A Week With You

A week with you.
Sunday
The room has windows that let in a lot of light, airy roof high up and the centre is the bed. Stars on the roof, a little stick on nightsky to lie back and look at and shelves of African ornaments and books on painting, life and how to self help the soul books. The covers are warm and her skin. A bow and arrow in the corner from night job as cupid or a tribal leader’s gift gives the feeling of an ancient curio shop and I like it here, old ornamental fireplace and all.
This feels so normal she says with a butterfly kiss to the air and a lazy spin on to her back, exhausted with the Sunday morning exercise of waking up. I'm tired and don’t want to go to the hour of tutoring promised to the mother of a friend. She has the vague idea that I’m a physics prodigy because I did quite well in the exam half by chance. In reality I have very little to impart except a proficiency for time wasting built up in dusty halls of schools and college and jobs meandered through, but I’m broke. So I’ll be late I know, but always her hair and her face and her half awake innocent morning voice make it hard to leave, and I won’t for a while. I know ill love this girl until I'm dead but sometimes I look at her and see indifference, glancing back over her shoulder while she walks down the street ten paces ahead. I feel like a drink but cant so I lie back again and ask wearily when her boyfriend gets back in the country because I think it’s in the next day or two. I rarely ask directly about him and the supple back tenses and she tells me Saturday. A week away and I know I won’t see her from the day he sets foot till the day he flies out. He’s nice, older and balding smiles and the family all love him, she seems to as well but what do I know about these things. I get up and make ready for an hour of angles and theorem.

I saw her again that evening for a brief hour or so and then she called me up later to tell me about something she had remembered. We ended up spending a long time on the phone while she read me out segments of her old diaries that she has religiously kept since childhood. Old stories and beautiful, nothing current that she thought would make me uncomfortable with all the shadows in the recent past. Looking back with her at a time when she was still wrapped in scaffold and uncertain with all her childish love and who she is now, it was all new to me. I went to bed shortly after and lay back and stared at the black while thinking about it. A few days later I woke up very anxious and on the verge of a panic attack all day, that wasn’t a good day.

Monday
The aeroplanes were singing in a high pitched whine and it was sunny out, sunny enough to warm the tarmac under the bare feet. Shorts on too and delicious outside. We sat on the grass by the side of the road in something like a dip and watched the horse in the field wander about, munch some grass, wander on easy like. The sun made me hyper and I rolled in the grass and pawed at her and broke her glasses while messing about. I felt bad while she laughed at her unlevel eyed reflection in the car window. I should get her some new ones but by the time I've saved enough she could be on a beach fanned by the sea breeze and unconcerned anywhere in the world. In the car home I still felt bad but she has a way of forgetting these things easily and I was glad of it. I climbed out of the car awkwardly and walked back up the lane.
Tuesday
She came from the airport direct and we talked for a while and she told me about her brother and his brand new baby son that she adores. She shows me a photo with her and the little man and I think right then that I don’t want children with anyone but her, no one. She’s the impossibly beautiful model mother on the TV that smiles in her clean kitchen and watches while her baby crawls the newly polished floor. In the photo she lays him out with a smile while I sat on the other side of the world with a five hour time difference. So the afternoon was pictures of her and the baby and inevitably kissing and after a while she realises her phone has been ringing in the other room and gets up from the bed. Breathlessly talking and admitting that she forgot while I sit there and feel bad for distracting her but she has to leave and a quick rolled cigarette and she’s gone till the next time.
In the meantime ill think about her more, think about her less, but either way the mind runs away and I think of duvet tents and soft sheets to lie in and being Columbus of her stomach smooth and warm, I cant help myself. And so sitting around becomes usual, vacant thoughts in space. Imagine you wandering from room to room and kiss you and look through windows and mark the retreat of the sun down the lawn before evening. Everything is usual. I read the news and swing between nuclear meltdowns and peoples revolutions in Africa and the hovering of a world police in the background. Democratic education and upheaval and everything that everyone thinks they want with maybe reactors going off like popcorn around the globe, radioactive tsunamis and Jesus perched on his cloud rubbing his greedy little hands waiting for Apocalypse and his I told you so sermon. Evening is here and I know I'm going to play football in an hour so I shiver myself into the kitchen and make myself a cold meal.

Wednesday
She told me and I sat silent in the car for the rest of the journey, catching myself every time I felt something like awkwardness and then sitting back and admiring it almost, letting it fester. I don’t know whether she felt it at all but she would burst into random snippets of song and then stop mid sentence unusually embarrassed about not knowing the words. It took us an hour to get in, long hour. And I wanted to talk and ask her why she would go away anywhere and what happened to vague ideas of going somewhere together because I would have liked that, really, but I don’t say a thing and murmur ill excuses at her when she worries at me. 

I had promised her that I would help out with an art project she was doing. We had filmed before, in the airport and an empty stadium that everything echoed in. the airport made me think of grabbing her hand and leaving to the sun but no. My involvement was limited to walking the wrong way up an escalator trying to stay in the same spot. That’s how I spent my Wednesday morning, revelling in inertia and sweating like a rapist while she smiled at my red face trying to slog upwards going on forever. Unknowingly apt. It was a wrap, and while drifting backwards down the escalator with twitching calves I caught her reflection in the sheen of the glass laughing, smiling again. I drifted way back down and thought as she slipped out of view of how she was going away. That would be it I feel, six months on the sand in a wilderness of their own creation and that would be it. I'm thinking of the day she comes or calls with pregnant news or engagement and how I’ll go on unconvinced that she ever really feels anything but necessity for this person or that but I know really that really, she’s not like that at all. So she’ll be gone and ill have to go somewhere to forget and I don’t know where that could be. Every bikini beauty will remind me, every kind face, every mother and child or young couple bound together in the wind, they will all remind me of her. I’ll lurch from corner to corner horrified by memories and in the evenings try and stamp them out sat in dark rooms. I only know this because it won’t be the first time I’ve done it, I imagine I've taken quite a few years off my life with this idiosyncratic bent of character. While others are more robust I throw in the towel before there’s a whiff of blood, before the bell has sounded, alone in the hall before the fight throwing a pristine white towel down. 

I'm sitting up here alone thinking of that, fantasising about brain tumours that I can almost feel bubbling below my cranium, almost urging them on with visions of hospital bed conversations and her soft voice reading to me. Another character quirk perhaps but these things occur to me and who am I to stop them?


Thursday
It’s not something I do offhand, just call her up in the middle of the afternoon for ice cream or tea and cigarettes. Out across the open ocean that I can see from my window miles of space and I'm sitting behind closed doors thinking of the telephones and the afternoon ahead. I have a slight headache from the early morning rum and I can’t help but feel the wasted day. She’s behind high glass and windows and bare white plasterboard sticking fragments of pictures up and laughing with the bearded old man cutting up cardboard boxes for his project. She’s young and peering out on the city, her third floor apartment a perched retreat from the mist of the port town below. I'm useless on the street, faces and pointy shoes and tailored phantoms and in the evening I can’t imagine, but all the same I catch the bus in and climb the familiar steps and sit and wait for the night.

So we’re telling stories and I tell her about a penthouse and two delicate skinned Mexican beauties and a pool and how the night extended into day and she tells me her stories, ripped raw in the African night by a stranger, caught by the glimmer of teeth and a lure with leaves scratching and heat pulsing in the stillness outside the village. And she wants to go back there and take him down to the quiet hollow lit by shafts of late sunshine, flies small as dust mites warming themselves while the two rustle quietly down to love. I drink too much and eat cigarettes and pass out early and I can tell she’s not happy but all the same I wake up in the morning in bed and cared for and no puke on the covers so a relative success.

Friday
In the morning she’s always brisk. Groaning and stretching out of bed and soon enough she’s smiling and asking the morning in the window why we don’t always get up at this time. I agree and disregard the feeling of haemorrhaging I get with early starts because it’s hard not to see the beauty of things in that place with that particular person when she’s waking the sun like that and pattering about pyjama’d, if you could only see it. Coffee and porridge and the day begins, she needs to get some things and I hold her bags while waiting outside changing rooms with a healthy morning milkshake and chocolate on the chin. The morning bustle of the streets is all sidelong glances and backwards looks from the men with envious girls and while she stops and buys flowers for her mother I smoke and think of how it could be, entranced and quiet.

Saturday
While it means enough that I sit here and record it while the days and weeks like this pass softly without inscription its bound for tears, headed strangely for wreckage in the future. Its warm skin and an hour’s fun and a substitute to pass the time and when the memory strikes on a beach or café seat it wont be painful, not completely. A friend’s face in a photograph album or the shared feeling of lost love in a dusty scratched matinee, something like that I imagine. While I know I love her now the dark time and visions of waking up alone with a crying baby and her on a quiet night ship to a secret cove somewhere catch me back and I stop. A bit of me will be driven mad by her I'm sure of it now. The other night in the toilets of that bar and the ladylike groaning behind the cubical wall that I recognised from two dark nights ago. I was about to get down on my knees, right down on the piss soaked floor and peer under the door at two complete strangers doing something that was none of my business until I saw myself in the mirror and stopped and walked out and could barely talk to her or look at her without seeing a faint glimmer of my future madness in her.

A while before she left we went to the doctor’s office for the pill and while she was inside talking to the lovely lady doctor I was outside sitting on the wall thinking of the sad little over eager child that wanted to come out but we weren’t ready for yet. Maybe he’ll have a little brother who wont share his elder’s impatience and maybe we’ll sit back in a summer swing chair and watch him down the lawn together, watch him pull apart the curtain of leaves and chase the dog, wash him and put him to bed together.

Sunday
She called down. I had been in the hills for a night and a day drinking and making noise in the open mountains so I had been un-contactable but when I got back she told me she had been trying late at night and the next morning, said she’d been worried. I had been drinking for the day and to kill the two hours before bed I kept drinking, red wine, nice merlot. Laughs, feet on my face and her doesn’t it feel nice? Lie back laughing. The T.V. had bad vaudeville song and dance on it and she sang along with a slow grin while I watched her. She had to go then, she was off to the airport to trail off mid sentence, but I knew and that was it. The thought of them together was in bed with me all night; I didn’t sleep well at all. She had left her jacket and called in for it the next day. I was sore headed and my skin felt raw and she was here again for a while and then she left. I had to tell her that I cant really see her anymore. She trembled a little and I sat in the car while we had a smoke and then she was off again, don’t know when ill see her again.