Chapter One: Number Ten
The door
opposite mine, number ten, belonged to a young man. Sometimes I had seen him, fleetingly. He was around twenty-five, a little my
junior, and had honey coloured, cropped hair that glistened with hair gel. He was almost sanctimonious about
cleanliness and had a bath everyday.
The pipes made a terrible squealing noise, but I always forgave him
purely because it was him. The
bathroom was at the end of the hall and I caught snapshots of him with just a
towel wrapped around his waist.
His back was large and smooth, like a beach without footsteps and my
nose would wriggle deliciously in the limes and lemons of his deodorants,
especially when the hallway was seeped in the warm, tropical like moisture
after one of his baths.
That
evening I sliced my fried egg. The
yoke bled over the plate. ‘It’s
like a sunset, clotting the sky’ I thought and admired the yellow cream... I imagined the food for chicks, its
richness for the tiny growing bird.
I rubbed bread into it and felt strangely triumphant; I always did when
I ate meals. And I heard the
crescendo squeak of the pipes. I
smiled to myself. It was the man
from number ten. Though we had
never spoken, I regarded him fondly.
His moves and his sounds were within my life. Maybe our dreams bled together too? I listened to the raw scream of the plumbing and wondered if
he realised what a disturbance his bathing caused. But I never wanted to say a word about it. I actually preferred the warmly scented
hallway to not and was prepared to put up with the cacophony. After all, the smell swam over the
mustiness of the hallway carpet, oversprayed with cockroach repellent.
The toilet
was beside the bathroom and I had to sneak out of my bedsit and try and use it
when no-one was in the bathroom. I
refused pointedly to use the toilet if the man from number ten was in the
bathroom and went through tortured moments of waiting for him to complete his
ritual wash. The same happened
that very evening and I peeped out of my bedsit to see if the bathroom door was
yet wide open and emitting a hot steam.
It was not. He was still
the object of the bathwater’s musical palpitations. I could see that his bedroom door was open and I glanced
affectionately at the arrangement of his shampoos and his CD discs on the
bedroom dresser. The objects had
their own order, a kind of assertive ‘this is how I like my things to lie’
look. He liked assertive music
too. I hoped very much he had not
heard my willowy opera music, for that, I felt sure, would be alien to him,
incomprehensible. I kept the sound
low, just for this reason. I felt
no disgruntlement whatsoever about the loudness of his music. When he opened his door sometimes, the
rock music blasted out like a fireball.
I would be shuffling letters in the lobby and turn to look at him. I would be so startled that my voice
hardly had time to collect words from the brain to say something.
Then my
eyes fell on a paperback book. It
lay beside the shampoos and the aftershaves and had curled up corner pages and
aging wrinkles from over use. I
recognised the cover straightaway, for it was a book I had read myself. A feeling of pleasure filled me. The man had travelled down the same
mental landscape as me! I closed
my door shyly, when I heard the crack of the bathroom lock and sat in my room
listening. His bare feet padded
casually and then there was the noise of the closing door and then that feeling
that his life was now hermetically sealed away from my grasp.
All at once
I was filled with remorse. I could
feel the pulse of my heart and it suddenly seemed to me that life was a
pointless place. In these faithless moments when I was scared, I had been known
to drink nearly half a bottle of whiskey.
“I feel lonely,” I had explained to my brother. He was my priest whom I confessed to,
to unload my thoughts “I’ve got drunk with Jack Daniel's” I whimpered.
“I thought
you said you were alone” my brother joked. I had laughed and my lungs had erupted and the funniness was
as calming as a massage. I had
felt so scared. Loneliness was a
scary feeling. It felt like I
would never recover when it swilled into me. It felt as if my head was being over flooded with mad
thoughts, thoughts no-one else had ever dreamt.
At first I
had tried to resist pouring out the first glass. ‘I can’t use this stuff to escape when I feel weak,’ I
thought and so I sat trying to play games to cheer myself up. I tried to do
) things to take my mind off loneliness, but my mind was determined not to be sidetracked. It had full control. ‘No-body will ever understand how you feel. You are not going to be able to be happy.... not now..for you will have me only and I have more power than you, I can make you lose interest in everything as soon as I click my fingers,’ it said.
I thought
about the man in number ten. He
was a different person now, now that I had seen the book. He had a new dimension, a gentler
dimension. ‘He has read McCann,’ I
thought, ‘that book can only make you a better person - closer to... compassion,’
I thought. I began to connect the
man in number ten to compassion and I imagined he was very in tune with the
needs of humanity. ‘He’s a clever
man,’ I thought. ‘He’ll want
nothing to do with me,’
0and with this defeatist thought I slumped into a deeper feeling of remorse.
The inconsolable state of my own mind
was terrifying me and so I poured out half a goblet of whiskey and topped it up
with water. I drank it as though
it was orange cordial and hoped it would affect me quickly. The glass was soon empty and I refilled
it with relief. Before long I was
sat on the floor, telling myself things in the mirror. I saw in there a woman who was still
young, who had long hair that had its own wave, my eyes, that were bright,
pretty inquiring eyes and breasts, that in the lamplight looked as smooth as
baby’s cheeks and very firm and very wasted. ‘No-one to see me....’ I thought sadly.
I sat, like
that, thinking about a man somewhere in the printing press of fate that I would
marry. I saw our wedding photos
waiting to be printed, somewhere in the future pages. I saw our laughter waiting to echo into my brain, I felt the
thump of my heart at the time in the future when we would kiss ...It seemed
improbable and a long way away.
Did the man in number ten feel the same way? Did he also sit in his room and feel the depths of
loneliness? It seemed a shame -
here we were in this house of bedsits, our lives separated by a wall like we
were each a tin of food.
I pictured
the man in his room that present moment.
He was inside a gold globe of lamplight and the duvet he was lying on
was very soft. He was
reading. He was enjoying an
evening in, with the night sky pressing its charcoal coat against his
window. I looked out at the sky of
my own window and took another swig of whiskey. The sky was large, timeless and summer, with its abundance
of greenery, was taking over and I never failed to notice, whenever I looked
out of the window, that the woodpigeons were always mating. I admired their openness about it. Trees didn’t have walls, and if the
branches were crooked corridors and hallways, the pigeons had no qualms about
trotting down them and entering another pigeon’s patch. I imagined doing the same with number
ten. He never locked his door. I smiled at my reflection shyly. No, no, no, I could not. He would be frightened rigid. What would it do to our future in the
house? We would both burn with
uncomfortable embarrassment whenever our paths crossed.
I finished
the whiskey and fixedly unscrewed the bottle. I filled a third glass. I no longer could gauge how drunk I was. It was strange, but I was having this
series of dull sensations that the thoughts arriving in my head were not my
own, that they were blown in like wind and that me and my conscious mind were
merely robotically and dutifully carrying them. I realised my dreams were my destiny and that I had no other
choice but to reach them. I did
not feel happy unless I worked for my dreams and happiness was again another
thing given to me as a reward for being dutiful. I felt all at once enlightened, and grateful for this I
wanted to share it with someone.
It was too late to go telephoning people. All I could think of was telling the man in number ten.
A silence
had settled over the house. The
walls and floorboards were no longer creaking and it was that time that a
drowsiness comes over human beings and their instinct is to fall still and
cease with their work. It was the
time when you feel like babbling away to someone, over a pillow. I could not take the man from number
ten out of my mind. Would his
privacy be terrorised if I were to tap on his door and say hello. In an ideal world I knew what I would
say. I would say that I needed him
for the night, that I needed some love.
I would say that I just needed to be with another human being for they
say that when two people are together god is in their midst.
I
considered whether to finish the bottle and fall into bed, so drunk I wouldn’t
have one muscle that was capable of thinking.... but my foresight told me to
stop and save my body for the next day.
I could feel a bright light in the next day...I realised my loneliness,
like a storm, was going to pass. I
was learning to have faith, that horrible moods always passed and nice ones
came.
But the
presence of the man in number ten was a harder thought to erase. Only over the hall, clean and sweet
smelling, he was lying there. I
wasn’t unattractive. Was I really
prepared to give him my body... just for the affection in return? I wondered if it might horrify him to
have me arrive, drunk, at his door.
After all, bedsits were sensitive burrows and if anyone knocked on my
door I realised the reflection of my own face was like a nervous rabbit.
But in my
little room, eating my egg and chips, I sat in a kind of abyss, now with no
boyfriend, now with no future.
Only me and nothing else. I
had been alone like this for months and people said to me “What did you do at
the weekend?” and I made things up to tell them, because I had done
nothing. I often sat in my bed for
a whole day just staring at the wall.
People, I knew, would think it strange. So I told no-one, rang no-one. I fretted sometimes that I was going to be so alone, and
no-one would care ever. I might fall
off a chair and hit my head, die and no-one would know... that kind of
thing.
I poured
the rest of my whiskey into my mouth and laughed at the light relief of
drunkenness. I noticed that two
little pink clouds had grown on my cheeks and felt, a little smugly,
beautiful. The feeling made me
stand up and open the door of my bedsit room. I gazed out at the dark hallway. A rectangle of moonlight lay before the front door as if
waiting for a royal visitor.
Besides that, I could see little else, only, suddenly, sparking alive
like a strip light, was the light under the door of number ten. He must have awoken and turned on the
light!
I heard the
turning of the latch of his door and swiftly closed mine to hide myself. Then I heard his familiar feet padding
quietly to the toilet. I peered out
once again, to hear the officious snapping of the toilet door lock. Opposite me, number ten’s door lay open
and all his brightly lit room, dripping in the golden lamplight, was there for
me to see.
I felt myself
crossing the hallway. I stood in
the doorway and looked into the room.
The bed was ruffled, a duvet, fluffy and soft, was coiled up like a
giant scoop of ice-cream. The
bedside clock made a soft and constant tap like a baby woodpecker. The walls were blazing with gold, as
though the lamp by the bed was an open fire, welcoming souls from Neanderthal
times.
Before I
realised it, I found myself curling up into the duvet and sniffing with the
interest of an animal the odours of the man. I found myself looking at the stains and cracks on his
ceiling and feeling the degree of springiness in the mattress with the senses
in my back. I was half in
disbelief at my action and half fearless.
I knew, in seconds, that the man would be back. I realised his reaction might be
anything, might be pleasure, might be anger, but I waited nevertheless,
listening for the flush of the toilet with bated breath.
Christopher
Mitchell straightened his shorts and wondered when he would remember to tell
the landlord about the lack of handle on the toilet chain. He could feel a fierce little hiss of
wind brush against his bare belly and looked at the broken window. ‘How could this house be allowed to be
such a mess, with the rents they paid?’
Locals had said that Madonna had bought the house next door - the place
was riddled with popstars, yet this house was a dump and it was the cockroaches
that had the biggest control of things.
The landlord was chimerical.
Who was the landlord anyway?
The agency were superb at beating about the bush as to how to track him
down...
He pulled
the flush and turned to get out of the chilly little room, leaving the water
scrambling around behind him. His
room was so bright it threw radiance across the hall and he felt a little
thrill to be approaching his safe, warm room, to get back into his snug
bed. It was late and the house was
so quiet it almost lulled him to go to sleep. When he got to the doorway, he stopped in his tracks and
went still. He could hear the door
close of number thirteen. ‘Perhaps
she was coming out for the loo but doesn’t want me to see her’ he thought,
shrugging and closing the door after him.
He pushed his legs into the very warm duvet. He felt pleasure at its warmth, amazement, in fact, for the
bed was warm as toast. It was as
if the duvet had preserved his heat for him while he was away. Amazing, he thought, switching out the
light and closing his eyes and rubbing
his face into the goosefeather quilt in gratitude.https://www.amazon.com/London-Paris-Contemporary-Keziah-Shepherd-ebook/dp/B00E3GZMK0/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1500551309&sr=8-4&keywords=Keziah+Shepherd
No comments:
Post a Comment