Issue 13 - December 2008 - Prose

Today and things by Alys Conran

I might jump in front of my train today. I like thinking about that kind of stuff, like when you’re holding a brick out over the window ledge and there’s that lady Mrs Lewis with the bags and the blue hat and the smile and the grey little eyes and the brown shoes and the skin folding down from her eyes like paper aeroplanes. When Mrs Lewis is walking straight under the window and you’re holding the brick and thinking how it could fall with a WHOOOOOOSH if you opened your fingers just a little bit, and it could land straight on top of Mrs Lewis. Like that. I like thinking about all that.

Like now I could step out off the platform and go squelch between the train and things and along the tracks. Like grating cheese on my Pizza with Daniel. Yuck.

But I don’t jump out, like I don’t drop the brick, cause it’s nice to be holding the brick and standing close to the edge and just thinking about all that stuff and the world and things.

Daniel says that all that is okay so long as I don’t actually jump. Daniel is good at knowing all those things like about mum and going to heaven, when I thought that was it and mum gone, like the last piece of Christmas cake, but Daniel says she’s not gone but she’s in heaven where I won’t go if I drop the brick or go in front of the train. And I do want to go there, if that’s where mum is, and where there’ll be cakes - which have never been so good since then, even when Mrs Lewis brings some round and Daniel says they’re soup herb.

Cake is one of the things Daniel loves and so do I, but Daniel – who is my little brother - loves me more, and I love him too.

A lot of other people love me. There is the lady in the booth next door to me, who sells chewing gum and flowers; she always smiles at me, and never says anything, and she gives me a red rose for Valentine’s Day every time – which is nice and, even though the roses are usually for the girls and she is a bit fat, I don’t mind.

But I like Daniel loving me most of all, because I love Daniel the most. Daniel is great.

Daniel has a really important job. Although he says it isn’t true, I know that Daniel’s job is even more important than my booth and the little churches. Daniel has a special bag that he takes to work, called a briefcase. Daniel also has to wear a suit to work. The suit is really nice. Daniel looks really good in his suit.

Daniel works in a really big building, like hundreds of booths all piled up on top of each other and covered with mirrors. It is pretty. Daniel is very important.

Sometimes, when we are having tea (Daniel can cook, so we have tea together every day) Daniel will have to take out his briefcase and look at some important papers, full of numbers. I love it when he does this. It is amazing.

Sometimes Daniel’s job is so important that he goes on looking at the numbers almost all night. I like looking at Daniel looking at the figures on the white paper, and Daniel doesn’t mind me looking. This is very nice of him, a lot of people get very angry when I look at them, especially on the train.

But Daniel doesn’t mind. I know this because sometimes Daniel comes over, pats my big head or my shoulder like mum did before she went to heaven, and, when he has finished the figures, Daniel sometimes gets two beers from the fridge and holds his beer up to mine to say ‘cheers’.

Anyway. Daniel’s job is great – and Daniel is great – and it’s great because Daniel got me a job too. My job is to sit there in the booth all day and wait for people to come by and buy sue van ears of the church. My favourite sue van ear is a little model of the church, made all clean, in plastic. It is really nice, so I sell quite a lot of little churches:

‘One pound, please,’ I say, holding out my hand.

And, usually, that is it, except when people say things like:

‘…a bit steep…’

Which means that one pound is too much,

Or:

‘Not made of money, you know.’

Which also means that one pound is too much,

Or:

‘Pricey’

Which means that one pound is too much too.

I like my job. One of the reasons is that my little brother Daniel comes into the booth every day to look at the sue van ears. Daniel never buys anything, never says that he isn’t made of money or pricey.

This is how I know that Daniel loves me like I love Daniel: because Daniel doesn’t really come to look at the little plastic churches and the mobiles and stickers that I sell in my shop. Daniel comes to see me. I have got him figured out.

There has been nothing special about today so far thank goodness: Daniel has come in to look at the churches. Mrs Lewis has also come. I have counted my money, like Daniel has always told me to. Now I’m heading home, as usual. I have walked down to the station, going all the right way, showing my pass to the stationmaster, who has given me that salute that he always gives me and has let me through the barrier. I don’t know why the stationmaster salutes at me, but he likes doing the funny salute, and so I smile at him…because people always like it when I smile.

I have walked down the dusty steps to the platform, swinging my arms by my sides like Daniel does, then, on the platform, I am looking through my glasses at the sign, which tells me in square yellow numbers that there is one minute to wait, 59 seconds, 58. I am pulling my shirt away from my wrist to show my new shiny watch, and pretending I am reading its funny little hands, then I am looking back up at the numbers up on the sign, 53, 52, because my new watch is really too hard.

And this is when I’m enjoying thinking that I could jump off the platform if it wasn’t for heaven and things. But then I’m looking straight ahead.

Straight ahead where I’m looking there’s a funny man coming. He is very strange. Through my fat glasses I can see this man’s arms waving around in the dark air that’s on the platform. His mouth is moving; it is all black inside his mouth like a train tunnel. The man in my glasses is very thin. He is white like a plate. He has black hair that’s greasy and snaky. There is white spit round his mouth. Spit is something that I get too, but Mum has showed me how to wipe my mouth with a handkerchief.

I am staring at the man coming towards me on the platform, and maybe he hasn’t got a handkerchief. I am staring at the man who is moving his body jerk jerk jerk, like the fish do when they are out of the water. He is talking to himself, which is another thing I have to try not to do when I am outside the house, although Daniel sometimes lets me do it at home for a whole hour in a row. I am staring at the man and then at the clock on the platform, which says 15 seconds and then 14. The man is coming towards me, talking and talking and talking.

10 seconds now. The man is still coming. I am staring, and now the man is staring too. He has big hands. His hands are coming towards me.

When the clock says 5 seconds, I don’t know what to do, so I smile at the man, coming towards me, shouting. After 3 seconds the train is already coming. It is coming through the tunnel. You can hear it: WHOOOOOOOSH. I stop checking the clock at 3 seconds. But the man doesn’t stop, and I am scared. And then I know it’s 1 second, and it’s like the brick is falling, but it wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.


This Bird Has Flown by Billy O'Callaghan

This morning, I awoke feeling very cold. There had been snow in the night, a heavy drift, but the cloud had cleared early and the temperatures must have plummeted. I looked out the window but it was still a little dark to see very much. The glass was frosted over, in odd, vague patterns that made me think of stained glass windows in churches. Not the colours so much as the texture, that same hearty, chiselled effect that seemed to twist everything askew.

A memory hung over me, one from years before, dating back to the time I had gone to visit my aunt in hospital. Jenny, my father's sister. I must have been dreaming about her, though it didn't feel that way, and what I was remembering was what had happened, nothing particularly fantastic at all. She'd undergone an operation -- for a woman's problem, I think; something painfully routine and permanent -- but when I arrived at the hospital she was asleep, drunk with medication. Her bed was in the far right corner of a very bright six-bed ward, and I stood around for a minute or two just looking at her, thinking to myself how strange she looked, not really like her usual self at all. We had been so close growing up; she was twelve years older than me but we lived near one another and, as an only child, I had always looked upon her as a big sister. When I was eight or nine years old, I used to imagine that one day we'd marry, and of course I was too young then to understand that such a thing could never happen. I loved her that much, though, and I know she felt the same way about me. But then time played one of its deft tricks, and a day came when we were both more than a little shocked to realise that the binds had been undone and our lives somehow had grown apart.

That afternoon in the hospital, sleep, combined with the trauma of the surgery, had reduced her to a lump, made a further stranger of her. Huddled under crisp white linen sheets, she looked old and overweight, a pulp of waxy flesh and dyed blonde hair and brand new cerise pink silk pyjamas, and her face held a pointed expression, most probably because of the pain. Worry lines had slit faint ruts into her forehead with a determination that even the after-effects of an anaesthetic couldn't rub smooth, and her mouth constantly pursed and puckered, the lips pale without their daub of lipstick, as if she was speaking inside her dreams. When I was eight or nine, I'd been sure that one day our age gap would narrow enough so that it ceased to matter, but in actuality it had only ever seemed to widen.

I stood there, as I've said, for a minute or two, thinking that maybe it would be okay for me to just stoop and kiss her, a simple peck on her cheek or her brow and only for old times' sake, but a feeling of discomfort stirred and began to swell, eventually forcing me to turn away. The ward, because of its stillness and high ceilings, felt empty, and I had reached the door before I realised that a girl was watching me from the bed to my left. I smiled at her, with some embarrassment, and I was about to push the door open when she smiled back. For some reason, that stopped me. There was something about her expression that seemed so forlorn I just couldn't bring myself to ignore it. I hesitated for an instant, then moved from the end to the side of her bed. I glanced around for a visitor's chair but found none, and she shuffled her body awkwardly and sat up in the bed, drawing up her legs in a way that made some room on the mattress and seemed to invite me to sit. I nodded, understanding, and perched on the edge of the bed; all very proper, but friendly too. The mattress was firm and didn't dip much around my weight. I had brought a small bunch of flowers for Jenny, nothing fancy, just some posies, and I held them out to this girl on impulse, sensing perhaps that she truly needed them.

"Well," I said. "The rain's stopped. The way it's been falling lately, I was beginning to think the government had stock in the stuff."

Her face tensed with confusion, in a way that brought out the fully stupidity in my words.

"My name is Billy," I added, and held my breath for a return.

Her name was Marketa. Her English, when it finally came, was soft and slow, fluent enough but a long way from natural, withered in places and in others thickly over-pronounced, and she spoke with an uncertainty that echoed shyness as well as fear. I tried to make her feel at ease, and even though I could see that she was struggling with the hard corners of my accent, I rambled on and on, taking a shot at anything that came to mind, afraid for both our sakes of what the silence might bring if we let it take hold. She made sounds that I took to be agreeable, but the bemusement in her eyes spoke volumes. When I had fully exhausted the asinine and the small-talk became too much of a struggle, I skipped on into the safer, easier rut of asking questions, keeping a happy and upbeat voice and then nodding with exaggerated interest to her replies, leaning in to catch every nuance of her answers -- as if they mattered at all one way or the other -- and making sure to pull and bend my facial expressions to match their tone. She was forthright in everything she said, speaking as if from a textbook. We were playing a kind of game, one that she needed and one that I felt obliged to continue. None of it was easy. I gathered in the facts, made sympathetic gestures with my mouth, and tried my best to make her feel important, at least for a little while.

She had left her home, she said, a small town called Stonava, in the Czech Republic's eastern region, to make a new life with her boyfriend. They had tried Paris first, but Paris was a hard city, unwelcoming, and after a couple of months they decided to give Ireland a go. That had been little over a year before. She liked Cork, she said, but there was something in her smile that seemed to add a caveat to that, and she saw me notice and shrugged. It could be lonely at times, she added, not really needing to make mention of the boyfriend again because that was a well-worn tale of woe.

A week ago, she had been to see a doctor, for something to ease the pain that crept up and down her side and which seemed to be getting increasingly worse. He took some blood, and the following day phoned her to come in for further tests. Only a week, a little less than that, even, but already the bed had made a mess of her, just as it had with Jenny. I lowered my gaze as she talked and, without meaning to, took to studying her hands. They were delicate hands, pale skinned and demure, the bones spraying out from her wrists and rising in spindles to the jut of her knuckles. Her fingers were slender, with meticulously trimmed nails, and she were no rings, not even the mark of one. She'd been chasing promises. Her voice kept on and on, just a little above a hush and delectably foreign, the vowels of her words carrying all the throaty allure of a Cold War spy film, and I watched as she folded and resettled her hands over and over, gently wrestling in and out of a prayerful grip and occasionally worrying the hem of the bed's pale blue woollen blanket. I didn't realise she was even crying until I looked up again.

"Since the doctor told me, I've been thinking about home. But I can't go back. That would be too sad."

What was there to say? I didn't know this girl at all. I had her name, as well as an image burnt into my mind, but nothing else. I felt something shift inside of me, but I put that down to pity, and I had a notion that it wasn't right to feel that way. Her hands parted, fluttered uncertainly or dismissively in the air and then slumped down to lie in her lap, fingers of her left hand overlapping at a slant the fingers of the right. I wanted to say something, to offer some few words of solace, but nothing came to mind.

"I don't sleep now," she added, in a whisper. A tear chased a runnel down one cheek and clung to the ridge of her jaw. In the strong white light I could clearly see the trace it left behind. More tears bristled in her eyes, and I remember thinking that they blurred vision in the very same way as stained glass. Not the colour, of course, but that texture. When you give the matter some thought, you realise that it takes very little to contort the world; one tear can ruin everything if it has a good reason to fall. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, reached out and dried her eyes. It was a reflex gesture; she'd become a child, and without tensing she surrendered wholly to that. "When I do drift off," she said, "terrible things are waiting. I'm not so troubled about what happens to me in the dreams as I am about how it affects the people around me. Even strangers cry for me, and I don't want that. At least, I don't think I do."

After a little while, a bell went off somewhere, and a few minutes after that a nurse came to the door and said that she was very sorry but that visiting hours were over. I nodded, and stood. The girl in the bed, Marketa, looked up at me. She thanked me for talking to her, and also for the flowers, and neither of us mentioned that both occurrences had been accidents, twists of fate. Unsure what to say, I leaned down and kissed her cheek, which made her blush but also smile with something like happiness. She dealt with that smile by chewing on one side of her lower lip but I saw past that and was glad that I'd done it. I mumbled a so long, and assured her that I'd call again, that I had to come back anyway because my aunt, Jenny, down there in the last bed across, had slept right through my visit. Jenny could hold onto a grudge until a day after forever, I said, though that was nearly the very opposite of true. I almost smiled as I watched the girl's expression grow bemused again.

That was it. We say a lot of things we mean, and I fully intended to go back, but life, work and a dozen other excuses conspired to keep me grounded. Then Jenny was discharged, armed with a crutch and a distant stare. We spoke on the phone as often as I was around to answer and, when she began to feel a little better, we made coffee dates to fill up Saturday mornings and picked at pecan muffins while she rambled on about hospital food and I chugged my eyebrows over cheesy, Groucho-styled double-entendre cracks about wanting to see her scar.

"The girl?" she said, and smirked while I plucked at her for information. "Oh yeah. I recognised your handiwork there, all right. A kid in floods of tears and a vase of wilting posies. Also, the nurse mentioned you were by. So thanks, I suppose. But you still owe me a bunch of flowers, okay? And nothing that you've lifted out of a graveyard, if you don't mind."

Floods of tears. I recalled how, after leaving the hospital, I had spent a good part of the bus ride home trying to tag her with an age. My best guess put her somewhere in her mid-twenties, though it wouldn't have surprised me if the truth lay some five years either side of that. Funny how five years can be the world at that age, or it can be nothing. Depends, I suppose, on the person. And funny, but not in a good way. She hadn't been an awful lot to look at, but I put a lot of that down to the collateral damage of her treatment, and even if her skin was rough and blotched and her hair spun around her face in lank, tawny tendrils, there was no denying that she still had nice eyes, large, just the way I like them, and a shade of green so pale that in lesser light they had probably often passed for grey. Or silver. Her tears had made them glisten, and made everything seem fleeting, delicately poised but waiting to be knocked askew.

Using my thumbnail to scrape muffin residue from the channels of the pleated paper cup, I pretended that my interest in Marketa was one of simple curiosity. Which, I suppose, it was. Still, it had all the feel of an act, and Jenny's smirk cut newer, deeper divots, ending finally in the revelation of teeth.

"They moved her out of the ward a couple of days before I was allowed home. She didn't talk much, but I think she'd been given some pretty bad news. The doctors seemed very interested in her." My aunt broke her second muffin into chunks and picked out the pecans to eat first. I watched her, wishing she could have told me more.

This morning, the scree of frost combined with the tempered darkness to make something ethereal of the early hour. Beyond the window, snow lay banked along the ditches and hedgerows, its bleak pallor adding depth to the silence. It felt like weather for dying.

Hospitals have this way of emphasising the strangeness between people. The setup almost craves vulnerability and, with its cloying antiseptic stench, overly waxed floors and stultifying, artificial glow, it quickly peels away whatever modicum of familiarity we might hold dear, until patients are reduced down to mush and visitors to hollow, creaking shells. This is a reality of our world. Perhaps though, it is because of this that we are allowed to hit upon some common note, a kind of knowing camaraderie, like survivors of some terrible disaster, or war veterans. I sometimes think that it is for just such reasons that we dream. At a time when social evolution threatens to send us spinning into space, scientists still scratch their heads in wonder at this most archaic of habits. They see dreaming as an obtuse reflex, some primeval semaphore worthless now in our new world and lingering only for nostalgia's sake. But dreams store up all the memories, hopes and fears that in our daily lives we overcome or simply toss away, and I think we need constant reminders of those things in order to balance and counteract the way that we have chosen to live today.

I peeled off my t-shirt and dressed quickly, foregoing the notion of a shower. That was okay; today was my own, and I had no place to be, nothing much at all to do. I was clean enough for just milling around the house. The cold bit at me, savage teeth nuzzling my skin, but I've known colder mornings. "Marketa," I whispered, because there was no one around to hear. I think I was hoping that by speaking of my dream, I'd somehow clear it from my mind, but the sound of it, my crushed voice, made me flinch. It seemed ripe with accusation. I paused, then I repeated the name, this time in my usual speaking voice. But that felt no better.

It was far too early to be getting up, but the day yawned all around me, its needs waiting to be filled, and I've never been one of those people who can just lie around once they've woken. Today was Sunday, an open-book kind of day and one simply built for idling. But there were right ways to idle. I decided that a walk would probably do me some good, take in some fresh air, wrapped up tight and warm against the cold. The exercise would help to build an appetite. Then, after a hearty breakfast, I could settled down with the papers and listen to a bit of Rubber Soul. Full of the feeling that I had wandered headlong into the early act of a story without an end, I sat on the edge of my bed and laced up my boots.

end.

 

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