I hold them until I sweat with holding and I can have faith there is something in my arms, against my arms.
I hold on until I have confidence again in the truth of sweet and voluntary touch.
Even in its absence I can believe. That’s what belief is all about — it cannot exist without absence.
Honestly.
I need no substitutes or replacements.
I am lost, but not that lost.
I can subsist on faith.
It seals me away from remembering the afternoon not so far before the shop. Hospital trip — latest hospital trip — mild outside, but the corridors snowy, as if filled with bruised snow — past the doorways and in and undress and smell wrong and like a stranger and wait in the bedroom — wear the gown provided and get into the bed — they wheel me onwards using the bed once I am dressed as someone other than myself — the wide elevator yawning and sluicing me down to the theatre level — chat with the orderly — politeness — I’m paying — shame the public system doesn’t work — I pay for that, too — but I pay more for this because then I’m less frightened, then I can think I’m doing something. I am my priority and contain the sum total of my hope. There are smiles as I go, propelled under the lights, and then come the intrusions and I am brave — just looking around to check the theatre, the monitor, the other equipment — I produce jokes, things that have moved on from jokes — and I’d rather not have the sedative and so get discomfort instead, not pain precisely — severe to moderate discomfort — I am very brave — I say this to myself — there being nobody about who is better informed.
Well done. You are being brave.
But when I said you, I meant me.
That was understood.
You weren’t there.
This story’s position is unequivocal on that: your absence.
You weren’t there.
You aren’t there.
You aren’t here.
Not your fault, I know.
It’s because I left you.
I have gone to trouble for you, so you don’t have to.
Left as if I was going on a jaunt to Over There and gave you no part of the story about the bad bodily changes and the nothing much that anyone can do.
No confessions, no lip gloss and crying.
I’m not in the mood.
No longer being a woman, not a complete woman, not comfortable and me, not as far as I can tell, since they’ve taken what they had to away. More may be removed on future occasions. Things moving on while I fail to keep pace.
That’s why the shop annoyed me.
Mandy.
Mandy and her shop selling everything unnecessary.
She hadn’t got a clue.
She’d never lain down with the neat snug of you and held your full attention — cooling skin and being in the afterwards of us — the afterwards being really the destination — the afterwards being the requested now — she’d never eased fingers by your cheek, brushed along your jaw inside a new quiet, just touching and peace and us — she’d no idea.
She didn’t understand reality.
She hadn’t kissed you when you taste of the most excellent stories, perfect in my mouth.
I wish I could tell you about her.
I wish I could give you this story.
I can’t, though.
I’ve gone to trouble without you, because what else could I do? I’m the one who took away your shelter, so I can’t bring trouble back to you, I can’t drag down the cold to hurt you. It has become necessary to be lost.
If I could see you, I would say this.
I miss you very much.
Because It’s a Wednesday
BECAUSE IT’S A Wednesday, he’s shagging Carmen.
Grotesquely unlikely name for a cleaning woman, Carmen. It doesn’t even suit her as a person — entirely inappropriate, in fact. As is the shagging, of course. I am her employer — professional relationship, position of trust and so forth — I should be more restrained.
Not that a shag might not indicate trust.
I could argue that, to a degree, I am really confirming some level of interpersonal détente.
It had started, the shagging, when Philip’s office hours were cut. Inadequate warning and then he’s semi-permanently Working From Home in the flat — emailing, drafting and whatnot — bit of a shock — while Carmen’s there setting his rooms to rights — polishing, ironing, folding, making his good order better and getting the place to smell of nowhere, or else like a well-maintained leisure centre, café, meeting room, a neutral space.
Which is what I request — no trace of my having been here, no spillages, no confusions, no scent beyond fresh linen, dry heat. Impersonal. People say that as if it’s a bad word when it’s fundamentally pleasant and light and unstressful.
Fifth new apartment in six years — third city, third country — sustaining that level of movement, you want to feel unrestricted, stay painless, be able to slip in and out.
No pun intended.
Christ!
Old bloke shagging the help, and cracking interior single entendres.
That’s a bit desperate.
He stares at his hands where they’re gripping her waist.
Old man’s hands he has now.
How did they happen? When? Where was I?
They give the impression he’s wearing ill-fitting gloves, gloves with baggy knuckles. And big, ribbed, spadey fingernails — a vulnerability about them.
And pale, pale, pale.
Carmen is wearing the pink-and-white-striped blouse today, which is his second favourite. His favourite is the green, the one she was wearing when they first shagged, when she stood up and made her move once they’d finished their cup of tea with the chocolate biscuits. This ritual they’d fallen into — there they would sit, eating these biscuits with bad, cheap chocolate on top and sharing a silent cup of tea at roughly, regularly, twelve o’clock. With no provocation, on that one particular afternoon — at 12.25, or so — she’d stood up and leaned against the kitchen counter, given him a slightly complicated look and then raised her skirt.
Not enticing, not particularly sexual, but unmistakably a request.
She doesn’t have very good English — not at home in it — probably thought a gesture would be more effective.
Which it was.
No idea what she actually speaks inside her head, what her language is.
Should ask to see her passport, find out.
International, me — fluent in several places, but it’s English that’s the big one, is dominant.
Which is a happy happenstance.
She was wearing white knickers — always does — dull from too much washing, unadorned, but somehow girlish. Surprising.
Odd when you suddenly realise that somewhere in your mind you have made an assumption about someone’s underwear, even though you have at no point imagined — not even considered — that you will see it, or touch it, or pull it down and have a shag.
Shag.
She is very definitely a shag.
This isn’t fucking, Phil’s not of an age any more to fuck. He lacks the energy and what he thinks of as the necessary edge. And Carmen, being plain, is not fucking material — he has to be truthful and truly she is not.
And we are absolutely not making love.