1
The knocking lit his subconscious and ignited a dream. Upon awaking, he would not remember the dream, but would know only that it had seemed to last for hours and that it had left him without hope; depleted and in need of something that did not exist
He pulled his blanket over his head. If he went back into the darkness, perhaps he would be able to re-enter that nether world, to cross that Rubicon and find whatever it was that had left him so utterly drained.
The knocks continued. There was no sign of impatience or urgency to them, just a constant, regular knock; da-da, da-da, like a heartbeat, lup-dup, lup-dup. He could see in his mind the gloved knuckles strike upon the flaky grey paint of his wooden door, go back an inch, then come down again with all the precision, thoughtlessness and reliability of an automaton. It begged a mix of politeness and determination, of doing what had to be done with the least malevolence and the minimum fuss. Yet he knew that it would not go away. He squeezed his eyes tightly as he would when he was a child and unable to grasp sleep. Those moments stayed. He could feel the same panic build within him now, the same imprisonment, the claustrophobia of entrapment, where one could neither find symbiosis with the trap nor break away from it. Surviving all traps was about symbiosis. One could survive anything if one was willing to compromise.
What did he dream? He could feel the puffy, sleep-swelled flesh around his eyes as he sought to extinguish his senses. This had happened a thousand times before, the emergence into sunlight to mourn the loss of his cocoon, but this time, it mattered, it mattered because it could take him away from the gloved hand that had brought down the gavel and passed sentence upon him. But one could not exist without the other. The despair at his lost dream would not have existed without the cancerous knock and the knock would, without the dream, be no more than a knock.
Now it was all. Now it was his prison, his trap, his claustrophobia, his fear. No childish eyes would save him now. No blanket smothering him like an overprotective mother would keep reality at bay. He felt watery fury seep from his eyes as he opened them. He could smell his night time breath as it cloyed upon the filthy blanket. He was rotten within, he knew it. Sleep allowed the rot to crawl from his belly. Light passed through the time-thawed weave of the blanket and flecked his grey sheet. The warmth of his filthy breath stole the air and forced his head into the open. He gulped like a man breaking the meniscus, his moist eyes wide and wild, his forehead as knotted as the bark of a tree.
He filled his lungs. His eyes swivelled towards the door. They were filled with cow-like fear, suffused by diamonds of impatience. He cursed. How dare they? How dare they rap their velvet knuckles against his only defence against the world. They were boulders slung by the trebuchet against his castle walls. He could give into this intimidation and allow the enemy within, in the hope that they were no more enemy than birds passing overhead. Or he could withstand the siege, live upon his own flesh, quench his thirst with his own urine. He could recycle himself in order to survive. Would it be possible to survive self-absorption? No, it was absurd. His hunger would survive his body’s ability to heal. His urine would eventually turn to syrup and turn against the machine that produced it. His body would run rampant with the poisons it had rejected in the first place.
There was nothing for it but to look for truce. So long as the boulder fell against the curtain walls, he would never get any peace and he would always wonder who it was that had caused him to poison himself. To die was bad enough, but to die in ignorance was inexcusable.
‘Wait.’
His own voice startled him. It was heavy with stale breath and sticky saliva. His dry throat grazed the air with a diabolical edge. Good. Perhaps it would drive them away. Perhaps he had found the antidote to the slingshot, a fearsome retort, but he regretted it immediately, aware that, if whoever it was left, then he would never know who had tried to storm his citadel.
‘Wait.’
Softer this time. There was pleading in his tone. He was happy with himself. To produce pleading on demand was a well-honed skill. This might have been too much. He felt a pang of shame at his retreat, his surrender, his willingness to capitulate, his need. He had no propensity for propinquity and yet all he could feel was a panicked regret.
He threw the blanket to the floor and exposed his naked body. It was greased by a sheen of sweat. The perspiration pooled in the creases of his abdomen. He held his breath and watched each suicidal drop jump with every throb of his aorta. With each breath it rolled off the side of his belly and onto the thundercloud of sheet, where it gathered like a storm waiting to erupt across his silent room. He repulsed himself. He was the only guilty party in the room. Only he had subdued his shadows and forced them to fight for life with the light. Only he had suffocated the child as it lay innocently sleeping, only to awaken at the smothering and die in the darkness of age.
Yet there was within this turmoil a certain satisfaction, that he had been right all along, that he had seen the future and shed the past. He had become what he most feared. In this, he was absolved. To fulfil your destiny, to foresee the binding of your soul, took greatness, took mastery. This was not fate and he doubted the existence of destiny, he simply believed in the fragile psychology of humankind. That was perhaps the only place for fate in the scheme, the shredding of a man from the wholeness of youth to the worn remnants of threadbare age. He accepted his decay with grace in the same way that one accepted the long-expected assassin and the coldness of the grave. One could not avoid the inevitable, so he had embraced it, from an early age, had lived it and slipped knowingly towards the abyss, in the same way the captain of a crippled boat steered straight and true towards the waterfall, no hope of touching land, only the determination to reach the drop with his hand upon the wheel. Once one accepted the flow, then all one had to do was go with it.
The knocking continued. He pulled himself to the edge of the bed and looked for his clothes. They were out of reach. He had taken them off the night before and, in his anaesthetised state, simply deposited them in the same place where he had made the decision to finally sleep, without thought of the consequences. He wasn’t the kind of drunk to fall asleep where he fell. He was too practised for that, and too fussy. He needed comfort to sleep, safety, the scent of his own dirt, the coolness of his own musty pillow. So he threw off his clothes and stranded them like a snake did its skin.
Now, they were too far away, out of arm’s length and beyond a stride, so he stooped and picked up his damp charcoal blanket, wrapped it around his shoulders and wandered, heavy-footed with sleep, towards the door. His thighs shook as he stood. They were, unlike his belly, thin and without stamina. The slightest effort sent them into an uncontrolled quiver. He could barely feel the soles of his feet against the floor. He walked as if on cotton wool, uncertain of the steadiness of his ship, of the reliability of the boards beneath him. If he had had the ability to step outside of himself and see himself as he was, he would have been tempted to laugh, for he imagined himself as a fat flamingo upon sticks for legs which lifted its feet clear of the water with each step as if uncertain as to where they were unless he could see them. He was, however, without the flamingo’s balletic grace, as if those thin, elegant toes had been substituted by the stumps of a rhino, not built to step lightly, but to shake the very earth as it walked.
He could not remember the last time someone other than his landlady had come to his door. She only came for the rent or to ensure that he was still alive. He understood that. There was uncertainty in his survival and she had a business to run. He was a temporary asset. She needed to make sure that the asset lived, not in the sense of having any responsibility towards the asset, only in the sense that it was alive. It lives, I live, they live, we live. When he had moved into the bedsit, she had told him that one of her previous tenants, in this very room, had lain dead for a week. She had been forced to climb the stairs for her income. She had knocked with fair firmness at the door, but there had been no reply. She had called his name, without malice or song. She had not seen him leave, not for some time so knew he was in. After knocking again, still to no avail, she had become convinced that he was merely trying to avoid payment believing, as many did, that silence lent invisibility, that a lack of sound forced people to dismiss you from their minds, no matter the facts. In many cases, she thought, this was true, but never when money was involved. You might forget the face of your dead husband or wife, but never the face of a debtor. There was none of the comfort in debt that there was in blood and there wasn’t, she was certain, much comfort in blood. Sanguineous proximity was no guarantee of correctitude, as she liked to say. Anyway, people faded through comfortable affection, all that was left were the rags and bones of memory, nothing substantial. Debtors lived on in discomfort, like poltergeists, rattling the owed pennies like chains, perhaps because we were more dependent of our debtors than the beloved deceased. There was always consequence to debt, for all concerned. His concerns, however, were not her concerns. She had made that mistake once, a long time ago, when she had inclined towards lenience with a tenant. She had possessed a better nature back then, along with softer skin and a kinder heart. Not only had he not paid her, he had made delicious and unbounded love to her and then stolen her valuables when she fell into an unarousable post-coital sleep.
Anyway, she had used a skeleton key to enter the room (‘I had knocked and knocked and knocked’, she felt obliged to say). It was winter and the room was like an icebox. This was probably what had preserved the body so well. The window was open and snowflakes had drifted in and settled upon the frost. If only, she had said a little too regretfully, it had been two months earlier. But for that body it would have been quite festive. She hoped that he had no objection moving into what had once been the room of a dead man. He had said no, that it didn’t bother him. The streets were full of dead men. In a world of three billion people, it would be difficult to stand in a place where someone had not died. If it bothered him, he would be forever rooted to a single spot awaiting his own death.
Anyway, that was why she climbed the stairs to claim the rent. A dead body was an inconvenience, and not just financially. The police had chewed on that death like mad dogs, determined that some sort of foul play had been involved. In the end, in the absence of evidence and in the inconvenient presence of truth (a large river of blood that had risen from ruptured varices in the lower oesophagus and trickled back into the lungs), they had relented. In future, if she could make sure of catching them just before they lurched over the precipice, then she could ship them off to hospital and let it be their problem. Leave the body on a neighbour’s doorstep. It was a good rule in life.
He admired her practicality, but he didn’t actually like the woman. She looked like his grandfather and he could not look favourably upon any woman who looked like his grandfather. He had been a bitter old bastard, even to his last breath.
He knew anyway that it was not her at the door. It was not rent time. Despite everything, he was not behind on the rent. In fact, he owed money to no one. That and his rightness about the inevitability of his decline gave him some pride. It wasn’t her knock either. She had the knock of a bag of bones, all sharp-edged, without resonance. Her knock could have been the knock of Death itself; steady, relentless and without the warmth of flesh. He could tell that these fingers were gloved; the material deadened the sound. He could also tell that the man, for it was a man, he could tell by the weight behind it, was not of slender build, might even have tended towards the portly, towards the edge of gout. The constancy of his knock suggested that he was a man unlikely to give up, who was used to getting his own way, and getting your own way could be guaranteed by only two methods; wealth or criminality. That didn’t of course mean that the two were exclusive of each other. He had known many wealthy criminals and many wealthy men who tended towards criminality, either because they needed to do so to maintain or increase their wealth or because one day they suddenly found themselves unencumbered by the boundaries of ordinary men, immune to the law. They were however, two distinct beings. He had also known poor criminals, because through either laziness, a lack of greed or poor luck they never quite achieved the riches they wanted. Criminality for criminals was a way of life, a job, something that flowed through their veins and the only way they knew to survive. In the wealthy, it was a by-product, like the sulphurous smoke of the coal burned in industry at the height of the Industrial Revolution and through the poisonous air of the fifties, a necessary evil. If one wanted light and warmth, one had to compromise. And he was realistic enough to understand the weaknesses of a man. If a man was not to be tempted, then temptation should not exist. The thirsty man drank, the hungry man ate. One could not blame him for that. It did not make him a gourmet or a drunk, merely a man. Man was fragile. Man was easily broken. Man did not have to fall far for the cracks to appear.
Neither did a criminal have any business knocking at his door, not when there was a perfectly serviceable window available, and no one would come to his door with a gun in their hand and intent in their soul, not in this part of town. The lock on the door could have been picked by a two year old with a hair pin and an ounce of patience. No, there were easier ways to rob a man. He had no social or business dealings with criminals either, so he dismissed that idea.
This left only the wealthy man. He realised that, by assuming the wealth of the individual, he dismissed the honest poor and the bourgeoisie, but he was even less likely to have dealings with them than the others. There was no place in his life for the ordinary and, in among the ordinary, he could include friends. He had no friends, but this was rarely a basis for regret. He had tried friends, in the same way that he had tried marijuana, but neither had suited him. He, quite simply, did not believe in friendship. It was just not a workable concept. The idea of true friendship was a lofty and unattainable notion achievable only by the weak, the deluded and the easily led. He believed in symbiosis, the beneficial collusion of two entities, but that there could be any more to friendship than need or greed, self-aggrandisement or vanity, was an idea with which he would have no truck. Each one of us, king, queen or common man, lived to serve himself. When it came down to it, people were animals and animals did not have friends, not if they were to survive. Even those that hunted in packs broke up into individuals once the prey was down; then it was each man for himself. Hierarchy reinforced this, the alpha male, the subservient pup who would eventually challenge that male to the death, and it was no different in mankind. Any animal that broke from this was cast out if it could not bite and claw its way to the top. Any human to deviate from these rules was imprisoned or executed or shunned. The only difference between humans and animals was that humans knew what they were doing. They were consciously oppressive. All kings were sociopaths.
He turned the key in the lock and, as the inner workings of the aged lock slid stiffly from their moorings, the knocking ceased.
Panic jolted him violently. He tore open the door, his eyes round with pleading and expectation, his teeth bared between rictus and smile. He no longer knew how to form a face. There was nobody. He hugged the blanket to himself, felt its now cool clamminess envelop him like the dead skin of another and stepped out of the room.
A single skylight, covered by moss and dust, lit the hall and stairway. The light fell in copper green as it seeped weakly through. He lurched towards the banister and craned over. The blanket slid moistly from his shoulders and fell to the ground, leaving him naked in a single piercing shaft of golden light that squeezed between the clumps of moss on the filthy glass. He listened for footsteps, for breathing, but there was none. Nausea overwhelmed him as he fell to his knees and peered between the balusters. He wanted to cry, but would not let himself do so. So hungry had he been for this morsel of companionship that he had tried to deny himself the pleasure and, now that it was gone, he was filled with remorse. He loathed himself for the disgust he felt for his fellow humans. He longed to feel the compassion that he perceived others felt, though he believed them all disingenuous, but he could not. He had never been able to do so and had spent his life searching for that moment within him that he knew existed somewhere and put it upon canvas. It was the only way he knew. There was nothing real in his work, only longing. The spots of paint upon the floor were the only genuine parts of his expression, the only uncontrived spontaneity.
Now that same longing sat naked upon the landing and clung to the darkness below in the hope of being extinguished.
2
The windowsill was wide enough to accommodate one, two at a push. The sash window, bitten wretched by time and the elements, lent a fine view upon the streets below which had once served as an inspirational spectacle. Each pane of glass now had its own dusty halo, occasionally strippled by rain, through which he could stare at the world in a misty bokeh and imagine each passer-by caught for that moment in that pose and each pose would in itself tell a tale, from a purposeful stride or a lazy amble, to the bitter knitted brow or faraway eyes that took them some place tolerable for a bent moment in time. The inspiration, he knew, was still in there, somewhere, he had just lost the willingness to look for it. He was caught in a purgatory where he took complete joy in everything he saw, but he could do nothing about it. It had become forbidden fruit and to even look at the fruit was tantamount to self-betrayal. He did not want the connection, but he could not help himself, in the same way that someone who cut themselves committed the act just to see if they could feel pain any more, to confirm their humanity, to show themselves that they were still alive. He longed for the connection, but despised it and feared it, for he knew that nothing could come of it but harm.
Now, in the heat of this glorious summer, he opened the sash window and the sounds of traffic, the throaty blasts of motorcycles, the protestations of double-clutches, the squeal of dusty brakes, rose in a synaesthetic union and coloured the air. Individuals could not be heard above the noise, but their lips moved, a silent jibber-jabber that contorted their mouths and puffed their cheeks and flared their nostrils like racehorses stretching for the final post. Their heads bobbed and shook like cheap advertising gimmicks on the dashboard, while their hands kneaded the air to help them sculpt their thoughts into words. Those on their own were barely present, their faraway eyes betraying lies of distant shores and happy homes and the contentment felt in the simple task of mowing the lawn. They had compromise on their minds. Almost anything was better than the something towards which they travelled. It was better to lose a finger than an arm, a toe rather than a leg. It was better to hang wallpaper on a sunny summer day than march in blind unison to the mechanical beats of the new human heart.
He had tried, more than once. He had tried to become a part of the salmon flow, had even grown to like the calming stroke of the current against his back, but it had never taken long for him to realise that what he was heading for was the shallows, the final dump of his fertility upon a stranger’s eggs and an exhausted, shabby death in an unflowing trap of familiarity. Was it possible to despise and envy all those who passed below in their own small Hell? Was it right? Did he have the right to despise their passivity in the face of such overwhelming inevitability or envy their ability to do so without screaming? It was actually he who was screaming. It was he who was feeling the pain. It was he, through choice, who fought, embraced and feared the end. Those people, those ants, who followed their scent day after day after day without question or pause, had no idea of their enormous obligation to life. He wished that he was one of them, able to walk around the obstacles set before them instead of trying to clamber over them or tear them apart, as he had always done.
But they were all going to that same end, whatever the method. They were brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, who would all end up in solitude. The journey, in the end, was irrelevant. There was no point travelling hopefully when one was bound by nature to arrive.
He poured the remnants of yesterday’s wine into a tumbler laced at the base with wine jam, that sweet concoction of leftovers that stayed in the bottom of a glass, no matter how you tried to suck it dry. After several days, it became semi solid and sweeter and added to the new pourings. He had long ago given up the pretence of using a proper glass. He was pleased to see that the leftovers came to the lip of the glass. He squeezed la dernière goutte from the bottle and craned his neck to the glass to avoid the risk of spillage. With pursed lips, he sucked at the contents. He closed his eyes and waited. Slowly (and more slowly each day), he felt the wine spread through him like rhizomes and make him whole again. It was a guilty relief to feel the sensation. He had tried to do without, but he was weak and would feel himself begin to fracture with each unanaesthetised second that passed.
He put the glass down firmly, next to the window frame where it was less likely to be knocked and bleed, and lowered himself from the sill.
The studio - it had been advertised as such – had appealed to him, not least because of the name. It was a bed-sitter, actually a room, that was all, but to advertise it as she did had been a mistress-stroke on the part of the landlady, especially in this part of town. It was a room, merely a room. A box of accoutrements, one of them being him.
In the far corner, next to his easel, his small table of paints and brushes, his canvases, jam jars full of cloudy water and spit-spotted rags, was his turntable. It was a red Dansette Conquest, with a cream lid. It reminded him of the advertisements he saw in magazines for finned Chevy Bel Airs, ’51 De Sotos and Plymouths, that weren’t just cars, but were passports to different dimensions; otherworldly, science fiction flyers. The Dansette represented the same freedom. It was a vortex to that other dimension, an escape, a place where he too could wander with faraway eyes and listen with admiration and envy to the wonders of creation.
Vivaldi, Albinoni and Bird had become the sound of his captivity, the soundtrack to his life. Their sweet sorrow broke his heart, that irresistible urge, awoke the passions in him. They had come to control him, to dictate his moods, his brushstrokes, his subjects, his eating and drinking, his happiness and despair. They made him want to live and content to die. They filled him with envy and the affirmation of a wasted life. They gave him hope, a breeze in the Doldrums, that there might yet be further to go, discoveries to be made. Then winter set in and he realised that he too was at season’s end and at the whim of men long since dead or distant enough to be not just dead, but non-existent. He envied and despised them for their power. He loved them for their caress. They brought him relief in his hopelessness and fear in the hope.
He flicked through his collection and plucked One Night in Birdland out from the pack. He removed the heavy vinyl from its sleeve. His eyes held the cover as he did so, the oh-so-cool purple pinstripe and the sax, ready to tear things apart and then put them gently back together. Fats Navarro, on trumpet, would be dead a week after recording it. Did he know? Did he know that he was entering the last week of his life? That this would be the last thing he laid down for the world?
His fingers touched only the label in the centre of the disc while his eyes followed that single groove from beginning to end. Deftly, he moved the record to between his palms and then laid it out on the turntable. He tweezered the arm between his fingers and laid the diamond life-giver upon the vinyl. It scratched the air like an incoming message with an outer space urgency, then in came Wahoo through the thin speaker at the front of the Dansette and carried him away.
He closed the lid, running his fingers over the patina of paint flicks that had settled on it. It felt real. It was uncontrived, unrehearsed. He had often wondered if he would be better off just spilling and spraying his work, like that crazy Pollock, but with less intent. At least it would be more honest than what he turned out now. Everything went through the processor before being laid tritely upon the canvas. The closest that he ever came to honesty was that he never sketched, not unless poor memory demanded it, never went over and over the finest detail. But what came out, after being processed in his mind, then his heart, his gut, then finally his fingers, was still processed, still contrived, still an arrival at an interpretation of his perception and, as such, it was dishonest. At least Pollock, for all his meticulously placed dribblings, came closer to the spontaneity that a real artist should have. It didn’t matter if it was pictures or words, pencil or paint, poetry or portrait, the first emissions were the ones that mattered, for they were the ones that fathered the honest child. It didn’t have to make sense, it just had to mean, to have purpose, to speak.
He was lucky though, luckier than many. At least he had, by hook and crook, managed to get by. He had combined the tyrant commercialism with his real needs and managed to keep his head above water. So long as he was able to lift a brush, he would be able to pay his rent. If he could no longer lift a brush, there would be no point paying his rent. No point. If he thought about it for too long, he would slip into broody melancholia, make him want to break his brushes and shred his canvasses. All the work that had brought him reward had been done for others. The work he did for himself made next to nothing, so he constantly had to block from his mind the knowledge that the next stroke upon the canvas was for another, never for him. Of course, they were done for pennies too but, in the end, the pennies also went to somebody else. It didn’t stop him doing his work, for he loved it, every moment, every smell that fell onto his tongue so that he could taste it, every line and curve and mix, and it tasted like creation. The circularity of the whole cycle made him afraid that he had become caught in the trap that he had always consciously tried to avoid. He suspected that his failure to remain in gainful employment, whatever that meant, was due to his desire to remain free of the trap. In the end he chewed his metaphysical leg off to get free. He always found a way to corrupt the goodness to be found in a decent, a ‘proper’, job. If he could put the blame for his failure on somebody else, then so much the better. He had always been reluctant to take responsibility for his life and using others to carry the burden of blame relieved him of that.
He took a lingering look at the blank canvas that lay like snow upon the deciduous easel and tried hard to imagine what could be on there. There was little that inspired him anymore. For that reason alone, he was glad of the commercial work. For someone like him, advertising represented a poor challenge. The ideas were already there; the subject matter, the target audience, the medium, the desires of the client. If he was honest, he would have told them that any precocious six-year-old with a modicum of talent and an only slightly withered arm could do what he did, but he saw no reason to give a six-year-old a leg up – the competition was hard enough; they would soon be stealing the food from his plate.
His most recent commission (it had to be called a commission for the sake of decency) was for a small yet flourishing business in the oil industry. It was all family and teeth and smiles and trees and the saccharine delights of nature and man coming together as one to make the world a better place, never mind the fact that man was slowly strangling the life out of nature with the by-products of nature’s compressed, fossilised delights. But he knew that he had better make the most of the work that came his way. Nowadays it was all going to agencies, those white-shirted busy bees that hid in their towering concrete hives. People like him, the independents, would be forced to shut up shop and fly obediently into those hives and produce the pre-ordered honey that Queen Money demanded. Independent thought was dying as surely as the earth itself. Damn humanity, he thought. We fuck everything up. If we had to fuck up to stay alive, we’d fuck that up too.
He waved a hand dismissively at the canvas. It would come. It always did. It was just a part of the process, to put himself through torture before he puked it all out in one feverish sitting.
He stopped at his bedside table, which wasn’t really that at all, more of an accidental cupboard, on the way back to his perch at the window, and picked up his cigarettes. He smoked Chesterfields. He smoked Chesterfields because he had always smoked Chesterfields and that was that. He had once tried a Marlboro and nearly shit himself he coughed so hard, so Chesterfields it was. He lit it and inhaled deeply, then went back to the windowsill and stretched out his legs once more.
The sun, already racing up the cobalt blue sky, had heated the sill up to boiling point. The glass in the windows, despite the dirt, magnified the heat a hundred times as it seared through the top half of the sash. Now it massaged his shoulder and the side of his face. He could feel his skin tighten. He put his hand down and found his tumbler of wine without even looking. He took a large sip and allowed it to mingle with the nicotine in his veins and bring him pleasantly to the edge of early day nausea. Sweet, sweet, he mused. Sweet, sweet.
Below him, summer was in full swing. He could smell hot concrete and electricity and singed petrol. Despite the sombre veil of work and business, which cloaked all in a weary grey, there were splashes of colour, corn yellow and red and sky blue and lime green and brilliant white, that wonderful rainbow that winter throttled in the stifling rigidity of overcoats. Skirts and dresses swished and twirled, high heels and low shoulders clicked and rolled and cars ticked-tacked soft tyres against gluey tarmac with windows down and bare arms surfing the air. A thousand radios played a thousand songs so that all the sounds of industry mingled with all the bebop trumpets and all the vagabond drums to create a new panegyric on mankind. Behind him and around him the Bird flew free and skimmed upon the myriad notes as if on a rise of warm air.
From here it all looked so fine, so full of promise. His eyes fell upon a girl in a summer dress. It was white with flowers of dark purple and red and leaves of dark green that threaded through the flowers on sinuous vines. The dress formed an oval around her neck so that her neck and half her shoulders were exposed. Around her waist she had a thin black belt that accentuated the perfect triangle of her torso so that, beneath her waist, the dress blossomed and took on a life of its own with each step she took. Her shoes were black slip-ons with no heel. She walked like a ballerina, all balls of the feet and barely touching the ground. Her hair was short and blonde, her skin pale, but a healthy pale. He couldn’t see for sure, but he imagined her eyes to be a brilliant blue so that they stood out like blue diamonds against her pale skin. Her lips wore red lipstick and were thick, kissable lips. Her nose had the slightly upturned impudence of an imp. It was delightful. She was delightful.
He loved her. At that moment he loved her and wanted to fall to his knees before her, his head against her warm belly, her hand in his hair. She was the most beautiful woman on that urban canvas. She stood out like a goddess among mortals, seemed to shine against the dullness of the ordinary. If she was here now, before him, he would simply stare and take in each perfect molecule of her being. He would kiss her full red lips and feel their warmth and their pillow softness against his own lips. He would kiss her neck and take in her scent, the natural musk and the talcum and the refreshing hint of lemon that he knew would be in the mix somewhere. When he was ready, when he had paid homage to this goddess, he would undress her, slowly, then lay her down upon his grey bed and make love to her as no man was capable of making love but in his dreams.
He loved her with all his soul. He loved her.
But he knew that it would not last. Love could not last. He had learned that love was an unattainable concept. He knew that, as soon as she uttered a sound, the goddess would descend to the human condition. From her mouth would fall opinion, dogma and the spittle of righteous prejudice with which he would quickly grow weary. Her body would be like any other, rampant with odour and decay and he would be left with little more than the prospect of her going the same way as all. The zenith of their love was now, when they did not know each other, when they had not tasted each other’s sour breath, when the thing that bonded them was their distance. With his thoughts, love fell from its height and plummeted to a messy death. He watched her go and felt utter, depthless sadness. He had met her, fallen in love, fallen out of love and watched her die in the time it took her feet to dance between the chrome and skip upon the kerb at the other side of the road.
He drained the rest of his wine. It would not be enough, not for a man as in love as he. He admitted to himself in the silence of his own confessional that he loved her. Her image was imprinted, burned, into his brain. She was and would remain, ideal. Still, he had more wine, that was the important thing. He would drink it over the course of the day until, by twilight, he would be numb enough to slough his skin again and sleep.
He took one long final drag upon his cigarette until he could feel the heat between his fingers, then crushed it into an ashtray replete with the corpses of the previous day.
God, he thought as he watched the girl turn a corner and disappear from his life forever. God, how I love you.
Then there was a knock at the door.
