Ani's Worlds (2)

Ani had to reach over to her phone. The girl in the bed had been there a week. Returning from work, there she'd be, in some new lingerie, in eager await. She was less appealing sleeping face down like this, however, with a spot of drool on the pillow the size of a sweat patch. Her hair, the dark, reddish and wiry sort, curled about itself in the air like arthritic hands. She mumbled to the vibrations on the wood surface by her head, but the girl could sleep through anything.

'Who is it?'

'Ani,' said the voice on the other end. There was an affectation of casual about the voice. 'It's just me, Marti. Had a day off. Here at home with Jeremy Kyle and thought I'd give you a ring. I can't remember if I was supposed to call you or if you were supposed to call me. Sorry.'

Gulp. 'Hey, I've been meaning to call you.' In truth, she really had been meaning to. Her voice went up an octave, a signal to drop pretences. We can let ourselves be excited, can't we? "I'm so sorry, I've just been' - her eyes fixed on the back of the girl's head, the wiry hair reaching onto infinity - 'a bit preoccupied.'

She slipped out of the bed, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her right ear, sweeping her legs out from under the white sheets and letting the bed slowly adjust. The weight shifted ever so slowly; she watched the girl's face twitch, her nose fidgeting about, near lips which look so much more beautiful in moonlight. A strip of sun broke through the blinds, straight across the mouth, down the middle as if teasing. Crapola. In a cosmic sense.

While they talked about the date, the quays, how the new jeans fit, she flitted her legs gently down the stairs in fluffy slippers. Every step was a performed move, to herself, revelling in the femininity she could assert when no one was looking. The private woman just the same as the outer one; whether this was true worried Ani somewhat from time to time, the careful dance of girliness was a never-ending waltz, afraid to stop and change the nature of her mannerisms forever by forgetting the moves. Being is seeing, or seeing is believing, or believing is seeing what you're being. It isn't important.

'Ani,'

'Marti,'

'Is it weird to say I've missed you?'

Of course not. Of course not. Of course it's weird. Of course it isn't. 'No, I've missed you too.' That she had. She tried to perceive the pretty, ginger-haired lady on the other side, straining her eyes through the cables and across the charcoal barrier and conjure up a woman in mens' pyjamas, with an empty bowl of cereal balanced on her lap. Without lipstick, they looked just the same, just as red; this was imagination, she was sure. The same little waltz, in a sort.

'Thank god,' (exasperated with relief, it seemed), 'You don't have work either today, do you?'

The bedroom was just above her now, looking into the TV, into Jeremy Kyle's soulless face. Craggy like the moon. In the movies, lovers looked into the moon at the same time, as if their longing could reach up to the satellite and back. Stellar love networks mapped through the heavens in ribbons and bows and knots of invisible cables reaching out from earth and back. Such a time may have never existed; now, whether in emulation of tradition or fiction, we simulate this with televisions and text messages. The bedroom, directly above her. There was the girl. The other beautiful girl. The betrothed, lying, unawares. One must be good about these things.

'I'm busy today, actually,' she said, at once hating and congratulating herself. Swallowing down a fingernail.

'Oh!' The insufferable 'oh', the one word, the one sound, a letter O, a single letter which reaches up to Heaven 'O Lord' and into Ani to stab at her with guilt, with pangs of longing, the desire to reward herself. To bite the apple.

'But I'm free Saturday.' The fireworks wanted to go off, but they just scorched the ground and burnt out slowly.

'It's a date.'

Ani's Worlds (1)

Ani kissed goodbye to Marti just once on the lips. The fireworks she imagined over the bay were made up of potential energy. The sea and the sky were both mirrors to this magical happening, catching the light and sharing it with the birds and the fish. Their lips parted slowly, regretfully. This was, at once, a beginning and an end. It was a door, ajar. The lights glimmered on the water for a second after they'd dissipated in the air. Trains tore them apart. The concrete floors in the station still pattered with feet, as they had before, but now Ani could only hear the roaring of the train as it cut through the air and tore a line across the South coast. The journey was to her, leaving a charcoal line in its wake, a separating of A from B.

The phone jumped, and lit up, as she had hoped. The small table on the train buzzed against its back.

'I really like you', is all it said.

Ani arrived back to the Hove apartment, dropped her keys into a shoe by the front door and slid off her heels and put them under the desk in the foyer. As she hung up her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed the light. The kitchen was lit up, as was the living room; the whole house was bright enough to see, apart from the creeping darkness at the top of the stairs. She walked through the house unafraid - it couldn't be burgulars - and found Lorrie on the couch, watching a DVD on her DVD player.

'Still have my key', she said, in monotone but with a smile reaching out. Her body was rigid, facing the TV, only the neck poised to Ani. They both sat on the couch, watching the twentysomethings playing teenagers in love, and slowly their bodies gave way and relaxed and conversation became more fluent. Laughs and wine later, it had been like nothing was ever the matter between them. The red-head princess and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks got it on, and that barrier broke all theirs too. Kissing seemed natural. Like they had kissed yesterday, or the day before.

The charcoal line widened.

Raising the dead

The box isn't shiny for the luminescent glow which brings the screen to life. No, it shines instead for the dead of the night and for the mourning of the day that went before it. The day has died. Time took it upon itself to wrap its coil around the world and choke it, as a whole, just as yet each minute of its entirety conspired to bring misery before the earth. The combination, so drastic and effective, saw it give back its partner in space and above and below the saddest look of reflection and the deepest sigh of eternity stolen.

Oh for the evil that men do, I wonder. I stare out the window at you and wonder if you know that the window you pass now is my own. I suppose you don't, for you've never met me. It is the unconscious evil that men commit that brings me before you in this helm of dark and despair and depraved things that forms the living room at night. The cat sits so quietly, she is content and her purr soothes the air with its majestic whim. Oh, what time God must have spent in her creation. Time; my enemy. Time; His plaything. What is time, to God? To the man that makes none outside His whim. Why must He be bound by seven days, unless its evil is greater than He? Time or He? He or it? Time or him...

Such unconscious dark desire, behind those eyes that lull in belief of truth and beauty. But you have no idea, and I have come to learn all of what you will do. You, the stranger by the window, who passes out of my sight. I know now that there is no way you will ever fall before my sight again and I hold so rigidly the contempt for your soul, for I know what evil it possesses. It is not God within each of us, not He, not he; Time is the only thing within us. Potential. All synonyms, I reach, and discover the word on the tip of my mind's tongue. For the knowledge that you will undoubtedly beak her heart, or maybe his (I do not know you, boy by the window), I return only one word. The word, not Time, not God, but equal in its wrath: inevitability.


Currently listening to:
Raise the Dead by Phantom Planet

Currently reading:
The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Bleeding lamppost

I'm wandering down these little narrow streets. They're wider when they're busy. The sunlight illuminates the cobbled pavements and somehow, with its reflected glare, the pavements seem bigger - big enough to carry thousands of shoppers, each so very individual and kooky and bohemian and cool (not to mention, original). Each stone of the floor is a sponge, saturated with a morning's tranquil light and spilling it out everywhere in a flood of orgiastic colour which seeps from the neon green of the sign above the shoe shop saying Offspring over to the demure browns of Montezuma's Ice Cream. The sun retreats, the stones dry, and all the light begins to shy: the stones, hungry to soak up as much light as they can, rob the streets of space and colour and any feeling of home.

Cobbled, cobbled, Stonewall and Milk. I can see where I'm going, thankfully, as I can catch the streams of light flown east from the distant pavillion as it coalesces in the air, before slipping along the pavements, and draining away, to the unseen sewer of light beneath which floods the underground clubs you enter along the seafront. I know the route, but I don't know where I want to go. Nothing and everything is the same as I remember it. Everyone is still my friend or my enemy as left before but no one quite gets along with each other the same way, and the city changes superficially: there's an Esprit and a Bench now, somewhere. These lanes could be the windy streets of any city, except in any other city they'd be a red light district. I kind of squint my eyes, and press my fingers against the lids and then against my forehead, and the whole city shifts into a spectrum of reds like I thought it might, because that's appopriate in so many ways.

I am choking on dirty air. Hallowed halls and 'dreaming spires' produced such a brighter mind and happier countenance. I run fingers along a lamppost, who in squinting eyes has an arm of light pointing out of the lanes and to Hell Itself, and there is something black and moudly now against my hand. I stare closely at it, and I convince myself that it's blood: the lamp is bleeding? The city? My fingers to its touch? I wipe it away, but it just smears my palm, and I close my eyes and imagine it is running upwards along my arm only that it's no longer blood; it is cobbled pavement sucking the light from the lamppost that gives texture to my hair and my skin, and these vestiges of personage become drowned in darkness. My eyes stay closed, and I walk as the city pulls me under into its belly, into depersonalised hell. Do I enjoy these moments of escape, or are they everything I fear? I open sharply and am spat out, or something. As if my eyes shot out light, there are flecks of it in the air with the swaying city as it resumes shape, before they disappear like all the rest of it, pouring and bleeding; stolen.

I walk in an and around the maze of streets until I bump into myself. Not a mirror, but actually me, on the street, as if I were two lost people in the same city. I wonder if if time is stretched and wrapped upon itself in strings and streamers, or if my soul has wandered out of my body to explore the city alone and I have found it (or perhaps my body has found me), or perhaps this doppelganger is a careful double who arrived to replace me in my absence but was crushed under the languishing lows of the life of Liam. He's wearing a new shirt I bought last week, from one of the new shops that weren't here before, and is staring at me with a similar puzzled expression and a hand reaches over - I thought to fondle me, but actually to grap at my clothes - and he lifts a tassle from it into the air with a physiognomy that spells a road not taken, a wanderer in similar straits. I'm in subfusc, and he's out for a night out, and I am confused by my desire to kiss this better me who with every moment I wonder might instead just be some helpless person, with a face a bit like mine, and hair like mine. How else do we distinguish people - not by who they are, but by how they appear. I think he wants to kiss me as well, but I'm suddenly pained by the knowledge that were we to do so our realities would collide and fold so as if one never happened. I never know which roads to walk, or which taken were better or worse. So, we shake hands, and hug, and walk apart but I turn around and he's doing the same thing I did a minute ago: running his fingers along a lamppost, then looking at it, and closing his eyes with only his imagination to sweep him out of this city.