Whoever It Was

I used to hide behind the sofa when the doorbell rang. If it rang a second time, I’d curl up as tight as I could and try not to shake. If it rang a third time, I’d stay there all afternoon.

Usually they went away in the end, but there was a day when Whoever It Was decided to try the door. It opened because Mum never locks it when she leaves, so he came in.

‘Hello?’ he called and I stayed behind the sofa and bit my arm so that my teeth wouldn’t chatter.

Whoever It Was stopped in the living room doorway and told the dog not to worry: he was an old friend of Mary’s. I didn’t know how he knew Mum’s name and I wished the dog was behind the sofa with me so that I could protect him.

Whoever It Was told the dog he’d wait, thumped into the sofa and sighed. There was a muffled bang when the dog wagged his tail against a chair.

Time stopped moving. I counted the grey diamonds on the back of the sofa six times before Mum came home and slapped her handbag on the table.

‘Oh my God!’ she cried and I know she was happy to see Whoever It Was because her voice went high and crumbly.

‘Come out, Lucy,’ Mum said wearily and I wished she hadn’t because I felt stupid.

‘She looks a lot like my mother,’ said Whoever It Was.

Silence

“I think perhaps we should stop seeing each other,” I say softly. “It doesn’t do us any good.”

There is silence.

I play with a strand of my hair and stare at a holiday programme with a woman in an electric blue sarong.

There is silence.

Your voice is so clear that it sends swords and icicles spearing through my skin: “I’m in your head."

Eyes

As soon as I see her I am stopped in my tracks. We stare at each other, paused, muted until one of us remembers how to carry on. Her hair is a sleek, glistening black; her eyes are green and bright: the moon reflected in a pond. We knew each other in another life perhaps. I loved her once, I’m sure of it.

For a moment, neither of us can move. We’re caught in each other like cobwebs. I want to say something but I don’t know what; I don’t know if she’ll understand.

It is she who looks away first.

She springs to her feet, turns with a leisurely stretch and walks away, flicking her tail as though she’d never known me; as though, if she had, she couldn’t have cared less.

Prints

The hand gripping the receiver is pale and shivering. You leave it there, the bones beneath your skin tensed into a claw. You stare. The phone doesn’t ring.

You keep it close all the time. At night you rip the cable from the wall, snake it around your arm, and take it to bed. You have to sleep on the other side now so it can reach the socket. You haven’t slept on the left in nearly twenty years. It’s colder and the light from the curtain’s shore slices your pillow like a fruit knife.

It doesn’t matter. You’ll go back to your own side when she comes home.

And then you’ll sleep.

Every time the phone rings, it’s her. Her voice is in the ringing. She’s calling out to you… you crash across the kitchen. She’s gone. It’s no one. Or it’s someone.

She set out one night in the snow. You saw her footsteps in the morning: soft hollows across the lawn disappearing into ice at the gate. You looked down from your bedroom window, your eyes falling into footprints bigger than your own, dark shadows in a sherbet blanket. You thought you might make lasagne for dinner: her favourite. You mopped the condensation from the sill with a dirty sock and went to wash the dishes.

Two weeks later and the mince is still tucked in the freezer. When you open the door, you see her footprints in the frost growing smaller, smaller, smaller. Her fingerprints, dark and clumsy, climb the sides of the ice cream tub and skip across the lid. Icicles scrape through your blood and you shut the freezer before you can feel an ending.

Thump.



Shell

Here’s what I did: I broke the egg into a small red bowl and whisked it up with a splash of milk. I melted a bit of butter in a saucepan and slipped some bread in the toaster. I poured the egg into the saucepan, cracked some black pepper into it and whipped it around with a wooden spoon.

The toast popped.

I spread butter on it and poured the warm, crumbly egg over the top.

I stepped over your legs. I sat down. I realised I’d forgotten to make a cup of tea. That’s when I cried.

The kitchen was so cold I could see my breath.

I couldn’t see yours.

(This story was first published by Cinamon Press in 'Exposure', 2010)

Displaced

"This isn't really a first date conversation but if you can’t cope with this then there’s no point in a second date."

I should have walked away then. But I fiddled with the sugar packets and waited for the bombshell.

"You've heard about the Invitarol mums, right?" Paul said, putting down his coffee.

I nodded. “Who hasn’t?”

"My mum was one of them," he said.

"Shit." I looked at him carefully. "How much of the sickness did you get?"

He shrugged. "Mostly just the bit they don't talk about. And the eyes." He pointed at them through his glasses: unusually purple.

I waited.

He took a deep breath. "They reckon it's something to do with the fight or flight instinct – it was altered by the medication somehow." He chewed his lip. "Some of us... well, we get displaced."

"Displaced?"

"Literally. We just find ourselves in different places. One minute I'm sitting here in London drinking coffee with a beautiful woman-” I blushed. “-and the next I'm in Manchester watching a horror film."

I laughed. "No way."

"That's not all," he said.  "Whenever one of us gets displaced, we get switched with another Invitarol baby. So I'm in the cinema in Manchester and the bloke who bought the tickets is here drinking coffee with you."

“But that doesn’t make sense. Why would that happen?”

“No one knows.”

“Why isn’t this all over the news?"

He shrugs. "Everyone knows about the sickness and the heart problems and the kids that ended up with the wrong number of fingers. All of that can be put down to medical accident. But can you imagine if this got out? It would totally screw Invita Works. Plus no one wants to admit that they don’t know how it happens."

"But people know. I mean, you're telling me."

"You've been cleared."

I swallowed. But it's like someone telling you they're a superhero. It's just not credible. I was thinking, wait till I tell Jessica about this one. I was thinking, the sensible thing would be to leave. I was thinking, that guy sitting at the counter in the black suit would be hot if he didn’t look like he was in the mafia. I was wondering if I could get away with a red beret like the one the woman at the next table was wearing.

And then there was a sort of buzz - like when a fly hits one of those electric bug zappers.

And now he's not here. Now there's a woman opposite me, tall and blonde with slightly violet eyes and a silver butterfly on her necklace. She looks confused then lost then embarrassed, flickering between them in just a few seconds. She looks like she could do with a couple of painkillers.

"Um... hi..." I say.

This has got to be some kind of practical joke.

She blushes. "I hope whoever was sitting here a few minutes ago prepared you for this," she says. "Where are we?"

I point at the logo on my mug. "Starbucks."

She rolls her eyes. "I mean what town?"

"London."

"Shit," she says. "Excuse me."

She stands up, smiles awkwardly, and staggers to her feet. She doesn't look all that well. I watch her weave between the tables, scrabbling in her bag.

The mafia guy is standing by the doors. “I need to call my husband,” I hear her tell him.  He nods at the woman in the beret. She strides towards me.

“Please stay calm, madam,” she says. “Everything’s under control.”

 (This story was first published on Dead Ink)

Red Carnation

I look for women who understand flowers.

The little boy didn’t notice the red crayon he had dropped under the seat when his mother hurried him off the train, so I picked it up and drew a picture of a carnation on the back of an election flyer. I went over it three times and the petals flaked like old lipstick.

I glanced at her, sitting opposite and reading a second hand newspaper. She looked up.

I held up the flyer, hoping she would recognise the ruffled petals, the tarragon-leaves.

She smiled, held up her wedding finger: used. 

(This story was first published in Stand Magazine)