by Graeme K. Talboys
There is no knowing when it will happen. No way to taste the wind. No feeling in the bones. No way to place a finger on that particular pulse. And the days between must be filled; so you go on, turn your hand to all the other things that must be done.
Staring through the window, I could see the slated sky wedged between the buildings at the crossroads. Snow began to fall – a nonchalant vanguard of wet flakes dropping into an unexpected stillness. And just for a moment that was it. There was nothing left to do, nowhere left to go, no more words to share. The end of the world had come and I had never felt so calm.
No one else noticed.
The three workmen at the counter stayed bent over their newspaper, engrossed in the quiet and earnest discussion that had occupied them since I arrived. Cigarette smoke wound itself about their heads before it trailed into the shadows by the ceiling. Paint flecks on their blue jackets were stars in a child’s picture of the night sky.
Behind the counter, polishing a glass with a cloth, the patron listened to a conversation in the kitchen that I could not hear. He worked at the glass with unconscious and ineffective twists, turning his head to make his contribution before turning back again with eyes on the world of words behind him.
An old woman in the tenebrous depths of the café took short sips at her coffee, dabbing at her lips with a napkin, eyeing the pile of loose change on the tablecloth. Perhaps she was wondering if she could afford to treat herself to another cup; perhaps she was calculating a tip.
Dim bulbs flicked on, struggling with the gloom.
I looked back out at the end of the world, but it had passed by. All that was left of the apocalypse was the steamy ghost of a world beyond the blank pale face that looked back in. The features faded as I moved out of the light from the overhead lamp.
Leaving my change on the bill, and a wave of my hand in the caffeinated fug, I pushed out through the door. Bundled in the same old garments, rags of yesteryear wrapped round like so many security blankets, I eased myself into the late December twilight.
A world moved through the smoke and fog of the cold afternoon, going down into the dark. Beyond the window, beyond the door, out on the pavement between dirty banks of old snow, there was a scene that was not open to arrangement. Chaotic, noisy, incessant. People were fighting through the weather, foundering beneath the first of the new snow.
Each journey taken is a new one through unexplored territory, pulling sense from the turmoil, looking for the intersections where new vistas and routes can be found. It is a place of broken worlds where fragments of dream are stitched both bright and dark across the grey stuff of the everyday. And I must borrow every changing shape to form my own dreams and find my own reality.
Beneath the heavy, yellow-grey sky, smoke clings in listless fashion to the chimneys and rooftops. The stench of sulphur is locked at street level. The world is not as I remember it. Stopping on a corner, waiting to cross, I stand beneath a lamp. The gas hisses and pops, anaesthetising the remaining colour with the ghost green glow of the mantle.
Away from the centre, the roads darken and the lamplight strengthens with uncertain conviction. Shutters and curtains are drawn, hints of warmth and private worlds glowing at their edges. One day the temptation will be too much.
Streets become alleys and the populated chaos becomes a deserted maze, haunted by whispers and echoes, disembodied voices and fragments of conversation. And looming from the wintry dark a high, old building that is hunkered down in misery against the coming winter’s night.
It isn’t far across the courtyard, the cobbles slick with half-melted snow. Heavier flakes drop through shafts of light absorbing sound from the world. Then the windy shelter of the narrow passage with the tailor’s workshops above. Stopping there to stand sideways on the damp, worn paving as someone passes in the opposite direction, head nodding. Emerging then at the far end beneath a cast iron canopy, ornate, rusting, and no protection at all from the wind and driven snow.
The gothic double door was of time varnished oak, studded with square farrier's nails and decorated with heavy, cast iron door furniture. The recto leaf was permanently bolted on the inside, top and bottom. The verso gave easily, swinging silently on greased hinges as the handle sucked warmth from my fingers. As I closed it behind me, the wind moaned around the edges, grieved at its exclusion. A handful of snowflakes whirled through the closing gap and fell in the suddenly still air.
The hall was dim and cold, an echoing space with a sepulchral atmosphere. Tiles that had once been red, white, and black covered the floor. They were cracked and grimy now from a century of indifferent shoe leather, despite their daily mopping. To the left was the entrance of a dark passage that exuded an odour of things long forgotten and best left that way. Beyond the dark opening the wall was covered with steel mailboxes, depository of countless dead letters.
To the right, the stairs clung with drunken determination to the wall and began a precarious climb into a chill twilight of the soul. Pale, broken light filtered down from a snow-covered skylight, touching the wooden banister before pooling on the floor. At the back of the hall, beyond the stairs, there were deep shadows in which one expected to find the dead waiting, bereft now even of the knowledge of what they waited for.
Somewhere beyond, in the complicated geometry of the structure, lay a garden with trees. I had glimpsed it from windows, but never found my way there. An adventure for another day, perhaps. It was a building you could all too easily get lost in. A building full of stories.
From above, the faint echo of a mellow glassy chime drifted down past the edge of hearing. Incomplete, tantalising, part of something bright that had escaped into this bleak wilderness at the opening and closing of a door.
I began to climb. At the first turning of the stair I stopped to catch cold breath, looking down with a mortuary gaze, before moving on to climb again, turn and turn around. The higher I climb, the narrower the stairs. They slant alarmingly toward the well and the hard floor far below. The last turn always scares me.
At my door I rest again, searching for the key. It feels like I have climbed on my hands and knees.
When I had finally coaxed flame from the soft, damp coal and warmth began to creep into the room, I went in futile search of that calm again. It lingered like an elusive scent; fading the more I sought to grasp it. No knowing when it will come; no way of calling it back.
Carrying the heat of the fire on my face, I moved about the room touching, straightening, re-arranging, searching in the end for matches and finally lighting the candle lamps. Four rings of light danced pale on the ceiling, settling as the flames found equilibrium.
At the window I looked past the dim ghostly face staring back in at me with worried eyes, watched the glimmering streets lamps below, the steady grey flickers of heavy snow. A shrouded figure, head bowed, collar high, pushed along at a steady pace, fading in and out of the cones of light. They moved off out of sight and the deep, ragged pock marks of their footfall began to soften and fill, dimples of pale green shadow.
I like it up here on my own in the dark. In this chair, at this desk, you can see beyond so many horizons; reach out and bring back glittering fragments of simulacra to examine and record.
Cold breathed into the fire-glow warmth. Candle flames flicked. A pale face appeared in the shadow of the other chair as I turned. In that first glimpse, a wholly unguarded moment on both sides, I saw the deep weariness etched in grey. A slender hand stretched forward for a moment to take heat from the fire. The spectral face relaxed, fading back into deeper shadow, hidden eyes watching me. A greatcoat hanging by the door, snow melting from the turned up collar. I remembered to breathe. Smiling, she slept.
Sometimes you only know she has been here because the scent of roses and sandalwood sweetens the air, like the memory of a kiss. Even then her presence is strong. Now she sleeps in the chair by the fire, long legs stretched in front of the hearth. I am overwhelmed by her proximity, the sight of that rose-gold hair, cropped again, the lustre dulled; the familiar folds of the worn old Guthrie; her strength; her spare, fey beauty. If truth be told, I am more than just a little bit in love.
There is so much more. I stood and listened. I sat in the chair opposite and watched. The reality in the shadow, detail drawn from a deep well of memories fed by the generations. But they are her stories. She must speak for herself when she sees fit.
Emerging slowly from metatemporal disorientation in this top floor decompression chamber of the senses, she slept when the sun rose and woke in the dark. I would tiptoe about in the strange grey light of snowy days. She would sit in silence by the fire at night, searching for words, drawing herself in from disparate locations.
She has her own little room with bed and chest and set of drawers, a rug on the polished wood floor. Perpetual summer sunlight passes unheeded through the window, one pane cracked, and moves slowly lighting up the colours in the carpet. It is tucked obliquely into the structure of the building with a door that’s not always to be found.
Making tea. Toasting crumpets. Tending patiently.
I found muffins. It was the unlocking of the door. Talk of the muffin man with his weskit over his apron, ringing his bell as he walked the streets with his tray balanced on his head. Talk of her Nan. She wiped butter from her chin as her eyes focussed on precious memories; licked her slender fingers and sipped her tea, still lost in the distant years, warm with sunlight and love. And that sudden, desolate, imploring look; the silent cry of a drowning childhood.
Helpless in the face of this, all the horror and sadness she has been dropped amidst, I stutter into a familiar silence solid with guilt. As ever, that little kick, the tap on my ankle with her lazily turned foot to get my attention. And having caught it, a reminder of all the wonders she has seen; all the joy with which she has been blessed. All the chances given. All the stories.
Some are her own, shared in the conviction that I will find a way to retell them honestly. Others are tales she has heard along the many ways, brought back as gifts from exotic lands.
It is not all stories. We talk long into the dark as the fire settles. How strange and rare it is. We would catch ourselves in the act of throwing the remnants of dissected verse back and forth in the comfortable twilight. As the days pass and the snow continues to fall, we talk of other things and I tell tales of my own. Of that first time, in the heartbreak confusion of all the haunting visions of death, that I saw her mother resting on the houseboat. A serene, ethereal presence by the lake’s edge, a misty oasis in an entropic world.
Rapt, she would listen, adding these tiny, precious fragments of reminiscence to the treasury. Laid out there like sherds in their cases. Studied, re-arranged, always in the hope of creating a narrative, no matter how short; always in the hope of a clearer picture.
By way of response, she held out her right hand, curled in a loose fist, a fine tracery of scars across the flesh. Turning it over, she uncurled her fingers. A flash of blue as firelight caught a facet of the sapphire. Leaning forward, I could see the open locket in which the jewel was nested. The chain hung down like a string of quicksilver. She rocked her hand gently, watching the sparks of blue light dart through the darkness. Then, with a swift, practised movement she snapped shut the locket. I caught a glimpse of the eight pointed wheel as she closed her fingers over it.
So many things to be said; or left unsaid.
Memories of her yet to be shared, tenuous, spectral, limned in mist, sometimes emerging like shafts of late day sunlight undercutting a storm. There is near here a stretch of ancient shore. Unobserved, I have seen her walk there against the liquid flint of the sea; seen her kneel and touch some fossil, caressing the form as if she had but lately seen it thriving in the warm shallows of vast antiquity.
The candles guttered, leaving us in the ember glow of the fire, breathing the acrid smoke of their extinction. When I lit them again, she had gone. Four circles of light danced pale on the ceiling.
You cannot take joy in a free spirit by holding it fast. But letting go is having some vital part of the self torn slowly away.
It was trying to snow again, hesitant flakes on the fall to envied oblivion. In the grate the embers faded. Seconds were shaved from the night, falling with the clock’s steady beat. I wrapped a blanket round my shoulders. I will write. To still the voices. To fill the void.
In some distant part of the building someone whistled the opening bars of Ich möchte nicht ein Engel sein. The echo faded and with it went some of the pain.
A tiny ammonite lay on my writing table. At first I thought it a fossil, but on turning it in the light from the lamp I saw it was an actual shell, became aware of a summer’s briny tang. It was warm in my left hand, the tiny calcite whorl rough against my flesh. Eventually it would join my other treasures in the Kashmiri mahogany box with the brass inlay of leaves. For the moment, I savoured the texture as I picked up a pencil, took a last glance at the falling snow, and began to write.