Twenty six.
I swore I’d moved on.
‘What?’ cried Selina. The fishing line snapped, whipping the pair of us off our feet. Asses sore and elbows torn from the jagged stone steps of the communal pond.
‘Nothing’, I said and pushed her off me. And soon enough we were back to popping water lily bulbs and counting how many of the tadpoles had grown legs. We were six then.
A few years later we had chased a snake to its nest in our little boat. We killed it with our paddles, one apiece - but not before tipping overboard, all the frenzied thrashing included. As we emerged from the murky pond as victors waving our paddles (boat abandoned for the day), I felt a sharp tug in my foot and yelped. Selina turned around, dead snake draped over her shoulders like a Hollywood starlet’s fur and laughed. Embedded in my sole was our old fishing hook, snapped line and all.
Her father caught us striding (and limping) into the village. How we cried when he beat us both. My own father nodded in approval as he tended to my foot. Of who, I was never very sure.
‘When I leave this village I’m never coming back.’ That’s what she told me that night. Thunder growled and I believed her. The air was charged and I told her ‘I’ll leave too.’
We were sixteen when my father phoned Selina’s. Theirs was the only telephone in the village at the time. We had been skipping rocks on the way back from school. Selina’s mother damn near dragged us the whole way by the ear when she found us.
‘Tell your mother to pack her things, son. You’re joining me in London.’
I remember how upset Selina was. We stomped puffer fish all week in near silence. ‘You’ll get your visa in no time.’
She didnt say anything. When I left we didn’t say goodbye.
Selina’s family followed not soon after. I remember it was the twenty sixth of a winter month because that was her favourite number.
They moved into a two bedroom flat not six minutes from ours. I shoved her face in the snow, she put it down my neck. I made her eat some. ‘That was fun’, she said and we walked home holding hands.
We went to different colleges but the same university. We kissed and fought and fucked the entire time, like only two halves of a whole could.
We were twenty six soon enough. I had saved a pretty penny for a ring. Christmas day we spent snuggled in bed rewatching old films. And the day after, on a snowy twenty sixth morning, I knelt on one knee and Selina walked away.
I hurt for a long time. The world became incomprehensible. I ran away with my medical degree stateside. Selina seemed to follow. I know because I followed her on social media like a maniac. We both zigzagged around the nation through the years, never within reach and neither of us reaching out. We darted between our respective bases in the US and our families in England and India. Her father wept for me.
We are thirty six now. As usual I am late for my flight. I’m okay with this. There’s something soothing about the dull rush of an airport. I sleep well in them. Still, I power through the travelators with a coffee in hand. There’s something to be said about making an effort.
I see a stewardess at my gate as I approach it. She looks mildly unhappy before she notices me and puts on her professional face. I am clearly the lone straggler they’re waiting on.
That’s when I hear that laugh. The laugh I havent heard in a decade. I would recognise it anywhere in the world. Much to the dismay of the stewardess, I turn around and head to the opposite gate.
The sound of her voice reels me in. I am caught again on Selina’s hook.
Before I know it, I am hugging her and shaking her husband’s hand. Selina seems embarrassed and the gentleman is confused. I dont remember the words exchanged. Only the feeling of floating on air. It’s electric, like those old thundering nights.
I’m very happy for them, selfishly and selflessly so. I tell them as much, and explain I am very late. My father is ill and England awaits. Selina is headed back to India to visit her in-laws.
They board their flight. We are separated again. The charged air dissipates and my feet find their way back to solid ground. I have missed my flight.
I am left standing at her gate. Gate twenty six. Thinking. I swore I’d moved on.
Of who I once was. I still live with him, my husband – although perhaps ‘live’ isn’t the best choice of words on this occasion. You see, I died some years ago now. Terribly drawn out affair. Absolutely horrific to go through; I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It was a car accident.
Nobody’s fault, mind; just one of those freak occurrences. A lorry driver was switching lanes when his steering wheel jammed momentarily. He managed to regain control, but not before veering into our lane and collapsing the passenger side of our car. With me in it. I did not pass upon impact. Let’s just say my eventual funeral was closed casket and leave it there.
Oh, what a strange thing to say out loud. Still doesn’t sound right to speak on. If I’m being honest, I suppose I’m not over it yet. Neither is my husband though, poor thing. He somehow got it in his head that he could have done something about it. He couldn’t. Short of taking another toilet break at a service station. But I wouldn’t have let him. In his heart of hearts somewhere he must know that. I was so set on arriving in London before morning traffic.
He mopes around the house most days. Swears to never take another after me. Still puts on his ring first thing every morning. It’s sweet, but it crushes my heart to see him like this. If he did take another though I’d kill him myself, I swear I would. I’d crawl right out my grave, dust off my Sunday best and we’d have serious words. But that isn’t to say he should live like this. That isn’t living after all, is it?
I follow him around. He sees me in everything he does, wherever he goes. Not me me, as I am now. But the me he knew. Or better yet, the me as he remembers me to have been. He talks his thoughts out loud and I listen. But it isn’t me me he’s talking to. It’s her me, the old me.
Me with a body. With a beating heart and flowing blood. Me without a shattered body and ruined face. He calls me pretty, remembers me as I was in life. In many ways it’s sweet, to be thought of as you lived and not as the intubated spectre that clung to life for a pained handful of days.
But who he remembers isn’t me any more.
For me things continued. The marks on my face remain fresh to my touch, no matter how many months pass. It changes you, truly. My heart is dark with the unfairness of it all. Why him? Why me, why my face?
He frequents our cafe and I limp and follow, sit at our table opposite him. He reminisces and I enjoy his present company. I’m tempted to show myself. To let him know I am near. That I am always near. That I will wait for him. I reach out with a hand, so tempted to connect.
But then he calls me pretty again, in his talkings out loud. And I recoil. He’s haunted by memories of me, my husband is. As am I.
Jamie looked across her knees hugged tight at the slow skitter of sunlight.
It was her favouritest part of every day, when the low sun moved quickest and the sky and waters ran a million colours. Sometimes she wondered how many of them she had marvelled at and never seen again. Sometimes she gave grateful thanks to the universe that contained such beauty, or to whatever great being had created such a container. More often Jamie thought no thoughts at all. A quiet meditation accompanied by the sounds of the sea.
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, rubbed her prickly skin gone cold as it turned dark. In a few minutes, like clockwork, her mother would enter her room and call out to her, “Jamie will you come in, my love? It’s dark out.” And Jamie would nod absently, and pluck herself out of her favouritest, most solitary part of the day.
Below her balcony sloped the town’s white walls, its rooftops busy with sundried spices and hung lines of forgotten dried clothes. And below all that, still visible to Jamie, was the cream beach that she had secretly sworn herself to. She had never known a day of her life apart from its view, without its salt in her ears.
The sunset was colder than most and the fine hairs of her skin bubbled. But Jamie clenched her jaw shut and squeezed her knees tighter, refusing to yield to it. And refusing to yield, she retreated deeper into her thoughts. Below her balcony, further still than the beach, out in the sea – that was where she had retreated to in her mind – the small uninhabited island.
Most days she never thought on it, but Jamie wondered now as she had many times before what the island meant.
No one ever went there. Some must have in the past, but none did so any more. There was no law or tradition as such that forbade the act – it simply wasnt done by the locals. It was a small unimpressive thing, covered entirely in trees. Short enough to hold your breath and run its length maybe, and near enough to swim to.
Come to think of it, it bothered her.
The island must have meant something once. It was intoned in their stressed nonchalance. In how adamantly the townspeople ignored its obvious existence. Like a gecko on the wall.
She had swam out to it once in the night, in secret – looked at it in the moonlight, encircled it – and then swam back home. But nothing had possessed her to touch its sands. To stand ashore.
Even now, as Jamie pondered on its being there. With the glorious red sun shining off its treetops during her favouritest part of the day. Even now, she had no urge to ever step foot upon it.
“Jamie will you come in, my love?” Her mother called from her bedroom doorway. “It’s dark out.”
‘Yes, yes, but it was my jungle, you understand?’ Said Nigel, cradling his crude beverage. ‘Perhaps things did change too fast, too sudden for some. But we don’t choose the times we live in, do we?’
George took a small pained sip of the stuff. ‘We certainly don’t.’
They had been talking all day – what else was there to do? Company was always in short order – largely disagreeable nonsense, but enjoyably disagreeable. Gone was Nigel’s sharp pointed way of speaking; now replaced by something more congenial and tipsy, yet coherent all the same.
‘Now George, I’m only a guest on your fine raft, and as such, I have no intentions of overstepping my bounds. But please accept what I say next as genuine compliment, and not just dutiful pleasantry.’ Nigel paused for acknowledgement.
George nodded him on.
‘We might not have liked each other in the old age, but now we’re all we have left to rebuild with. I pride myself on sniffing out a man’s worth and I tell you now: we need your sort to rebuild the kingdom. To rebuild civilisation.’
George’s flushed cheeks were hidden by the sunset wash. He raised his tin cup and toasted Nigel’s. ‘To rebuilding civilisation.’
It sounded like a gull at first. A shrill caw that wouldn’t let. George jerked up when he realized what it actually was – a human voice. He looked about, half in panic. How many months since he had last seen another person? A man silhouetted by the sun shouted and waved madly, one hand holding a cloth. George knelt by the waters to wash his face and then ran to his tent.
George sat in his foldable chair, which he’d retrieved from the tent for this momentous occasion. It was best to make a clear first impression, he’d always been taught, but the lesson rang truer than ever these days. As the other man’s raft came within distance, George rested his arms over a folded leg. And in his rested hands rested a loaded rifle. The stranger dropped his tablecloth, both hands up in the air as the two rafts gently bumped together.
‘Bloody hell. Where’d you get a hold of that?’
‘Traded for it’, George lied. He took in the man’s raft. It was a neat thing, larger than his own. Where George’s was made of chopped wood roped together, the stranger’s consisted of segments of timber grouped together and buoyed by large tyres underneath. In the centre was a three-sided shelter. George hoped his face didn’t betray how impressed he was. ‘State your name and business.’
The man pointed to his shirt pocket, and slowly reached into it. He threw the contents to George’s foot – a red passport:
EUROPEAN UNION UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND
‘I was an Englishman too.’ The man gestured at Her Majesty’s waving flag. ‘Name’s Nigel. Business is trading if you’re up to it. Could do with some things I’m short on.’
George cautiously bent over and opened the passport, careful to keep the rifle pointed at the stranger. HUGHES, NIGEL. Place of birth LONDON. ‘Not so fast Nigel. Who did you declare for?’
The man, Nigel, looked puzzled. He stepped forward a half step still smiling and met a raised rifle point. ‘What do you mean?’
George took a deep breath. ‘When it all happened. Who did you stand with? The continent? The union? England? The south? Where did your bloody loyalties lie, Nigel?’
The man’s eyes sharpened. ‘You want me to say the union, or England. But it was the south. Are you going to shoot me now?’
George chewed his tongue a moment and lowered his gun. ‘Doesn’t matter who was who any more, does it? What matters is you stood at all.’ He reached under his foldable deckchair and threw out some rope. ‘Name’s George. Welcome aboard.’
George rubbed the sea salt between his fingers and blew it into the winds. Gone, like all else he’d known before.
Toes perched on the edge, he squat low, riding the light bob of the seas. He was prone to seasickness – or motion sickness, as it had been back when they all travelled on land, by car and other motorized vehicles – or had been, in his previous life. He had sea legs now, had King George. Literal ones too, he thought, impressed by his own sturdiness as he pulled up the bare net. His skin was red and flaky, but his forearms were all sinew. Alone, he could admit to himself that life after the end of civilisation was actually quite satisfying. It certainly beat working in an office.
George released the net and blew his nose out between thumb and forefinger. Perhaps fresh fish was off the menu tonight, but he still had some salted supplies from weeks before. George walked past his tent and saluted the flags: one for Her Majesty’s once and future kingdom, and the other for his own sovereign raft (his above hers). Three days with no luck – there was no haul to be had in these waters. He unfurled his small sails and sat at the raft’s bow, waiting for the wind to whisk him where it may. The sun hanging low in the sky still felt warm.
How to explain myself… Have you ever looked upon a colony of ants with such fascination that you were compelled to become one? To live among them, as one of them. To dance and fight and feed and build and die as one?
And then, having done so, to communicate with them?
Perhaps the thought never occurred to you, as you stood over them, insignificant as they are to your higher plane of existence. Or not to the same depth, your imagination throttled by the physical limitations of reality.
Not so for I. For I am the god of all gaps. And I have stood over the creation, not of my own making, that is your universe, this colony teeming with humanoids, and looked upon your kind. Compelled to understand your feeble minds. And in doing so, decided to fold my being an infinite number of times into your restricted dimensions and live untold lifetimes as stars and wildebeest.
Perhaps another metaphor to better attempt an explanation. Imagine yourself at a museum of never ending scale, perusing the exhibitions presented by various artists. And all of it a grand waste of time. Until you come across the One work that moves something in you. Vibrates the waves in your soul. Not a lot. Just enough to halt your motions. To catch your eye and make you ponder. And this piece… a sculpture or flat painting so engrosses you the longer you stare at it, that you would partake in more of it if you so could. If you could pour yourself into it. Climb into its enclosures and become an ochre pigment or marble fragment.
I have been angel, prophet, god and demon. At times all at once. I come to warn and goad and guide and tear asunder. I have been both babe and mother alike, the lion and its meat. I am birthed and simulate an existence. I die and slip forms like you might a cloak. I scream past your little planets as comet, harbinger of doom. Herald of glory.
Still I do not understand you. I can mimic, serve, command. I have shaped and destroyed you, yet always something eludes, eluded, will elude my grasp.
I am not your God. But certainly I am the closest thing to that which you envisage when you prostrate and grovel. And I do not understand you.
I live it through forwards and backwards, inhabit every particle and wave of this colony. My experiment come to completion, I slip sideways into the dark. Spacetime washes over me like passage through a waterfall. I am more again. Resplendent once again in all the dimensions that are.
I stare at your little painting sculpture ant colony. I see my prints all through the weave. I saw it ‘before’ I entered, being outside your paltry concept of time.
I move on now, having written this note in ants tongue as farewell. Onto the other artefacts of the exhibition with infinite disinterest. Insignificant as you are, I could not, I cannot understand you.
The devil watched the sun creep low from up in his tree. He swished the toothpick about his mouth silently before sticking it back out one side of his lip and sucking. In the distance a woman lugged a large suitcase towards his crossroad.
The sun was falling faster and faster. The woman moved slower and slower. One of the wheels broke and she profaned his names at her poor luck. He couldn’t help but grin. Shadows elongated and the orange streaked sky teased reds and purples. His hour drew closer, as did the dark unsuspecting woman. In minutes he would materialize for the night. As agreed in the covenant of old. The toothpick disappeared back into his gum line.
The woman was still muttering curses when he jumped down in her way.
‘Oh Lord.’ She said, a hand held against her chest.
The devil dusted off his suit and reached into his inner pocket for a comb. ‘I’m sorry if I scared you there, pretty lady.’
She looked him up and down twice over before speaking. ‘What the devil are you doing up in a tree?’ Her voice was the smoothest gravel. She laughed a short laugh before he could answer. ‘For a second I thought maybe this was a sundown town I’d come to, but my God, you’re as black as me. Ain’t that a relief?’
The devil said nothing. He wanted badly to hear that voice again but the woman waited for him to speak now. He pointed to the overpacked suitcase missing a wheel. ‘Must’ve been a bad set to throw you off so bad.’
She narrowed her eyes distrustfully.
‘It’s plain as day you’re a musician with a voice like that, and don’t try telling me you ain’t!’ The devil waved the comb about as he spoke like a wand, each gesture punctuating his words. ‘Why, I can smell out a musician sure as I can pick out a cat from dogs.’
‘You’re awful observant for a man jumping from trees. In a suit and in the damn near dark, no less.’
He soaked in the coffee cream of her voice. ‘I think… I think you know who I am. You look like a smart little lady. You know the price of the trade.’ He coolly put the comb back in his inner pocket.
The woman broke into a deep belly laugh. ‘Mama always told me this would happen, playing the devil hisself’s music.’ She looked at him with steel resolute eyes. ‘I have no fear for you to prey upon, nor any wants that you can false promise.’
His mouth turned to dry cotton. He believed her, by God. ‘You know what I have to offer. Surely you’ve heard the tales. What I’ve given to countless before you. What I may give to your peers if you pass. The great gift!’
She shook her head, all confidence. ‘What I have is God given. My soul is not for sale.’ With that the woman shook her broken suitcase, and trudged on passed the devil.
The sun was gone now and the devil stood alone at the crossroad.
Hugh knew exactly where he’d find Stevie when he opened the door. What he hadn’t yet figured out though was how to broach the topic with her once he did. He put his phone in his mouth as he fished around for the keys, careful to bite with his lips. Fridays he always finished work early, but purely to buy her a little time he’d decided to do additional grocery shopping. If she isn’t doing what I think she is… maybe we can cook together. Like how we used to.
He turned the key and stepped in. The thick stench of body odour and old sweat knocked him back. ‘Jesus Christ Stevie,’ Hugh said, jerking his nose away. Dropping the phone – and then the groceries as he tried to catch his phone.
He should’ve been used to it by now. The smell. But it had intensified again. This morning when Hugh had left for work, it was far worse than every other day this week. But in the space of half a day it had become more potent again. The stench growth is non-linear, he couldn’t help thinking.
‘Hey Hughie. Back so soon? Hope there wasn’t any eggs in there.’ Stevie stewed around on the couch but didn’t bother to get up.
‘Stevie. We need to talk.’ Hugh left the bag and phone where they fell.
‘Here we go again.’ To her credit, Stevie sat up now and made space for him to sit beside her. Hugh opted for the table instead, windshield wiping a forearm’s worth of mess off it first. He made sure to block her view of whatever game she was playing. He knew it would kill her.
‘Please tell me you’ve sent off an application this week. Just one.’
Silence. ‘Just tell me you’ve started one then. That you’ve found one opening and got a tab open.’ Nothing. He loaded up the laptop beside him. ‘Give me something to work with. Please.’ There were no such tabs to speak of.
Stevie rubbed the back of an arm. ‘Well. I only just woke up.’
‘And last night? Yesterday? It’s three pm, Stevie and you’ve not so much as sniffed a shower. I gave you a whole bloody week. You promised me.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. I can’t seem to do anything. It’s like… it’s like my health bar won’t fill back up.’
‘It’s a soap bar you’re missing. Mum would be horrified. You’re a grown woman Stevie.’ It was too much but Hugh had held back for too long. Perhaps in being so patient and kind he’d even enabled her sloth. ‘You used to go on and on about carving poetry into stone. What happened to that girl? What happened to that fire?’
Stevie shrugged her shoulders. Her eyes cast down to the control pad on the floor. ‘I’ve been wondering that myself.’
These are not really new year resolutions. They’re not even statements of intent at this point. More like the broad strokes that I’m using to tailor the systems and mental processes I’m slowly building. I’m quite pleased with what’s happening on most of these fronts already.
* Developing a healthier relationship with risk and money and commitment. * Giving myself greater permission to be mean, or at least indifferent, when required. * More deliberate practice, and deep work where needed. Fuck the amateur hour dilly-dallying. * Complete first draft of Untitled and get some works self-published.
* Bonus: new job ples. This has been a bottleneck for too long and I should start addressing it as such.
abdulj. 