Tin Man(34)

Black light drenched the room and her teeth glowed brilliant white. Her bra too, visible at the deep V of her shirt. I pointed. The gloved hands were raised above us, fingers flickering like feathers. Look, Annie! Doves flying! I shouted. I gasp. A hand down the back of my jeans has found my crack. A blast of poppers hits my nose and my heart thumps to the bass notes of desire.

In the silence, in the dark, the shitty B&B didn’t seem so bad. It was two a.m. and our ears were ringing. I had a slight headache encroaching and I knew she must have too. Oh forgive me, nose and brain. I was restless and much too hot. I drank chlorinated tap water out of a plastic cup and almost choked on my thirst.

You don’t have to sleep on the sofa, said Annie, from the double bed she’d booked as two singles. I’m fine, I said. Really.

She sat up. Her body a silhouette backlit by streetlamps.

Mikey, she said. If you ever met anyone—

– I know, I said.

I didn’t want this conversation and I cut her off before it broke ground. The idea was incompatible. I could never bring anyone into our three. I had no room to love anyone else.

Out beyond the confines of the mas, dusk envelops the land. Evening light falls upon the walls and dusts them in pink, and dark shadows press upon these walls. I’m aware of my loneliness in the intermittent silence along the road. An occasional car up ahead turns on to gravel. The shrill pipe of swallows above me, annoying then reassuring, dark arrowheads across the sky, their last dance with sun. I walk as far as the olive groves, but not as far as town. I want company, I don’t want company. I turn back. My fickleness knows I’m too agitated to sleep.

The candles are extinguished on the dining tables and the outside gates locked, and quiet chatter snubbed by sleep. I go up to my room and change. I rub mosquito cream over my body and put on my swimming shorts and T-shirt. I walk downstairs, out across the grass, along the stony track towards the azure light of the pool.

The sunloungers have been repositioned and their cushions put away till the morning. I pull off my T-shirt. I crouch down and feel the temperature of the water. It feels cold after the heat of the day. I don’t dive in, but jump. I bend my legs and the bottom of the pool swiftly meets my feet. I surface and begin to swim. My arms blade through the water. One, two, three, I turn to the left and breathe. At the wall, in deep water, I flip. Disorientation and bubbles, a brief moment of letting go, but all too brief, and my feet push against the concrete side, and my arms blade, and I breathe, and my anger propels me, back and forth until my lungs burn and my head feels tight and there are no thoughts just a body in motion. And every length I swim, I slough off a layer of hospital visits, of smells, of hopelessness, of medication, of young men who became old too fast, and I swim and I swim and I swim.

In the middle of the pool, I stop. Face down, floating not breathing. I used to do it all the time as a kid out at Long Bridges. Learnt to float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt.

All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night.

I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me.

She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry.

A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible?

Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry.

One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was.

I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I pouted, the satin lining of the skirt clinging to my skin, electrifying the fine hairs on my legs.

What the fuck d’you think you’re doing? said my father.

I hadn’t heard him come in.

He repeated the question.

Playing, I said.