Such an uncomfortable day, though. She would prefer if it were done.
But no need for worry.
No sense in making assumptions, or being bleak in advance.
There’s no way to be certain of when anybody will leave.
After you.
In every doorway, without fail, he tells her.
That’s what she wants.
After you.
Then at least she’d keep the whole rest of him and miss nothing else.
But he has to be the gentleman, can’t help it.
No. After you.
Which wouldn’t be right.
But neither is right.
Someone else having their apple trees, lighting unwatched fires.
And she isn’t sure she’ll manage, not in the end, doesn’t see how she could, and she wishes she wasn’t carrying this silly paper bag with the fig in it that she won’t eat, can’t eat. She wants to fold her arms, or put her hands in her pockets, she isn’t clear which.
He settles his hand at the small of her back and then lets her swing and face him and see how he is weary and gently and sadly himself. ‘Are you okay, though? Really?’
She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best.
Baby Blue
WHAT HAPPENED WAS that I got lost.
I swear to God.
I got mixed up and then was lost.
I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean anything. I had, in fact, headed out on a jaunt, I might say if asked, so that I could skip meaning completely for a spell. I’d hopped on a plane to Over There, slipped out from the airport and into a brand-new Having A Break kind of city with hope in my heart for sustaining a speed consistently sufficient to outpace myself and every trace of significance.
There’s no law against it.
Other than that, I had no intentions, not one in my head. I promise you. Truly.
And then in the hotel later that funny sleep caught me: the twitchy and messy unrest which comes after flight. A wrong sun was behind the curtains and my day had been knocked all westwards and stretched and my skin smelled frightened and of catering in confinement, bad catering, and also carried some harsh/sweet combination of scents that wasn’t like me and wasn’t something I could like. This despite having taken a bath as soon as I’d got to my room. No one can win with long journeys: in every case, they precipitate bad bodily changes.
That’s what I’d say. If asked.
That’s what I’m saying.
I’d go on the record should I have to, although I won’t. Why would I? To whom would this be of interest?
After the bath and the lying down and the discontent I woke up fifteen hours later raw-eyed. I’d got a headachy thirst as well — drank the whole big bottle of bedside mineral water, which I thought was free, but it turned out not.
What had roused me was the so, so quiet quietness — everywhere the broad silence which is the same in no matter which country and indicates snow. Even before I’d gone and checked the windows and worried I wasn’t keeping up my pace, I already knew that, close around the outer walls, normality had been taken and this pale stasis was locked down in its place.
Same every time. One understands the symptoms, causes, and maybe refers internally for a moment to girlhood information about each individual flake being not quite the same as any another and having continually found this a source of disappointment when so many seem entirely the bloody same, just bland clumps and gobbets of cold. Not the miracles promised.
Because, of course, I continue to have an appetite for miracles promised, I stood and watched the whiteness dropping, fine and gentle, and wished them all welclass="underline" not flakes, more a wavering dust, a disturbance barely visible in the blanked sky. This is the style of fall that doesn’t seem it’ll be a problem, but it’s deceptive. The stuff doesn’t stop and tenderly eats up your street, your views, and settles, and being out in it will make you end up cold — cold in the lungs — and still it keeps on and overwhelms and then the fun’s gone.
There is usually fun at the start, I think. Snow makes the only wholesale change that human beings choose to tolerate. People embrace it.
We’re an odd species, embracing ruined water, a gradually sifting possibility of disappearance. Some of us don’t, I realise: those trying for specific ends and getting trapped away from them — making hospital trips, for example, contending with rural environments — residents of places held habitually under various things like winter, the effect of winter.
But city snowfalls conjure up simple delight. Often. More often than in the country. The older woman who comes and stays sometimes in the flat next door to mine, she adores it. Or, more properly, she demonstrates her adoration on behalf of someone else. That would be the best way to put it. Oooh, la neige. Voilà. On peut faire les boules de neige. One morning she was there on the front path with her bilingual grandkid looking up, or else with her she’s-sodding-well-going-to-be-bilingual grandkid looking up — I don’t know the woman, only to say bonjour to, and am unsure of her details — the grandkid looking and complete in wonder — beyond the grand-mère thing having been established, I can’t recall exactly how, she’s really a blank — this kid looking — pink outfit, so I presume a granddaughter, the nose visible and eyes, but not much else, which led to guessing — the bundled-cosy granddaughter looking up and widely about herself and breathless with the newly bright air and amazed by the strangeness lying and giving beneath her feet and the wonderful — attention aux pieds! — and the wonderful danger there, made fresh and lovely.
It was a great morning. I wouldn’t swear to it having touched on fun, but it did feel clean. Or cleaned. Erased. Eradicated. I have an inordinate fondness for blank sheets.
Bright white and unbothered, that’s what I like. A crisp domestic glare of cleanliness.
Love it.
Crave. I feel I can say I crave it.
I crave the potentially fraudulent kiss of fresh hotel sheets along limbs, even though the mattress beneath may be a nightmare of mites and skin cells, sweated into by strangers for several nasty reasons. It’s a stupid thing to crave.
But I long for and choose to believe in the sharp linen. I allow it to give me confidence.
So here we have it.
Me standing by a foreign window on a valeted carpet, underfloor heat that’s pleasing the bathmat, through in the bathroom where I’d have a shower soon — I had confidence.
Wash me in the water where you washed your dirty daughter and I shall be whiter than the snow.
I had a relative used to sing that.
Granddad. My grandfather sang it.
And, in addition, we have –
Kid standing and about to pitch in for a go at a laundered world. With her relative. Who maybe sings, perhaps French standards, favourites, Belgian show tunes, I couldn’t say.
There’s a type of confidence in both of them, too. There’s noticeable faith.
Sod that, though.
It’s all nonsense.
We can forget about the plane and the hotel.
They didn’t happen.
Or they did, but they’re not relevant where we are.
We could also get rid of the snow.
It has no place in the current narrative.
The winter-sports granny is true, absolutely, and numerous hotels and aeroplanes and weathers have been parts of my life, but they don’t belong in the story I’m telling you.
This didn’t happen abroad — this thing that happened — this parcel of things that happened — and this also didn’t happen on the morning of the grandmother — Vous parlez Francais? Un peu? — and the obliterating sky. I shouldn’t begin with leaving her behind and a walk to the bus stop beside the park and seeing the narrow balances of bleachwork along tree limbs, frosted trunks, the fountain halted.