Songs From Spider Street (9 page)

There he is again; the twin that I’m not one half of. Where does he come
from? And why is he mine? Why not … someone else’s … anyone’s?

His eyes
stare into mine. His glassy gaze almost empty, except for the last wisps of
bewilderment that refuse to burn off in the morning sun. Huge eyes, sometimes,
that could only belong to an idiot, a member of the brigade of the mentally
disenfranchised that seems to grow daily. A phantom limb that can never grasp
what I mean.

I’m not you.
I’m not you. I’m just not.

The first time I saw you was memorable, of course. You seemed to wander
from nowhere into the small garden that sits outside the window. You were just
suddenly in view, standing next to the small tree.

I waved
frantically and you looked at me and smiled. A smile full of hope, or that’s
what I wanted to see. I beckoned to you and you came over to the window,
curious.

Dumbshow, I
tried to explain to you that I needed to get out. Could you help me? Could you
let my family know where I was? You seemed annoyed at my amateurish mime act,
shaking your head often.

Your face was
pale and so beautiful. Not a storybook actressy beauty but a real beauty, with
wonderful eyes and a kind mouth and a mind behind the face that would devour me
whole in a single second.

Finally you
seemed to sense what it was I was asking for. “The door,” you said. I’d
forgotten about the door. Yes, the door. I spent the morning looking for it,
and then part of the afternoon. It’s not there anymore.

I’ve spent so
much time since looking for the elusive door.

There are
plenty of doors. Six, at least (sometimes more). But none of them is the
right
one; the one you mean, the one that leads outside. Someone must have stolen it;
that’s so fucking typical these days, isn’t it?

Or maybe it’s
just a door that doesn’t look like a door; a door disguised. But what would be
the point of that … except deliberate cruelty? Yes, that would be it.

The lack of a
door brings me back here, to this window; the huge eye in the wall that sees
only what it wants to see. And back to me, staring back at me; a half-me, a
phantom from this doorless internal world.

Then you started coming back every day, finally you became ‘you’ in my
mind; no longer simply ‘the girl’.

Within a week
of your daily visits I knew you were extraordinary. With the use of exaggerated
gestures, near-somnolent dumb show, we conversed at length about so many
things. You made shapes with your body that successfully communicated such
abstract ideas in a way that was wholly understandable. Or maybe there was some
form of telepathy involved, a sympathetic vibration that passed through the
glass without setting it humming.

I’d met only
a handful of women like you before. Some I’d loved. Some I’d wanted to but been
prevented from doing so. They were I sensed, under their different skin, my
sisters. And I had not wanted to fuck them (although I did, of course, giving
way to that inevitable, ancient urge). Instead I felt an urgent need to
fertilise them with my self, my mind; to fuck them with my soul and not my
body.

I want to see
your soul standing in front of me instead of your flesh alone. Or at least to
be able to gaze into your soul. But that is denied to me, too. The best thing,
the nearest I can get, is to gaze in through a window. Behind which is a mirror.

Sometimes I wonder if he’s really out there, standing by the single tree
in the small ornamental garden, or is it simply a reflection. When I retreat
into the room, he usually steps back to lean against the high wall at the back
of the garden. My confusion doesn’t give me any tools that I can use to
disentangle my muddled sensations.

At other
times I look at him so hard that I think he becomes you. That can’t be right,
can it?

At other
times I imagine you changing under the tiptoe of my fingers on the keyboard. I
can see your face burn off like a cheap plastic mask, revealing the identical
features underneath, unblemished, unscarred.

Are you
indestructible, then? In a state of permanence that not even flame or character
development can assail? Something from a life completely alien to the one I’ve
always known, where the only certain thing was flux and decay, where I feel in
a constant state of falling, inevitably drawn magnetically to the point of my
own demise, with no deviation possible from that set course.

There are moments in the day when the glass appears to quiver, as if from
some unheard and unseen shock, and I pray that it will crack, shatter and fall.
Almost unconsciously I cower away from it, aware of the damage it could rain
down on me even as it offers me deliverance.

Memories of a
story told to me about a man who punched through a plate glass window only to
have it descend on his arms, severing his hands completely, flash into my mind
and I close my eyes shut very tightly; attempting to squeeze the image from my
head, feeling it run down both my cheeks as I expunge it from my immediate
memory. Because I don’t want it to be me.

There you are again with your insistence that there
is
a door, a
way out of here. But your mere repetition seems like a sort of betrayal to me.
Why don’t you come through that door, showing me the way to escape this place?
Why do you stand out there, detached and seemingly unwilling to help?

I suspect you
came here merely to stare; to enjoy the unenlightening show in this one-man
zoo. No saviour, simply a spectator.

He’s there again, with his idiot glare. I’d shout but I know he wouldn’t
hear me. “Why don’t
you
do something about this?” Even if he heard me,
he wouldn’t understand; dumb incomprehension is a career choice for him, it
seems.

Sometimes he
dances my dances, shouts my shouts. But I’ve become convinced that it’s an
empty mimicry. He simply turns himself into a mocking mirror of my frustration
and anger.

But then
there are times when you do the same, it seems to me. Is that me being him
being you out there? Or are we all in here? “I am he as you are he as you are
me and we are all together,” as the song says. I look around but I’m alone.

When night comes the glass turns its reflections in on me, like the black
blank surface of a vertical sheet of still water. I press my head against it
and steam my breath over it, watching the mist of moisture shrink as soon as it
forms.

Are you out
there I wonder, standing in the darkness? I often hope that your features will
suddenly appear on the other side of the glass, your breath misting up the
other side – mere millimetres away from me; your mouth against my mouth, you
breathing out as I breathe in.

Maybe you are
there and I simply can’t see you. Maybe our lips are echoing each other’s,
letting our enraptured respiration pass between them to wear the glass away
within a mere million years. But how would I know if that were the case?

This damned
glass meniscus, with you out there and me in here. Or vice versa. Forever.
Forever.

And ever.

Amen.

I’ve been blackmailing myself for years. I haven’t got a penny left. “If
you dare even admit to it, I’ll ruin you. Finish you for good!” I keep
threatening myself.

A new life is
supposed to be just that. Clean and fresh and untroubled. That was the plan,
anyway. The hope. My pointless prayer for myself.

But it hasn’t
left me.

The memories still pursue me, calliope-music choreographed and
sawdust-scented. The stench of the mangy animals let loose from their cages
clings to me, night and day; with every move I make, they pad heavily behind
me. The dreams I race through in my sweat-soaked bed inevitably leave my pillow
greasepaint-smeared every morning; yet I haven’t put the make-up on for years.
Years, now. But not long enough, it seems.

From the top
deck of the bus each morning, the department store windows reflect back the
bright-faced loon in the seat where I am sitting.

On the stairs
at work, I trip incessantly over giant invisible shoes. My colleagues burst out
laughing before a brief, unconvincing show of mock concern. Am I OK? I nod
dumbly, an unseen hat several sizes too big waggling back and forth on my head.

Sometimes I
see the elephants performing in the park across the street from my house. The
first time was early one Tuesday morning as I pulled open the bedroom curtains.
There they were, Bella and Zion, doing their funny dance, the one that always
delighted the children. I was so sure they were real that I dressed quickly and
dashed out to them, looking around for Sonya, their trainer. But there was
nothing except the frost on the grass and a few sparrows.

In a bid to
destroy the circus inside me, I had even taken the box with my old costume and
paints out into the garden one Sunday afternoon. I smiled as the greasepaint
pots cracked in the heat, chuckling even when my neighbour complained about the
smoke and threatened to call the fire brigade. If I’d been wearing my revolving
dickie bow, I’d have had it going round like a demented windmill trying to take
off.

Nothing could
wipe the smile off my face that afternoon as I watched the flames take my past,
just as they should have done five years before.

But that
night the faces still bled out of the darkness, seeping into my dreams to
poison my sleep and destroy my rest. The bearded lady joyfully, desperately
copulated with the headless ringmaster as my fellow performers stood around
them, flames streaming from their gaping mouths. The animals processed around the
edge of the ring, turning this way and that to show me their wounds.

The
invitation was clear. So was the condemnation.

Every morning
I look for answers smeared in the greasepaint on my pillow. But there never are
any. By the time I get to the bathroom mirror the gaudy colours have faded from
my skin, evaporating in the stale air of the stairway, worming their way into
the worn carpet.

I’m standing back in the field now, just outside town. First time I’ve
been back in five years. It’s not hot tonight but I can feel the heat of the
flames from back then. That night when the circus died.

When Flaming
Frederic literally exploded with his own talent. The straw catching so quickly;
the terrified punters running; the beasts screaming as they cooked in their cages;
the high-wire snapping in the heat, decapitating the ringmaster as it fell …

Rosa’s facial
hair shrivelling up in the heat as she screamed in outrage and horror at seeing
her lover’s fate.

Escaping
people tripping over the guy ropes, pulling them free in their panic, bringing
the burning big top down on everyone inside, trapping them, burning them.
Blazing sails, huge and bright as they moved against the stillness of the dark
above them.

Only me left.
And two wailing children. And the ‘geek’, aching for his whisky, all boiled
away in the heat. And a baby elephant, so badly burned that it died two days
later.

The police
and the ambulance crew looked at me with their prosecution witness eyes, as if
I were to blame for it all. “And how did
you
escape?”

“But I didn’t.”
That was the truth. That’s what I should have told them. And then squirted my
joke flower right in their eyes.

Suddenly all the clouds I’d harvested during my life were there in the
room with me. The breath of the heavens, clinging to the walls and ceiling,
crowding in on me. Silent and reproachful.

To exist they
will rob me of my air, I know it. They hang there like threatening memories,
their insubstantial forms pushing and moving and somehow growing. They’ve been
with me since my childhood but this time it’s different.

I look down,
hoping to escape seeing them; out of sight, out of mind. But a soft mist is
beginning to creep across the floor, too.

The door is
only two steps away, I think. And, yes, I could simply go through, shut it
behind me and lock the floating fear inside. But that would only be a temporary
respite. They would be back, later today or tomorrow. Next time it might be in
public, or while I slept. I don’t know which would be worst.

I don’t know
where the best place to die would be.

There are broken days now, stuck between the annoyance of a fresh morning
and the dark lure of night, when my memory fails to fail me and I can remember
her. Too many days like that, now.

It was a purely private love affair totally unrelated to the crimes with
which he was charged. This was a lie her husband told himself often, I
believed. Maybe it was the only way he could carry on. Yet he was still absent;
segregated from the world in which she and I lived, at liberty.

Steel bars
kept him out of my hair.

We met in the
street. For the first time, I mean. Our first meeting was like a scene from an
old Cricklewood film. Corny, really, when I think back on it.

She’d been
out shopping and was carrying home a stack of boxes that blocked her view. I’d
just been to buy the most absorbent newspaper I could find, and was waiting to
cross the road, when I saw the boxes wobbling towards me.

A trolleybus
turned the nearby corner and clanged its bell loudly. Rushing to get out of the
way and finding her shoe caught in the track, she tilted forward, tipping
herself and her tower of boxes onto the pavement at my feet.

At once she
pulled herself together and began to apologise, scrabbling at the topmost
package which was feebly tied with string and now had a large blue hole in it.
Two small, winged creatures were struggling free from it, unpicking the knots
and wriggling to be free. Peserichens, I realised.

“Let me give
you some hands with that,” I’d said, kneeling to help her. Two were all I’d
needed after all and soon the package was back together again, after a fashion.

I gallantly
said I’d get her shoe for her.

Glancing to
my right to ensure no trolleybus was near, I stepped out onto the road to
retrieve her delicate tricorn shoe. It was stuck in the groove of the rail and
I had to tug at it to get it free. It had been cut almost in two by the vehicle’s
steel wheels; the soft leather sliced through, the satin torn and dirty with
two of the delicate bone buttons missing.

I held it in
my hand and gasped with a suppressed erotic delight when I realised how tiny
her feet must be.

My suggestion
that we take tea at a nearby cafe that I knew was as much for my benefit as for
hers. She leaned on me and hopped the short distance to the establishment, a
tower of parcels balanced delicately in front of us.

Once inside,
I tossed my aftercoat over hers in a display of open erotic bravado. She merely
smiled and lowered her eyes as we took our seats.

After some
self-deprecating comments about how much she had bought today, our tea arrived
and we began to talk. Meanwhile, one of her parcels began to move across the
table as her Peserichens sought freedom. A questing hoof poked through the
paper at one side while the edge of a wing appeared just under the flap at the
top of the parcel. I intercepted the mobile package and was given a sharp nip
for my troubles.

This both
amused and appalled her and I allowed her to bandage my hand with her
handkerchief, despite the lack of blood or any obvious injury. By the time we
were on our second pot of tea, she was chatting away openly about quite private
things: I remembered to smile often and feign interest.

It was only
when she mentioned a husband and noticed the perturbed look on my face that
things took a turn for the worse.

She began to
weep quietly while speaking about him, her small dark eyes filling with tears.
Because of the nature of his crime she was not allowed to visit him and his
letters had become infrequent, their contents confused.

I reached
across and placed my hand reassuringly on her arm, all the while harbouring
thoughts of her slumped across my bed in exhaustion following the successful
completion of my erotic ministrations.

As the
afternoon light began to fade, I called her a cab and reassured her that she
had found a friend. I promised to keep in touch.

Yes, it
should have been in black-and-white but it was mainly in subtle shades of dust
and smiles and loneliness.

By now there were armed men on the streets. It was impossible, and
unwise, to determine which faction they represented but always best to appear
happy at their presence, whenever they were nearby.

During our
third meeting, at a little restaurant overlooking the submersible station, I
suggested that she get out of the city as soon as she could. She immediately
told me of her parents’ old house in a village some miles away, near the frost
forest. It had been empty for the past three years and she confessed she never
visited it as often as she felt she should. It seemed ideal.

I said I
would accompany her, for her own safety, and that we should leave the next day.

To escape the
best of the violence, we waited until dusk and travelled in my cousin’s
borrowed armoured car (an ex-Colonial Services model with five skis).

We played
palliative music through the two external loudspeakers in order to placate any
armed gangs we might encounter and, even though we had used the more roundabout
and less well used roads, we reached the house shortly after midnight.

It was agreed
that I should stay overnight in a spare room and return to the city the next
day.

The house rambled pleasantly into two wings. I noticed that she placed me
in a room that was in a separate wing to where she herself slept.

After a
breakfast of whatever was left in the cupboards and some very old-tasting tea,
she showed me around. Besides the living and sleeping quarters, mainly
furnished in an uncomfortable style 30 years out of date, there was a large
wine cellar with a good stock. Her father, an engineer of some sort, had also
ingeniously supplied the house with a food cellar that was cooled entirely by a
stream flowing down from the frost forest.

There, below
the house, were two large open pits. One contained frozen fish while the other
was filled with neatly cut joints of meat.

“So you see,
we’d never starve,” she giggled. I smiled and nodded.

I soon
remembered that I had to get back to the city. I suggested, however, that I
should return to stay at the house that evening, for her protection.

She smiled,
lowered her head and I heard a whispered ‘Thank you’.

The journey
to and from the city was becoming increasingly hazardous. When I arrived the
fighting was just two streets from my apartment. I gathered some clothes, a
handful of entertaining books and some money, and sped back to her as fast as I
could.

We spent our time lying in the field behind her house and letting the sky
fall into our open eyes, harvesting clouds with our gaze. It had always been
one of my favourite pastimes since childhood and I was pleased to introduce her
to it.

At night when
I was sure she was asleep, I would surreptitiously move my few belongings to a
room that was nearer to hers. By doing this one room at a time, I hoped to
avoid any suspicion on her part.

Photographs
of her husband were everywhere and he was her constant topic of conversation. I
began to find it wearing. The only time she relaxed this rule was when we were
in the field, gazing upwards together.

In a time of intellectual and spiritual pestilences, the soul plague was
the worst. It stole your most intimate moments and printed them up as someone
else’s novel, distributing it free on the street corners of the dirtier,
angrier parts of your home town.

Flights of
Peserichens, broken free or released by panicking owners, migrated east. Meat
prices rose as vegetarians abandoned their principles and sought greater
amounts of protein per meal. The prison population soared into the millions.

Within days
there were reports of riots, fires and mass prison breaks. I realised that her
husband might be affected or even freed, though I prayed he had been one of the
many casualties that the hand-coloured news boards were reporting.

Yet it was
some time before I realised that my darkest wishes had been granted. It was a
hot summer day and we had gone to harvest clouds once more.

The field was
dotted with daisies, standing out like white punctuation marks on a page-long
green paragraph.

We had lain
side by side for some minutes when a movement caught my eye. I raised my head
slightly and, away in the trees at the field’s edge, I saw a face float before
the leaves, wispily and wistfully.

Although I
had never seen him alive, I realised it must be her husband from the
photographs. He must have died in the prison riots after all. Now our love was
a haunted love; a more romantic affair than ever before.

My body
partly blocked her view of the trees and she evidently hadn’t noticed anything.
I resolved to say nothing and to carry on our love affair with an even greater
intensity. After all, what harm could the shade of a weak man possibly cause
us?

“How many
clouds have you harvested?” she asked me softly.

I lay back
down and looked straight up into a pure, cloudless, blue sky. “Oooh, lots,” I
lied and she laughed.

The clouds twisted slowly above us, reforming themselves constantly in
the midst of their delightful airborne recreation. I fancied that our breaths
would somehow rise up to become a part of them; or perhaps form a mingled cloud
of their own, ascending to glide between the drifting white islands, searching
out its own place.

The higher
clouds would sometimes race past, while those closer to the ground went by more
slowly, like fallen blossoms turning slowly as they were swept downstream.

On the
hottest days of all, I would watch as the clouds came down to touch her nose
and float around her ears, while her face held an expression as if she were
floating up to their domain. I delighted in her delight and thought myself so
lucky to have met her.

In the midst
of our reverie, I would often feel the desire to tell her of my feelings. Of
how I could happily tear her beautiful clothes from her, releasing her from
their constraints, and watch her roll among the grass and flowers before
descending on her to press home my love.

But courage
always failed me and I was reduced each time to my solitary sordid fantasies of
twisted, sweat-stained sheets. Sometimes, in my most desolate daylight dreams,
she would be bleeding.

Finally, one golden sunlit day, I took my courage in my hands and
suggested to her that I move my things into the room adjacent to hers. To be
nearer her and to assure her of my constant attention.

She seemed
shocked, her dark eyes filling with something approaching fear. “Oh no, I don’t
think that would be right. My husband would …”

I forgot
myself in that moment and shouted at her: “He’s dead. Forget him!” The look in
her eyes told me immediately that sharing this near-certainty with her had been
an unfortunate error. She seemed to visibly shrink into the grass, wanting to
escape from both me and the truth.

The clouds
began to race above our heads as she turned her eyes from me.

She avoided me now. In the house I would sometimes be caught unawares by
her fish eyes staring at me through the banisters. I came to expect that every
door I passed would suddenly creak closed a few more inches.

I tried to
ignore the fact that she had turned against me for daring to speak the truth
that she had tried to ignore. Perhaps she thought me unkind to tear away any
shred of hope that she had clung to.

I
concentrated on the day-to-day tasks of household management in a time of
crisis. Some of the furniture would have to be broken up for fuel soon, for
instance; given its lack of comfort, this would be a particular pleasure for
me.

I began to
help myself liberally to the contents of the wine cellar. And when the bottle
had finally won the battle between thinking and drinking, I was no longer able
to help in any meaningful way. In one of my more intoxicated moments, I
resolved that I would return to the city in the next few days, leaving her to
her fate.

She continued
to cook for me, meals being left in the kitchen while she ate in another part
of the house. I felt like I was being sent into exile.

In a last gesture of apology before I departed, I decided to re-stock the
kitchen cold box for her. I descended to the cellar, knowing that fish was her
favourite food.

Removing the
hooked pole from the wall, I began to delve into the shiny and mottled mass of
fish in the chilled pit. Several of them had become stuck together and in some
places the ice was quite thick.

My breath
formed clouds before my face as I hacked at the frozen mass with the pole.
Finally it cracked and I was able to move several blocks of fish-filled ice
aside. I hoped she would be grateful that I had performed this final task for
her: this was no work for a woman.