Steak

The room was very cold when I fell against the sheets. The plates strewn across the coffee table and the arm of the couch, one just grease and off-cut fat, the other barely picked through, the slab of well-done steak untouched. The duvet was cold I laid my head against it drowsily and slowly began to cover myself in it, letting the bitter leaf and seed lull me to sleep. I lazily tried to pinch my cheek awake but I knew I was very far from home- at this time of night anyway, with the last train already gone from the station. It would cost me some money I didn’t have or time from tomorrow that I couldn’t afford to spend.

Harry crouched by the settee and asked me what kind of movie we should watch. Barely conscious, I waved a hand- nothing with blood and guts I said- and he let out a short chuckle. That’ll be hard, he said, and I saw that his shelves were filled with slasher films or mind-fuck blockbusters. After a while he slipped out a copy of Waking Life in its slick and tangible case. As he slid it into the DVD player I realised it had been a long time since I had watched a film this way. I let out most of the tension I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.

He climbed up next to me but I hadn’t the power in me to be wary. Sleep threw its shroud over me, the philosophical wanderings of the film puncturing a series of short and inescapable dreams, in which I was not doing much but standing and staring, or perhaps I hadn’t dreamt at all but slipped into darkness. The corner of the settee swung from its anchor, the pink and yellow lamplight splash above and around me changed form and wavered. The bed seemed to float about, released from its envelope between the wall and the clothes rack.

Halfway between unconsciousness and wake I thought for the first time in a long time about my Nan’s high bed that I used to sleep on as a child, and in a time almost exactly like this, between sleep and wakefulness, I almost believed that my body was really levitating- a small pocket of air between my back and the bedsheets. So high and foreign was the bed that it seemed to be pushing me up like a cloud, but so that I was almost uncomfortable, too aware of the red blinking alarm clock counting the night, sometimes a number, sometimes a strange floating red dot. The wardrobe was where the door should be, the door was too large for my liking.

My only real awareness in the lake of night was when my grandmother would settle into bed next to me, I would roll towards her in cotton pajamas, pulled down from my small altitude, pulled suddenly into the materiality of the mattress and down into the weight of her superior and learned body. Her laptop roared. In this artificial rectangle of light with her face undone, she looked foreign… she looked suddenly and inescapably like a woman, not the far distant thing I had known her to be, something infinite. One of these strange nights I awoke to her watching a Western. Trussed up like a pig was a woman with a knife pressed into her side, I knew suddenly she was going to be skinned, and hid my face in the crook of my arm.

I woke up in Harry’s bed with my jeans still on and my throat parched. I felt my heart beating hard. A sense of sudden panic swept into me and I began to gather my things, stealing about in the faltering light, drunk with morning. Harry woke up and as he struggled into a hoodie and trousers I realised he had slept next to me in his underwear.

Walking to the train I thought of my Nan so far away from me now with all her memories slipping away from her, sick with the things she cannot access, and I was knowing with biting guilt I would most likely never see her again, never kiss her pallid cheek. Much too often I had seen the sick and changed and believed that time holds out and it was not randomness that dictates the waking hour. Many times I had seen only what I wanted to see, and faced with the invincibility of youth, thought that all the universe would hold its breath for me. Many times I had relished in soft cruelty, ignoring the darker cruelties that lay underneath, or I had turned from one thing to the next, one joy to one suffering, and back to the next available joy. Now I was fearful of the day I had to face, and the eventual and inescapable unfaithfulness of my own mind and body.

My grandmother was a woman and as I bend toward her I have moments of panic, a desire to show my likeness to her in the way I carry myself. The way she had learned to be a woman is so foreign to me now that I would not be able to replicate nor would want to replicate this sense of gendered place. I think of that black and white film often, the woman in her nakedness, trussed up like a pig. I think of my Nan in her white kitchen, red nails against the cream counter.