smile
He held a door open for me, just wide enough for me to squeeze through, narrow enough for me to have to almost brush against his arm. Once upon a time, back in the old days, let’s say before the exorcism, when I had a personality of my own, not just a freebie bag of age appropriate, peer reviewed, therapied to death opinions, I would have punched him in the nuts for looking at me like that.
As it was, the way things were, he stood there leering and I, flushed with anger, turned away. Counted to ten. Slowly.
You can’t just go around hurting people, can you? That’s what the psychiatrist said, in her serious way, with a kind smile to show she cared, and using terms like ‘red mist’ as if it was like that for me. It wasn’t like that for me. It’s just that I really hate them, all of them.
Alright, I can stand seeing them in the street, yes that’s OK because I know they’ll be around. Or in a shop or something. But they always look, have you noticed that? They look like they want to touch you, they definitely want to touch you. And they take space that belongs to you, like when you’re on a bus and they sit there with their legs spread wide like their balls are so big they need all that space and they don’t care or even notice that they’ve taken up half your seat. Sometimes they shout out to you, that’s the worst, when they call names, but it’s bad too when they come up to you and tell you to smile, like they think they’ve even got the right to tell you what to look like. Like they think you’re not being ornamental enough.
So I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong. Now I have to see a therapist every week and she tells me what to think instead of what I actually think, which she says is not really very constructive or nice. Be nice Georgina. I have to practise thinking what I’m supposed to think and when my own thoughts come along I have to count to ten, slowly, and keep counting until they go away.
The thing is they all want you to be nice. That’s what they call it, letting them do whatever they want, taking your space or telling you to move your face in the way they like, or clean up after them and laugh at their jokes: it’s called being nice.
I saw the man again, you know, the photographs. It was funny, he looked like daddy, except of course for the smile because I don’t remember daddy really smiling, at least anyway not like that with half his head open.
So I let him leer at me and I just walked away, because you can’t just go around hurting people. It’s wrong. They are people too. They don’t mean any harm.
hope comes into a room
Hope comes into a room, sits in a chair, watches our faces.
We do not trust her. She holds a flickering candle in her hands.
A little light for the heavy hearted, she says.
We are sewing garments which may or may not be armour.
In the dark, we cannot tell. Should we give a little more at the seams?
Hope holds up her candle, saying, ‘leave room for me’.
But we hear Hope is sick; her candle flame gutters,
And there are true stories being told in the dark,
Of all the deaths she has suffered in the world.
So we make our garments fit close to the skin, seams all stiff,
And we sew ourselves into them, which is a tight comfort,
For when Hope leaves the room they will serve in our defences.
The Kings of Cairo
For Susan Abraham
Coming off shift, the boys smell of onions
sweated in iron pots. They have blood
stains in the cracks of their fingers.
Snapping cards at a propped up table outside a café,
smoking, ignoring the wail of the mosque at five a.m.,
the carts trundling into the street,
the rising dough of the morning bread.
They’ll eat beans from the back of a van for breakfast.
Even the cats have stopped fighting.
On Taalat Harb street, cab drivers sleep at the wheel,
On a road impossible to cross in daylight.
flash duel: four halves
Adrian Graham challenged The Bearded Lady to a flash duel.
Here’s what happened:
Lucky plastic
Sandy drove her pink jeep over to Pete’s place, curling her toes to keep her slingbacks on, remembering to depress the clutch and the brake pedal when she wanted to stop. She wanted to impress Pete. Pete was an action man. He had especially keen blue eyes; they swivelled. Maybe later they’d go back to Sandy’s place and Do It. Doing It with Pete wasn’t that great, as he would never take off his blue underpants. But he did have very flexible joints. In a way, it was a relief to Sandy that they never properly Did It, as she wasn’t sure she was really completely normal down there. At least she didn’t have to wax.
In the end, Sandy and Pete went horseriding. Sandy’s horse was called Destiny Star. She liked to be stroked by Sandy and Pete, with their stiff hands; Pete’s knuckly fist on her mane, and Sandy’s dainty, finger-melded flipper running over her flank.
“Do you ever think about the future?” Sandy said, gripping Pete’s waist as they rode Destiny Star fast along the highway. Pete didn’t answer. Sandy wasn’t sure what she was really asking. It seemed like her life had always been this: riding Destiny Star, going home to her double fronted townhouse, the shimmering pool on the roof terrace, the plastic balustrade.
They stopped outside a nightclub and tethered the horse to a post. The nightclub was called ‘Bratz’. Sandy didn’t want to go inside.
Pete gestured across the road. “How about the bar?”
Inside, she sipped peach flavour spring water while he stared into his beer.
“Where did you get the scar on your cheek?”
“The war,” he replied.
“What war?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Just some war they sent me on.”
She looked into his eyes and played with her shoes.
After they got back to his house they drove into the desert in his camouflage Humvee.
“Dammit!” he said, tapping the gas dial. “We’re out.”
“I guess we’d better stay the night,” she suggested.
Sandy grabbed the rug and unfolded it carefully on the sand. When she looked round he was already down to his blue underpants. They ran out of gas every time they went into the desert. Luckily Pete always remembered the spare gas can in the morning.
The Box
When I got home that evening I pulled the curtains shut and rushed into the bedroom. I didn’t get out of that room for two whole weeks. The closest I got was answering the doorbell to let in grocery orders, a pizza delivery and signing for the package.
Two weeks of lying on the bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
The minutes merged into hours. The hours turned into days.
I’d placed the package on the bedside table. And every second I lay on that bed I mulled it over. The same question went through my head. Should I or shouldn’t I?
The package sat there. It felt like it was smiling at me, teasing me.
Should I, shouldn’t I?
No – not now. Not later. Never.
I promised I’d take it somewhere people didn’t go and hide it.
But I couldn’t. It kept looking at me, taunting me.
Of course I ignored it, but the temptation kept coming back.
Finally, that Friday morning, my head pounding, I opened it.
It was full of those little polystyrene nuggets. I dug my hand inside, but kept coming up with more and more squeaky nuggets. Dig deeper. I pushed my hand down to the bottom of the box.
There was no bottom to the box.
My hand was followed by my arm, my shoulder and my head. Then the box swallowed my whole body in one gulp.
I was swimming through packing material. Couldn’t see, couldn’t think, my mouth was full of the stuff.
Finally I hit the bottom. I caught my breath. My vision cleared. I stood up and took a look around.
I was in a box.
The box sat on the bedside table.
seven sworn sisters
In silence: that is how she will go. She will refuse to speak the language that does not fit her; the language that flaps loosely off her tongue and scratches her throat; the great conquering language with which she cannot make meanings. The family, her children and grandchildren, will sit by her bedside and hold her hands and implore her, but she will withhold the secrets of her passing.
She is the last of the seven sworn sisters, the youngest, and the keeper of the memories. All their past moments fly around her breast now, like birds, happy birds. She remembers being a girl, and laughing with the others, in a time when the whole world spoke the same language as her, when secrets meant closed doors and whispering in ears. But their world was defeated, their language starved, cordoned off from meaning. They became a floating island, an island of girls, floating in the middle of a noisy, senseless sea.
As long as they lived, they still spoke the language of their heart. When the first girl died, they sang the forgotten songs, they recited the unknown poems, they read her indecipherable letters and told each other the unimaginable story of her life. As each girl grew old and died, she passed on her secrets in the old language, until there was only one left, the last sister. She had a language all to herself.
It was a small, clear, precise language, intimate and wise. It was a body. It was a home.
No she would not speak the clumsy new words. She would not tell her sorrow and love, not even to her children and their children, though they cried. She would not attempt to make the translation. She would take her stories intact with her into the next world, take them to her seven sworn sisters, and let them burst out of her breast like a thousand happy birds.
