Changes

This morning she has woken with change splashed across her body like
a cheap perfume. The mattress sighs in the same places, the bed's rich
canopy trembling the way it always has, but something feels different.
When she peers through the drapes enclosing the four-poster, she is
relieved to find her palace is still in place. Her make-up, antique
mirror and vanity case all unchanged.

In the eight days since Daniel was arrested she's eradicated all traces
of that stupid man from the room. She swept the contents of his
dressing table into black plastic sacks and left them for the maid.
She's not asking to be treated like a princess, but she expects certain
standards. Failure, the hint of it, must not be tolerated. His drawers
have been reclaimed, filled with a spree at his expense, soft, feminine
and never to be worn. She doesn't need to wear anything. The point is
it all belongs to her now. But she's uneasy. She sniffs the air. The
insolent anti-cyclone that covered the country with headlines of heat
waves has left town. Cold, fresh air blows through brick-shaped hole in
the window he left last night.

She had laughed when he pleaded to buzzed in. He looked a different man
on the security monitor, unshaven, creased, with panicked eyes.
"Henry bailed me. It cost him fifty grand," his electronic voice
cracked through the intercom. "God damn it woman let me into my own
home."
"What about me Daniel? How do I feel, the shame of having a criminal
for a husband. I'm going to be a convict's wife. Don't think I'm going
to visit you because I won't."
He held the button down, until the drone filled the manor. "I need you
now darling. We'll get through this together."
"No we won't. You're on your own. How can I face my ladies club after
this?"
"But I only did it for you. For the life you wanted."
"Don't you blame this on me Daniel. I've got the life I wanted."
He hung on the bell until she was forced to pull the voice box from its
bracket. Then something started thudding against the bedroom wall. She
never knew he could throw so far. It took him four attempts to hit the
window, which was typical. The man never got anything right first time,
from the time he picked up a stranger from the airport instead of her
mother to the catastrophe of her engagement ring. When the window
finally broke, she screamed, "You didn't have to get caught," and he
slunk off into the night.

He's a useless man. "Useless," she tells the empty space in the bed.
The cave of his head is still impressed in the pillow, an unreadable
goodbye written in golden stands of hair. One of the hairs is grey. She
notices an inkblot of blood has dried indelibly into the fibres where
his stupid nose should be. "Damn fool man," she tells him and plumps up
the pillow. She plumps it up with her fists. Then she's just thumping
her fists against the padding until tears trickle down her dry face and
she has to throw it into the corner to cover his stupid brick.

The rug in front the window is a mosaic of glass, surely more glass
that could have come from a single pane. When she pulls back the
curtain she sees why. Four panes are smashed, the antique leading
between them mangled. She's a tiny bit impressed. "Maybe he's been
working out." Sunlight catches the shards and throws weird shapes on
the ceiling. Sometimes there are rainbows. The shapes move and she
thinks she can see the silhouette of him and her flitting behind the
other dancers.
"Dance with me," he'd asked her once and really meant it.
"I'm shy," she couldn't believe she'd said back. She'd been watching
him all night, picked out her target by the labels. She asked him to
buy her a drink first, which he did.
"I like shy girls. Maybe shy girls are more interesting." Maybe they
try harder to believe the lies. But he could dance. He really could
dance, so she didn't just love him for the reasons they thought. She
stretches fingers up to touch the lights, puts a foot down to steady
herself and glass cuts into her sole.

There are two types of changes. The ones you expect and the ones you
don't. There are two styles of changes, ones that are bang sudden and
the creeping ones that you hardly notice. She likes the first type and
the second style. She doesn't like surprises but loves the feeling of
something building, starting as faint as the rain, then washing through
the gutters, and splashing down the drains, intense, soaking, until it
cannot be ignored. When you hear it, it's past. You put your head
outside and it's dry again. But the road glistens so you know it. It
has happened. You've been changed. While she's sitting on the side of
the bath, picking glass out of her foot, she realises the point where
the tweezers meet her skin is a blur. It never used to be a blur, but
then, the last time she examined her sole it wasn't so hard and
leathery. She decides not to wear shoes again. She wants the sensation
of different surfaces underfoot. She decides her feet are pretty and
need to be shown. The freedom to walk to the shops in bare feet,
carriers filled with the racks of shoes she owns. She will give them to
Oxfam or, if they won't have them, Help the Aged. If they're closed,
put them in the bin. But the glass is still in there, so she rubs in
cream and ties a bandage round instead, hobbles to the window in the
guestroom.

Back in the seventies, there were factories here. Then there was an
accident. A fire or explosion, she couldn't remember the details.
People had been killed. Not just the factory workers but some of the
locals too. It had made the news on the telly. She remembered her mum
saying, "It's a terrible, terrible thing. Look at those poor people,
those poor, poor people. That poor little girl, she can't be much older
than you. Look at their homes, everything gone just like that." She was
hugged, the sweet, yeasty smell of mum's apron rising to her
nostrils.
Mum got upset at things like that but she'd been young, eleven or
twelve. The pictures on the TV were just that, images, real, she was
told, but to her, imagined. They never had the life of the world around
her, even when the colour set arrived. It was all flashes of light with
no depth. Nothing you could touch and nothing you could run to, so
nothing to run from.

At eleven or twelve, she had bigger plans. The brace she wore, that
prevented her saying her own name without spitting, was enticing her
teeth into a perfect smile. She'd already sold her Christmas kitten to
Suzy Twister and was working on a deal with Danny Banks to take Bonny
of her hands. Then she found out Danny Banks' friends would pay her to
kiss them. She'd never though of kissing boys before, or the other
things they asked for, but she was happy that those fleeting moments of
contact became piles of silver coins in the bottom of her wardrobe,
little growing piles.

She never had time for the flat land her mother cried over. The images
were far away back then. They seem close now. A vivid snap of a woman's
burnt hands clasping a man's twisted face. A camera crew struggling to
keep up with firemen pelting down an ally after a limping dog. Rescuers
collapsed against a blackened wall, pulling their masks off, ripping
their shirts away, gasping for air. That all happened here.
It's all gone now. The factories were levelled, the rescuers decorated,
the memories pasted into scrapbooks and bundled into shoeboxes. They
all forgot. After the site had been derelict for a respectful number of
years, or at least until the respectful local councillors had retired,
Daniel's father had ploughed a considerable slice of his wealth into
this ground.

His vision, Daniel told her while they lay on the roof of his Mercedes,
craning to see the construction, was to create a kingdom for his son.
There was to be a grand manor house, the first manor built in six
hundred years, surrounded by a cluster of peasant houses. He called
them peasants and kissed her. She wasn't sure if that was because he
though of her as his peasant girl, or because he didn't care where he
came from. Either way she planned not to remain a peasant so she made
herself pregnant in the skeleton of his family home.

It was more complicated than that. There was the small matter of a
child born without life, but by that time, they were engaged and
nothing could stop her marriage. Nothing could stop Daniel's
inheritance being so pitiful either, or the bills for pretty clothes
sneaking into their home, and forcing him onto the six thirty-five to
the dirty city. He would return around seven each evening to ask about
her day, and not talk about his. When parading her new outfits for his
approval, she loved him most.

Love fades, she decides, eating toast. She hasn't got dressed yet. She
deliberately took off her gown that instinct put on for her. The maid
is late today but she doesn't care what the maid thinks anymore. How
can you be with someone for so long that you have to cover yourself up?
Was it to preserve some mystery? Or was it to hide the fact you've
stopped trying? She is brazen now. She is cross-legged at the breakfast
bar, eating the toast carelessly so that crumbs might fall between her
legs. So, love fades, a creeping change, like paint fading. The sun
bleaches colour to the vagueness of clouds. Sometimes it scorches, and
blisters up, sometimes it dries out and flakes off. One way or another
it ends up a mess. That's her toast theory. Her three hours sleep a
night and an open bottle of red at ten in the morning theory. Like all
theories, it can only be disproved.

The post is always late on Saturdays. She hopes the postman enjoys a
lie-in as much as she does. She fancies she might rush to the door and
ask him. Ask him in, but when the letterbox clatters, the bandage slows
her down. He's stuffing a large letter through the slot. She can see
his outline through the frosted glass, so he must be able to see her
pink blob. The wife covers herself up, but the separated woman drops
her hands to her sides and sticks her chest out. His rattling becomes
more frantic. The package tears, wedges, and the postman stops. He
might be reaching for the bell. Instead he whacks it, sends it spinning
across the marble to her feet. He lingers for a second, an impression
of lips and eyes through the glass, then he turns, and his blue uniform
scurries up the steps.

Packages of a certain size always mean trouble. She wipes margarine
prints over the envelope as she turns it in her hands. A smudged
postmark, no returns address. No clues. She's sitting on the bottom
step of the main staircase, the same place she sat when they arrested
her husband.

The hall had been full of uniforms, snooping in every room. A tall PC
struggled to carry Daniel's computer out of the door, followed by three
younger men balancing cardboard boxes of files. He was standing with
two suits outside his study, kept wiping his forehead with the palm of
his hand and shaking his head. A policewoman sat on the stair above
her, nodding to the column of men matching up and down.
"What are they looking for?" she asked.
"Evidence," was all she got back. The woman looked cold, wore no
makeup. She could have been one of the men.
"Evidence of what? Daniel's never broken a law in his life."
The woman laughed sharply, showed all her yellow teeth. "Do you ever
wonder where this all comes from?"
It was ridiculous. All the paintings, the ornaments, the furniture,
that the woman nodded at had come from Daniel's father. None of it was
theirs. They hadn't holidayed recently, not even changed the car for a
couple of years, half the clothes in her wardrobe where last season.
People though because you lived in a big house it made you rich. How
she knew that wasn't true. These people are all just bitter. They
haven't worked like she has. They might want it, but they don't want it
enough. She stood, thinking she might find the officer in charge and
explain the mistake, but the men talking to her husband took out
handcuffs and put them on his wrist. He looked towards her. The
questions in his eyes she answered with a curt shake of her disgusted
head. Sitting back down on the step, she decided she was single, and
looked upon her kingdom a queen. She expected to feel changed then,
passing back into the arena of the unattached, bringing back the spoils
of war to enjoy, but it was still raining outside. Her treasures did
not glisten.

She rips the flap off the back of the envelope and the contents spill
out onto the carpet. Pamphlets explaining everything with cartoons,
thick booklets in microscopic type, and papers, papers, papers. The
phrases on the pages she glimpses look frightening. People to ring for
help, where ask for money. A red form, a figure printed in black
brackets that makes her gasp. She scrabbles for a letter, something to
explain what's going on. She finds the crammed headed notepaper of a
solicitor she's never heard of. He's done it this time. The paint has
gone, taken the plasterwork too. She scans the text, long words, little
sense, and flushes red then white. A tremor starts in her fingers than
spreads to engulf her whole body. Goose bumps prickle her exposed flesh
and her eyes glisten with tears. It has happened. She has been
changed.

--This is work in progress. If you would like me to finish it, please
email or vote. Thank you --