Rebekah

A cloud hovered over her, designating divine presence, all the way back from the hospital.  Nobody saw it.  They called her Rebekah anyway.  A complete coincidence.  And they let her go on her way

That was many years ago.  They were never sure how she really functioned, even though they knew so well her weathered family tree.

All through her early years she conjured up rain when neighbours started spying on each other’s use of hosepipes, and she knelt down purposefully somewhere calm and charmed the sun when everyone just looked too sad.

This girl, whose name was Rebekah, lived two stories above the postcard and picture shop.  If only it had been three.  Or four.  Imagine the view from the roof top if the stair well had had a trap that one could push through and be instantly closer to the sky.  Feet on the concrete altar, nothing between her and the trip down into the street below except the idea that she was already in heaven.  As it was, Rebekah’s flat was in a building that only had two floors.  Its roof slanted and it looked out across onto the department store on the other side of the road.  From her own flat it was possible to see a bit of Neville Street too if you craned from the window.  There was no little-used stairwell with secret traps.  No concrete terrain brushed by heaven.

*

It sold other things too, the Postcard and Picture shop.   In its annals of two shops now joined into one, were hosts of goodies that one wouldn’t have imagined existing before entering into the brightly-lit, tightly-packed labyrinth.  Once inside, the possibility of owning all manner of seemingly essential (for a millisecond) knick knacks grows and grows and could take over if you had left your sensible head behind.

Rebekah rarely pops inside, she feels guilty just looking, and she certainly doesn’t want to buy anything. She passes by without turning her head, goes in the side door and begins the climb to the second floor.

Everybody calls it the postcard and picture shop, like everyone calls her Rebekah.  Established.  Early twenties and her hair’s mid brown and mid-long, and it sells postcards and pictures.  What you saw was what you got.  But the things hidden in the labyrinthine interior were a different matter altogether. 

*

And so this girl – whose name was definitely Rebekah; remember how she had been brought home from the hospital with the cloud trailing above her, unbeknownst to anybody - lives two floors above the postcard and picture shop.  She hasn’t lived here for very long and most of the shelves have only dust on them.  Leaving the window open sometimes seems to displace some of it.  She is impatient for windy days and being Rebekah that usually works.  Her boxes are sagging beneath the shelves.   Her belongings are comfy in there, although the empty wallscapes make her try to remember where her photos might be.  One night, after a quick meal of bland noodles, a cursory search finds a pack of them and she spreads them out over the parquet.  Rebekah in the garden where it all started; the roses and the maze that she knew by heart.  Snaps of houseplants in their element, over the years.  Her years, alone, after the people whose garden it was sent her on her merry way.  She is not alone tonight.  Tricky, her mongrel sleeps soundly beside her. All is well, God might just be in his heaven: the day had been a lovely crisp grey, just like she wanted.

Tricky stirs a tiny fraction in his dreams, and it is there, poor Rebekah, in a dark corner of her mind, the thought that she might go back.

Three days later, Rebecca returns home to find her dog smashed on the pavement outside the picture and postcard shop.  There was a little crowd.  Nobody had bent beside him.  In the flat she found only the upturned geranium on the ledge, probably the result of Tricky’s last ditch attempt to hang on to the real world.  She wondered if she had left his half-finished tin of Chunky by the half open window…she wondered if it had rolled off down the street, with no Tricky to chase after it.  She sat at the kitchen table and slowly unpacked the groceries, not wanting to associate with any of it, let alone put it away or eat it, for the time she had queued to pay for it had probably been the death of Tricky.  Then she had shut the open window.  He had been bored and had nothing better to do than sit on the ledge and wait for her to appear around the corner from Neville street.  Then as the day began drifting into night and she had rubbed the dust and the tears out of her eyes, she began to wonder if someone had pushed him.

She had scooped him up, leaving some remains on the pavement.  A little smudge of blood and gristle that someone saw to.  ‘It was most unpleasant,’ someone else says.  Rebekah doesn’t say anything.  She lives with the unpleasantness, doesn’t go to the doctor’s, only wishes she had a garden so she could bury him close.  But she lives on the second floor above the postcard and picture shop and leaves her window open sometimes.

She doesn’t know whether to water the geranium.  She hasn’t slept.  Her thoughts are as tangled as her hair.  She knows it is coming.  Her divinity goes into overdrive.  She starts knocking on the ceiling trying to get through to the sky.  She kneels down and begs.

*

Today, Rebekah is going to write a story.  True, she had been prompted.  It wasn’t like the rest which flowed freely,  a scanty breeze or a westward rush; a trickle down, then temperatures logged lovingly in a little thing she called her diary.  But the only real constraint was the end.  Isn’t it always?  It had to end with Home.  One single word.  Rebekah could live with that.  She had lived with worse.  She is not going to set any other objective than that it has to be finished by this evening (so they told her), so no sleepless nights, just a free-hand story.  She is going to make it up as she goes along and there must be some poetry in that.

Rebekah woke with the skin taut around her eyes where she had let the tears dry.  She felt a pain coming alive in her shoulder and along with it the memory of the day before that had woken up with her too.  It all comes flooding back – she had ordered rain, rain so much rain – a torrential, angry sea.

It always happened like that.  When they found her, all they could do was to take away her belt and put her in a room with bars at the window instead of curtains.  All that rain had been causing damage and she’s here so that they can pin it on her.  But she won’t let them. She’ll deny the storm, the wind, like she always does. And they never get to the snow that she falls down into, soft and comfortable but so, so cold.   Luckily the day before she had been up on the roof, through the trap that only she knew about and kneeling on the silver pitch, she had elicited the sun for the next day.  That way, the remains of the rain would soon disappear and no one could be disapproving.  It would filter through the bars on her window and make pretty the yellowed tiles of her room.

And the next day he had his hat on.  That was a relief to Rebekah because if the skies still listened she didn’t need anybody else to.  They all did so much talking here.  She should have been able to remember names by now and converse, but her mind had a particular way of wandering off, avoiding introduction, farewells and anything that came in between.

“Miranda’s here.  You coming?  Didn’t you hear the shout?”

 Rebekah has been finishing her story, her right hand cramped, sprinting towards the end.  Now the shout, the tap on the door, and she can flex her hand like a cat’s paw, and lean back in her chair.

“Yes, I’m ready.”

There is a room for various modules that the folk can do here.  Today, it is creative writing.  Rebekah sits through the reading out, and then reads her own story. There is silence.  They begin to clap her, this girl, whose name is Rebekah.  She lives two floors above the postcard and picture shop, sometimes.  When she doesn’t live here.  Afterwards, she goes back to her room feeling like she might have disclosed a bit too much.  These things that have indelibly marked her; incidents to shape a life… forever she will step around the third pavement slab from the entrance to the postcard and picture shop out of respect for Tricky. If they ever let her out of here. (Had she been doing it when they came for her?) She does not trust humans.  And she will not leave it to the winds to decide what sort of day she was going to have when she is perfectly capable of doing so herself.

Rebekah brought a cloud home from the hospitable; an unshakeable cloud, a magic cloud, that when the sun managed to burst through it, she became gold and glorious.

She misses the stairwell; she has photos to hang up.  Her geranium must be dry.  She has things to do.  In the dark room with the yellowed tiles, she closes her eyes and goes back home.

La Fin