Two Sketches of Disjointed Happiness

by Simon Kinch

  It begins to eat at me, that reason why she would end it. I think about those last few weeks together, before I went travelling. I remember one evening, sitting where I sit now, my arm round her, reassuring her things would continue when I returned. This memory – of her so upset, so paranoid our relationship could end – is at odds with the abrupt text message I read on the harbour bench. Something must have changed in my three months away. I continue to scan my mind for clues. There was a sushi place we ate at a week or two before I left. I try to remember her mood that evening. I can’t remember her being that talkative, yet can’t remember her being too closed. I remember trying to tell her about my trip, where I would go. About how I wanted to go to Lake Bled in Slovenia, with its church built on the island in the middle. I’d looked up that you could take a boat across. She had seemed interested at the time, but the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that she was putting it on. The only other things I remember with clarity are the matchstick-sized implements placed with the wasabi sauce and the snap of the wooden chopsticks as they split.

  SIXTEEN

  One morning early the next week, I woke sharply, at what must have been 6am. The room was still dark, although I could make out the muted morning sunlight through the netted curtains. I tried to wrap up in the bed sheets and fall back to sleep, but needing to piss, got up and went to the bathroom. Coming back into the studio, I stood in my boxer shorts, considering whether to return to bed. I looked towards the window, towards the rooftops across the street. Through the mesh of the curtains, I could make out flickers of movement, silhouettes on the roof opposite. I approached the window cautiously, the figures becoming clearer as I approached the curtains.

  A guy in a baggy T-shirt and harem pants staggered across the rooftop and slouched down against the far wall. His friend, clutching a Spanish guitar, followed briefly, before returning to the stairwell and calling out ‘Raquí . . . Raaaaquí!’ A girl emerged, clutching plastic cups and a bottle. The guy with the guitar laughed hysterically and they both swayed across the rooftop towards the far wall. The girl slumped herself next to the guy sitting down. I moved my face closer to the curtain to try and make out their faces. The last guy was now sitting cross-legged, the guitar across his body. He shaped his fingers and, in one movement, released a rasqueado, his fingers springing out like the pages of a flipbook comic, each striking every string independently. The guy in the baggy T-shirt smiled broadly and drunkenly. The girl had begun to speak quickly, whilst pouring the bottle between the three plastic cups. The guitarist began in earnest, his friend joining in with syncopated claps, his hands held high as he did.

  Through the netted curtain, I watched them laugh and sing. The girl continued drinking, whilst the guys had slowed down, clearly drunk enough already. I worried they might see my outline, but not once did they turn towards me.

  I took a seat at the table, losing sight of the drunken flamenco, the sound becoming muffled. The table was as I’d left it the day before. Half a bottle of red wine, the cork next to it on the table, rather than replaced. A plate scattered with the crumbs of bread crust. The detective novel I’d bought from the book vendor on the bridge, finally finished. I’d unpacked all my belongings. My clothes sat folded on the bookshelves, my few possessions arranged between them. I’d bought coffee and a single-shot Italian percolator, which rested on the hob. But these few things did nothing to fill the space of the studio, leaving it empty and impersonal. I re-corked the wine, pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, and left the apartment without showering.

  The rooftop was just beginning to catch the sun. I felt the chill of the morning in just my T-shirt, so rubbed my forearms to warm them up. I looked out over the rooftops for a moment, before heading down the staircase through the building.

  The streets of the city centre were empty. There were no postmen on their rounds, no early-morning commuters catching trains. Sevilla was as quiet as Madison in the dead of night, only instead, hazily lit by the morning sun.

  I reached the edge of the old town. Across the road, a cambered bridge stretched the river.

  I dropped down to the path on the riverbank beneath the bridge and continued my walk. As I got further away from the main road, the sounds of passing cars faded enough for me to catch the morning birdsong from the tree-lined bank opposite. When the traffic was almost inaudible, I took a seat on a bench. The birds chattered and the water lapped against the concrete riverbanks. I heard the sound of patting, from the direction I’d just come from. I turned to see a jogger in the distance, slowly treading towards where I sat. His features became clearer as he approached. A man of about forty-five, fifty, with greying, curly hair, dressed in a running vest and shorts. Almost pristine trainers, black with orange trim.

  As he passed me, he made eye contact. He acknowledged me with a quick smile, maybe the first person he’d seen this early in the morning. I looked at him blankly, only thinking that it wouldn’t have hurt to smile back when he was almost out of sight.

  SEVENTEEN

  After a few days working a strict 7.5 hours, I begin to stray away from my desk at any opportunity given. Between the rows of filing cabinets at the back of the office, large windows look out over the rooftops of the adjacent buildings. I often linger here, clutching paperwork and filing to my chest, watching pigeons peck at food and scrap with each other, or perch along the roofs’ ledges.

  Each lunch hour is stretched as far as it will go. There is an independent burrito place a street away from the office that I go to every day. It’s still a fast-food joint, but I find charm in its small, square, metal tables, lined in rows. The shop owner learns my name and I learn his. He knows my order and, each day, packs an impossible amount of rice, black beans, chicken, sour cream and cilantro into a wrap. I eat in every day: the square table nearest the door, a burrito on a sheet of greaseproof paper, a can of Coke to wash the food down.

  I make it a daily habit to grab a coffee from the coffee house opposite the office. Here, there is seemingly a different barista every day. I repeat my order – a long black – every visit. Nobody remembers it – that, or they deem it too rude to assume ‘the usual?’

  One lunchtime, Laura, the girl from the far side of the office, spots me in the queue. She smiles when we make eye contact and then more broadly after she comes over, and we begin talking. She asks me if I’ve come here before. The question strikes me in how mundane it is. I then begin to doubt myself and whether the mundanity is in her question or in the fact I come here every day. She points out their blueberry muffins, exclaiming how they are the best in town. I’ve never even noticed the display counter they sit on.

  Thinking I can extend my time away from the office, I invite her to take a walk. We buy our coffees in takeaway cups and walk down the block slowly, so as not to spill them. The street is alive with the bustle of lunchtime activity, yet this is a hollow verve – office clerks clutching sandwiches, secretaries out for coffee. Laura’s hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail, strands occasionally caught by the fine breeze. I imagine her with her hair untied, it falling onto her shoulders. Thinking about this as we walk, I am often caught with nothing to say, yet she instinctively fills these silences with little anecdotes, as sweet as they are trivial.

  She asks me how I am enjoying my work. ‘It’s actually really interesting,’ I tell her, as I’m afraid that the truth would both sour our conversation and make me sound uninteresting.

  ‘That’s good. The last temp didn’t like it much. But he was a really boring guy. I don’t think he really found much joy in anything.’

  A film has started to appear on the top of my coffee. I swill the whole cup down, without really noticing any flavour. We sit for quarter of an hour on a park bench, before walking back to the office. In the elevator, she tells me I’m wearing a nice shirt. I want to say I like her cardigan, but worry she’ll find this comment on her office attire as banal as I find hers.

 
EIGHTEEN

  I went back to the book vendor on the bridge, intending to buy everything he had in English. He sat on a small chair, underneath a parasol with a makeshift stand. The enthusiasm I had arrived with waned as I flicked through a small selection of trashy novels aimed at middle-aged women who fantasised about being seduced away from their marriages. Anything in this vein I left, but took the remaining books: a slim thriller set in Stockholm, a sci-fi novel and a tattered set of essays by Walter Benjamin. I thought briefly of the criss-crossed streets of Portbou, dotted with their Walter Benjamin information points, then of the moody waiter at the fish restaurant. Abruptly, I sandwiched the Benjamin between the thriller and the sci-fi and paid the vendor a euro for each book. I then walked purposefully off, angry that I’d reminded myself of that harbour and that cold steel bench.

  I bought tomatoes, sweet satsumas and chirimoyas from the Feria market. The grocer placed each fruit into a brown paper bag, with hands of the same texture: tanned, creased and rough. I took eggs from the stand next to him, then two rings of soft cooking chorizo from a butcher dressed in a white coat, as clean as a doctor’s.

  Returning to my studio, I placed the groceries in the kitchen, then went to the bathroom. I ran the tap, taking a cupped handful of water, and drenched my face. The water turned a slight grey as it ran from my face onto the porcelain below – the fine dust of the city, mixed with the sweat of early summer.

  I cooked up half a chorizo in a pan with two fried eggs, letting the red juices run through the whites of the eggs, then ate on the corner of the table nearest the balcony. The balcony window ran from floor to ceiling. Moving the curtain aside I had a bird’s-eye view of the street: the small cafe below, old ladies walking slowly, pushing trolleys of shopping. The odd cyclist weaved through the ambling pedestrians. At about 2pm, the waiter from the cafe – an older man – began to heave the tables out in the street inside. By twenty past, he’d locked up, the street already deserted, everyone at home to lunch, or to have a siesta.

  The sun was at its highest and beating down stronger than it had that year. I felt the mugginess press through the open window. I stripped the sheet off my bed and, making my way out to the rooftop, stretched it out on the hot concrete. I took off my shoes and shirt, and lay out, basking in the sun.

  It took only a few moments for the sweat to begin forming along my brow. Immersed in the heat, smothered by the heavy air, the sounds of the city were reduced to a quiet rumble. I raised my hand to shield my eyes. Above, a cloudless sky of such rich blue. This was the kind of sunshine and heat I’d never known in Wisconsin, never anything so oppressive. I closed my eyes and pictured the back porch of my house, the tree outside the window, the fences surrounding my yard. There I would sit cross-legged on the grass, in jeans and my Brewers sweater, looking up at the summer sky – yet a sky of grey-blue, dotted by cloud. The wind would ruffle the grass, occasionally making me shiver.

  I opened my eyes again to the Sevilla sky above and let that image of home dissolve in the brightness of where I lay, a reality disconnected now. Only the most vivid of memories really retain their clarity and even this is relative; in a city of such light and lucidity, even my fondest images of Madison faded to loose notions, unanchored by any common sensation I felt in Sevilla.

  I wanted to drop into a half-sleep, to let the distant sounds of the city below blend with the shapes and forms of my imagination, detaching my mind from the present. Here, I would explore a future, an invented speculation, and project myself onto it. But I was stopped from dropping off by the heat’s intensity. I closed my eyes, but my skin became hypersensitive. As my awareness fell onto any particular patch of my bare skin, I could feel the scorching heat of the sun, I could almost feel the pigment reddening. Of course, all of this was my body’s protection system, no more than an evolutionary alarm, yet there reached a point when I could no longer stand this intrusion to my meditative state. I returned inside, intending to lie out on the bed. But looking at the empty studio apartment, I felt a dull punch, the weight of boredom. For a moment, I stared at the unmade bed, focusing on the folds between the sheets’ creases. I pulled on a shirt and headed to the street.

  I walked down Calle Sierpes, smoking. The only shops not closed for the siesta period were the large multinational chains. After putting out my cigarette, I flicked through a rail of white shirts just outside a shop door. I stopped halfway, dejected by the repeated cut of cloth.

  I continued walking. Here, the afternoon was busier. I was kept afloat on the faceless commotion of shoppers and tourists.

  Outside another clothes shop, I caught an American accent. Two Virginian ladies stood admiring a rack of floral dresses. I stopped and feigned interest in the shop display to eavesdrop their conversation.

  ‘Do you think Jane would like this?’ one asked, clutching a dress. The second lady took a pair of glasses that hung from her neck on string and pushed them to her face.

  ‘It’s very pretty. She’s a slender girl, is Jane. Is this the fashion with the girls at universities now, Mary?’

  ‘I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know whether I should buy it or not. Do you think she’d like it?’

  The first lady continued to talk, changing the subject to Jane’s boyfriend. I became frustrated by the mundanity of their chatter and walked away.

  Still on Calle Sierpes, I took a seat at a small cafe, adorned with glazed tiles, and lit a cigarette. A waiter in short sleeves came out, with a pen and notepad in his shirt pocket. He clapped his hands together to confirm my order and returned with a thick dark espresso.

  Only one table was still shaded by the cafe’s parasols and this was taken by a couple in enamoured conversation. I took a sip of my coffee and leant back in my chair. They spoke in Spanish and I could barely understand a word they said. I focused on the shape and tone of their voices. Her voice shaped a phrase in a tone I knew, implying that whatever he had just said, he should know better. I listened intently, trying to gauge more, shifting my gaze past my knee, to the floor beneath their table.

  This girl had a thick, styled bob, with a fringe swept behind one ear, curling back towards her chin. From the bottom of a slender earlobe, a golden earring glinted. She sat away from her date, though aligned her body directly at him, occasionally looking him deep in the eyes, cautious yet intense. His responses were short and blasé. He was sitting too confidently, as if in little doubt of his powers of seduction. His hand reached out to touch hers. Without looking up, I sensed the goose pimples run up her arm. Her body froze, unable to react, yet craving to.

  They continued to talk. She questioned him, demanding to know more about him. He continued his series of abrupt responses. She should have been put off by his arrogance, yet the more aloof he became, the more she persisted with the conversation. My stomach clenched. Something wasn’t right, there was a dishonesty here, I could feel it. I glanced up at the girl and, in both that fear and lust I saw behind her features, I knew. I knew there was some other man, some guy who was infatuated with her. Not this man here, some other. A man who knew her intimately, who had one day stood in front of her and told her what he felt for her. A man who had engrossed himself in her, maybe into what they once had together. He had given her a love that wasn’t enough, or just wasn’t right, something that could never be this animalistic fling. I imagined the other man far off somewhere, travelling, moving from city to city, anything: attempting to widen a world that had once centred round her. And now she sat across her table from a man who couldn’t give a damn about that love. He either didn’t know he existed, or resolutely didn’t care. The girl just looked at him and rolled her bottom lip under her teeth.

  I told myself these were strangers, what they did meant nothing to me. But thinking about that unknown other – and that she could ignore such infatuation for this brute – left me desolate. My eyes watered. I stood up and fumbled around for enough change to cover my half-finished coffee. The guy
looked over at me as I left, a hint of disgust at my weakness. The girl with the bob kept her eyes fixed on him and only him.

  NINETEEN

  I stay late one evening to help Robert prepare a client’s file. Robert tells me a willingness to stay late is one of the key ingredients to success in this business, but does so without sounding at all impressed I’ve chosen to do so. We barely talk as we work, the only sounds being the tapping of keyboards and rustling of papers.

  On my way home I go to take coffee from the coffee house opposite. I consider taking one of the muffins Laura had pointed out, but decide against it.

  It’s the time of evening when the people finishing work mingle in the streets with those going out to the bars. I keep my gaze fixed ahead, on the pavement stretched out before me. By chance, I find myself walking at the same pace as a man ahead of me. Although our pace is the same, his stride is shorter, meaning he makes a busy shuffle to achieve the same speed as me. In the end, he makes a turn at Grant Street. I continue walking home.

  Two blocks down, I see Clementine, one of Alyson’s best friends, ahead of me, across the street. She is with a friend and must be twenty metres ahead, walking in the same direction as me. I cross to their side of the road, feeling there is less chance of them seeing me here. Clementine has her hair pushed up in a bun, and wears a jumper I recognise. I don’t know her friend, a red-haired girl about our age.

  We are halfway to my house when they take a left. When I reach this junction, I look down the road they have taken, seeing them outside a bar. I take this detour. By the time I catch up, they have entered. I cautiously peer through the window, wondering if they are meeting Alyson. The room is empty, with just Clementine and her friend standing at the bar, looking at drinks menus. I am suddenly gripped by the fear Alyson will turn up any moment, come walking down the street and see me peering through the bar window at her friends. I walk back down the street as quickly as I can and rejoin my route home.