On Top Of A Leather Sofa

Parties became dinner parties became dinners. The well of our
friends had dried up. There had been years of drought. Without rain,
the aquifer had emptied. Friendship was like that - exhausted when you
needed it most. No, it was more like the ocean, lapping against a
harbour wall, waves of friendships rising, overlapping, and falling
away. It was low tide. All that was left was dry sand. Maybe friendship
was more like a well. When the children clambered over the parapet,
their parents crawled after them, left the village for the villa. Or
they slipped away into obscurity and all we heard was echoes when we
called their names.

A freight train rattles under an eiderdown of black cloud stained pink
by the waning sun. We don't notice these things anymore. The sound that
shakes our crockery thirty times a day barely registers. If people
call, and they often don't, they always say, 'how do you live here with
that noise all day?' We remind our guest, 'and all night too, except on
Sundays. All night too.' But we don't notice it. The reactions we do
have - Mary picks up her cup to prevent spillage and I crucify against
mantelpiece - are functions of the lower brain. Mary hardly looks up
from her crossword.

The trains are a comfort to me. I feel connected to another world. If I
was riding that train, I could be going to Birmingham, Glasgow or, via
the overnight sleeper, to Skye. To think, all those places are just a
few hours away, from outside my own backdoor. Just climb over the fence
and flag an engine down. Of course, that could never happen. Imagine
the reliability if anyone could stop a train anyplace. They'd never get
anywhere. Probably best to keep the station system. So, I count the
wagons, happy to know that if there was a bus to the station, if I
cashed in my post office account, if that was a passenger train, I
could be halfway to Skye by now.

The guard van is towing a storm front. Downstairs, Mary is brewing.
There's no need to rush when the first spots splatter on the skylight
window. The washing is all in and the windows are secured. We are
locked down almost airtight. I hesitate to say watertight after last
year's flood. I call it a flood, really just an annoyance. The man from
the insurance was very kind. He gave us a new carpet, and a new suite.
As he said, we might as well take the opportunity, as they can't renew
the policy this year. We were pigs in heaven's clover. We bought a
leather four seater, for when we have guests.

One night, three days after the shifters squeezed it through the door,
Mary said from the kitchen, quite unexpectedly, she said, 'I've always
wanted to do this.' 'What's that dear?' She walked out starkers. 'I've
always wondered what it would feel like to have leather against my
skin.' She sat down carefully, keeping her legs together and a big
smile came across her face, a real beamer. It was the middle of the
day. I haven't seen here like that in natural light for, well a long
time, before the creases overtook her thighs. 'Join me,' she said. But
I'm too old for that. I told her. So, she lay across the sofa, dangled
a leg across the arm. 'Paint me!' That's exactly what she said. That
smile had gone to her eyes too. 'Go and get the camera. Take pictures
of our new things. Take a picture of me. Send it to that damn insurance
firm.' She can still be funny. I think that's the secret, keep
laughing. No matter what happens, keep laughing.
When I laughed, she got upset. She stood up and said, 'don't you want
to look at me anymore? Are you afraid of me John Taylor?' 'No,' I said,
'Mrs Braithwaite's just come to the door.'
Joan Braithwaite is one of our bridge partners. 'I don't care what Mrs
bloody Braithwaite thinks, the dry old cow. Has she never seen a naked
woman before?' And she turned to the window, our big bay windows, and
shouted, '"Mrs Braithwaite, Mrs Braithwaite, don't you wish you had
tits like these?'

The wind changes direction and I'm forced to close the skylight. The
ink on the box labels under the skylight are already smudged, I fear
more spots will obscure their contents completely. Joan didn't hear the
commotion, I don't think. She is a remarkable woman. I'm sure Joan's
lain naked on her sofa, her deep-pile velvet sofa. I can picture her,
legs crossed over hint of a golden kiss curl, grinning, maybe winking
for my lens.

The camera always lies, but its subjects never die. I heard that
somewhere. Maybe that's true. These boxes, half of them are filled with
pictures. Sepia, hand tints, then slides, then Polaroids, then snaps.
They might have spots of brown and smell of mildew. The cellophane in
our wedding album might have separated heads from bodies, but the
people still live on, in their own moments of red-eyed surprise. School
discos, drunken songs, work dos, stag nights, barbeques, year after
year of Christmas meals and the children, appearing, walking, bathing,
growing, always growing, then their friends, becoming girlfriends,
becoming wives. There are photos of grandparents whose only trace of
ever being is sealed in a rusty Roses tin.

I mean to put them on my computer, on a compact disk. David showed me
how to do that over the summer. I haven't yet. He said, 'then you can
throw the shoe boxes away.' I said, 'Then they wouldn't exist at all.'
Imagine if everyone's memories only existed in a machine. David
laughed, spun the disk on his finger, bagged in on the desk, 'last
forever, these do.' Forever. He thinks forever is the space between two
periods. I don't think he had a girl for longer. He's no sticking
power, can't compromise. I said, 'look at your brother. How well he's
doing for himself, with Annette and little Nathan.' He got angry, said
'I could show you things about her dad, she's no saint.'

Then, after he'd gone back, we got a packet in the post. Underpaid, had
to go down to the post office to collect it, and hand over double the
difference. A note inside, in David's handwriting, not signed but
obvious because we never got him to join his o's and his u's.
'Something you should see.' And a video, the sort you get in a six-pack
from Woolies with one free. The picture quality was poor. Our sitting
room, out of focus, the bay window not letting in enough light. But we
could pick out Annette's twisted face against black leather, the white
dress Mary cut, hitched up over her bump, flesh tones bleeding with
overexposure.
'Is that our David?' whispered Mary about the naked man on top of the
sofa.
'I think we should turn it off now,' I said, but Mary held my arm. 'We
have to think about Nathan. I don't want my grandson growing up in a
broken home.' I was finding it hard to concentrate. I hit stop sharply
and the video jammed. It does it all the time. We need a new one, a
Nicam one, that skips the adverts. 'I don't thing those tests can tell
between brothers anyway,' Mary said. I had my face pressed against the
screen, feeling my way to the manual eject round the back of the
recorder, trying not to look at the flickering image. 'My,' said Mary,
straightening her skirt, 'hasn't David grown up like his father?'

They'll be here soon. Michael said the baby's grown. Apparently he's
got a full head of hair, not like his granddad, ha, ha. On the phone he
said, 'You don't want to miss your grandson growing up, do you dad?' I
don't, but I had to keep making excuses. In the end Mary said, 'I'm
having no more of this John. He's our grandson, whatever way you look
at it.' But what about her? 'What about her?' But you saw what she did.
What will we say? What will we tell Michael? 'If you break my son's
heart, I'll never speak to you again John Taylor.' And that was it,
monochrome and simple. I must run the head cleaner through that video
again.

Look at this damn rain. I could do with a smoke. I don't smoke, only
socially, when I can slip away where nobody's going to notice. You have
to have you privacy haven't you? Not much chance with Mary
around.
I haven't smoked since I didn't smoke at school. Wasn't posh enough for
bike sheds, so we smoked round the back of the bins. Smelt of the
kitchens, lumpy mash and tapioca, and it used to get me into trouble.
Little bits of cabbage in Joan Benton's hair. We we're planning on
running off to Gretna, but her dad's car had an argument with a
juggernaut, and her dad came off worse. She said he couldn't take
another shock, so she signed up to Wrens. Girls promise but women
deliver isn't that what they say? She went around the world she did.
Married three times. A Cadet in Portsmouth, a Warrant Officer in
Bahrain and a Captain named Braithwaite in Hong Kong. Joan has pieces
of luggage that had travelled further than me. But she came back. Now
Mary jokes before bridge, 'I'd better watch you with that Mrs
Braithwaite, hadn't I John Taylor?' just because Joan gave me leather
thong for Christmas. Like Joan said, it's more hygienic.

Mary's shouting, kettle's boiling, up here it's not easy to tell apart.
You end up with all these habits, shouting through walls when you know
she can't hear, muttering below the threshold of her hearing, moving
the vase in the living room because I know she'll move it back.
Childish stuff keeps you going. Watching raindrops flocking on glass,
wondering why they sometimes go up instead of down. There must be a
reason, but do we need to know? Sometimes, I think, it's better to keep
wondering why.