Worlds from the Word's End

by Joanna Walsh

  I took a bus from Athens station, what remained of the shipment in a single bag. Alighting at Monastiraki I was the victim of a purse-snatcher but fought back, losing the bag but retaining more than half of its contents.

  I reached the hotel with no more than crumbs. There must have been a hole in my pocket. I traced and retraced my steps but the ground was yellow as cake; birds might have taken what was scattered. Here is what’s left, in one of the hotel’s ashtrays. I will keep watch over it until you join me. My eyes will not leave it for a moment.

  You will find me in the roof bar of the Attalos Hotel, where I await your arrival, and that of your return shipment.

  Yours etc.

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  ‌Femme Maison

  You wanted to look different for him. You wanted a change of a dress. You wanted a new dress you had never seen before. You wanted to be someone else, someone neither of you knew.

  But then you have not met Him yet.

  He will take you away from all this. As things are, you can’t go on in any way: everything is missing. If you were somewhere else, you would already be wearing the different dress, a summer dress. You would be comfortable. But the dress you have is too big. You can’t wear your dress if you can’t alter it, and you don’t have sewing-machine needles. You broke the last one and the shop didn’t have any more.

  You were typing on your laptop: something important, you can’t remember, but you began to search for sewing-machine needles.

  It’s the same all over the house. You go to look for things but they are always in the wrong room. Where are they? They might have been left outside in the rain. They might have been put on a high shelf so the children would not get them.

  No sooner is there something to do than it requires something else to do it with. The piece of information needed is always at one remove: scribbled on an envelope already in the recycling; printed on an old bank statement, perhaps shredded; written in a letter filed in the cabinet you don’t open any more.

  It’s a question of systems. Go upstairs and you’ll notice a tea towel that should be in the kitchen. Bring it down and there are the books that should be by your bed. How did they change places? Why didn’t you notice the books before you went upstairs for the tea towel? Then you could have taken them up and put them by the bed and picked up the tea towel and taken it down. Except it wasn’t the tea towel you went to look for, was it? It was something else, but exactly what you can’t remember.

  Sewing-machine needles.

  You should have established some kind of process.

  There is a process to the day. You eat at established times though it’s such a bother to make. Always afterwards you find a wrapper without a name snaking across the kitchen surface. What is it from? If it is vacant, why was it not cleared? How did you miss it? On tables small things migrate according to the season: the seals from plastic milk cartons, beer bottle lids (though it was He who drank beer whereas you drink wine). How did they get there? Why were they not removed? There must be a way to get rid of them.

  You forget to wash your hands before reopening your laptop. Its keys are slick with butter. Not with jam, at least, but this is because the jam is still in the shop where you forgot to buy it. You came away with 250g of cherries and a pint of milk. The milk you needed, undoubtedly. You needed cocoa but they did not have cocoa. The queue was long and you were distracted by the labels of the wine bottles behind the counter, not the bottles with graphics and fancy typography but the bottles with pictures of chateaux, sea bays, farmhouses. You walked into each of these landscapes as if you were visiting. If you were in those places, any of those places, you could wear the dress instead of tight urban jeans, the dress that needs altering. You could have been comfortable.

  You go into the post office in case there is something else you need. Each time you go in you look at the magazines and consider buying Vogue. You do not buy it. Next time you shop you will do the same thing.

  All your life you’ve been asked to choose: to be the woman who didn’t drink canned sodas, who didn’t watch American television programmes, who would never, even in fun, decorate her home with Anaglypta wallpaper. Some of these injunctions you have overturned, but there are always fresh ones. You choose not to choose any more.

  It’s not only your fault. After the children left, bit by bit you and He abandoned the house, eating takeaways, spending evenings in cafes. At one point you could afford to eat out every weekend. But the house missed you. The fresh flowers you bought were, it knew, an insult, a sop. That’s why you knew He had to go.

  But how did your keyboard get so dirty? The dust builds all over the house, always on a different surface. You chase it with a corner of the dress’s sleeve. The dirt is still there, grey and furry. It has merely transferred. You are now part of it.

  After He was gone, things altered. You expanded into the areas of the house you hadn’t previously used: the study, the front room. You felt, for the first time, that they were yours. You also felt you owed it to them.

  But the house is still not a perfect fit. Still things surprise you. When you try to get to the cupboard holding the dusters, there is something in the way: a stand of washing, a tall stool from the counter. Who put them there?

  You turn, you remember – the laptop. You had forgotten. You remember. You had got up. You had wanted to clean the keyboard. You had gone to find a duster.

  Something was altered. What was it?

  Wait. You remember.

  You had cut but you had not pasted.

  Your words hover in vacant space. You turn. You run. You will save them. You paste. They are still there.

  How could you have left them? How could you have forgotten? How did you manage to leave your thought at its waist to search for the duster? How did you fail to get the duster but return to the laptop?

  What you had written might have been lost forever. The words are still there. But so is the dust.

  You thought it would be OK after He was gone. You thought you’d have more time for work, for fusslessness. But the house is relentless.

  The fridge must occasionally be defrosted. Something knocks in the icebox. Frost has grown on the walls of the cool section as moss does on a tomb but inverse, its fingers reaching down towards the salad drawer. An afternoon hacking though the ice forest may reach a single embryonically suspended fish finger.

  You still attempt to generate one bag of rubbish each week: the bin demands it. The dishwasher is completely redundant. The washing machine begs to be used but your piles of laundry are dwindling, pathetic. They barely skim the bottom of the drum: they are hardly dirty.

  Vines slap against the window. On the patio the barbecue is rotting, the lawnmower is rusting. How are you meant to attack the overgrowing jasmine? With the blunted shears? With the kitchen scissors?

  Some things used to matter so much: the exact shade of green of the garden chairs, which did not match the exact shade of green of the garden table. Now both are sun-bleached, flaking. ‘A Generous Family House.’ That’s what the estate agent said when he came to value it, ‘Generous.’ For a few weeks he sent you emails: would you sell? But that was years ago.

  The machines wait patiently. They must wait. In the daily round, certain chairs must be sat in.

  You put the dress into the washing machine. It will be clean before it is altered. You add detergent, switch it on. The drum goes round and round. The dress is not dirty but perhaps dusty. The dust travels from the dress to the inside of the washing machine, then out through the tubes. The house senses an exchange. It is satisfied.

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  ‌Dunnet

  In the past tense, it was a bird.

  Whodunnit didn’t matter, whether it was I, said the sparrow, or the snowy, or the barn – hoo-ever. Who would lay the blame on top of each other like that hand-slapping game for two? There’s never a winner. Pull the bottom one out – the whole thing beetles over.

  By the cliff’s edge, I’d not thought to f
ind a dunnock, a sparrow, like, with those markings. It was way out of its neck of the woods. Seabirds live on cliffs in vertical colonies without the hazards of horizontal pairing. It might have been one of them that did for it. The country code says ‘cliffs have inherent dangers,’ but that’s a horse of a different feather. When I picked it up, its neck flopped back. It was only recently dead.

  I didn’t know the name till after, but that was where we were, outside Dunnet, a village in Scotland with its Mary-Ann’s Cottage Preserved Croft, its C H Haygarth & Sons Scotland’s Oldest Practising Gunmakers, its family-run hotel with twelve bedrooms and two bars, its church whose history dates from 1280 – but like I said, who’s counting?

  When something’s gone it’s gone. I’m only winging it through here.

  All writers are itinerary. And all books look the same in the dark.

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  ‌Two Secretaries

  We are two secretaries. We sit in the lower ground floor office where there is little light. It is an old building, but it lends the business class so we do not mind about the dark.

  That is where the description of us as a pair ends. If you come into the building you will see two secretaries, one of which is me. We may look alike, but we are not. K is the other secretary. That is, she is a secretary: I am a clerical assistant. I have asked to be called a clerical assistant, so that is what people call me. They can see that I am not a secretary. I am not trained in secretarial skills, though I can type and also take shorthand. I am a recent graduate. I have a degree. I do not expect to stop here for long. K has been a secretary for a number of years. She is, no doubt, a good secretary and, no doubt, wants to be a secretary all her life, although sometimes she likes to call herself an office manager.

  I am good at my job. It doesn’t take much to be a secretary. For instance, L, one of the department assistants, wanted some paper clips for her department from office supplies. She requested coloured paper clips but I ordered plain. I had been asked to keep costs down and this was something I did voluntarily. I showed my initiative. I was surprised when L wasn’t pleased but I’m sure those higher up in her department appreciated it. I try to go to lunch with the assistants in the offices, sometimes even with the juniors. This is because someday soon I will be working with them, especially those high enough up to appreciate my initiative.

  K wears a blue skirt suit with a jacket just the same colour. She wears it every day. Her hair is permed. She wears sheer hosiery. She has a boyfriend. One day she confided in me that she wants to marry him but she is not so sure he wants to marry her. They are moving in together, to an apartment in a suburb. They cannot agree on the paint colours for the walls. She likes lilac, he likes primrose.

  I would not paint my walls either lilac or primrose. When I move in with a boyfriend, which is something that, like an apartment, I will also have someday, we will not live in a suburb but in the centre of town. Like the office our flat will be in an old building. It will have class. Right now I live in an outer suburb. My lease is up soon, and my flatmates are finding somewhere new. I have plans to find somewhere new too, but not with them, and much nearer the centre. Because I also have plans, I can sympathise with K’s plans without letting her know I don’t like primrose or lilac, or the suburbs. I can be happy for her and I can hope she gets what she wants, which is not at all what I would want.

  K ordered a new office machine. It was put beside my desk. As its wrapping was removed the smell of plastic hit the whole office. It is an old-fashioned office: the machine is the only modern thing in it. It is pearl grey: a whale of a thing. K switched it on and it started to whirr. I began to cough quite loudly like this: ‘eheugh, eheugh!’ These were real coughs but I made them even louder to show how bad the smell was. The smell the machine produced was so different to everything else in the building, which is made of paper and wood, that it made me feel sick, and so I went and stood in the hall to breathe the fresh air. K said, how long are you going to keep on doing that? And I said, Until the smell goes away. I will come back every time I have to answer the phone (this is one of my duties). K said nothing.

  One lunchtime all the assistants invited me to have lunch with them. I was surprised and pleased. They said they knew that K was being unpleasant to me about my housing situation and that I had cried and that they were sorry. I was surprised because I hadn’t noticed that K was being at all unpleasant. However I didn’t say anything as I was pleased to be out with the assistants and to know where they lunched. The next day I hoped to have lunch with the assistants again but it seems they do not always go out for lunch together. This is a pity because lunch is one of the things I am looking forward to as soon as I get to assistant level.

  K and I don’t speak much now. Sometimes K asks me a polite question about my housing situation and sometimes I ask K a polite question about her boyfriend.

  K has ordered a large green fabric screen from office supplies. This is despite our being asked to keep costs down. She has put the screen in front of her so that she sits between the screen and the window. I get less light. When K’s phone rings I don’t answer it. It is behind her screen and everything that goes on behind her screen is her own business. And when my phone rings K doesn’t answer it. But this is all OK as in any case I do not expect to stop here for very long.

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  ‌Enzo Ponza

  I was still quite a small girl when I decided to kidnap Enzo Ponza.

  I remember clearly deciding it would be him. He was standing in one of the sloping streets of shabby residential buildings that lead down to the harbour off the main road. Who knows if he lived there? He was speaking to someone who got into a car with a small child, perhaps belonging to one of them, or the other. When they drove away, he came quietly, and at once, almost as though expecting it.

  I had never seen him before.

  I led him to our block and up the fire escape. When we got to my floor we sat at the table on the balcony that is accessed from the walkway. I did not yet want to take him inside the flat. He sat facing in, I facing out, in case I saw anyone coming to rescue him. He was wearing a long black coat, and had long black moustaches. He looked sad, not angry, or maybe just the kind of sad some adults have on their faces all the time. I guess they call it melancholy. He did not look me in the eye. He said nothing.

  I brought food out to him and he ate, uncomplaining. My parents, indoors, saw him through the window but made no comment. That night they suffered him to lie down on the settee, fully clothed. They asked no questions. Nor did he. He made no attempt to leave.

  I can’t say exactly when he began permanently to live in our flat. He was accommodating, waiting until everyone had gone to bed to unfold a mattress in the living room, which he stowed away before breakfast. I think sometimes he even slept in the hall. My mother fed him without protest. My father shared his newspaper in silence. Enzo Ponza spent most of his time sitting: at the table, where he played patience; on the settee, where he watched television. He seemed to enjoy the football most, but never demanded a change of channel. No one liked to sit next to Enzo Ponza, but no one asked him to move. To challenge him would have been to acknowledge his existence. No one complained about his use of the bathroom early in the morning while we all got ready for school or work. No one complained that he left squeezed teabags bleeding by the sink. His disposition was taciturn. Though my parents occasionally addressed him on practical matters – ‘pass the salt,’ or ‘move your feet so I can hoover’ – my younger siblings never mentioned him at all. Perhaps they thought he always had been there.

  In the early days, he never removed his coat. I have no idea what he did while I was at school, while my parents were at work. I did not ask him as he seemed preoccupied, as preoccupied with the mysteries of his own adulthood as my mother and father were with theirs. When we returned, there he was, sitting on the settee, sometimes smoking – something neither of my parents did – sometimes reading the newspaper, his feet up, one sock off so he co
uld rub between his toes. While I did my homework, he sat opposite me at the table, reading the western novels that had belonged to my grandfather. He never once asked when I would let him go.

  For the first few years, he never went out. He cut his hair and his moustaches himself with our nail scissors. We would sometimes find the trimmings in the sink. He must have washed his single set of clothes while we were at school, at work, sitting naked while they dried. We never discovered his underwear dripping on the lines strung over the bath.

  If we came home to find him, say, frying eggs in the kitchen, he became particularly reserved, would act like he had been discovered at something illegal which, I suppose, they being technically our eggs, he had. The situation was complex as, ostensibly, he was here against his will, so we had no avenue for complaint. During that time, these abruptly finished activities were all we could discover of his inner life.

  It was not until some years later that I began to encourage him to go outside. I had reached my teens and, with expanded horizons, felt a new sense of responsibility. Enzo Ponza was mine, after all; my parents didn’t interfere any more than they had with the goldfish, or the guinea pig. They had been hands-off in these matters: if I did something wrong, the consequences, and the lesson, would be mine. Perhaps they felt the same in this case. I became concerned for Enzo Ponza’s health, and began, each day, to lead him into the green area between the flats, and encourage him to walk about, to do stretching exercises, and pull-ups on the children’s climbing frame.