Someone’s watching me (a short story)

Someone’s watching me….

 

   As I turn onto Great Russell Street, the whole of Bloomsbury behind me seems to echo with my footsteps. There’s something about frosty nights that seem to make sound travel further and faster and for a second, I am sure that the echo is more than an echo and a second set of footsteps follow at a distance behind me.

   Nothing.

   The immense bulk of the British Museum looms, oddly bereft without the usual hoard of visitors milling around; a faint odour of old fried onions still fills the air as I approach the gates, but the hotdog seller is long gone and maybe the smell is my imagination, like those footsteps. I consider my route for a moment, and turn back a little and head along Museum Street.

   Click clack click clack…my heels would strike sparks if I walked any faster; little Segs nailed into them to slow the inevitable wear. I’ve only got one good pair of shoes for going out and they cost me far too much to let them wear down as quickly as they will otherwise do. I can’t bear seeing girls wearing heels that are half worn and uneven, stumbling because of the poor grip. I’d much rather wear good running shoes but out in my glad rags, they don’t exactly go, if you know what I mean.

   It’s also cold and I wish I had worn a proper coat instead of this excuse for a jacket. But you have to look the part, and I hadn’t originally intended to be coming home this late or on foot for that matter. I’m not the first girl to walk home because she’s run out of money for a taxi and I won’t be the last. At this time of the morning, the tube is still shut and I’d never go down there alone at night anyway. Brave I may be but I am not either fearless or stupid. Up here, I can hear anyone or see them before they see me. Or at least I think so. Those footsteps are beginning to bother me but it’s late and I’m tired. I worked a long day yesterday (or was it today when I got off shift? Can’t remember now).

   I cut across New Oxford Street and down into Shaftesbury Avenue and think about Shaftesbury the man, and how today’s London would thrill him. None of the dreadful, mind-blowing poverty is left; even our poor are better off than the poor of his day. I’ve gone past the turning for Neal Street now and I curse softly. I want the most direct route and if I continue down Monmouth Street I’ll be funnelled straight down to St Martin’s and Trafalgar Square. If I cut through Neal’s Yard, I’ll be back on track.

  Neal’s Yard is eerily quiet and unnerving; the massive potted trees rattle their twigs at me and I shiver as I pass through. At the other side of the yard, I pause, sure I have heard something, but a small black shape races across the gap and I relax. It’s just a rat; you’re never far from a rat in London (or any city) but you seldom see them by daylight.

   But daylight is a long way off, and I want my bed and I cut across Long Acre and down into Covent Garden. It’s deserted, as you’d imagine, and silent, how you could never imagine it being in the day. Litter blows across the cobbles and I can hear music somewhere. It’s past closing time for just about everywhere, so maybe it’s someone’s car stereo.

  Another rat darts across. Despite the best efforts, food waste attracts vermin and I wait to be sure the rat was alone. Something that might once have been a burger is so mashed into the cobbles; another small black shape detaches itself from its meal and starts to run.

  “Nothing to fear from me, mate,” I say, and begin to walk again.

  There’s traffic noise now coming from The Strand, but only intermittent and again I am certain I can hear footsteps. I still myself as I walk, willing myself to be calm and to listen. I’m going slower now, even though as my heartbeat begins to race I want to break into a run.

   Yes.

   There is indeed someone behind me, maybe thirty yards or maybe a bit more. They are keeping pace with me, keeping out of sight in the shadows. Oh crap. Whoever it is he (or she, because I can’t see them) is very good at this. When I stop, they stop. No wonder I thought it an echo. As I round the corner and come close to the shuttered Jubilee Market, I know that whoever it is will have to cross the open space and be visible, so I take the road next to the Market and walk down very fast till I get to the Strand, where the lights are brighter and there is a little traffic.

  It’s not a lot of use really, because as soon as I get there, I know that I can’t even hail a taxi. I have about thirty pence in my purse, and no means of getting more, so I can’t even say, “Take me to a cash point!”. I’ll just have to hope that my follower is slower than I am. I can run pretty fast if I need to, but in these shoes? I don’t think so.

  I cross the Strand and take the alley between buildings. I can sense someone behind me, the other side of the road but I’m damned if I give him the satisfaction of turning round to try and see him. The alley is steep and has a flight of steps, and I nearly fall as I negotiate the steps. It’s horribly dark down here and I wonder if I have made a mistake. But Embankment Gardens are at the bottom of this alley and once through those, I’ll be down on Embankment and into brighter light.

  At the bottom I realise my mistake too late. They lock the gardens at night. I consider my options. I could climb the railings and cross like that. But I am in a tight skirt and I don’t think it’s going to allow me to do that. Short of taking the damn thing off while I hop over the fence, I’m stuck.

  It’s then I make my big mistake. I turn right and start to follow the gardens roughly west. I’ve forgotten that if I turn left, I can cut through and join the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. I am thinking that maybe one of the other gates will be open and I can cut through. Like I say, I’m tired. Turning right takes me between the Gardens and the backs of the properties in the streets behind the Strand. Once, hundreds of years ago, the Savoy Palace stood somewhere along here and further back in time, the Strand was indeed a sort of beach.

  My heart nearly bursts out of my chest; the footsteps behind me have got a lot faster suddenly and like an idiot, I instinctively begin to run, cursing both shoes and skirt as they impede my speed. To my horror, the way ahead plunges into a dark lane, leading to parking garages or something for the buildings that tower above me. Dim orange lamps make more shadows than light and as I stumble, I fall headlong into a darkened corner. I scramble onto my knees, poised like a runner at the start of a race, trying to see who’s there.

   I hear breaking glass and the dim lights vanish and I am in almost total darkness. All I can hear is my own breath rasping in my throat and the sudden slowing of footsteps. The bastard has broken the lamps so I can’t see him, and after a second, a bright light appears directly in front of me, ten or so yards away. He’s holding a powerful flashlight, shining it deliberately in my eyes so I can’t see him. I can feel bile rising in my throat and I think that maybe if I throw up on him, then he’ll be so disgusted he’ll let me go. I’m also feeling so angry that I could burst; some anger at myself for letting this happen to me but simple, atavistic fury at the old, old story of the subjugation of women by fear.

  Something glints as the light wavers and I know he has a knife. Oh well. The fury passes and I am left with resignation; if I can live through this, then maybe that’s something. There’s nowhere left to run after all. My mouth is so dry but I open it anyway to scream.

  “Don’t scream,” he says.

  His voice is flat and deliberately accent-less, as if he doesn’t want me to know his origins. That’s good. It might mean he intends me to live. I try to control my breathing but it’s coming out ragged and rough and I retch with fear and I sense him smiling. Don’t ask me how I know that, but when he speaks again I can hear his pleasure in my fear.

  “Throw your bag over there,” he says and with shaking hands I comply, fumbling a little.

  “Don’t hurt me,” I say, and am shocked. I sound like a little girl.

  He just laughs. The torch dips a little and I hear him moving towards me and then I hear the unmistakeable sound of a belt being undone. I swallow hard and brace myself for the inevitable.

 The next few seconds are chaos and yelling and even a bit of blood.

  But the blood is not mine. The knife clatters across the concrete; I even fancy it sparked a little, and my attacker stares at me in shock, clutching at the side of his head cut open when I hit him with the torch I retrieved from my bag. But he only has a second to investigate his wounds, before I wrench that arm into a firm hold behind his back and secure it with the other hand in cuffs, and because I am only human, and because my knee is in the middle of his back (my skirt has now ripped beyond repair), I lean over and press his face ever so gently into the dirty floor and whisper,

  “You’re nicked.”

   And I get to my feet and walk away and leave my other followers to drag this animal to the van waiting outside in the street.                     

The Fairy Trees

The Faery Trees

The scent of the elder trees seemed to shimmer in the hot June sunshine, making a heat haze of aromatic oils and dust, as Becky flung herself down in the shade and buried her face in her hands and wept, loudly. The hard earth beneath the two bending bushes had been packed tight by the baking of the summer sun and by small feet, she noticed with some surprise. The worn footprints, made when last the ground here was muddy, were no bigger than her own would have made, and she saw for the first time that the two stunted trees leaned together to make an archway, and beyond it, she could see a narrow path, vanishing into the deeper woodland beyond. The path was barely more than a rabbit run and she wondered why she had never noticed it before.

She wished she had thought to bring a bottle of water; her throat was dry with the heat and it hurt through her wailing. A sob rose again unbidden and she scrubbed at her face as the tears began to course down her face again.

“Why are you crying?”

Becky jumped with shock, and saw to her intense surprise that a girl was standing over her, her face hidden in the mass of wild flaxen hair that tumbled round her shoulders. Becky’s own hair was tied back neatly in a tight plait to keep it from escaping and looking untidy.

“Nothing,” Becky said, gazing at the girl with awe, and rubbing the tears away hastily.

The girl came and sat next to her, her face still shaded a little by her hair and by the dappled shadows cast by the trees they sat beneath.

“You sound so unhappy,” said the girl. “Tell me about it.”

Becky drew a deep and shuddering breath.

“It’s my Gran,” she said. “She’s mean and nasty and she won’t let me have what I want.”

“That’s terrible,” said the girl, her voice sympathetic.

“So I have run away,” Becky continued. “Just for a little while, to scare her, the mean old bitch.”

“Why don’t your parents help you?” the girl asked.

“My parents are divorced,” Becky said. “Dad works abroad. Mum went back to live with her mum; that’s my Gran. So Mum goes out to work and Gran stays home with me. Only, today, we were going to get me new shoes after school, and this is what she made me get!”

Becky pointed dramatically at her feet. The sensible and comfortable shoes were coated in the fine white dust kicked up by these chalky fields in drought.

“They look…” the girl tailed off without finishing.

“Exactly,” said Becky triumphantly. “They’re hideous. I’m going to be a laughing stock at school tomorrow.”

The girl patted her arm.

“We could swap,” she said. “You look like the same size as me.”

Becky glanced at the girl suspiciously. The girl was wearing much the same clothes as herself, jeans and tee shirt, but while Becky’s jeans were a standard supermarket brand, ironed and laundered and ordinary, this girl wore designer jeans, with the artistic rips and chains Becky coveted. Her tee shirt had a neat little Chanel logo on it, and round her neck, where Becky wore a tacky Best Friends Forever pendant on a worn thong, this girl wore a heavy gold chain, bearing a suspiciously real looking diamond. And her shoes! Well, her shoes were the exact pair Becky had seen in a magazine and had begged her Gran to buy for her.

“Why would you want to?” Beck asked grudgingly.

“To make you happy,” said the girl, throwing back her hair and smiling a big broad, braces-free smile. Becky has stopped smiling properly the day they fixed her teeth with braces.

“OK,” said Becky, kicking off her shoes with speed, in case this strange girl changed her mind.

Within a few moments, the exchange was complete. The high-heeled red shores hurt Becky’s feet but after a few moments staggering around, she found she could walk just fine in them. The girl buckled her new sandals and smiled in a way that reminded Becky of her cat’s face when it had just stolen some cream.

“Drink?” said the girl sitting back down in the shade and proffered a bottle.

Becky took an experimental swig and nearly choked.

“But that’s cider!” she exclaimed.

“And?” said the girl shrugging.

“It’s nice,” Becky said meekly and took a long drink.

The sun peeped through the leaves and sparkled on the diamante trimmings of her new shoes; Becky felt the drowsy heat of late afternoon fill her and her eyes felt heavy.

She woke to hear her name being called and shivered. The sun was setting, blood red in the West and the fragrance of the elder trees had begun to smell like a tomcat had used the earth here for a toilet. She scrambled awkwardly to her feet and swayed out from under the shade of the two elder trees. Her grandmother was crossing the field, coming towards her fast.

As she caught sight of her granddaughter, her whole body seemed to spasm, as if with shock.

“Oh no you don’t,” she shouted and Becky cringed before realising that Gran was not shouting at her.

Gran seized her arm firmly and then bent to yank the glorious shoes off Becky’s feet.

“Not my granddaughter, not ever, you conniving little thieves,” she yelled and to Becky’s horror, she threw first one and then the second shoe at the narrow path between the elder trees.

“But Gran, we swapped shoes, they’re my shoes now!” Becky protested, but then stared open-mouthed, unable to believe what she’d seen.

The path had closed up, like a book shutting and now there was no trace of the way through between the two elder trees. Of either pair of shoes there was no trace at all.

Her Gran gave her a little shake, and pointed at the last rays of the sun as they dipped below the horizon.

“Just in time,” she said. “Another few minutes and I’d have been too late.”

Becky felt her tears returning but now they were tears of incomprehensible relief. Gran looked at her, and passed her a hankie.

“Well, losing your shoes is a fair price to pay, I guess,” she said. “You can walk home barefoot or I can give you a piggy back? Which is it to be?”

Becky went to school the next day in her old, worn out shoes and a much better frame of mind.

by Viv (c) 2009

Heyokah Blues

“When everyone thinks something is good, it becomes evil”- Lao Tzu, Chinese sage, fourth century BC

Lest anyone think I am being pretentious quoting Lao Tzu, I should explain I found this quote at the start of what I hope will be a very enjoyable pulp fiction read, Kingdom by Tom Martin. I read the first few pages last night before succumbing to tiredness and conking out.

The recent discussions on the various comment threads, and also Psychscribe’s very moving essay this morning have brought me to try and explore both my disconnectness and quite why this is actually a very valuable function in this world.

I’ve been involved in certain aspects of Native American spirituality now for many years, but not as a plastic Indian, rather as someone seeking to make sense of the now through the eyes and the understanding of another culture. One of the aspects that struck me the most forcibly is the role of the heyokah in NA culture. There isn’t an easy or concise way to explain what the heyokah actually is; you can call them sacred clowns or fools for god, or jokers or tricksters and they are all that. Sometimes they are described as people who do everything backwards, upside down, the wrong way round, inside out. I must say here this is NOT by personal choice. A heyokah is CALLED; sometimes they are called by the Thunderbeings. Those who are struck by lightning and survive often become heyokah. My friend Alice, half Cherokee, half Blackfoot and all medicine woman has a cousin who is heyokah. She tells me he’s a pain in the ass; he eats with his back to everyone at table, laughs when everyone cries, cries when everyone laughs, dresses in light clothes when there’s snow on the ground, and complains of being cold when there’s a heat wave. She also tells me he cannot help this; he would like to stop but cannot. It is how he is and mostly this is tolerated and often even revered. They see him a someone touched by a kind of divine madness and his acts and speech are viewed as messages from God. The interpretation of the messages is often difficult, but in their culture the heyokah is valued and important. I shall leave you to try and understand why for yourself.

My trouble is that in certain senses, I was born Heyokah in a culture where this is not welcome. The heyokah is often apart from the society in certain ways; they are sometimes shamans, often some of the most powerful and feared medicine people. Here, in the West, people like me are not welcome. We’re seen as partypoopers, oddballs, weirdos, mavericks, individualists, lone wolves and above all, a threat. I’m the one that says, “Hey, the Emperor is wearing NO clothes and boy, does he have a tiny todger!” I’m the one who gets the giggles during solemn moments, or laughs out loud at funerals.  I’m the one who cries when a small bird dies on the road as I walk to work. I’m the one who won’t dance at parties and then embarasses everyone by dancing under the new moon on the way home from work. I’m the one who you dread meeting when you’re with your new boyfriend because you know there’s a risk I will say or do something that’ll make you cringe.

And I can’t help it. Foot-in-mouth disease? Incurable case here, guys.  There’s no hope for this one.

The thing is, I’ve begun to realise that the role of people like me, even where the concept of the heyokah is shunned and reviled, is essential for a society to remain whole and healthy. Lao Tzu doesn’t mean that something everyone believes to be good becomes evil instantaneously; becoming is a long process. If you do not have a few arbiters who retain independent thought and are able to stand clear of popular opinion, then there can be no true freedom. If you let yourself think about the Third Reich and how everyone allowed themselves to believe it was good, then the role of the heyokah becomes clear.

We stand as guardians of something none of us truly understand, but we stand nonetheless, and stand firm even when the personal costs of loneliness and isolation and even hatred from the community seem overwhelming. We stand because that is who we are and we can do no other than what we do.

That’s why I’m blue, I guess.

Meaningful relationships

I had to go for a long stomp on the beach and thankfully, due to sunshine, I had company: the dog decided a six mile hike was just what she fancied today. There’s something decidedly naked and unnatural about going for a walk without a dog, if you are used to having one with you!

The reason for the stomp was down to simple irritation with someone. Not even someone very important to me, but it did get me thinking.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t bear small talk any more. You know the kind I mean. Not the sort that is the socially accepted preamble to a more meaningful conversation, nor yet the gentle pleasantries exchanged between people at bus stops and doctor’s surgeries. I mean the banal exchanges of nothingness that takes the place of real conversation between friends. Now, again, I don’t mean the banter and playfulness that close friends engage in, but this deadly, dull, shallow and pointless chatter that masquerades as conversation when you’ve said all you’ll ever need to say to each other and you can’t yet face the fact that you have nothing worth saying any more. It’s a horrible feeling when you realise you have been talking to someone and actually, you really would have been better just walking away. It can be the awakening to renew a relationship, to find something deeper but in the main, it’s a death knell. It’s a clanging bell that says, this friendship is going nowhere, never was going anywhere. It may not ever have been a real friendship anyway.

Before anyone worries, I don’t mean me and mine. After 21 years of marriage, we can still find enough to talk about to keep us up half the night sometimes. It was just someone I was friendly with . It just made me realise that I don’t have time to waste on that kind of relationship, where meaningless nothings are exchanged rather than deeper somethings. I’d rather be lonely than fill my life with that sort of empty rubbish.

by Viv

Picture of the legendary Watson

 

This is he, the rat-catcher of Ruby Street.

 

Viv

Watson and the Flying Birdcage

Sometimes an animal touches your life in an unforgetable manner, and within your life their memory takes on the status of legend.

When people say, “I’m a dog person,” or “I’m a cat person” I tend to remain silent. I’m a people person. It doesn’t matter terribly much if the person is wearing human skin, or wearing fur, feathers, scales or shell.

If reincarnation is true, then Watson’s last two lives were probably those of an Anglo-Indian colonel and a  Royal Bengal Tiger and he wasn’t much impressed by his current body. It had limitations he wasn’t used to and it frustrated him enormously.

Arriving with us as a half-wild former stray, he was about five or six months old when the Cats’ Protection League decided we were suitable custodians, and he spent the first two days lurking under furniture, convinced the Fuzzy wuzzies were going to get him. His first interaction with me was to bite right through my hand when I attempted to move him from a bed I was trying to make. I think he was very surprised when he glanced back that my hand was not severed from my body.

After that I think he resigned himself to his new life. Initially we had to show him a lot of things we imagined were instinctive to cats, like climbing. We spent a drunken Sunday afternoon after church demonstrating the art of scrambling out of the walled yard at the back of our two-up, two-down in the back streets of Middlesbrough. He watched us intently for an hour and then had a go. He suddenly realised his current body has certain advantages over the one he was remembering, and effortlessly leaped to the top of the wall and stayed there, master of the back alley till sundown.

Our first Christmas presented a problem. Having only a motorbike meant that the journey from the north east of England to the home of my parents in East Anglia was going to be too long and cold and there’s nowhere on a Superdream for a cat basket. So we chose to take the train. As far as Watson was concerned, he really didn’t see why he had to be in a basket and he sulked with us the whole way, though he did choose to schmooze with anyone who came along and admired him perched in his basket on the table in the middle of the train. Us, he gave the cold shoulder to.

Arriving, we allowed him to explore my parent’s house just as soon as he felt like coming out from under the bed. Clearly this was an outpost of the Fuzzy wuzzies too, and he would leave such mundane matters to the troops(us). Emerging for some light tiffin, he sauntered down the stairs and his hunting instincts were alerted by a chirping sound. Damn, no gun. However, Watson had discovered that his current body needed no firearms to bag some rather impressive kills. He’d dragged in rats half his size before, so a mere budgie was not a concern.

The difficulty was the cage. Henry was suspended about six feet up, in his cage, from a bracket on the wall. Since I have seen Watson leap twelve or more feet in single jump, this wasn’t a problem.

The first we knew of this was a terrible crash, a yowling and a frantic(and triumphant) cheeping sound from Henry. As we made our way down the hall, Watson came streaking out of the living room and back up the stairs to his hideout. In the living room was a mess of bird seed, feathers and grit, but Henry was safe. The cage had separated from its base, as it fell , and much of it had clearly hit Watson. Henry was still on his perch, though the cage was upright and parted from the base, and he was clearly very pleased with himself.

The remainder of our visit Watson was very cautious. Every time he ventured outside and a bird flew overhead, he ducked, covering his head with paws, as if expecting it to come with cage descending. He did return to Henry’s room, sitting on the arm of a chair, calculating angles and velocity, but made no more moves. The following year, we returned, and the silent war of attrition continued, and he made no move. The third year we returned, this time complete with baby and a car, and he was ready. As soon as he was allowed from his basket, he headed straight down to the living room and stalked in.

We hadn’t had the heart to tell him that in the intervening year, his adversary Henry had passed on and had not been replaced. All his plotting was in vain.

By way of compensation, he went out the first night we were there and killed the robin my mum had been feeding. It was a hollow victory after so many years of planning.   

I loved that cat, you know.

by Viv

An odd dream….

I’m feeling a bit haunted by a dream I had this morning, shortly before waking.

I’m a bit of a believer in dreams being the way many things(including our own unconscious) can communicate with us, but rather often the meaning is harder to fathom.

I’m not talking about those random replay dreams, where the recent past is rehashed, or those anxiety dreams where we play out our fears.

I’m talking about the dreams that seem to have no foothold in the usual run of dreams. They’re often the ones we remember when we wake, and often, like today, they haunt us for days, or even years afterwards.

I dreamed I was travelling down a river, towards my home. I don’t live near a river, and never have lived close enough to one to the scenario I knew was true in the dream, that my home was only a very short distance from the water. In real life, I’d never chose to live so close to a body of water that can be so temperamental, but in the dream I accepted this as normal reality.

Until, that is, I rounded the corner of the riverbend and where I had expected to find a short stretch of water and my home a little way beyond it, the whole topography had changed. The river had become a dead end, a lagoon of cloudy water, almost like a T junction. I could go no further, unless I took to the water, and even then, I couldn’t see my home at all. The water swirled, like flood waters, full of eddies and a milky wash of clay from the fields, and I knew it to be deep and dangerous.

I turned to the left hand side, where the arm of the T led me and found that as well as the work to change the course of the river, work was in progress to build a footpath through what were fast becoming marshes. Brand new duckboards had been laid across the mud, and a new bridge, all resinous with fresh pine and larch, ended near the duckboards, the steps rising to greet me. As I approached, a woman came down the bridge steps and told me, “They haven’t finished it yet, you can’t get through that way,” and encouraged me to try and follow where the duckboards led me. I couldn’t see where the new path led, but I climbed over the foot of the bridge and began to try and follow the wooden path.

By this stage I was feeling very frustrated that I couldn’t get home and angry that “they” had changed the route without giving me either warning of the work or any alternative route to my home. The woman had vanished and I was alone again, standing below the bridge, unable to either see where to go or make a single step forward because the duckboards had given way to thick sticky mud and no path was visible at all.

Now typing it all out(I jotted it in my dream journal when I woke) I begin to see some of the themes emerging but if anyone has any insights, I’d be more than delighted to hear them. I can get so caught up in my own head I can fail to see the obvious, and unless we really are living in The Matrix and everyone out there is somehow part of my own mind, the voice of someone beyond my own self can be a very welcome addition to the melting pot.

by Viv

Magic

Let’s play word association.

If I say the word MAGIC, what are the first words that spring to mind?

Harry Potter?or Aleister Crowley?

Tommy Cooper? or Derren Brown?

David Copperfield?or Paul Daniels?

I’ve always been fascinated by magic of all kinds from conjuring and sleight of hand to the kind of ceremonial magic you read about in Dion Fortune and others. I am drawn to the magical even when I know it’s a matter of smoke and mirrors. The child in me adores it.

But there’s another kind of magic that I crave and its the subtle kind that hardly seems to deserve the word.

I’m talking about serendipity and synchronicity. The happy accidents, the weird coincidences. Probably one day they will all be explained and something for me will wither and die. I like the idea that there are always surprises around the next bend in the road and that they are often(but not always) nice ones. 

Einstein once said that coincidences are God’s way of staying anonymous, which I like because it makes God seem like a real gentleman! But it’s these coincidences that make life magical when the other sorts of magic have lost their charm and power.

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room

 

 

“It’s strange how some rooms are like cages…” Paul Simon in The Obvious Child.

 

   Not always just cages but almost like holding pens. You enter them and things stand still while you wait for the designated outcome. Waiting rooms: we’ve all spent far too much time in them. Whether they’re called Waiting rooms or whether they have a fancier title….the wings, the sidelines, the vestry, dressing room, bus stop… they’re all still just waiting areas. When you enter them you become committed to staying till the waiting is over. No one forces you to stay, there are no locks and no bars, but how often do you ever see someone walk out before their appointed time? Not very often. There’s an unspoken contract that once you enter, you stay.

   Hospital waiting areas are the one people seem to spend most time in; due to the usual policy of doubling up the number of people assigned to each appointment, while you might be expecting to see the doctor at 10.0am, so is another person. They count on people not turning up to keep the place busy and it usually works, because even if you have to wait two hours, almost everyone will wait. It’s the same with trains as well. You have a fixed object in mind and unless you change your plans radically, that object usually remains the same. So no matter how late your train is, you sit and wait.

  What a waste of valuable time I can almost hear you saying! This is certainly true if you regard waiting as a passive activity, one empty of meaning and purpose. While there isn’t much to prepare for when waiting for a train, many other events we wait for actually need the waiting time for the event to work well.

  I spent a fair amount of time in the past backstage, waiting for a show to start. Of course, some of that time was spent in practical matters, checking props, sound checks and learning lines, but there’s always a moment that dawns when all the things you have to do are done and there is nothing to do but wait. And that is crucial to the performance. That funny little jumping of your heart as you hear the distant murmur of the audience arriving and settling down is the burst of adrenaline you need to be able to step out on stage. The hugs and kisses from fellow performers and backstage crew placate the nerves and bind you together in a fellowship as old as theatre; it tells you that you are OK, that things are going to go fine and that people are behind you. I’m not involved in that world any more and I have few friends that are, but I gather that there are very few performers who can walk cold from the car and onto a stage and give their best. I’d never be one of them, to be sure.

  The relatives’ room at hospital is another kind of waiting room; the place you are relegated to when dressings are being changed and when the consultant deigns to visit your relative. It’s also where you wait after the worst has happened. Have you ever noticed the boxes of tissues? They’re there for good reason. Last year, we had to rush north when a close relative was taken seriously ill. We arrived in time to visit him in the ICU and he was lucid enough to communicate with us. But overnight things deteriorated and we were called at 5am to say come now. He’d been moved to another waiting area, a single room off the main ICU ward. He was not conscious really and after spending some hours with him, I went with my sister-in-law to get some coffee and we were directed to the relatives’ room. I’d been up since 5am and Zoe had driven down from Scotland at 6am when she got the call, so we were tired and upset. I knew this stage could easily last days and I was shocked when less than an hour later when my husband came in to say his stepfather had gone. He’d never been one for waiting around in life and in dying, he had waited till we’d all got there, and had gone, just like that. Even the staff were shocked. So we all sat together in that waiting room, crying and drinking coffee and talking and even laughing, waiting for the next stage to come. In those waiting hours, we’d been preparing ourselves, in such ways that I can hardly begin to describe, for what we knew to be inevitable. I didn’t pray for miracles; we’d had our miracle when he’d been conscious and lucid when we arrived and the things that needed saying had been said. I’d been getting my head around what was happening, so I could deal with it.

  That’s what a lot of our waiting is about, or should be: becoming ready for what is next. It’s an active process in many ways, but performed often in a passive fashion. When I wait for a hospital appointment, I am not killing time; I am preparing my mind and my spirit to deal with what is coming. When I am waiting for a class to arrive, I am marshalling my thoughts and my materials and working out what best to start with. When I am sitting waiting at an airport, I may be watching and listening and observing and above all, thinking. Even when I am waiting for a bus or a train I am preparing, thinking about the journey and the day ahead and using the time to ponder ideas and enjoy the pause in my busy day.

  Right now I am in a waiting room of another sort; it has no special physical location and is more a metaphysical place. I’m waiting for plans and hopes and dreams to start to move forward. It’s a bit like when you sow seeds in the spring. You look at the pictures on the seed packet and you dream of those flowers or vegetables or herbs as you sow them, and after it’s done, you have a little moment where you stare at the bare ground and for a few seconds, you imagine the riot of colour that will ensue in months to come. No gardener hangs around much after that; you might come back a week later to check; to ensure the seeds are undisturbed by hungry birds, or to remove the rampant growth of new weeds, or maybe to peek and see if the tiny earthquakes have started that signal the sprouting of a seed here and there. Another week and you see the tender tip of the first shoots and you sigh with pleasure and anticipation and then go on with your other chores.

   That’s the thing about waiting; there are so many things you can do while you’re doing it. And when you do it like that, it’s never a waste of time, but rather a gift of time that you didn’t know you had.    

by Viv 

 

Snag, a short story

Snag

There was thunder in the air and a scent of coming rain, and as he went down the steps into the cool of the cellar bar, he had an odd sense of expectation, though he couldn’t have said why. It was just the usual post-work drink on a Friday, a couple of glasses of something cold before going home to shower and change ready for the night ahead, a demarcation point between the world of work and the real one. So he didn’t know quite why he had the feeling he might have had if he had been expecting to meet someone, when the chances were at this time, the bar would be deserted.

It wasn’t quite deserted. In the corner to one side of the door two women lurked, chatting in bored tones over white wine. He knew one of them slightly. They had history, but not the earth-shattering or even earth-moving sort, so he nodded to her curtly so she didn’t think he was ignoring her.

He was about to order a drink from the languid and damp-looking barman when the door swung open again and in a sweep of rain-scented air a woman walked in. A girl really, though as he glanced at her he realised he really couldn’t guess her age. She had the freshness of skin only the under twenties usually have but her eyes had a kind of self-aware intelligence he’d rarely seen in anyone under fifty. She was oddly dressed, and as she entered the bar, the woman in the corner said in a deliberately audible stage whisper,

“God, I hardly think wearing a sack is exactly the height of fashion.”

The girl paused, her arm nearly touching the bar. The dress was a bit odd, true enough; the fabric did indeed have the open irregular texture of hessian but as he looked at it he saw that the cloth had a shimmer and a gleam and a softness that could never come from sackcloth. Raw silk, or linen and silk mix maybe, cinched in with a wide, worn leather belt of burnished brown with a plain buckle of some dull metal.

He saw her brow contract and the girl bite her lip with hurt and on impulse he leaned over and said in an equally loud stage whisper,

“Ignore her, it’s a lovely dress.”

She gave him an uncertain smile.

“Do you think so?” she said, her voice soft and musical. “I made it myself. Excuse me, I should have a word with her.”

She turned away from him and went unhurriedly to where the other woman had now turned her back on her.

“A word?” said the girl, touching the woman’s shoulder gently.

“Well?” she demanded, staring up at her with undisguised contempt.

There was a definite pause and even the barman stopped polishing glasses to see if a fight was about to erupt. Then the girl leaned down and spoke directly into the woman’s ear. The woman’s face froze as she listened, and then went very red and finally so pale her blusher stood out on her face like the imprints of a slap. She seemed to gasp and then got unsteadily to her feet and rushed out. Her friend stayed still for a second or two and then rushed after her, shouting,

“What did she say? What did she say?”

The girl gave a small secret smile and walked back to the bar.

“What did you say to her?” he asked, impressed.

She smiled again, a pleased smile.

“I only tell people their own secrets,” she said and ordered a drink.

His curiosity was piqued.

“OK,” he said. “Tell me one of my secrets then.”

She sipped at her wine and shook her head.

“You won’t like it,” she said.

“You don’t know any,” he said, disappointed.

“Oh, I do,” she said. “But as you saw from the lady over there, usually people don’t like what I tell them.”

He was a little stung.

“How do you know these things anyway?” he asked. “Are you some sort of private detective or something?”

She shook her head.

“I just have a gift for it,” she said. “An instinct for knowing things if you like.”

“Bet you don’t know anything about me,” he said, a little galled.

“I know you’re getting married in a month,” she said.

“Anyone here might have told you that,” he said unconvinced. “She could have told you that.”

“I’ve never been here before,” she said. “And I don’t even know your name.”

If it was a pick-up line, he wasn’t going to fall for it by telling her.

“But I do know you’re having serious doubts about it,” she went on and his certainty began to waver.

“Oh yeah, why is that then?” he asked, a touch aggressively now.

“That’s for you to know, not me,” she said.

“Lots of people have doubts. You’re not much cop as a psychic, you know. Bit of guesswork, that’s all that was, and maybe some local knowledge,” he said.

She shrugged unconcernedly and took another sip of her drink.

“As you say,” she agreed and it annoyed him that she wasn’t arguing. Then she raised her eyes to his and he saw for the first time that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. He’d so seldom seen a woman without makeup that her face seemed indecently naked and he found himself blushing at that thought. Her eyes were fringed with long thick fairish lashes and he found himself thinking how much nicer it looked than being caked with so much mascara raising the lids must be aerobic exercise. Despite virtually living with his fiancée he was certain he’d never seen her without makeup.

“You keep a photo of your dog from when you were a child in your wallet, under the one of your fiancée,” she said, her eyes looking deeply into his. “She hates dogs, most animals in fact. That’s one of the reasons you’re having second thoughts. You know the others.”

He was shaken, badly shaken but he tried to hide it.

“I take it back,” he said. “You are pretty good as a psychic. Nice trick. How’d you do it?”

“As I said,” she said. “I have a gift.”

There was an awkward silence.

“What did you tell her?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“That’s not for you to know,” she said. “I was going to remind her to get her Lottery ticket tomorrow, because her numbers will probably come up, but when she was so nasty, I thought, no. It’s not her time.”

“So you reckon her numbers will come up?”

Again she shrugged.

“Nothing is certain you know,” she said. “But when I came in here and saw her, the chances were those numbers would be coming up.”

“What numbers were they?”

She laughed out loud.

“Come on now!” she said. “I’m not telling you that. It’s not for you. You aren’t the one who dreams about leaving her highflying, highly paid and hardworking career to live a life of decadent luxury where she need never wear the same pair of knickers twice.”

This time he was shocked.

“How do you know about that?” he demanded. “There was no one else there.”

She smiled.

“I told you,” she said. “I have a gift.”

He was beginning to feel very unnerved now. He had had a fling with the woman who had left. It had been some years ago and it had ended almost as soon as it began. The evening had begun with a lot of drinks then back to her place for more drinks, leading to various confessions of their dreams and ambitions and finally to bed. Languishing in post coital bliss he had made the mistake of asking her how it had been for her.

“Not too bad,” she’d said. “But maybe next time I’ll draw you a map and a set of instructions.”

Understandably from his point of view, there had been no next time. But he had always thought bitterly of her every time he saw the Lottery draw on television. He’d never so much as bought a ticket himself. He’d almost decided to stop coming here on a Friday until he told himself sternly that he would not let her ruin something that he enjoyed. He enjoyed the few quiet drinks here in the dull quiet hiatus between Friday afternoon and the start of the weekend. He enjoyed them so much it was a real effort to go out again properly later in the evening.

“So what are my dreams then if you know hers?” he asked, feigning indifference by finishing his beer and signalling for another.

“You want to make a difference but you don’t know how,” she said and he found himself blushing again as if she had revealed his intimate dimensions to the world. “You worry that if you marry your fiancée you never will get the chance to make a difference anywhere, anytime, except maybe to the prosperity of the shoe and dress industry.”

He was speechless with shock. These were not things she could have found out from anywhere; these were thoughts he had never so much as given voice to. Even in that drunken game of truth or dare he had not revealed his true dreams and ambitions and he had never so much a breathed a whisper of concern about his intended’s taste for expensive shoes and designer clothes.

She finished her drink and set the glass down.

“I must be off,” she said. “I’m supposed to be meeting my sisters. We work together.”

“What do you do then?” he asked and she frowned slightly.

“It’s a bit difficult to explain,” she said. “You might call it human resources, I suppose. We have our own company.”

“Are you any good then?” he said. “I could put some work your way if you like.”

“We are good,” she said without any false modesty. “The best. We have sufficient business currently though, thank you. It was kind of you to offer though.”

She started to move away from the bar. The sleeve of the dress caught on something, a nail or a splinter and a tiny shred of fabric ripped away and hung on the edge of the bar. She grinned at his distraught face ruefully. He was clearly expecting the kind of tantrum most women were likely to throw at ripping their dress.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m pretty good with threads. And you’ll be all right too. Just listen to what your heart is really telling you and you can’t go far wrong. You’re a kind man, you know. Go make a difference.”

She walked away from the bar, her worn Greek sandals slapping softly on the smooth floor and her strange dress shimmering around her as she walked. He unfastened the shred of fabric from the nail it had caught on and held it up to the light. It felt like silk, so soft he could almost not feel it at all and through the oatmeal coloured fabric he could see finer threads of what looked like gold woven into the material. A faint and agreeable herbal scent seemed to cling to the scrap, a fragrance of bay and thyme so very unlike any of the power perfumes popular with city women but which really gave him a headache. He tucked the shred into his wallet with the picture of his dog and went home.

A week later he found himself in the bar again, listening to the music of rain and traffic outside and contemplating his coffee. He’d half hoped the girl would be there again, but inside he knew she wouldn’t be. Even so, when the door opened, his heart lifted. It was the woman he’d had the fling with years back. He got up and went over to join her, motivated by some curiosity he’d not have given in to before. Her face looked jaded and sour and her perfume had gone sour too with too hot a day and too little fresh air.

“Bad week?” he asked lightly.

She looked at him with the amused half contempt a woman reserves for an inadequate lover who still tries to be friends in the hope of a second try.

“Yes, actually,” she said acerbically. “First of all, I split up from Paul. He expected me to forgive him his little slip but when I told him about mine he blew up and dumped me. Then I was so upset I forgot to buy my Lottery ticket. And of course, guess what?”

“Your numbers came up,” he said quietly.

“Four and a half million quid lost just because that little bitch last week told me that if I didn’t tell Paul someone else would,” she said bitterly. “And you? Bad week?”

“No, actually,” he said. “I split up with Michelle.”

She looked at him with some interest.

“So that makes it a good week then does it?” she said sarcastically.

“Better that now than later,” he said.

“Why did you split up?”

“We want different things from life,” he said simply.

She gazed at her wine for a minute.

“Well, an ill wind and all that,” she said. “How about coming back to mine then and consoling each other? I bet after two years with her you won’t need a map any more, not with her experience after all.”

It might have stung once but not now.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m going out shortly.”

“You don’t hang around,” she said sharply. “Plenty more fish in the sea after all.”

He smiled.

“Not exactly,” he said, finishing his coffee. “I’ve got my first shift as a volunteer at the Night Shelter.”

He went out into the evening, sunshine showing through the grey clouds like gold thread through raw silk, and smiled at his second chance.