Footsteps

This sound of footsteps is sliding down her nerves. Makes her want
to glance round. Have wing mirrors. Eyes in the back of her head.

Her father rang her this morning to tell her that he'd left her mother.
After thirty eight years. For another woman.

Thirty eight years of her having to put up with his continual
theorising. His historical overviews. Lectures over the breakfast
table; milk sodden cornflakes spittling through the air and into her
face. This is indicative

How can he do that? How can he move into something so different now?
Surely there's an age when you just have to learn to accept things ad
they are? There's a wisdom in that isn't there? In learning to be
thankful for what you've got.

She is thinking that somebody may be following her. It's not a lucid
thought, just a ripple of uncertainty. She's beginning to notice this
tendency of late. A desire to hunker down and let things pass by
quietly. Somehow some fear has got into her. She doesn't really know
how and she doesn't really know what to call it. How to grade it. But
it's sneaked in from somewhere. Made her cautious in a way she cannot
quite understand.

He used to watch as they threw themselves into their play as children,
only interfering when the fall occurred, when the accident stopped
waiting to happen. Her sister needing fifteen stitches. And they used
to roam. Go and roam he'd tell them. And take your time. Remember it
wasn't built in a day. And he'd expect to hear about their adventures
when they returned. About the dangers they had confronted.

And then sitting in that chair, night after night, book in hand,
sidling up to revolutionary activities, and revelling in those great
swinging moments. Imagining himself there. The swoop from the hills,
arms aloft; sharing bear hugs with comrades. The low hanging light and
the tense cabal.

And she and her sister would hear him climb the stairs wittering to
himself in a number of exotic voices and humming strident tunes as the
toilet bowl splashed.

He would love to have been followed. To communicate instructions and
incisive judgements to those that came up to him as he strode
purposefully forward. Try this my friend. Have you considered this
possibility?

She does feels that somebody is following her, that somebody is ready
to impinge on her life. It could be any of these people. Each has a
parcel of threat in their pocket. Intellectually she knows it's
ridiculous of course. That the chance of that man spraying her with
violence is probably nonexistent. But there's a hesitancy curling up
inside of her.

There was a boy at school who would walk behind people and trip them up
continually during the breaks. That's all he did. And if it was the day
that he had chosen you as his next victim then it made your whole day
stutter. You tried to look uninvolved, tried not to let it bother you,
but there was a foreboding which skewed your whole body and sat all
over your mind.

That's what she feels like these days.

How could he have walked out on her mother? Half blind with joints that
tear at her, always able to tell the weather in the mornings before
opening the curtains. It's not what she expected. It's too big a
change. What will he be doing now with this new woman? Sitting round a
campfire singing songs about bullfighting. That's what's driven him. He
always dreamt of finding love on the barricades.

Maybe she is full of tales from the front that will keep him warm in
his dotage. A pair of wrinkled lovers lying there in sweat stained
fatigues, sharing a cigar and scratching their beards.

It's the insistency of the steps that's worrying. Maybe that's it. The
sense of purpose. Clarity. A fanaticism. Can you imagine one hundred
thousand Communists setting out to walk six thousand miles now? If
there are that many left. The Long March, in association with the
Diana, Princess of Wales Trust Fund. Adverts for Nike and Cup-a-Soup in
the break.

She won't let her six year old son walk to school even though it's only
round the corner. She drives him there, just like everybody else.
Nodding to each other as they disgorge the children from their moving
metal boxes.

What's she going to say? You know Grandad, well he's decided to walk
out on your Granny and leave her lying in bed in agony while he goes
off with some clapped out old hag that makes him feel the world is
ablaze with promise once again.

She's sure she's being followed.