don’t want a Nan-type kitchen – and then a shop that seems full of ice-cream pink and pale green paper.

  Waves scurried by like crowds in a subway, heads bent.

  Simon again, he’s always in my mind.

  Waves scurried by like crowds in a subway, heads bent.

  This isn’t the tight-lipped Simon I know. This is unrestrained, a linking without contrivance, as if waves and rushing crowds are, to him, already superimposed on each other. Are they?

  Today’s list

  I feel unlocked in my mind by the connection of waves and subways, as if I’ve burst out of a dungeon into the air. Do other people feel like me?

  Is there special thinking that poets do, that artists do? But not only them: what about tens of thousands of years ago, when someone amongst my distant kin had, in the blur of swirlingly disparate sensations – dog worm bird man flower dolphin bud spider child – walked over to a tree and scratched an entirely new mark: one.

  Is it a special mind? Special muscles? A special gland? Special paths of thought? Streams of green fluorescent light so he sees lines between disparate things that no one else has traced? Now I’ll never see waves without a scurrying crowd.

  Can anyone make those connections? Can I?

  And are you allowed to say that? But who is there to give permission?

  Those times when I was little, lying in the spare paddock, nose so deep in the grass it tickled, thinking about you,3 thinking about the smell of dirt, ant piss, then nothing – that was when I was happy. Strange things came into my mind. Does Simon lie down – not in a paddock, of course – and strange connections come into his mind?

  I’m so deep in thought, I step into another puddle and then on the footpath, my shoes squelch, making puddlets of their own. Will the shoes dry out overnight? What will I wear tomorrow if they’re still damp?

  I order sandwiches and coffee, and reach for a free newspaper someone’s left on a nearby chair, but Simon keeps invading me.4

  The new Left Brain Right Brain theory might be a clue – Simon knows to use the creative side of the brain – but many scientists are scornful of the theory. It doesn’t feel that my brain is divided but the mind tricks us, making us believe that what we feel is what is. And should I be saying brain not mind? Are the two different?

  People say creative brains buzz with ideas all the time, but my nose-in-the-grass times didn’t come with a feeling of buzziness. Just a sort of dreaminess. I heard about a scientist who said that creative people’s brains go more still than normal.5 I wish I could ask Simon but I’d have to admit I’m stalking him and ruin everything – and maybe he wouldn’t even know.

  The rain so heavy it weighs down thought. I’m bogged down with Simon. I almost wrote bedded down. I wish I’d met him before his wife came along but of course peasant stock wouldn’t rate.

  I watch cars plough through the wet streets like tractors, sending fountains that spangle people, or bedew them; there’s new but uneasy camaraderie as people cower together on damp porches, considering a dash between the buildings, eyeing the passersby like me who hold umbrellas self-righteously, not offering to share.

  I hide from the rain, from thoughts of him, in the pastel paper shop. It has a heavy-panelled, old-fashioned green door. I push it open, and the doorbell tinkles into a hush of pale colours, I put my dripping umbrella in a stand. A woman, a thin streak of black dress behind the counter, looks up in a preoccupied way and smiles doubtfully. My spirits plummet for the shop sells only gold embossed journals, spiralled notepads with marbled edges, note paper decorated with flowers. The well-mannered pastels, the ice-cream pinks, blues, and peppermint greens and even the fleshy thickness of the paper insist that this paper must not be smeared with the dirt of the unguarded. This is not the shop for poets.

  I turn to leave and almost knock over a display of coloured inks in little bottles with a human shape of shoulders – almost like a Minoan female sculpture. When I tip the bottles back and forth, ink flows and lingers, and the glass is stained, this one with crimson, this one with emerald, this with purple, this with turquoise. They’re my glossy bared shoulders I’m imagining, and it’s Simon tipping the bottles. Am I in love? Of course not – it’s just natural to imagine the poet tipping the ink like that while he thinks his unrestrained thoughts, his brown eyes with eyelashes as long as a cow’s, tracking the turquoise, purple, emerald, crimson ink flow past the bared shoulders and up the slim neck, and back again.

  Can I help you? The shop assistant, the elegant black figure.

  The colours, I say to the woman. I can’t say more, with the light blazing through them. My voice chokes. For no reason at all, there are tears in my eyes.

  They come in a boxed set of four, she says.

  I’m relieved to talk about boxes and sets and how many.

  Oh, four is too many. Just three.

  Because a plan is forming. If he wrote in these inks, maybe he’d be more often unrestrained. I would be, I know.

  I take risks with the traffic in side streets, partly because I want to keep as dry as possible, but also because of my thoughts about Simon, not thoughts exactly, I couldn’t call them that. Just nudgings of thoughts.

  Is he thinking about me right now? A green stream of blazing light?

  I carry the bottles back to my office in a little plastic bag so the white boxes stay new. But a rogue gust of wind blows my umbrella inside out, the spokes bend in the wrong direction like bony elbows. I turn into the wind as a sailing boat might, hoping to catch another gust – but it’s useless, I give up, run through the rain like everyone else.

  By the time I pass my park bench, I regret the emerald ink. Simon wears serious, scholarly colours, brown sweaters and trousers, navy blue cardigans and black trousers. How can I have been such a fool? By the time the lift arrives, I’m regretting the purple ink. And by the time I enter the workroom and see him chatting to Sarah, the Italian translator, in her cubicle, leaning his elegant, slender body against the board that divides her from her neighbour, and swinging his coffee mug back and forth, I know the scarlet is ridiculous.

  I’m weak with jealousy – perhaps he’s talking to Sarah about poetry, about what goes on in his mind – is it Sarah’s greyhound body that has elicited the talk I’ll never have with him? Oh how foolish, how foolish I’ve been. Chastened, I put the inks in my drawer, along with the dust, the stapler, the large orange scissors, the bent paper clips I refuse to throw away. All three inks are inappropriate. What if he shows them to Sarah? What if she says: That fat girl’s got a crush on you! Watch out! And he’ll say in his boarding-school way: What could she have been thinking of?

  This afternoon, tomorrow, next shift, I’ll just mention I’ve seen his photo, I’ll admit I know he’s a poet. That’d be better, that would make it the right moment to give them to him. Wouldn’t it?

  But when he comes back to his desk, he sits without looking to left or right, his handsome head constantly bent to his work, and I can’t stop myself, I interrupt him to ask his opinion about using ‘whom’ in a conversational setting, and he seems to drag himself out of a deep pool of reflection.

  I won’t say anything now.

  Day f
our of the rains: The rain has eased and I’m so preoccupied with rehearsing what I’ll say, I forget to buy a new umbrella.

  I’ll say I was in that card shop down the street and fell in love with this little bottle of ink but I’d never use it – would you like it? I’ll show him just one, the turquoise.

  Would you like it?

  I go over and over it. I must get the tone exactly right: indifferent, wry, confessing to a foible.

  As always when you don’t take an umbrella, it starts pouring again.

  I haven’t found the right moment but it so happens that we finish our shifts together. Just as I pack up, the rain becomes a wall of sound again. He hears my gasp. At least, that’s how it seems.

  I’ve got a car and an umbrella, he says. You need a lift?

  The old hotel has a flight of twelve marble steps sweeping in a blaze of white around a corner and marching up to the lobby. Pieces of marble have fallen off the outside corners of some of the steps but the staircase remembers being grand, with Art Deco lamps shaped like tulips of light. Simon insists I must go up first, and he’s assiduous about protecting me with the umbrella. At the top of the steps, now hidden by the curve of the handrail from the footpath below, I stop to fish my key out of my handbag, and I turn to say at last:

  I was in that card shop down the street

  but his lips are open on mine, his mouth, the poet’s mouth, only it’s a cavern full of teeth.

  He pulls away.

  All you’re interested in is pleasure, he says.

  The words take their time to untangle, they’re in a language I don’t speak. I reel, steady myself, wait for the whirling to stop.

  He puts his mouth back on my open one, breathes words into me, dirty words, he’s got peppermint on his breath, my mind stupidly snags on details, it says that he never sucks peppermints.

  And then, The Ceasing comes: my cells of jelly: my cytoplasm cytoskeleton endoplasm lysosomes mitochondria plasma ribosomes; they all jolt together, clang, collide, change shape, mill, murmur. My wits fail.

  The Ceasing, as it always happens, has always happened since the terror.

  His voice, his teeth-filled cavern, his peppermint-breath words, more dirty words I won’t tell you, don’t want you to ever know, you my better self.6 And then to prove I’m who he says I am, he reaches under my skirt and between my legs.

  Why don’t you run shout kick scream bite punch, you’ve been trained, they taught you, they said Don’t just stand there.

  But I’m always eleven years old, the years have crashed away, down the broken white marble steps, I’m eleven and unable to run shout punch kick scream bite punch.

  He thinks my stillness is saying yes, they always do. I become aware his palm is making a crescent moon of heat under my breast.

  And more heat – oh, don’t, don’t let him notice, don’t let his hand know – my panties have a flood of warmth, I’m losing control, I am eleven years old and terrified and urinating and they’ll know, they’ll smell.

  He’ll find me out. He’ll know others have been here before.

  A bone in him, oh his penis of course swells and hardens against my belly.

  I should yell but I scream the way I do when I’m asleep, a silent scream.

  Heavy feet on the steps – not high heels, full feet – a man’s feet? Who cares, man or woman? – the creak of an umbrella being closed, a big one, rain-laden one, heavy plastic folding. The dearest sound.

  It’ll be okay. Soon.

  His penis softens. I’m rescued, rescued, the madness of The Ceasing stops, my wits return, I pull his hand from my breast as I jump away.

  Irene looms, face warm comfortable ruddy round, and now I see she has a kind koala face with a bush of hair over each ear despite her accent from Europe. I beam at her, my friend, my teacher, my rescuer.

  Ah, you’ve got a key, she says. I thought I’d be shivering, waiting for someone to come.

  If she sees Simon, she doesn’t acknowledge him. I put the key in the grate and push. I keep my back to him through the slow slide open of the jangling old wrought iron. Irene walks with me, shaking rivulets of rain on the lobby tiles.

  Thank you! she says.

  At least that’s the order I hope it happens in.

  Footsteps, penis softening, my hand detaching both of his, we part, Irene appears.

  However, The Ceasing always muddles me. It could’ve been

  Footsteps, penis softening, Irene appears, my hand detaches his, we part

  or even

  Footsteps, Irene appears, my hand detaches his, penis softening, we part.

  The doors close, he’s locked out. He turns on his heel and dashes straight out into the downpour, not waiting to put up his umbrella. He’s ducking his head against the rain in a useless way, as if he could escape its wet flaying.

  While Irene goes to check the letter boxes on the wall, I hold the lift door open.

  You went to work without an umbrella? she says.

  Silly me, I manage. I’m panting.

  I long to tell her, to cry in her arms – but what is there to tell? God knows what she’s gone through. From now on, I’ll peg my clothes under the armpits. I’ll squeeze mouse-like through doors.

  And then, without warning, she hugs me.

  Did my thoughts go into her mind in a green sizzling line?

  Thank you, she says, and releases me.

  Your skirt, she says.

  The Ceasing returns. Isn’t it over yet, the torment? My legs – my very bones have dissolved and all that’s left are threads. Did he come on my skirt? His semen? But his penis wasn’t bared, his fly never opened.

  I look down.

  My skirt?

  Wet through, she says. This shocking rain.

  Shocking, I repeat, nodding hard. Shocking.

  I’m still saying shocking shocking as the lift doors clunk-choong behind me.

  Safe in my apartment, I double lock the door and put the chain on. I hold myself up by the walls, I feel my way to the kitchen counter, and for no reason except that its ordinariness is comforting, I turn on the jug. Its familiar humming stirs up a little courage in me, enough to pull my shoes off, put on the heater, set them in front of it. Enough to take off my shamefully sodden pants, now chilly, and throw them into the wash basin, and take off my skirt wet only in patches. Enough to wash my hands, to put a teabag in a cup, to fill it with boiled water, to warm my hands. I put on music to drown my shame. I turn into the cushions, to drown in shame.

  You must care for yourself, they trained you to care for yourself, you must remember it, you must do it now.

  But they couldn’t train me for there wasn’t a me, how can I care for myself if I’ve ceased?

  That’s my defence. My heart has imprinted on me its own way to defend me. Cease, it says. Cease.

  I failed to do what I should’ve done. I weep with shame.

  After a while, I put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I wake hours later, the milk has congealed. But the rain has stopped.

  I ring Nan too early in the morning, though she’s always up early for the chooks and she’ll be swearing at her old stove for the first cup of tea. I ask if she’s fine.

  Have you forgotten, I’ve got the hillside, she says.

  Even her cackling sounds like home.

  Her flooded neighbour, Snakey, says it’s wrong she got the hillside when all she does is run a few cows on it.

  I’m in the city, I’d forgotten the rain.

  You sound like you’re moping, she says. When are you coming back?

  In all the welter of words between us, I’ve never really known if she loves me.

  I try to think about Simon: all this time has he been furtively observing, noting my every breath, tremble, swallow, twitch, gulp – oh god have I farted in deep concentration? He’d know my farts as I know his – was he noting them down in his lonely lunchtime while I was imagining him writing poetry? I thought I knew him but I knew only a bit of him, like my dentist knows onl
y my teeth. Knowing someone suddenly seems as hard as learning every silver drop of rain.

  And then, as always, the Blaming, just as if I was eleven all over again: Was it my fault? Did he guess my thoughts?

  Today’s list

  Dearest P.,

  It’s true I want sex, wild, uninhibited sex, not one but a group, three men, all panting for me, though not just wanting sex but wait – they must first know who I am, know my fears, they must understand The Ceasing.

  Though that’s a lot to ask of blokes at an orgy.

  It’s true I want sex.

  I want love.

  I want people around me who love me.

  I want home, shelter, belonging, continuity.

  I want to think clearly, clear as water, but I want more.

  I don’t want Nan’s life. I want my life to be extraordinary.7

  There’s so much to fear.

  I must not hate myself.

  I hate myself.

  I must not hate myself.

  What do you like doing? They asked.

  I like writing lists.

  Then write lists, they said.

  Up to this moment, we all pretend there’s a me.

  I can’t, I said. There’s no me.

  Day five of the rains: It’s an act of bravery to rise from my narrow bed.

  My face blotchy, my eyelids red from crying, broken vessels in my left eye.

  I must find a me, even though there’s none. I’ll paint on a face as if there’s a me. I scrabble in a drawer and there’s a broken kohl pencil and I sharpen it with the kitchen knife. It makes the red eyelids worse. I rub it off.

  I’m anxious now to go to work for the buzz of company. I leave with a half hour to spare before my shift so that I can stop at a chemist and choose a lipstick. I’ve been meaning to get one for a while. A lipstick will put an outline around a me.

  In the chemist as the shop assistant, a girl a little younger than me with a pure, shining face, considers the exact shade I need. She doesn’t laugh at me, or reject me. The subject of my lipstick has gravity.

  To go with your outfit? she asks and I realise that I’ve pulled on what I took off yesterday and thrown on the floor, my baggy brown jumper knitted by Nan. Today, however, too late for safety, I thought to wear my jeans.