I'm still here. I put my hand up to touch my face and the hand in the mirror does the same. Its fingers push into my cheeks. The flesh sinks around them, shaded by the morning light coming through the large bay windows. A living room is reflected behind me. The mirror hangs on the wall above an upright piano, strung from a hook on the moulded picture rail. It is tilted slightly forwards by the way the strings are attached to the back of it. Like most mirrors, it's a bit too low: I have to lean forwards to see my whole face.
I'm here and my face is part of the room behind me. I'm as real as the green tiled fireplace, the wooden chest used as a coffee table with magazines and books on top of it, the sofa with the worn beige upholstery and the pale gold braid sewn onto the front of the arms. My heart beats, my eyes blink, my lungs fill and empty. I'm tired. Tiredness is real, the weight and solidity it gives to everything cannot be false. I walk across the deep pale rug and slump down on the sofa. It's even more comfortable than it looks. It faces the windows, not the television, as in many homes. The curtains are open. Their colourful pattern and satin texture contrasts nicely with the understated decor of the rest of the room. They look pretty, bunched up on either side of the windows. They make me think of hairbands and girl's hair, or older women, dressed up in flamboyant gowns for a ball or some other occasion. The sofa really is comfortable. The contrast couldn't be stronger with the nasty acrylic bus seat I sweated on for so many hours last night. That garish pattern, zig-zags and rhombuses and electric palm fronds, like a visual interpretation of a schizophrenic mind. And the twist on fan blowing on my head, always striking it from the same angle, creeping into the bones of my skull and giving me a headache and a stiff neck, while the rest of me stayed as hot and fidgety as before. Then outside, the motorway night. The workmen making repairs when the traffic flow was lightest, toiling under those hellish lamps in orange reflective jackets. You can see the fatigue etched into their faces; the fatigue of abandoning the sun and the stars for the loveless, untwinkling glare of industry. You sit there on the bus and there's only so long you can watch the orange streetlights sweep across the face of the passenger opposite you (who is sleeping with his mouth slightly open), or swim down the body of the car in the next lane, winking at you once each in the wing mirror; after that you just have to let go and slide into nothing, while the engine grinds on and on and the road scrolls in front of you, white strips flickering by on the black tarmac, red and white halos drifting down the lanes.
But all that seems very far away now. I can't even remember where I'd been, that I had to come back in such a hurry. Maybe I don't want to remember. I sink a little further into the couch and an ache melts away in my lower back that I never knew I had. There's a tall beech hedge in front of the windows --- to keep passers-by from peering in. Its leaves are pale green. Daylight sneaks through them in many places. Above the hedge is a stone wall, protecting a garden, and above that the slate roofs of a few houses. A wooden pylon sticks up from the pavement, black wires arching away from it. I always get a shock when I notice the wires hanging above a town --- for trams and traffic lights and telephones and electricity. I half expect to see them rising from the people as well, making their limbs bobble up and down, opening and shutting their jaws. There's a music stand in the corner next to the piano. And a long black case beside it --- for a flute perhaps. A songbook is open on the stand. More sheet music is piled on the floor. The book is old and its paper is yellowing behind the spindly black notes that rise and fall across it. It seems like part of the music, that paper, a background warmth like the resonance in the wood of a guitar or the hiss on an old record. I close my eyes and lean my head back against the sofa. I imagine the flute and the piano playing a duet, their quiet notes, hammered and blown, filling the room. When I open my eyes again I notice two blurred patches of light on the ceiling. Reflections from something, I don't know what. They always seem to be moving. I think of them as chimes, chimes of light. Their quavery little melody accompanies the piano and flute. The whole room is playing me a tune. The different colours of the spines of the books on the tall bookshelves that flank the windows form some kind of dusty, intricate harmony.
Harmony.
Melody.
Music.
The words themselves sing in my head. I look out the window again. The rows of identical houses, the small lives inside them, the grey pavements, the young children, the old, incurious people. Life's river dammed. It used to make me so unhappy. But now the thoughts have been rearranged, or maybe the arrangement is the same and the tone or quality is different. Now everything is different. Everything is turning into music. All these notes --- they were there all the time but I couldn't hear them. My ears were stuffed up, I had my fingers in them, I couldn't hear anything except myself. Now they're open and the whole world is singing to them. Singing softly, singing a lullaby. Now the past is making sense and the connections between the future and the present are becoming clear. Now the jigsaw fits together. Now the emptiness fills with stars. Now...
Oops, nodded off there. Happens to me sometimes. Not very often though --- I find I don't sleep as well at night if I take naps during the day. I'm lying. I take naps every day, and several of them. Sometimes I drift in and out of sleep all afternoon. I feel so tense. I can't understand why I'm so tense. The air in this room is stifling. It's as if no-one's been in here for years. A metal gate swings open outside and hard leather shoes tap down the pavement. Tap! Tap! Tap! Drops of cold water falling on the head of a torture victim. Drip! Drip! Drip! Falling from the cracked pipe high above the wooden chair he is tied to. In the cold room he cannot see through his blindfold. It's the uncertainty that drives him mad --- never knowing when the next drop will fall. The footsteps pause and I hear a muted neighbourly greeting. This is ridiculous. I can't spent my whole life wrestling with my emotions. Swinging from euphoria to panic a hundred times a day. My heart is beating so fast. So fast. I need to calm down I can't calm down. Words and thoughts make it worse. They make it worse! What I need is touch. I need to be touched. It's appalling, the way we live today, with our heads full of thoughts and never a moment of simplicity, all eyes and ears and no touch, nothing ever touches us. It's unbearable. I want to cry. I don't want to cry. It's just, I can't stand it, it's this blockage of everything that should be natural, this awful oppression of ourselves, our flowers, our love. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of shame, always shame always creeping crawling hiding what I am. I won't hide I won't hide. I won't, I want, it's okay, shhh, it's okay. That's right, keep doing that, shhh, it's okay. That's right, my flower, don't hide...
Don't hide.
Time is passing. The wooden metronome on top of the piano should be ticking, its wedge shaped weight swinging back and forth, marking the peaceful moments. There is liquid on my stomach. A car is driving down a nearby street, not turning onto this one, just driving on. A drop of the liquid runs off my stomach, towards my hip, following the ridges of my body. I don't like it, the way it feels. But I don't want to move. It's okay, it's stopped now. There's only the cold snail trail of where it passed. Cold then dry and stiff. I'll have to move soon. You always tell yourself, this is perfect, this is peace, I never want to move again. But you always move. Anyway, it's becoming tiring, keeping my top pulled up from my stomach and holding my hand still so the goo doesn't slide off it. I pull my pants up and scoosh them round. I put my hand inside them and wipe it, then hoist them to my stomach and wipe that as well. There's a flat taste in my mouth. Chewing gum that's lost it's flavour. Or something worse, a kiss that doesn't tingle. It's time to leave. I'm on my feet now, it was much easier than I thought to stand up. I hardly noticed I was doing it. I button my flies and resettle my clothes, doing everything briskly, yes, it's definitely time to leave. I take a quick look at the sofa to make sure I haven't dropped anything --- images! my wallet left on a train, glimpsed through the smudgy window as it pulls away, coins and keys clattering down the sides of other people's car seats, panic, never keep track of what I've got, never hold on to my life!
On the sofa I see the print of my arse --- two round and slightly damp depressions --- and a small dark spot beside them. Dark and slick, slightly blurred around the edges. Oh god, the horror is back. The faded elegance of the sofa is completely ruined. All I can see when I look at it is that small dark spot. The whole room is ruined. All this comfort and taste, these bourgeois trimmings --- suffocation, hypocrisy, death. I imagine the man of the house, sitting on the sofa with his stockinged feet on the wooden chest and a look of unspeakable weariness on his face. I imagine the children, their sour squabbles over which T.V. channel to watch, which armchair to sit in. I imagine the piano being played --- the same tune starting over and over, always ending on the same wrong note. A boy mutters and stamps his foot, then the tune starts again. It's horrible, the limping, deliberate way he plays, as if each note is a punishment for laughing. I have to go. Besides, the family who live here might be back any minute. I leave the room, shutting the door behind me, then walk to the back of the house and climb out the window I smashed to get in. Through the garden and the big wooden gate. Along the stony path beside the house. I am careful to look nonchalant when I step onto the pavement, as if I'd just stopped by to deliver a message, or see if my friend was home.
