by Lucy Durneen
His eyes are slow to open so there is time. I think of granite rubbing the back of my knees, the bright bliss of clouds: you remember things like this at the oddest of times. My hands like flat stones, splayed out behind me, the weight of the sun, which is the weight of a universe. I was a hippie back then, it’s true, my hat had a sunflower stitched to the brim and I even braided my hair. I say I braided it; my sister did it for me each morning. When we went to Starcross I had to leave the braids in, night after night, until the elastic bands became part of my hair, and then my hair became elastic, I could actually stretch it right round the back of my head and still suck on the end of it. But I cut it the next year. That was the last summer I had long hair.
He nods at me, yes, sure I remember. But, he says, an owl flying in the day is not particularly unusual. Later I realise he doesn’t remember at all. He can’t, because he was not the one who took me to Starcross; it was another man I loved. The guilt rushes through me like my heart is a barrage, just trembling to let go. But I hold it back. I feel it, everything, all of it, like a giant lake, like the Nile behind my heart, dammed, and if anything, I am too alive.
I read him poetry, sometimes. I stand in another world, I read. Not the past, not the future.
He says, ‘You want to get further away than that’.
Mostly I read to him from my magazines. I tell him about the rugby player who has just come out of the closet.
‘Let him fuck whom he wants’, he says.
‘Who he wants’, I say. ‘Who’.
But suddenly I am not sure of anything at all, even grammar.
They don’t provide meals for visitors, even regular ones, but we have struck a deal with the Thai orderly who brings the food. He is fed through a naso-gastric tube, but we fill in a menu for him anyway and the Thai orderly says nothing as long as I give him last week’s Hello magazine and rub his arse as he leaves. Not everyone thinks hospital food is worth this kind of subterfuge but I was a child of the Eighties. If it didn’t come out of a box, a packet or a boilable plastic bag I didn’t eat.
The coffee is terrible though.
In the concourse I see the man from the lobby, which gives me the sudden urge to buy him a latte. Maybe it is just because he is familiar and all. It is late, but I think I might want to tell him something. His eyes seem far away. He says, ‘Damn fine coffee’, to which I answer, ‘And hot!’ which shows both our age and a mutual preference for surreal and morally questionable drama. But we both know it is not true. The coffee is bitter and scalds our palates. He keeps sipping, and I want to ask him if it’s possible it isn’t the coffee but the words, the ones neither of us are saying, that are responsible for this.
Someone has left a newspaper on the table, open at a page that chronicles the history of the search for extra-terrestrial life. We haven’t got very far in fifty years, it turns out. The waitress shouts, Closing! and the noise of the security grille descending drowns out the section I start to read aloud.
‘Do you think’, the man from the lobby says later, ‘it would be worse if it turned out we are alone in the universe after all?’
Across town from the hospital is a hotel building made entirely of glass. This is where I go when it is time to leave the ward. I tell him I am going and he raises a hand in a slow salute. Even at the last minute I turn. Like Orpheus, like Lot’s wife, like every TV movie ever made. If I were in a TV movie I would say his name as a question when I turned. Our gaze would be capable of penetrating vast distances, as if our eyes were meeting across a lake. And then I would say, quietly; ‘Nothing.’
It takes forty-five minutes to walk through the city. You could do it in a cab in less than ten, but if you have never run away from anything then you will not know what it is to need the power of your own limbs.
The city at night is submarine, dark, like a Caspar David Friedrich. I paddle downstream. I slip in and out of streets like they are bays and I am a boat, nudging into harbour. Any floating vessel will do; the Jumblies went to sea in a sieve. I cast out and sail into the centre of the moonlit city and I wear the silence like a fur. All about my feet I see the stars and I am treading on the stars. With just my feet I kick whole constellations into touch.
The foyer is like any regular hotel foyer except you can look out of every wall, and anyone can look in. Even the darkness is transparent. I think, this is what fish must see in an aquarium. I move through corridors into other worlds, luminous in the depths, followed by the scent of salt and death.
Perhaps I will not forgive him for what he said about the owls. There are subtler ways of communicating anger than I ever knew.
Underneath the man from the lobby I at least have the decency not to move. His weight like water. My blood like a foreign tide.
Now whenever I am in a tall building the urge to jump is reverent.
We went to marriage counselling a few times, which some people find surprising and to this I say: illness doesn’t make you a saint. Anger is the real problem for us both. The counsellor says that very often it is not the loss of an actual thing that makes us angry but all the potential things. This was a long time ago and it was in response to his complaint that I never do the washing up, which we learned—I learned—is not about good domestic hygiene but respect. When you are fighting over the dirty coffee cups you are really saying, love me. But now I understand what it is the counsellor actually meant.
Suddenly it becomes very important to have tried scuba diving. Suddenly it becomes important to have eaten shellfish that have not been boiled continuously for at least three minutes, or to fuck whom you want. Knowledge becomes the important thing. I have never been to the circus so I cannot say for sure why it is exploitative of animals. I have so little right to take part in so many debates.
Suddenly it becomes very important to have been in love, truly in love, the kind that could cross continents and survive the darkest histories, made deeper by its own wounds. Who doesn’t want to love that way? I want to say to the counsellor; really, find me someone who doesn’t want to love that way.
This is something I would show you if I could. To understand, you need to know that there is a stone plaque above the reception desk in the hospital lobby, carved to look as if it is really old. But you can tell it isn’t because of the shape of the letter ‘s’. The plaque says Whatever it is, it will pass. And what you think is, yes—but when?
There is a woman in this city whose name I will never know so I imagine her as Bella, which was the name of my first dog. The woman might not even be from the city. People come to this hospital from all over the world. Our eyes meet in the mirror of the bathroom in nuclear medicine. ‘You too?’ she says.
I say nothing. I am dispensing soap. I don’t even know what she means. Me? Then I understand yes, she means me, there is no-one else here. I run my hands over the warm tap to rinse them, but it feels so good I hold them there another minute. The water starts to steam and hurt but I don’t take my hands away. I know her look; I have worn it myself. I want to say it is hopeful, but the word I really want is famished.
‘It will pass’, she says.
The sting of my hands? No.
‘But what if it doesn’t?’ I ask, and I can see she has never thought of that.
In the mirror my shape is feral. I have crow’s feet. I look out of them but they are not my eyes. I look up and what I see is not the ceiling but a closed lid. They say fluorescent light is the most unflattering kind but in it what I feel is savage, and not myself. This is just flattery in disguise. What else is flattery but telling you that you look like something you are not, to make you feel better about the thing that you are.
The hospital soap is called Hibiscrub, which might refer to the inhibiting of bacteria, but the overwhelming perfume says to me, hibiscus. A delicacy in Mexico; the national flower of Malaysia. Tahitian women wear a single red hibiscus behind their ear to show they are ready to be a wife. In the mirror crimson petals bloom violently against my cheek. The last thing I wa
nt to smell of is flowers. I run my hands under the tap, rubbing hard on the back and front the way the surgeons do. I hook right in under the nails. The door bangs shut behind the woman I call Bella but I do not stop scrubbing. I might have been doing it for half an hour, it might be I am there all day. This is what I want to show you: it doesn’t pass.
One night I tell him I want to get fish and chips. There is only so much rehydrated food anyone can eat without compromising the basic human desire to stay alive. He raises his hand as I leave the room. He says, ‘pass me the mirror, I want to do my hair.’ Then he says, ‘I liked it when you were a hippie’. I say, ‘you didn’t know me when I was a hippie’. But then I turn. I say his name, like a question.
I sit in the patients’ lounge, in the dark. I pull the vertical blinds and listen to the winter wind, coming in from far away. It has never frightened me like it does some people. I try to imagine what it is to be far away and realise this; that I am too close.
What I realise is that everything beautiful is far away.
I catch the bus home and then I take the car that has been sitting in the garage these past seven months and drive half way across the country to Starcross. Around Birmingham I realise I have left my phone in his bedside locker, along with the book I am reading and my hairbrush.
I start to think in threes, as if what I can see in front of me is not the slope of the motorway but just the beginning, the middle and an end.
There is no colour along the coast apart from the sea pinks, brave in what is still moonlight. Winds hit heavy against the groynes. The air that blows in the window smells of tanker oil and the radio plays a cover version of The Smiths song, Please Please Please let me get what I want. The piano rises and I listen, and I think: but how can you get what you want if you don’t know what that is?
By morning the sky and the waves are the same, smashing down against the sand which looks like snow, which all along the edge of the world is as fine as snow.
I lied about what I said when I left his room. But I cannot repeat them again, the words I used.
The other man I loved had black hair, like Leonard Cohen’s gypsy boy. Who am I to presume he felt anything in return? I think of the song, Scarborough Fair, and I wonder if he remembers me at all. There are times when it seems more than I can do to remember how to breathe and suddenly everything I have ever known is gusting back to me, dredged through the stink of tanker oil from an old place at the bottom of my heart. Suddenly it feels as if the seventy-eight per cent of my body that is water is trying to get back to the sea. Sehnsucht, the Germans call this. An intense yearning for a thing far-off, a thing that no word in the English language can define.
A gull flies out of the surf and taps down lightly on the sand; then another. But, miraged behind the spray, it is possible it is just the same bird. When I reach Starcross the shellfish sign is still there on the harbour wall and it’s been fifteen years.
Even at this hour there is a man selling chips from a truck stand. I am like one of those crazy people who will talk to anyone. I tell the vendor about the rugby player who has come out of the closet. He hands me my food. He doesn’t look like a person who cares.
On the other side of the wall the water shudders in, the visible surface tremor of an innately rocking world. A bottle smacks the stone, eddies down and goes under. Today the sea is a breathing sheet of lead. The entire sea is a stone, shattering. I am out of metaphors. The sea is just the sea. This is the Earth. In space we are just the remnants of ancient, accidental collisions. But this doesn’t explain our longing, or desire. It is obscene, if you think about it, the way we take so long to realise anything.
Here is one way to look at it. It is like the shock of realising that nothing is new, that you—still so resiliently unclonable—are not new. I don’t mean this in any zen kind of way, I mean it the way it sounds. Sometimes you can think that you were the one to discover something only to find out that everybody knew about it all along. It is always a shock to learn that other people have been in the same place as you.
There is a pencil on my desk that says ‘I used to be a Paper cup!’ in black stencilled letters down the side. I know this is possible, that we can recycle anything, but still I find myself holding my pencil in wonder, and crying.
If people ask I will tell them it was peaceful. But how can any of us know this?
I eat my chips. I wave down to the beach as if there is somebody out there who will realise it is me. I call my own name, just to hear it aloud, just to allow it to enter, for a moment, a different world.
Not the past, not the future. Not paradise not reality not a dream.
It is only last week I read him that poem.
Here is something else I do not know. If it passes—what then?
Note: The poem quoted by the narrator is Wildly Constant by Anne Carson, from The Forward Book of Poetry 2010, Forward London, 2009.
The smallest of things
The woman on the bus had done her laundry the day before. Or Monday, perhaps. There were two loads of colours and then the whites, so possibly she had been washing over two days. When she thought about it, the woman on the bus had in fact washed a fourth load too because yesterday was the day they changed the sheets. The problem with the tumble dryer meant that they had to delay one load, so laundry was almost certainly what she had been doing for the last two days. It was unacceptable that no engineers were available over the holiday weekend because this had an impact on how many loads you could expect to get through in a day, and you would hope for a contingency plan at least, because even on public holidays the laundry had to be done.
The woman on the bus had recently been to a local beauty spot, where the parking charges were also unacceptable and there was only one four-hourly tariff, although they had still chosen to use the facility. It turned out the beauty spot was really only somewhere beautiful, which seemed not to be what the woman on the bus was expecting, so they stayed just an hour, which gave them a surplus of parking time. A family pulled up in a nearby space and the woman on the bus asked if they would like the unused portion of the ticket. But the young wife, who had moon-shaped hollows under her eyes and a stain on her liberty print dress, said yes so sharply—Yes!—that it made the woman on the bus not want to give it to her any more.
It was almost certainly a completely unrelated action but the driver pulled up particularly hard then and we all learned that the woman on the bus had a spiky knee, although we had no frame of reference for this condition, which might have represented some external expression of an inner angst, or been slang for something degenerative and related to shitty bones. There was no way of telling whether the information was meant as a threat, but the man standing in the wheelchair bay took it seriously enough to risk moving into the aisle, notoriously vulnerable to the ricochet effect at the point the bus hit the car traps, which was the part you had to brace yourself for even though the whole guided busway project had cost the taxpayer millions and was advanced in other, more invisible ways.
Even though it was traditionally the way things were done, the woman on the bus had no intention of thanking the bus driver at her destination. The woman on the bus felt that, seeing as his driving was intolerable and there were not enough seats, thanking him would be in some way a betrayal of her core beliefs, which her therapist had encouraged her to preserve. The lack of seats was not in itself the responsibility of the driver but the woman on the bus had little doubt it was made worse by his poor judgment calls, mostly relating to where there was a line of international students waiting at the local college, which was a point that closed the debate almost immediately because it involved discussion of immigration and political allegiances that some people preferred not to talk about on the bus. There was a moment at which a girl on a bicycle had made an ill-judged attempt to cross the bus rails and the driver was forced to lurch to a halt, but this was a regular occurrence and no-one’s heart had stopped, noone’s life flashed in disappointing vignettes before t
heir eyes, which meant even the woman on the bus had to accept that the foolishness displayed was entirely the fault of the girl, although it wouldn’t have hurt the driver to sound the horn.
It was also normal to expect a delay where the bus had to cross a taxi lane to make a left downtown, but the intersection was on this occasion unusually clear and provoked vocal speculation as to why the city was so quiet, which meant we never did find out if the woman on the bus gave her unused parking ticket to the young wife with the moon-hollowed eyes. The suspicion was—not. You couldn’t quite see through the window because of all the breathing going on in the bus, but it was enough to tell it was raining, which caused a problem with the preparation of umbrellas in a small space and seemed unfair considering at the start of the journey there had been the promise of wide, clear skies and even a little sun. It was as if the bus itself had absorbed all the best things the day might have been able to offer and released them back to the world in the form of a very fine, very intrusive vapour, the kind that your clothes would take in and slowly discharge at inopportune intervals throughout the morning, like you were breathing water, like a reminder we shouldn’t have left the ocean.
The woman on the bus expressed an opinion that implied this change in the weather was also the fault of the driver, albeit in some way that couldn’t quite be qualified. Perhaps if he had driven more slowly. Perhaps if he had been someone else. The implication seemed to be that had he driven more slowly or been a different person we might have arrived in the city at some other point in the space-time continuum, some point where it was not raining and we did not have to contemplate the evolutionary processes that had made us so incompatible with our environments, shaped us into such exposed, susceptible forms and then failed us. The sky was momentarily pale gold and still, and for a minute we wondered if this was possible, if so much could really be so different based on a change in the smallest of things. Then the rain returned, firm and regular, and equally it seemed inevitable that all paths were fixed and you were going to wind up in the same place eventually, anyway.