Outside My Window: Homeless Love

A few short weeks ago the sun would only be setting at this time, but now it is deep night. Today it turned bitterly cold, as though the old gods are reminding us that it is nearly winter. There is no wind, and the pavement echoes with the sharp attacks of my boot heels.

I am walking aimlessly. I left the house with the intention of walking around the block to stretch my legs and clear my head, but now I seem to have set out for the city centre. There is a tearing feeling in my heart like thin fabric being ripped. If I keep walking, if I keep running over this knot in my mind, maybe I will reach a point of calm.

As I reach the heart of the city, I see that the Christmas lights have been erected along the main street of the south side. The sight of them makes something break within me a little more. I am irritated, it is not even Halloween yet, it is much too early for this – and still, I am thinking: “I don’t want another miserable Christmas.”

By the time I reach the university, the tears pushing at my chest and throat have ebbed away, and I have reached determination. I pass a woman whose face I recognise – the mother of a girl I used to call a friend – but I look away, afraid of being recognised. My anonymity is what is holding me together. It is allowing me to believe that I am a different person, in a different life, who will not break apart if this is unfixable. Who will not allow herself to be unhappy in this way.

Once inside the university gates, a feeling of coming home envelops me. The small flat I left only half an hour ago seems distant and alien – it has not seen me through the ups and downs, the terrible lows and the ecstatic highs that these old buildings have witnessed in me. Inside these walls, the greatest love of my life was born and nurtured. And now when it all seems to dangle over the precipice, its memory will be held safe by these monuments of time.

I cross the front square, feet hitting the ground uneven on the cobblestones, and sit down on the cold cement steps of the university chapel.

The world becomes still. I take my heart in my hands and imagine a life on my own until I can imagine it calmly. Until I am serene with the weight of it. I become tall again, my limbs stretching out into the gaps of my independence.

I watch students come and go for a time. A young man in a university society hoodie jogs past, face shadowed by the orange lights; two girls hang out of a dorm room, shouting down at someone below. Above the haze of the city lights and smog, right above my head at the highest point of the sky, pinprick stars gleam coldly. I imagine the worst – my heart rests a moment – and then the world moves on.

The warmth is leeching out of the thin film of sweat that had accumulated at the back of my neck beneath my scarf, between my breasts, under my arms. I feel as though I am sinking into the cold stone steps – or the stone is seeping out into me, turning me icy and paralysed under the Medusa-stare of the chapel. I rise, and zip up my jacket. I consider buying a coffee, and decide against it. It is time to go home.

On my way back up to the main street, I pass a woman crouched in a sitting position against a pillar outside a newsagents. She has the characteristic shabby, mismatched demeanour of all the homeless people in this city – clothes of indeterminate colour, torn and dirtied; hair dry and dishevelled.

But she is not begging; she is paying no attention whatsoever to the passersby. A large plastic carrier bag sits before her on the street, and out of the top of it, a tiny kitten’s head protrudes. It is young, barely old enough to be weaned away from its mother; a scruffy white little thing with a tortoiseshell pattern down its back. The woman dangles a black sock before the kitten, dancing it before its eyes before tugging it away again. The kitten’s tiny claws wave uncertainly, catching on the sock like needles, its green-gold eyes wide and excited.

The homeless woman is as enthralled as the kitten. Her features are tender and smiling, like the face of a doting parent. The moment catches on my heart. I wonder how often this kitten will go hungry in the long nights it faces on the streets, and tears press against the backs of my eyes again. I swallow, look away, and walk on.

 

Outside My Window is a weekly series every Saturday on Sirens & Muses where I write a short story or vignette based on something I see outside my window, outside my door, or on the streets around my area. It’s a little late this week again!

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Outside My Window: Where Life Takes Us

When he was a child, as he grew older, he had an idea in his head of what his life might look like, what shapes it might take. It was rarely a definite picture – it was more of a general feeling or expectation. Sometimes specifics would creep in, and he would imagine being married to certain woman, or going to work every day for  a certain job. But mostly it was vague, fleeting. He might see a sunlit kitchen in the morning, a sea of faces of his audience as a lecturer or musician.

It was often drawn up in negatives. He saw the failures of the future: the desk job when he really wanted to be on stage, the poverty of his student days, life in a run-down house in a bad neighbourhood, growing old alone. Or just the smaller disappointments – a life more stressful than it was enjoyable, the realities of mortgages and raising children, a wife he loved less than he could have.

At some point in his twenties, he started to feel himself stepping into this future. He lived the college days he had envisioned; he moved into a shabby apartment that wasn’t all that bad considering his lack of money; he had a relationship with a girl more real and more vividly beautiful than he could have ever dreamt up.

And every now and then he found himself in a moment that defied his expectations entirely. He became skilled in things he had never dreamed even existed, and felt things he never would have expected. Sometimes he caught himself living out a life that he would never even dared to imagine for himself – a snapshot of the life of another, luckier man.

Outside My Window is a weekly series every Saturday on Sirens & Muses where I write a short vignette based on something I see outside my window, outside my door, or on the streets around my area.

Outside My Window: Cat Fight

It’s mid-morning of an autumn day and the sun is leaking out a last burst of rays before the rain rolls in. My small home office, so dark in the afternoon and evening, is filled with sunlight. This is my favourite time of the day; when the house has emptied and the day is still ripe with possibility.

As I raise my second cup of hot black coffee to my lips, there is a sudden explosion of sound outside the window, and my arm jerks, hot brown tears of coffee spilling over the sides of the mug. The noise is indeterminate at first – a crashing or violent hissing, maybe – and then a piercing banshee wail erupts from right below the windowsill.

A cat fight. The hideous howling is familiar, and I am on my feet and at the front door without having made a conscious decision to intervene. By the time I get there, a small but agile tabby cat is slinking away, slipping through the wrought-iron gate into the street. Kitts trots over to me from the undergrowth of bushes by the window, proud and purring, a precise and vivid line of blood dashed across her white nose.

And I realise; Kitts has no conception of her own mortality. At fifteen years of age, she is comparatively slower than she used to be – she spends the vast majority of her days sleeping, and when I stroke her back I can feel her bony shoulders through the still-sleek orange fur. But in her mind, she is immortal, invincible. A young, fit cat dares to invade her territory and she retaliates. For Kitts, there are no greater consequences beyond the now.

I hold my hand out for her eager rubbing cheeks; her stiff whiskers bristle against the back of my hand. And for a moment I wish I could share her sense of timelessness.

Outside My Window is a weekly series every Saturday on Sirens & Muses where I write a short vignette based on something I see outside my window, outside my door, or on the streets around my area. It’s a bit late this week due to illness!

Outside My Window: Feeding Ducks

Outside My Window is a weekly series every Saturday on Sirens & Muses where I write a short vignette based on something I see outside my window, outside my door, or on the streets around my area.

Laura crouches at the edge of the canal, crumbling pieces of bread between her tiny fingers with the kind of focus only three-year-olds can muster. She frowns at the crumbs as they escape her hands to float on the top of the scummy canal water, and is transformed with glee as the ducks dart about pecking at the pieces.

I stand behind her, a firm hold on the back of her red coat, and can’t believe how tiny she is. The smallness of my daughter is just part of life, and if anything I sometimes can’t believe how big she has grown, how the tiny creature that made its way out of my wife’s womb could have turned into this little person. We marvelled at her smallness then – it took weeks to get used to the delicate hands and feet, the paper-thin miniscule fingernails, the tiny whorl of her soft pink ears. I felt clumsy and huge at first, afraid I would hurt her with my big awkward hands.

Her hands still get lost within my palms, but now she has a soft nest of dark hair, vibrant green eyes, and an increasingly expanding mind. She is like a flower unfolding, waking up to the world. She asks questions about the world around her and I can see her soaking it all in. Every day of her life builds her personality – every sentence spoken to her, at this age, could change the rest of her life.

In five minutes’ time, her focus will have shifted – she will lose interest in the ducks, distracted maybe by a passing dog or a sudden fierce longing for ice-cream. But right now, this moment, this action of crumbling the bread between her fingers and letting it fall to the waiting ducks below is her entire world. Her sparse eyebrows knit together, the smooth baby skin rumpling slightly between them; her moist rosy top lip pouts in concentration. She achieves without thought a state that most adults can only begin to achieve in meditation and mindfulness exercises.

Laura turns her head and looks up at me, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. ‘More bread, Daddy!’ A tidal wave of love rushes over me as I smile at her imperious tone. I tug the plastic bag out of my coat pocket and hunker down beside her, tightening my grip on her coat with my other hand. We crouch together on the cold stone paving and look out on the still, murky canal water, the willow trees reflecting in its glassy surface.

9 to 5

Sarah was exhausted. Two heavy bags of grocery shopping pulled on her elbow sockets, the plastic threatening to rip and spill their contents all over the grey streets of Rathmines. Living on the city outskirts was convenient and even picturesque when the sun shone and the canal was relatively free of debris. But pushing her way home through the rush-hour pedestrians made her sad in the pit of her stomach. In a few months’ time it would be pitch dark on her way home, but in the autumn months like this it was usually all just grey – grey buildings, grey streets, grey sky.

On evenings like this, Sarah’s life began to seem ridiculous, consisting as it did of a strange hamster-wheel 9 to 5, the uncomfortable boring clothes, and the tired non-conversation that usually ensued when she and her husband collapsed onto the couch together in the evenings.

Once a week, she would make a detour to a supermarket on her way home, elbowing past hoards of flustered-looking professionals searching freezers for frozen petit pois and angrily examining packets of lean beef. She once saw two women fighting over the last free-range whole chicken.

Today, she had not had the energy to do a full week’s shopping, and instead bought some half-hearted fruit, a few microwave meals and two bottles of red wine. The ten-minute walk home still seemed to take twice as long as usual, and she stopped twice, readjusting the plastic bags and wishing she had remembered to bring a shopping bag.

Come the weekend, they would try to get out of the flat and do what couples were supposed to do – go for walks, buy coffee or lunch, sit by the canal contemplating the floating crisp packets and naan breads, the anchored shopping trolleys and traffic cones, and the fish that darted between them. And Sarah knew that she would enjoy those weekends, would revel in the bottle of wine shared or the pints of lager consumed in the pub, and would forget this empty feeling.

She arrived at the apartment just as Mark was slamming the car door shut and locking it with a blip and a flash of orange light in the falling dusk. ‘Hi sweetheart, let me take those,’ he said warmly, kissing her on the lips and peeling the chafing plastic handles from her sore fingers. And all in a rush, she felt the sad emptiness well up with something. For a moment, there was a sort of tender poignancy to the delicate skin of the forehead emerging from beneath Mark’s receding hairline, the slight soft bulge of his stomach under his navy jumper. She thought inexplicably of the surprising softness of his flaccid penis in her hand. Tears began to well up inside her.

‘Yes, please. Thank you.’ They were tears of relief. Sarah followed her husband inside and shut the door.

Mr Brown

Mr Brown was a man in his forties with a receding hairline and a fondness for tea. His hair worried him. He began to grow his fringe further down onto his forehead, and felt an increasing affinity with those old men you saw in pubs with truly awful comb-overs. He let his fringe grow, and hoped that when the time came that it could be hidden no more, he would accept his baldness with grace and dignity. His wife, he thought, would surely never let a comb-over in the house. But then, he supposed that she too might be caught unawares, lulled by the gradual decline. So, every now and then, Mr Brown peered into the bathroom mirror and pushed back his hair, inspecting the damage and wondering if it was time to succumb to his impending baldness.

He liked his tea strong with a dash of milk and a small bit of sugar. If he was honest, he actually liked it with a bit more than a small bit of sugar; but he didn’t like to admit this, and slipped in the extra spoonfuls when his wife wasn’t looking. He told himself that it was his little luxury, like the bars of chocolate his wife kept in the drinks cabinet. Mr Brown was fascinated by the way she savoured these bars, nibbling on one or two squares every evening as they watched the nine o’clock news. He himself was not overly fond of chocolate. Sometimes he tried to enjoy his evening cup of tea in the way she enjoyed her squares of chocolate, but he always felt unable to grasp her passion.

His wife was called Rosemary. Although she was frugal with the chocolate, she had a multitude of similar little indulgences, and it seemed to Mr Brown that she spent half her life in their grips. She liked to take frequent long baths – she would light an alarming number of candles, add several salts and bubble mixtures to the hot water, and lie in complete silence for upwards of half an hour, leaving steamed-up mirrors and strong feminine scents in her wake. She also had her hair done every month, another ritual which seemed to take much longer than necessary. The rich, auburn shade of her hair was so vivid that it had erased Mr Brown’s memory of her natural hair colour.

However, on the occasions when Mr Brown chanced to see his wife’s pubic hair, he noted that it was turning increasingly grey, like the fur of a badger. The sight of these coarse white hairs made him think of his receding hairline, and he always found himself raising a hand to his forehead at the sight of Rosemary’s naked body.

Fox

The body was unmarked, undamaged, laid out in such a way that it might have been asleep. He started and hesitated when he saw it, for a moment thinking that it might wake and run away. But something about the way the fox was stretched out on its side, its felt-like ears pointed forward and unmoving, made him realise.

Someone had obviously moved the corpse, placing it on the grass verge of the narrow path over the railway bridge. It was a strange place for roadkill – the side of a footpath, where the only roads nearby were through a small housing estate on one side of the bridge, and the town’s church car park on the other. A car in the night, perhaps, had swung through the estate too fast, seeing the darting fox too late – but why carry the body so far from the road? He thought of poison, but this was somehow too upsetting to contemplate. The swift blow of a car bumper, the sudden stunning flash of the bright headlights, before everything went dark – it seemed more dignified. The thought of a slow, choking death was too gruesome to contemplate.

He had been living in that suburban housing estate for over twenty years, and was accustomed to the autumn surge of wildlife activity. Foxes would regularly steal across his garden, going unseen but for the flick of a tail as they dashed through the fence. And in the past couple of years there seemed to be a new colony of grey squirrels furrowing their way into the landscape. But he had never before seen a dead animal in this neighbourhood. These tragedies usually belonged to motorways and dark country roads – badgers, rabbits, and the occasional unfortunate cat.

He was not a sentimental man, but something about this poor animal brought a sting to his eyes. The thick, healthy coat, perhaps. The perfect turn of its ears and the thick sheaf of grey whiskers.

On his way back home, made slightly lopsided by four pints of Guinness, he forgot about the dead fox until he reached the apex of the bridge. With a half-stumble, he briefly contemplated turning and going around the long way. Then he raised his jumper sleeve to cover his mouth and nose, and stepped past the body into the light of the street lamps.

The space before

All these little daily disappointments, I feel them in my knees. When I rise in the morning and feel the ache as my toes spread and my weight moves down my legs, I know I am in for a tired and uninspired day. But when I make mistakes, I feel it rising behind my ears like a blush. I feel it sometimes, as I reach for the hand of the wrong man, as I set aside something important. The warning in the space before regret.

During the day, in the glare of the sun, it is hard to tell if the scorching against my ears is the heat of the summer, or an impending disaster. It is easier in the dark, when the wine and tequila lays a vignette over the world, and he comes into clearer focus in the centre of my life. My whole body burns then, and the fear is gone.

I have yet to find the part of me that responds to what is correct. I sit for hours, staring questions in the face, and mentally examine myself from head to toe. That twinge in my chest – excitement or fear? Anticipation or trepidation? When I feel the tears come I don’t know if it’s sadness or exhaustion.

We all long for what we can’t have. And because it doesn’t exist, we long for that one true love that will follow us throughout a lifetime. Is there anyone who doesn’t wish their first love, that first flutter at the tender age of fifteen, was their last? Their one and only? We all want that clarity of feeling, the knowing that it’s right simply because it always has been.

But it’s never that easy. We fumble through life, clutching at the straws that are offered to us. And it can be hard to tell the clutching from the genuine falling.

So I try to just feel the want. It can consume me, if I let it, but I’m too old now for such extravagance. I rise in the morning, swing my legs off the bed, and test out my knees. I try not to take the disappointments personally.

Demise

Every time she woke, she felt she had lost something. The confusion was numbing. She would hold her breath, hold her muscles completely still, containing the panic. Then she would remember. It was not so much remembering as realising she had known all along. It was like waking in a bath and realising you were submerged in water. She remembered herself.

But there was still always something missing. A corner puzzle piece, it seemed small and vital. And it would drop slowly, becoming larger and larger as it loomed above her, and then she knew. It was catastrophic. She was not nineteen anymore. She was sleeping in a strange bed. She was a stranger.

A jolt of fear electrifies her; she realises there is someone in the bed beside her. The sunlight streaming from a gap in the curtains plays on the peaks and troughs of his shape under the covers. His body is angled away from her but his head is turned in her direction, his dark curls splaying out on the pillow. The unfamiliar eyelids suddenly fly open and he looks straight at her with unfathomable eyes. She leaps in fright and confusion from the bed.

The past few days, or weeks, are present in her mind but are clouded, foggy. The man in the bed is unfamiliar but she knows she has been sharing this bed with him for some time now. A vacuum of forgotten years yawns behind her. This man fits in somewhere amongst these lost years, like a piece of a long lost jigsaw puzzle extricated from a crack in the couch. For a moment, they look at each other uneasily, she and this man-shaped puzzle piece.

She sits, turning her back on him. A full length mirror mocks her from across the room. She ignores it. She sit on the big white bed and stares at the carpet. She follows its green pattern from swirl to swirl, her eye moving with the shapes across the floor. She tries not to think about this big double bed and what has happened in it, what it means. She tries not to look at the unfamiliar objects. Her things, her objects.

With some reluctance, she begins to look around. She stands up and takes in the room; the green curtains; the floor-to-ceiling built-in wardrobe. She wants to look at the clothes in it, but she is afraid. Instead, she turns and studies the bed again, studiously avoiding meeting her husband’s gaze. Her side is the left side; female objects clutter the bedside table. Nail scissors, moisturiser, a half-used packet of the Pill. The damages foil spaces of the popped pills speak to her of loss. She picks up a lipstick and inspects its garish shade with scientific interest.

A sudden noise startles her; he is rising from the bed and is pacing across the room, pulling open the wardrobe door. He starts to pull on clothes furtively, hiding his naked body from her. Are you late for work? It’s an innocent question, but he stops and stares at her. No, he replies slowly. I work from home.

There is a silence more weighted than the situation seems to call for. They stare at each other like cats, wary and thoughtful. Then he straightens, and leaves the room. The front door slams.

***

She was as alien to him as he was to her. He would wake some mornings before her and lie awake trying to figure out her profile. The curve of her ear seemed more complicated than he remembered; her shoulders were confusing. Her shorn hair was the only part of her that made any sense. It at least acknowledged the change, the difference.

Unwilling to face the realities of the day, he lies now with his eyes closed. He knows she is awake; he can feel the tension emanating from her taut, still form. He wants to avoid this moment of truth, to wait on the sidelines until she has found some equilibrium or coping mechanism, but his curiosity gets the better of him. He opens his eyes to find her watching him with an expression of fascinated horror on her features.

The panic, the leaping from the bed, is all familiar. This has become a ritual, a routine, a grotesque repetition. She moves visibly back and forth from incomprehension to understanding, and he finds himself hoping, as comprehension settles visibly on her face, that she has remembered him.

It is not that their life had been perfect, before. He watches her now, sitting herself carefully back down on the bed and staring fixedly at the floor, and tries to feel as he had then. Some days she had felt like an extension of himself; almost as though he had invented her perfection. He had once lain entwined with her at night, his face pressed into her thick auburn hair; and the line between me and her blurred and vanished.

But at other times she had been alien, impenetrable. One day, she had come home in the evening with her hair cut short around her ears. He never forgot that day, the sense of loss and bewilderment and the tears he struggled to hold back. And on cloudy, cheerless mornings, he had often found himself thinking that although there was nothing wrong about their relationship, there was nothing right about it either.

He has lost her now. But the suddenness, the whole and complete nature of his loss, is paralysing. To let go might be easy but his fingers are locked tight. He feels as though he is teetering at the edge of a steep drop, clutching to a cliff-edge with his toes. She is looking around the room now, studying the objects on the bedside table. With a sort of careful but detached interest, she picks up a lipstick and studies it with a vacant expression on her face. He feels a sudden but violent urge to wrench it from her hands and fling it away.

The drop yawns below him and suddenly he needs its escape. He pulls on clothes like protective armour, but her voice breaks through it. Are you late for work? The question is like a blow. He looks at her again but cannot find her in her own face. They are strangers pretending intimacy.

He takes a deep breath and jumps.

 

Published in The Bell, 2012 – UCD English & Literary Society (University College Dublin)

Mermaid

We met as children. When I was seven, pale and skinny and already taller than all the other boys, a new girl joined our school class of scruffy and boisterous children. Her name was Judith Mirsky, and she had an English accent. She was demure, with an impassive face, straight brown hair and deep chocolate eyes. In her ochre-coloured school uniform, she looked like a sepia-tinted photograph. Next to us, with our ruddy cheeks and bright sea-grey eyes, she was like a glimpse of the past.

She glanced around the classroom at us from under a long fringe and hid her small hands in the pockets of a brown coat that was too big for her. But despite her apparently timid nature, despite her alien accent and appearance, she was greeted with curiosity rather than hostility.

In class, she was quiet, but knew the answers. Out in the schoolyard, Judith was transformed. She ran faster than anyone else and laughed harder than anyone else. A red flush seeped like blood from two pin points high on her pallid cheeks; her eyes turned jewel-bright amber. She became abrupt and sharp, the kind of girl who would pinch you when you weren’t looking, but not hard.

Judith and I were not exactly friends. And yet, her presence was notable throughout my childhood. We would bump into one another at the supermarket. Our mothers stopped to make small talk, and we made faces at each other across the laden shopping trolleys. She came to my ninth birthday party, and broke Steven’s action figure, because he wouldn’t let her play pirates with the boys. When we were in fifth class, we were both enrolled for swimming classes at the local swimming pool.

I had been to the beach on July days when the dull Irish sun deigned to shine. My father had waded into the sea with me, water streaming in rivulets through his chest hair, and held me afloat in the water, his big hands under my torso. I kicked and splashed, but as soon as he let go, I sank spluttering under the waves.

My experience thus far with swimming had therefore not instilled me with much confidence. Emerging from the warm, damp changing room into the cool air of the connecting corridor, I walked carefully along the ledges of the green tiled pond of disinfectant to avoid getting my feet wet. The clamouring echoes of the pool made my head ring, and I could feel goose bumps erupting on my skin as I approached the edge of the water. Several of the shivering children lined at the edge of the pool were in my class, and Judith was one of them.

There was no part of me that wanted to learn how to swim. Even my toes seemed to curl up in dismay at the prospect. They retreated back from the edge of the swimming pool with a mind of their own. ‘No!’ my knees shouted in agreement. The hair all over my body strained away from my skin in a desperate attempt to distance itself from the body that was, inexplicably, about to immerse itself in this expanse of deep water.

The children who could swim were separated from those who could not.

‘I’m a mermaid’, Judith said, poking me sharply in the ribs before joining the other group. I was eleven, far too old for believing things. But, I wanted to believe her. When I watched her small, lithe body writhe and contort under the water, I could almost, at times, see a flash of a tail fin, a scaly underwater glint.