unless I tell her mine.
‘I don’t have any.’ I hear my body say, and I try to snarl, but I’m held back, chained, roaring like a wolf in a cave beneath the world.
‘Really? I’ve got thousands.’
‘You should let me borrow some, sometime.’
‘Okay; if you can tell me one, I’ll tell you one, that’s a fair deal, right?’ I can barely hear her, and she starts to raise her voice over the swell of the crowd in the adjacent room. I know there’s a band on tonight, I just don’t know who. Something generic and metal, no doubt, something weak and malnourished and desperate for recognition.
‘I’ve been dreaming,’ I say, remembering something not-forgotten but unobtainable, ‘of a girl called Victoria.’
‘Oh?’ I see her smile has fixed a little now, but she tilts her head and urges me to go on.
‘She isn’t real; she’s a, an ideal, I think; I’m not too sure.’ The body looks up at the ceiling. ‘I think she’s salvation.’
‘Salvation? Salvation from what?’
‘I don’t know,’ the body lies to her, I feel its heartbeat speed up, ‘but it’s your turn anyway.’ She looks confused. ‘To tell me your dream?’
‘Oh,’ she looks embarrassed, looks into her dark cider, takes a mouthful like she’s gathering courage, ‘I want to be an artist.’ I hear something like the slap of a chess piece against a table, like the toppling of a king; like the midnight crowning of a pawn.
‘I can tell you’re an artist, you know.’ I lean in closer and she copies me, I can smell her sweet fruit breath, and I’m certain she can smell the rot of beer and whiskey on mine.
‘How?’ She seems to whisper it, but it resounds in my blood like a church bell tolling, like nothing else, like it was the only question that mattered. I smiled, and looked down at her hands. ‘Well?’
‘You’re alive aren’t you?’ We stay quiet for a while; she looks at me and I look around the room. The black dress is propped up against the wall on the other side of the room, with a bent knee holding her right foot flat against the wall. Three guys are standing around her, each one trying to look cool, nonchalant, but I can see that their palms are sweating, that they’re trying to hold back the shivers of excitement, like the twitching of a cock inches away from a woman’s hand. The bartenders kept an eye on her too, they had been doing all night. There’d be a fight there, at some point; one careless look and testosterone jealousy would fill the air and hate, hate, more hate in the sweat we breathe.
‘That’s not a great line. It doesn’t really mean anything, does it?’
‘Means whatever you want it to mean, I guess; maybe nothing, probably nothing.’ Yeah, probably nothing. We carry on drinking, but I can see that she doesn’t regularly drink so much; she starts to blink, hesitantly, like every time she opens her eyes there’s some new world smiling back at her. I’ve known people who look like that when they’re drunk before, so I resolve to finish the drink and put her in a taxi. Then I could go home and sleep and scowl over my notes in the morning and worry about whether they’re madness, whether they’re mad enough, whether they are, truly, digital lines of gibberish.
Her questions roll past me as I walk with her to the stairs, and the wooden double doors that hang like silent sentinels. There’s a crash behind us, and the music stutters for a second until all I can hear is the muted screaming of the band next door, before resuming a loud, droning wail once again. The bouncers look at me outside, and they’re shivering beneath their layers of white and the unassuming black suits. They smile at her, but she’s too busy talking to notice.
‘Are you getting a taxi back? I don’t mind paying for it.’
‘I think the las’ bus should be here soon, if we haven’t missed it.’
‘Right; I’ll come and wait with you then.’ She breathes something in the air, and it appears like fog from her lungs; I try to read it out of the air but it dissipates as soon as she moves through it, heading down the long road in the direction of the bus stop. The bus, when it eventually comes, doesn’t stop for us; we look after it, angry for a heartbeat, furious for another, and the rage leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I walk her back to my apartment, and she starts to ask questions again; questions that I answer shortly, too cold, too furious for conversation.
‘Do you have a job? Do you have any tattoos? Have you ever been in love? Did you go out with anyone tonight? Do you go out often? Did you think that blonde girl was hot? How long had you been there? Have you lived here all your life?’
I open the door and she starts to climb the stairs towards my apartment; my body looks up at her, at the shapes of her legs, her hips as they shudder slightly and drive her up the stairs; the way her hair falls by a fraction of an inch with her drunken momentum. She walks past me door and I call her back in a hushed voice; she turns her head first, relying on its force to turn her body back to me and, for a moment, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She’s a model, a perfect ghost of music turning, revolving, with her body twisted and taut and the corridor lights in her eyes are like the candles in a church.
We sit and we talk a while, she’s sprawled out on my couch and I’m at my desk, but turned to face her. She asks if I’ve got any music to put on, and I tell her all about the building, the room, the ghosts of the pianos that have passed through this place; I tell her about the old man downstairs, and his rotten whiskey, and the old man upstairs and his rotten beer and his silence. By the time I’m done, she’s almost fallen asleep.
I ask her to move and she does; she sits up sluggishly and the drunkenness is in her arms now, hanging limp by her side. I help her stand, support her and walk her through to the bedroom. There is a strength in her legs that momentarily gives me pause; like she’s letting me help her, like she doesn’t need me; she doesn’t. She’s probably done this a hundred times; perhaps not a stranger’s apartment, but she’s not unfamiliar with drunken movements. She places her feet in the perfect way to move forward with as little effort as possible, she doesn’t use her arms at all, leaves them hanging, and her eyes aren’t listless, but they’re moving in slow circles around the room.
The body moves into the bathroom and pours her a glass of water; I can see her in the mirror, reflected, defined by the falling light from the streetlamps outside and the humming bathroom. Her jeans are unbuttoned, and she’s pulling the jacket off of her shoulders. She tosses it out of sight and, in the moment, she looks as sober as anything; it looks calculated, I think, like she knows exactly what she’s doing. Already, I can picture her naked; I can picture the morning, with the sunlight cutting across her body in existence; I can picture her silhouette’s coloured shadow, and the curve of her breasts and her rising from her sleep with bent knees.
She pulls her t-shirt above her head, and the curve of her back chases her hands, like a cutting of moonlight. No; that’s what I expect to see; pale skin cut in half by a bra strap, pristine, like a sculpture. Instead, her back is a mess of purple and block, two great curving blocks of colour splitting away from her spine. Every shade of purple is there, against her skin – ingrained in her very being, the colour of royalty and sorcery and of ancient things in the depths of the ocean; each shade plays a hundred times across a hundred feathers, lying beside the black lines of shadow – the whole thing seems to twist, to shudder beneath the weak light.
I picture them, for a moment, breaking free from the confines of her skin and spreading across the room; muscles on her spine twist and curve and scream with the pleasure of ascension until the wings snap taut. Great angel wings of the night, of the forgotten evenings and the nauseating mornings, fill my bedroom and hide her from me and I see her jeans fall to the floor; she steps out of them slowly, half-seductive, half-afraid of losing her balance, but I cannot stop staring at her wings, creaking with blood and muscle and promising something above it all, above the sounds of the ghosts of music, above the hate in the streets like the canal had flooded, above the bitter, barking laugh
of tracksuits; above dyed hair and piercings and hesitant, blinking eyes; above the doctors and their patients and their thoughts; above everything, above salvation.
I can’t stop look at her, at them, even as she crawls across the bed, shaking her ass and her blue underwear that hold the promise of redemption I will never taste; she folds her wings against her again as she falls asleep, curled into my bed and my duvet like a saintly child, warm, contented, safe in her drunkenness as I am in mine.
She sleeps in my bed all night, and I lie awake on my couch, with the streets and the moon and all the stars from a billion, billion galaxies falling over me like it was all meant to be, like there was a purpose and the purpose was a heartbeat and the snap of tattooed angel wings breaking from the spine of humanity; I lay there, all night, and I smiled and listened to her snore and cough and mutter in disturbed sleep until the sun started to come up and blinded me and sent me off to sleep.
Contact
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