I.
Seventeen days later
Mark Lewison has almost finished everything
off. Just this day left and it will all
be in order. The opportunity that will
then arise will be one of solitude.
Palliative, pre-ordained solitude.
He has been alone for seventeen days now with the same noise going on
around him. The lives that jostle past
him as he heads to and from work, the snippets of conversation he tunes into,
the carrying on, the surround sounds that are playing full blast now that he
has been stripped of the show that usually makes of it all a background
noise. The light and shadows are taking
on personas as slowly slowly one talks less and less to other people, and
instead starts listening to the day, the night.
Both have been intruding upon him mercilessly since he found himself
alone. The day comes all light blue corduroy
to dress him up. She can see that he has
become unsure of her so she pulls herself tightly about him until he can
imagine the something inside of him – shocked and icy – beginning to thaw.
Today’s work is to gently cajole him into the rest of his existence. But the more callous voice of night pierces
him just in time, has him hurrying home to lick his wounds, still fresh, until
all he will be one day is the dried scab, and then the ugly scar. Here are the notes. Piled high before him. They will be his only companion in this
interlude of absolute solitude that he has engineered for himself.
“I hear you’re taking two weeks off?”
He is at the coats. He has left the long room of partitions and
grey shapes (the day had been a grey shape, of all the eyes that he had had to
encounter not one pair had leapt from the monotone that washes each day away
inside this building and replaces it with another without anyone ever
noticing), dragged himself up to the staff room and offices, and is getting
ready to go. He turns towards the
voice. It is Nathalie. They do the same job here. Her voice is gentle, her eyes are too.
‘Yep’, he is watching her put on her coat and
now her hat. Her outer garments lend to
her an appearance of shabbiness that makes her appear more fallible than the
sharpness she possesses in black under the uniform light of the long room.
‘Just like that?’
It is well into autumn. Outside, everybody is buttoned up and here
are Mark and Nathalie in the process of doing the same. He had already taken his holiday in the
summer, even sent a postcard to work. He
wishes he could fabricate something light, something in keeping with holidays
and relief miles from here, but his chin is in the collar of his overcoat and
his breath is all around him, hot and unpleasant.
‘Oh.
You know. Me and Imogen are a bit
at loggerheads. You know...’ he manages.
Her eyes widen, she is checking in her bag for
something. She looks at him, ‘That’s
brilliant. Most people’d just leave
it. You’re actually going to sort it
out...Before it gets ugly!’ She looks
genuinely pleased that this is the reason for his two week leave, out of the
blue, there in October. ‘Mind you, if I
had a holiday every time Pat and I argued...’ She laughs and is gone. Mark catches the swing of the door and goes
out, too.
‘Yep’, he says to the street and the flurries
of people walking along it. This is what
I am going to shut myself off from, he thinks, these brief gluts of kindness
followed consecutively, like a revolving door, with a whole batch of anonymity
and passing strangers. The pleasantries
and the drill are what he is going to holiday from, and the standing here on
the verge of the flurry; a still leaf stunned by the movement sweeping along
all the others, knowing that in a moment you are going to feel it beneath you,
lifting you up and on…But now, seventeen days later, feeling brittle, left in
the gutter, no reason to go home.
The plan is to immerse himself (there is his
head going under, bubbles trying to escape from the thick liquid) into a
nourishing solitude (like a hot pot of soup it is waiting for him at
home). He is going to look too long in
the mirror. He is going to listen to
every creak and groan as the flat becomes his ally, his one true friend. (Is it
my arm or the door? This tired reach,
this swinging open?). He is going to
work out what he is now that Imogen, who he is at loggerheads with, has
disappeared. ‘Oh. Imogen’s left me’. How could he have responded in kind to
Nathalie’s simple questioning? How could
he have bundled Imogen and three years and that empty, very empty space beside
him each night now for seventeen long days into a sentence, starting with ‘Oh’,
like she had surprised it out of him?
‘Imogen’s left me’, like it hasn’t been there all the time, heavy and
disabling. Imogen left me, she left me, she left me.
Behind him, the building that he has left is darkness. He steps away from it, trying to catch some
light as other peoples’ directions sweep him along and he becomes a small part
of this waning October afternoon. Behind
him now, the order which runs from a
to z, and constructs systems spinning
invisible webs perfectly; in the distance now, the building that houses this,
that he comes to five days a week (small, grey, a dot) for three years now. It
has infiltrated him and persuaded him (something small, grey, unmoving inside)
a little order is desirable outside the hours of the office, too. Like the food you eat three times a day (and
buy on your way home), the flat you rent (being signed for) and the pinnacle of
it all coming in the guise of the woman you love (being there every evening
when you get home).
Mark Lewison is entangled in webs, so fine you
live in them; a little grey and collecting dust before his time. He is all upside down and askew, although
walking down the street like you or me. Walking forward, an empty bag on a
curled shoulder that he is going to half fill with food (something plain, no
fuss). The central mini market is
luminous and large making of the dusk streets outside something soft and
unreal. Once done, he will be on his way
home to entice back some of the order that vacated the premises along with
Imogen. Perhaps he has it somewhere, written down, some proof that it had
existed. Perhaps he can force it to come
back. But with all the relevance leaked
out of his life, all that had puffed him up gone, he doubts he has the strength. He begins to doubt many things except that it
must have been like this. She must have
been leaving him for a long time.
Barely. Imperceptibly. But for now, seventeen days old, it still
feels like he has been winded.
