eager reinforcements 1/?

towards the end of last year I started work on a novella that currently holds the title “eager reinforcements”. Other work has been pushing it back but I have a little more time at the moment so I’m committing more time to it. As part of that commitment I’m going to post it on here, a chapter a month, as i write it. There’s a lot of reasons for me to not do this, but in all things Ive found that nothing gives clarity like doing something in public.

July

‘Susie told me I could stay here until I work something out’

I hate how my voice betrays me, shatters any protection I might have had, or could at least imagine I had.

The girl holding the door open doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t shut it in my face either.

The handles of the plastic bag, a taut tumour, cut into my hand, but putting it down would seem forward surely? Or maybe be an invitation for me to be left outside to wait? Or worse It could draw attention to the bag itself and all it does and doesn’t contain.

The girl looks at me a little longer, then stares over my shoulder like she’s taking in the street for the very first time. Like someone arriving in a new country. She shrugs to the rest of the world, then cuts her glance back to me.

‘Ok, you should come in then. I’m leaving anyway. I’m going on holiday’

A nervous impulse of ‘where are you going?’ starts to crawl out of my throat but she’s already reached behind her and is passing me on the mat, pulling a large burgundy suitcase towards the stairwell. I stand in the doorway to the third floor ex council flat, the Sunday afternoon wind phasing the street sounds below through the open exterior walkway. Neither in nor out. I hear the heavy metal entrance slam shut at the bottom of the stairwell, and only then do I enter the flat and pull the door closed behind me.

‘Hey, there you are!’

I’m so confused and it takes me a while to work out the pieces. Susie is standing in the doorway to the tiny living room where I had been sitting and then later fallen asleep on the white sofa. On the TV a screensaver dusts the room in pale purples. Lavender spores. No lights are on in the flat. I nearly knock a mug of water over on the coffee table as I start to stand up.

‘Oh don’t worry yourself!’

She reaches to grab the remote and kills the tv, leaving only the dirty glow of light pollution from the little square window.

‘We’ll speak properly in the morning’

She whisks away, long rain coat swooshing against the banister in her vanishing to the upstairs without even turning on the lights. Its already too late to ask anything. I check my phone for the time but its dead. It was dead when I was walking from the bus stop this morning, I remember now. I consider whether the TV might tell me the time and then decide it doesn’t matter. I am here to do better. To start again. To not be hurt. To become an artist. To be the things that Susie’s effortlessness promises.

I tell all this in a whisper to the thin dark of the flat while a light pull clicks in a room above and fan I hadn’t noticed stops humming. I think about crushed blister packs and exhausted glue and cooling cuts on my younger legs and remember I need to grow the fuck up.

In the darkness I pull two dirty sweatshirts out my plastic bag, hopelessly ripping it in the process. Shreds of plastic rolling away. My lost luggage. Curling up on the short sofa I stretch one sweatshirt over my legs and other other over my shoulders and neck.

Its very early when I wake up with the cold grey light of spring dawn. I get up from the sofa but can’t see how to close the blinds, and searching behind spiteful cacti and small ceramic desert churches propels me far beyond being able to return to sleep. My stomach rumbles and my bladder hurts, but I don’t know which door leads to the bathroom and the only food I have with me are the cans of soup that I stole from the staff room when work let me go. I didn’t think to steal the can opener. Which is lesson. I re-wrap myself in my dirty clothes, and wait.

October

Three months in and living with Susie is a life devoid of patterns. There are ‘tendencies’ and when she likes something she will return to it until it has been ground to the smallest particles and then sucked dry. But that is the kind of repetition only observable in hindsight. She will also say the same thing, but with different words at different times.

Recently we were in a supermarket and between the vegetables and the personal care products she whispered through a small smile to me that,

‘All institutions are a cover for abuse by men’.

Then another time I was driving her to the beach to watch the birds. Susie was on the phone to her agent looking out the window and in the middle of a long conversation about missed opportunities and sex crimes she muttered as if breaking a forth wall between the rear seats and the front.

‘Is the soul also in your blood or just the body? Would that then mean the soul is dry?’

I am not as eloquent as most, but I can understand that these two utterances pertain to the same. However because I am less eloquent than most, I cannot rearticulate why they reflect each other. And reflect also the times she has asked me in public toilet queues whether I have thought of killing myself, and the moment in the middle of a conversation to a barista where she told me that ‘vanishing can leave an impact more potent than presence’. She said this with such a calculated performance that I believe the barista did not register those 9 words as she slipped them into her order for coffee and cake for us both. Because those words, in fact, were addressed to me.

‘Vanishing can leave an impact more potent than presence’

In hindsight, I recognise all of these instances as part of Susie’s exploration of a thing that she is enraptured by. It is sometimes hard for me to not feel stupid.

I am gratefully obviously, I can’t imagine where I would have wound up otherwise if she hadn’t come into my work and decided to talk to me while I was sitting in the cold winter stairwell. But part of living with Susie is embracing her artistic spontaneity. So when she comes into the bathroom and asks me ‘do you like tricks?’ I want to say the right thing, which really leaves no other option than,

‘Yes, like magic?’

‘Yes like magic. Finish up and I’ll see you downstairs.’

I dry myself off, put on the clothes that are laid out, and head downstairs.

Susie has turned on a single light in the kitchen and she’s sitting at the table which is covered in old fashioned vinyl tablecloths. Swirls of chocolate brown and bright red and illustrations barely legible. Patterns of cornucopias cracked with age still spilling their contents forever. Susie is sitting, and massaging a huge lump of wet red dough. The dough covers nearly all over the table, almost to its edges. She has rolled up her sleeves and is wearing an apron, the kind a surgeon or coroner might wear. Mint green symbolising cleanliness. The dough on the table wobbles and shines, the single low light casting its shadow on the wall. Susie doesn’t look up at me as a hang in the doorway, so I move closer reaching out to touch.

Smack.

I look down at my hand, the red mark on the back raised up where Susie slapped it away. I don’t feel any pain, but I feel ashamed and four. The old cuts on my thighs rise as a chorus, I want to kill myself. Still without looking at me, Susie says for me to,

‘sit down. We need to prepare for the trick, so I need your complete attention. Can you give me that do you think? And your full concentration? ’

I nod as I pull up a chair opposite her, sitting like a child hotly washed and waiting for dinner.

‘Good. We need to fit all of this inside of you’

Reaching across the table she tilts my head back, and opens my mouth.

The next day, Susie has an appointment so I am left on my own for the morning. Earlier in the week as she mentioned this while I was opening her post, I had been secretly unnerved. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all week, laying in the dark and imagining an approaching challenge I unprepared for, visualising the Simpsons episode where Homer tries to jump the canyon.

However this morning all that fear was for nothing because Susie has left me a ticket for a museum exhibition and a twenty pound note, held with a magnet to the fridge door where I would see it. Drawn in Sharpie on the fridge itself is a downward pointing finger, and short note.

‘Wear these, and clean this message off so I know you have read it’

In front of the fridge, sitting on the tea towel we leave there to collect leaks, are a pair of the finest shoes I have ever seen. They are black and shine with straps, buckles and dignity. I immediately put them and in doing so the world becomes right. I know what I am doing and will excel in every direction. I will spend the morning in the exhibit and then Susie and I would both return to the flat, meeting at the doorstep as I step forward with me key, and converse about our respective outings and activities. The shoes look up to me, meeting my gaze and I sail over the canyon. Woohoo is the tapping of my heels on the grey kitchen floor as I go looking for mentholated spirits and a rag.

I get to the bus stop and wait a little while, unsure how these things worked now. With no one around to ask I decide it would be fine to walk the whole way to the museum. It should take about an hour which should leave me enough time to take in the exhibition and get something quick for lunch before heading back. The streets are dry and the sky is thick. I walk the meandering path of the bus route through the city, my journey measured by the stop signs that bear its number, and peering people of little interest to me. My feet hurt after a while, unused to such activity and pressing into my beautiful shoes. The bus I was waiting for passes me once, and then again. I want to wave like one driver to another, but I know that’s not appropriate.

I feel pleased to notice that I have arrived at the museum in under an hour. I will be able to take my time a little more, take in more of the experience and make something from it to share with Susie. The museum is a small one, its body adapted from one of the city’s many historical houses that would have once been home to an upper middle class family of eager industrialists. The door is held open with a jam and when I go inside the air is dusty cool and the lighting kept low to simulate old gas lamps. It feels like stepping into chilled velvet.

I don’t notice the woman for a few minutes. I had been standing with my arms slightly out, enjoying the feeling of my body cooling after the walk along unshaded streets and across brown grass parks to get here.

‘Hello there, welcome to the museum.’

The woman who speaks is standing right beside me. There is an easily overlooked door just off the house’s hallway and now the doorway’s lower half has been fitted with a kind of reception desk complete with a card reader, a tablet, and rubber stamp pad. The woman smiles at me from within what must have once been the house’s front room. In the dark I can see shelves filled end to end with ring binders, and somewhere in the back the small coloured standby light of a computer.

‘I have a ticket.’

The line practised on the journey here.

‘Here’

I hold it out to her so she will know that I am not lying.

She takes it and stamps my hand with the image of an angel before waving me further into the old house.

The first room of the museum is dedicated to waiting. Stacks of unopened packages dominate the room, cardboard pitted, tape peeling, labels faded to liver spots. The stacks begin neatly pressed to walls and then extend out in tapering heaps towards the centre of the room. Razors of late morning light cut through from the net curtained bay windows which have been mostly filled with more boxes like the dry stone walls of the village in which I spent my childhood..

The air is so still that I feel it move to accommodate my entrance, careful on blistered feet and social uncertainty. An imprint of my body a few steps ahead losing form from the moment it began. A mindless spectre still birthed between heartbeats. A joist complains above, a printer grumbles through a mouthful of paper, far away a bell rings the hour.

This is stupid and I feel a flash of anger for being taken in so easily and then I remember that I’m here to show Susie that I can be cultured and refined. That I can have substance and thoughts. This is what it is to engage with the humanities. A little humiliation at being led on a flight of fancy.

With the awkward feeling of seeing something I shouldn’t I walk straight through to the large, thickly painted white door opposite. I have to squeeze between a still wrapped pallet and a fraying mailbag and send dust into the still afternoon air.