Siobhan comes to bed. Turn off the music, she says. I am half asleep but I reach over and hit the mute button.
“Do I have to do it?!” She sounds annoyed, as she comes round to my side of the bed.
“I did it already!” I reply.
Later on, I am fully asleep when she reaches over, gently touches my arm.
“What is the time?” she asks. But I am asleep. She reaches further over.
“Ngghh,” I mutter and I push out at her. “Why you waking me?” And I push her more.
“Don’t fight me,” she exclaims, “I am not a ghost!”
In the morning I notice Siobhan is already gone and her car is not in the driveway. I too take a car, take a drive along the coastal road, top down. The sun is already setting by the time I cross the Tappan Zee bridge back home, but when I return she is still not back.
She could not be gone shopping this long. Is something wrong? It has been a lonely day.
It is getting dark. I am in my childhood house on Coring Road. I do not feel well, so I go up early. Maybe I should call her.
I walk up the stairs and on the landing, it is fully dark now, I notice the trap door to the attic is open. The attic light is on, but the ladder is not down. How can it be?
It would be work to get up into the attic, to turn off the light. The light pull is not long enough to reach up and grab. So I peer up to see who could be there, in the square of light, but I see no one through the opening. It’s not a good idea to look too closely and I am afraid to confront it. Instead I go to my room and to bed. I should call her.
A boy had a COVID test in hospital chair, had a hard time of it, so I think I’ll try the same. To see if it was that bad.
I sit down in the blue hospital armchair. The nurse puts the tube in my arm, but I can’t get comfortable. There’s no pain, but there’s a strange feel of the rubber hose rolling under the skin of my bicep as I move from side to side.
I hold up my hands, trying to adjust my position. My hands are frozen in the shape of duck feet, pale webbing and pink fingers. They might look strange but they don’t hurt, they’re just amusing to looking at.
Then I am trying to go to the office, but the route is up a large hill and I see that it is very icy.
Skateboarders at the top are poised to slide down. I’m with two women, nurses, one is chubby and is lagging behind the other. And I lag behind her. She struggles because her shoes slip off her feet. Her shoes are black, broken, though I notice one shoe has a bright metallic green heel. Again she tries to slide her feet back into the shoes. She has worn black stockings. Nurses don’t make much. They should be paid more.
And now the skateboarders come flying down the icy hill. They sit on their skateboards at the top of the hill, but despite my thoughts, they don’t try to hit me on the way down. They whiz past and clear me even as I climb the hill. And just as I think they’re being safe, one boy gets too close. Stupid! I could have put my leg out and he would gone flying.
I decide to return home instead, because even at the top of the hill I’m still lost… Because it’s ok if I only go in 2 or 3 times to the office. I used to always be at home.
I tell the nurses I’m going to Elephant and Castle. Isn’t that the station? I ask, pointing down at a corner street in the town.
No that’s not the station, that’s Pratt street. Anyway they are going nearby, to London Hospital, it’s near the General Hospital.
As I descend the other side of the hill and into town, the streets turn into a series of tunnels, with medieval stone walls lit with sconces on both sides. The glow of the lamps casts across the tunnel ceilings and lights the windows of already closed shops.
“I just got fed up,” I explained to two women I had bumped into in the street. I had landed in Libya . “I am going to travel around Africa,” I continued. “I’ve done it before…” I pictured my route, westbound from Libya then down towards the equator. “Upped and left.”
My company had given me a new phone just before I departed, bright orange cover, large and rectangular, not like the iPhone I was used to, or like the flip phones the business women were carrying.
Perhaps I could go with them, even join their company?
I was still standing in their hotel courtyard when it was getting late. “I need to find a hotel,” I told them. I looked across the yard, through to a covered souk, I could ask in there. “We should swap numbers before I leave.” I said… “It is typical for travelers”. Sure thing, they said. One of them pulls out her phone. I type her number into my own phone but my screen is hazy with moisture, and the numbers are difficult to type.
Later, in the same hotel we are trying to lay out the design of a tennis court. One room is ill-shaped with angular walls like a tetrahedron instead of your typical rectangular room. The other is regular but long and thin. The rooms are airy, white, ready for our plan.
We will fit a doubles tennis court and a singles tennis court in the angular room. In the other room, we can only fit a singles court, I suggest.
There is a debate over which way the two courts will face, and whether we can squeeze two doubles in the larger room, but in the end everyone concurs and we stick to one doubles, two singles.
The painters start first with the doubles court, using bright blue for the court’s area, painted directly onto the white floor. Looks good. But when it comes to the singles court, they instead start painting the outline of a rowing boat, with three concentric stripes in thick gold braid.
No! No! No! that should be a tennis court, I exclaim. Perhaps we can paint the tennis court over it.
Or perhaps the boat can look good to embellish the court?
I am with a platinum blonde, bolt straight hair, almost silver in color, cut in a bob. She is thin and tall, has a soft pouty face. We are having a party in my apartment. A good view of the city. I sense she is a little bored; of the party, or of the guests, or perhaps she is not into me as much as I am into her. Siobhan is there, as well as Nena’s friends. The woman is leaning against a doorway, surveying the room and I look up at her.
You. Are. Gorgeous, I tell her. She instantly brightens up, gives me a wide smile.
Let’s have some Pimms and take a bath, she announces.
OK. I get two crystal tumblers, but they are not matching. Regardless, I pour in the orange brown liquid over ice.
I tell people the party is over. A dark haired boy, early teens, is one of the last to go.
I’m finishing up my laundry, he says. I cannot believe someone brings their laundry to a party.
We’ll cancel the cycle, I tell him. The console of the washing machine looks more like the back panel of a stove, old, black, with mechanical dials for the different cycles. I press various buttons trying to stop it. The console falls forward, is loosely connected to the base of the machine with only a couple of wires to prevent it from being entirely disconnected. I prop the console back up. The boy wants to unload his clothes from the machine.
You can’t go in there, I tell the boy, pointing towards the bathroom. She is waiting for me there.
Through the doorway, I see the woman lying down on what looks like a bed. She is wrapped head to toe in a blue blanket like a shroud. The boy will just have to carry the laundry home wet.
I am going to a restaurant in Hanwell, stopping first in one of the side streets to drop off both Siobhan and Liam. It is badly lit. And there is thick brown mud everywhere.
“I will park and meet you there.” They go on ahead. But I don’t need to move the car, I am already in a good spot, though my Citroën 2CV is pressed perhaps too close to the curb, hub caps and tires covered in mud. It is between a motorbike and some tree branches that have been thrown into the road. A tow truck hauls a dirty red skip past me, it blocks the view between the 2CV and me.
The car will be fine, I think and head off.
I walk through a dark alley, boulders and thick mud everywhere. I head down a tunnel. I hear noises, people, threatening. The tunnel winds round to the right.
“Why don’t you come into my restaurant?” a young man says.
To the left I spot a neat diner in an alcove, a row of seats, clean with red and black décor. Originally I did not see it.
“You need a better sign,” I suggest.
He is writing today’s menu on a blackboard. The blackboard is hung up against the mud wall next to his restaurant.
“…And I have to meet up with my family.”
There are others there too.
“We wanted to stay away from the crowds as it’s Saturday night,” they tell me.
“I am lost,” I reply.
In chalk, they draw out a map on the mud floor. But the map only shows the town center, scrawled with stick figures, it doesn’t make sense.
I walk back the way I came, up through the tunnel and out into the alley. With relief I recognize the rocks and the mud. I make my way over them but suddenly the dark closes in. I can barely see. The blackness descends over the alley hiding the path. I scream.
(Do I imagine a glimmer of light appear in the distance?)
