My girl.
‘Meg?’ His feet — big, ridiculous, guilty things — bring him downstairs.
The girl I didn’t help to make.
The other girl.
The girl I choose.
There’s no one in the living room.
You can hear crockery, soft motion. There’s a spillage of light from under a further door.
Kitchen.
And you follow her to where she’s gone, walk through the air that her body has already pushed aside, head along the corridor and down three little steps — they’re all the same these Victorian houses, you needn’t expect surprises, you just shouldn’t.
She’s there at the far end of the kitchen and her face is to the window, so you can’t see it.
And you can hear when your voice says, ‘I’m hungry.’
She tells you, low and even, ‘Yes, well, so am I hungry because some fucker stopped me having lunch and stopped me having dinner and I haven’t felt like …’ Meg with her back to you in the dimness and leaning on the counter by the sink. ‘It’s not good if I don’t eat. I get a bit crazy.’
The kitchen smells nice, like being in a home with established habits. ‘Meg …’
‘What? Don’t tell me you’re scared.’
‘No. I won’t. At least …’ He presses on into the room and is aware that Meg can watch his reflection approaching her. ‘I made the rules, you see, the rules for the letters and I was, you see, surprised when you … The idea was that I would never meet anyone and that … I was surprised.’
She brushes her hands through her hair and sighs and he doesn’t know if this is a sign of disgust, or tiredness, or something else, and he doesn’t feel able to ask, but then she tells him, ‘There aren’t any rules. We aren’t playing a game. I’m not a bloody game, Jon. I don’t have time to be a game.’ Meg turns, looks at him and her face is so gentle, soft, secret-looking — as if she is dreaming him. Jon would like her to be dreaming him — she would do that very well and undertake many improvements, he is sure. She asks him, ‘You want a game? I’ll tell you a game. We’ll play rock, scissors, paper, volcano. That’s what we’ll fucking play. That’s all anyone needs to play.’
And Jon’s head wags, ‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘You said you’re hungry — I’m starving, I think. Yeah … I’ve got …’
Meg paces about from shelves to cupboards and back and this is all right, this is perfect — he watches her, each shape that her body reaches and then passes through, abandons. He asks, ‘Do you have honey? I think I would like bread and honey.’
This makes her, for some reason, smile, ‘You’d … Well, I do have that. All the ingredients for that. Bread and butter and honey. The butter’s on the table — butter dish, see? You slice the bread, I’ll get the honey.’ She pauses, as if testing whether he will take instructions, whether he likes them, whether he — in this context — is pleased, so pleased to do one thing after another and be uncomplicated and know where he is — in Telegraph Hill, in a kitchen, with Meg Williams.
‘While you’re doing that, Mr August, I’ll tell you about rock, paper, scissors, volcano. This little girl was talking about it and I made sure I remembered it. Every time I see something good, or kind, or silly, or worth collecting, I remember it. Every time the city gives me something sweet, I remember and I write it down.’
And Jon goes and collects the butter and lifts out the bread and his hands do not stammer. He might have been in this same kitchen for lifetimes and worked with Meg to make plates of bread and honey and to end their hunger. He might have done this over and over again and always loved doing it. It’s beautiful.
02:06
A MAN AND a woman are asleep in a living room. The art deco lamp shines on without them, makes shadows.
The couple are lying together on an old leather sofa, their bodies released into careless shapes, their faces unguarded. The man’s coat lies on the rug beside them, as if it might have covered them at some time, as if they have turned in their dreams and it has fallen from them.
The man’s shoes are together by the door, neatly parallel, the woman’s are under an armchair, also tidily paired. Beyond having stockinged feet, they are fully dressed, wear jackets, their clothes disarranged now, creasing.
Because the sofa is quite narrow, the pair are snibbed together — the man lying on his back and the woman’s weight resting partly across him. Her head is turned on his chest so that she seems to be listening to his heart, perpetually making sure that it continues.
This is something the woman would wish to remember, that she would collect along with all the other incidents, moments, presents that have seemed valuable and something to sustain her. But instead she sleeps.
04:18
‘YOU SHOULD REST, darling.’ He says this as if they have made love.
‘I am rested, sort of.’ She says this as if she doesn’t find him ridiculous and as if she is speaking from somewhere still perfect and unpreventably possible, somewhere which is a dream.
Time falls on them quietly and gentle as dust. The house is full of silence, a well-disposed silence.
They are lying on the old leather sofa together — Jon loves the old leather sofa — and Meg is waking against his chest — she also now loves the old leather sofa. They are both discovering hurts of the sort they can find entertaining, of the sort that make them proud.
Meg’s neck is cricked from being trapped at an unwise angle by Jon’s arm and something about one of her ankles isn’t right — it’s been jammed in hard between a cushion and the sofa’s back … that feels like what’s happened … she can’t move to get up and find out, or else won’t move to get up and find out.
Jon is coddling Meg — as he intends it — like dozens and dozens of eggs, enjoying the pressure her weight puts on his breathing. His one arm, laid safely over her, is cold but not uncomfortable — the other is bent beneath him and filled with jarring and shooting types of tension. His knees have been folded over one end of the sofa and this has made his knees ache and cut off the blood supply to his feet.
I might get gangrene, because of falling asleep while holding my baby, my sweetheart, my girl.
‘Meg?’
‘Hello.’
‘You should rest, though. You should go up, go to bed.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Rather be here. With you.’
Which he’s not unhappy to hear, but it does mean that she doesn’t expect him to follow her and keep her just as safe in her bed — she doesn’t want that, or doesn’t want that yet — doesn’t want that today, or wouldn’t take him and keep him there, ever.
She moves in tiny ways against him and this feels like lava, like delicately boiling oil that runs over him, breaks. She gives him the explanation he wouldn’t have asked for, ‘I could tell that you weren’t resting, because you were staying awake to check that I was asleep, so I can’t go upstairs and go to sleep, because you won’t sleep when we’re there.’
Thank you.
We.
When we’re there.
Thank you.
He retrieves his lost arm with some difficulty. ‘I slept.’
‘Liar.’
‘I don’t lie to you. I won’t. I did sleep in the end quite significantly and parts of me are sleeping still.’
And here’s to them staying asleep.
I haven’t woken up with an erection in years, I haven’t.