The Way Out Page 4

  I broke into a slow jog and she did the same. Without looking around she maintained the distance between us. The rain grew heavier, driving down in diagonal sheets. My fringe stuck in clumps to my forehead. I increased my pace and so did she. The race didn’t last long; I was out of shape. I stopped, pressed the heel of my hand into the stitch below my ribs, and sucked in air. The woman took advantage of the break to remove an umbrella from her handbag and put it up. I pushed the hair from my eyes and watched. She was toying with me. I started walking again and she set off too. We kept a slower pace this time. We walked, and we walked.

  At some point the rain stopped and she folded her umbrella away. The sun came out, high and blind in a washed-out sky. We were passing through streets I no longer recognised, threading through the fringes of the city. The streets were hushed and an air of expectation hung over the houses. The glass in their windows flashed and glittered. There were no other pedestrians but even if there had been, I knew I couldn’t ask for help. The woman looked as composed and unremarkable as she had in the shop, whereas I was unkempt and sweating in my damp overcoat. Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, I removed it and slung it over my arm.

  I lost track of how long we had been walking. It felt like hours, days. I should’ve turned back. I wasn’t especially attached to the shoes but it was no longer about them. I wanted to know why she had done it, why she was still doing it, but the distance between us remained. She was always just on the edge of disappearing from view. The sun grew hot and warmed the tarmac, releasing a heavy, oily smell. The soles of my tights wore right through, rolled up over my feet and encircled my ankles in ragged, bloody frills. I imagined the skin on the soles of my feet doing the same, the skin rupturing, peeling up and away from the flesh, leaving my feet a splayed mass of contracting muscle and bones. I pictured reaching down, grabbing hold of the loose flaps of skin at the ankle and pulling, rolling the skin up off the flesh of my legs, the thin connective tissue between skin and sinew like damp spider webs. In my imagination, I crossed my arms over and bunched the empty skin in my hands and tugged it up over my hips, like taking off a dress. I eased it over my shoulders and extracted my arms, my hands, each finger popping out as if released from a tight-fitting glove, leaving the complete skin draped around my neck in a heavy cowl. Finally, I dragged it over my head and dropped the whole lot in the gutter.

  This scenario, this process, repeated over and over in my mind as I walked. It kept me going. There was comfort in the repetition and, with each reimagining, I refined the details: the delicate unfurling of the complicated areas between my legs, over my chest, around my mouth, the skin coming away in one unbroken piece. The satisfaction of that, like a single ribbon of apple peel. It began to seem real. I felt lighter, cleaner. The air on my exposed veins and blood vessels was cool and alive with something like electricity. I was pared down to my essentials, all branding removed. I was purely human.

  How much better it would be. Better than any self-knowledge, to lose all concept, all memory of self, to lay that burden down, absolved of the responsibility. Here was an end to existence that was not death but a new kind of life. Life as a harmonious expression of a larger cosmic force that didn’t care about packaging.

  And simply to keep walking, keep going, one step after another, feeling no pain. I glanced over my shoulder at the trail of footprints now drying to a dusky russet on the tarmac. They looked so old they reminded me of cave paintings and that idea seemed entirely fitting. If the first signs of individuality were hand prints, then it made sense that these footprints should mark my departure from identity; my exit from the stage of me.

  We came to a bridge over a slow-moving river. The woman stopped on the far side. This could have been my opportunity to catch up and confront her. But now it no longer mattered. What need did I have for her, or what she had taken from me? I fixed my eyes on the horizon and let it draw me on, turning the world under my naked feet as I walked, rolling it gently from heel to toe. By the time I crossed the bridge and reached the place where she had stood, she was no more than a reflection dispersing in the water below.

  Loving the Alien

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never bought into all this ‘Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus’ malarkey.

  For a start, I know for a fact that Derek is from Bathgate. And considering Venus has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere filled with clouds of sulphuric acid, it’s not somewhere I’m particularly keen to visit, even for a day trip.

  Of course we have our differences – me and Derek. Otherwise it’d be creepy. But despite them, we’d been getting along great, until recently. After last night’s little scene I honestly think it’s time for me to pack my bags and move on.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Please, Sandra, pleeeease…’ He was making those little praying hands at me. Good grief. Now, I like to see a man beg as much as the next woman, but Derek was beginning to get on my nerves.

  ‘No,’ I told him flat. ‘You know that green body paint brings me out in a rash.’

  But he kept on wheedling.

  I tried to bargain with him. ‘Look, sweetheart,’ I said, ‘you can still be my James T Kirk. I’ll even let you teach me what love is – again. I just don’t want to be green anymore.’

  You wouldn’t know it to look at Derek. He kept it well hidden, I can tell you. We’d been seeing each other for a few months before it came up. We’d been having a night in, pizza in front of the telly, bottle of wine, all nice and cosy, when a trailer came on for the new Star Trek film. He asked me if I’d like to see it and I told him sure, I’d love to. Then he asked, all casual, if I like Star Trek and I said ‘Yeah, it’s cool. Beam me up, Scotty!’ Thinking nothing of it.

  But when I looked round, Derek had this big, daft, open-mouthed grin on his face, like a cartoon puppy looking at a juicy bone. He grabbed my hand and stared, all intense, into my eyes. ‘From the moment we met,’ he said, ‘I knew you weren’t like other women.’

  Well, he got that right. But I couldn’t help thinking that Derek’s delight suggested a failure to appreciate the nature of individuality. There is no being in this whole entire universe exactly like me, but then no matter how long or how carefully you look, you’ll never find another Derek either, or another you. We are all cosmically different, each of us a very specific and unrepeatable collection of atoms, with our own very specific and unrepeatable hopes, fears, dreams, hang-ups, screw-ups and longings. And while that makes us all unique and separate, it also gives us something in common and brings us together.

  It wasn’t the time to point this out though. ‘Oh Sandra, where have you been all my life?’ he gushed. He was fair transported, so he was.

  ‘It’s just a film, Derek,’ I told him. ‘Don’t get your jollies in a knot.’

  Well, after that he started taking any opportunity he could to slip a bit of Trekkie talk into the conversation. One night in bed he started making all these weird noises. Kind of grunting and choking. I was about to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre when he stopped and looked at me and said, ‘So you don’t speak Klingon then?’

  It was right about then I should’ve left.

  But you don’t see what’s happening. It’s all just a series of episodes and you don’t see the big picture till much later. I wasn’t bothered about the dressing up at first. It was just a bit of harmless fun. We all have our little quirks after all. And it certainly seemed to push Derek’s buttons. Improved his stamina no end. So I reckoned wearing a pair of sparkly deeley-boppers and some blue lipstick was a small price to pay.

  But after a while, when it got to the stage that I was dressing up every single time, I did start to feel a little… overlooked. Derek didn’t seem to want me anymore, just me, myself. It was as if I wasn’t different enough for him anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some hopeless romantic, I do know that in every relationship, that initial hot flash of infatuation has to transform into something more stable over time. B
ut if you’re lucky it sets, like a molten planet cooling, into a world you both want to settle on and share, maybe even colonise, with its high mountains, lush valleys and deep, rolling oceans. Ideally, you’ll want to preserve a scattering of exotic undiscovered regions just to provide a few surprises along the way. That’s what love between two people is: your own Home World. That’s what I’d always been looking for, what I had hoped I’d finally found with Derek. But rather than allowing our planet to form, Derek grew increasingly distracted by certain design features.

  He became more ambitious, his set-ups more elaborate. The ears became a bit of an issue. It wasn’t enough that Mr Spock got to experience emotion for the first time. He needed perfect ears for the occasion, and Derek would spend ages sitting at the kitchen table carving them out of potatoes before he’d come up to bed. Eventually I got tired of waiting.

  His fixation with the green Rigelian dancing girl was really just the last straw. Our relationship’s final frontier.

  It’s 3am when I shoulder my bag and tiptoe from the bedroom. No point in waking Derek and risking a scene. I navigate the darkened hallway using only the faint glow from the tip of my extended index finger. Derek’s face would be some picture if he could see this.

  Outside, the stars are spread out across the sky, at once both lonely and welcoming. I press the button on my key and the wheels of the Honda Civic parked at the kerb rise and disappear smoothly into its elongating chassis. My starship hovers there, waiting for me.

  I’m not too sure where I’m going, where I might one day find somewhere, or someone, I can call home.

  Her Feelings About Auckland

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she says. ‘You’re always trying to put things in boxes.’

  He pauses and looks up from the box of junk he’s sorting through. Rain patters on the attic skylight, a peaceful backing track to his rapid rewind through their conversation. He’d like to pinpoint the problem with the boxes before responding. He recalls talking about how pointless it was to keep all this broken stuff in the attic, but nothing that provides a clue to her current irritation.

  ‘Um…?’

  She knows he’s pretending to be clueless so he doesn’t have to engage with what she’s saying. ‘You know. That thing you do. Compartmentalising everything?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I thought we agreed we were going to have a proper clear-out? We don’t need any of this stuff.’

  They both go back to raking through old lamps and burst tennis rackets.

  ‘It’s not just stuff though. There are memories and associations, feelings attached to everything. It’s not healthy, this ability of yours to turn all that off whenever it doesn’t suit you.’

  He sighs and stares into the mouth of the old toaster before dropping it back into the box. ‘I’d like to get this finished today.’

  ‘We will. But we don’t need to be like robots about it. People, normal people, don’t work that way. You can’t separate thinking from feeling.’

  ‘Course I can. Some thoughts are just thoughts. You don’t have to get all worked up about everything. All emotional when there’s no need.’

  ‘I’m not getting worked up,’ she says, her voice rising. ‘I’m just saying it’s not possible to think anything without having some form of emotional response to it.’

  ‘I’d say it is.’

  ‘And I’d say you’re wrong. Every thought you have, no matter how mundane, you also have a feeling about it. I’ll give you an example.’ She sets down the tatty box file she was holding, puts her hands on her hips and looks above his head for inspiration. ‘Auckland is the capital of New Zealand. There.’

  He scratches his head. ‘I think it’s Wellington, actually.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘No. The point is, I don’t know what the capital of New Zealand is, and crucially, I don’t care. No offence to the people of New Zealand, or the residents of Auckland—’

  ‘Wellington.’

  ‘Whatever. Auckland’s status as a city really doesn’t concern me at all.’

  ‘Fair enough. I don’t think they’d be too bothered what you think either.’

  ‘But then, the more I think about Auckland, I start to wonder about other things. Like why’s it called Auckland? Does it have Auks? What is an Auk anyway?’ She punctuates each question with upraised palms, a little higher each time. ‘Do they still exist or are they extinct? Is that the fault of human settlers? Did they arrive, see all the Auks and decide to name the place after them, then kill them all, without really meaning to, but in the way things get killed when you’re not paying attention, not making sure they’re safe. And then they’re left living in this Land of the Auk with no Auks in it anymore. That must make them feel sad and a bit bad about themselves, or their ancestors. And also, isn’t there’s something called a Great Auk. I mean, are they really that great?’

  He looks at her standing there with her hands raised above her head, breathless and indignant. ‘What? What are you on about?’

  ‘The thing is,’ she plunges on, aware she’s maybe overdone the Auk thing but still hopeful it’ll all pan out, ‘before I know it, I’m having a whole bunch of feelings about Auckland after all.’ Her eyes feel hot and there’s a tightness inside her throat. She knows she’s close to becoming ridiculous but feels precariously self-righteous. ‘Those poor trusting Auks, what chance did they have? With their big stupid-looking beaks and useless stubby wings.’

  ‘Is that not a Dodo?’ He smiles, hoping she’ll join in.

  She swallows, blinks twice in quick succession and looks at the skylight. ‘I am trying here! I’m trying to explain how I feel.’

  ‘About Auckland?’

  ‘…’

  The rain fizzles against the skylight, like a dying firework.

  Bingo Wings

  ‘Bar doesn’t open till six, love. You may as well have a seat.’ The barmaid with the yellow hair was blunt but not unfriendly.

  ‘That’s okay, I’ll just wait here, thanks.’ Dora knew, as soon as the shutters clattered up and crashed out of sight, there’d be a stampede for the bar. Some of these old dears might look sweet but they’d elbow you right in the tits to get in front.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other in her queue of one and wondered about the mice. Everyone knew fine the place was infested. She didn’t mind sharing, as long as the cheeky wee bastards stayed out of sight till the bingo was finished.

  ‘Come on, ladies. Time you opened up. You’ve a customer waiting.’ Colin sidled up to Dora. He was a little ferret of a man with spots on the back of his neck that glistened under the lights like boiled sweets. ‘Got all your books, Doreen? I think you might get lucky tonight!’ He nudged Dora theatrically in the ribs and winked. ‘I have Caller’s Intuition.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ Dora raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Better make sure and call my numbers then.’

  ‘For you, gorgeous? Anything.’

  She was more than twice his age. It wasn’t as if she minded that fact, but pretending like she was still a young thing? Some of the other old biddies loved it though, got all giggly and excited. She busied herself rummaging in her handbag. Colin went off to look for a more receptive audience and the shutters rattled up.

  Up in the balcony, the usual crew were installed at their table. Dora laid down the tray with their order of drinks and crisps.

  ‘Nice one, Dora,’ said Jim, taking a deep pull on his pint and sitting back in his chair. He’d get himself a sly whisky at the bar later when it was his round and Mary would pretend to be none the wiser. Mary and Jim were good at being married. They had a natural ability, the way some folk were good at singing or dancing. It was a gift. The way they accommodated each other reminded Dora of a kind of old-fashioned waltz, each of them anticipating the other’s moves. There was a grace about them that couldn’t be hidden by any amount of brown cardigans or puffy ankles.

  Alec was
there too. Mary and Jim’s grown-up son wasn’t quite all there in the head. Poor soul. His lips were always wet and his clothes, although clean, looked like they’d been corkscrewed onto his body. Sometimes he would get agitated and start shouting and Mary had to miss her game to take him out of the hall until he calmed down. A lot of folk tutted at her for even bringing him. But what was she supposed to do? He might be a grown man, but she couldn’t leave him on his own at home.

  Dora handed Alec his lemonade and watched as he settled to sucking on his straw, eyes slightly out of focus, completely contented, like a baby with a bottle.

  ‘Has she phoned then?’ asked Mary, through a mouthful of cheese & onion crisps.

  ‘No, not this week. She’ll be busy. The time difference, and her working shifts, it’s hard for her to find a good time. Doesn’t want to wake me up in the wee hours just for a chat.’ Angela was a nurse and worked hard at it. She’d always been a caring girl, always wanted to help others. Dora pictured her cycling to work in the Australian sunshine, barbecuing dinner on the beach, poised on a surfboard at the crest of a wave, her black hair streaming out behind her like a banner. No wonder she didn’t have time to phone. Dora understood. Like the song said, if you loved someone, set them free.

  She poured half of her bottle of stout into a glass, arranged her books on the table and tested her dabber on a scrap of paper, making a trail of red dots.

  The first games of the night passed without so much as a line for any of them. Dora waved away Jim’s protestations that it was his round and hurried back down to the bar, eager to beat the break-time rush. She felt restless this evening and wanted to be doing something. She passed Jim in the press of the crowd streaming down the stairs on her way back up, no doubt using a pretend trip to the toilet as cover for his quick whisky. At the table, Mary was trying to pacify Alec who’d got himself in a bit of a state. He was hunched over, making a mournful keening sound that made something clench and twist in Dora’s chest.