Sophia

“God,” she said. The word had been with her all day by now.

  The question that had struck her down was mediocre: why the alphabet is in the order it is in, why there is even an order... She remembered learning to write with special handwriting pens, fumbling down the lines and out of the edges of squares, and little smiley stickers and stars slapped against the margins by her teacher.

  She left the rope within the cupboard. It had been a very exciting day, going to the shop to get it. Simon had been at school. The summer holidays were almost upon them. Whilst she worked in that hell, that shop with that woman and all the others, and the stifling air and the dwindling visitors, all gone to the internet, all fled from reality... and at that, Sophia realised that she was forty. Time had fled too: most of her life lived before she was nineteen. All the things she had dreamt of doing, she would have time to do them.

    Simon would be back home in an hour. It was his birthday next week. The whole morning had been spent finding the right wrapping paper for the gift.  She would go to the library tomorrow, to answer the question of the alphabet.

    She had seen two dead men in her life. The second had been at university, at Cambridge. She had returned years later, whilst her son had been on a school trip.  Silence everywhere, save for the ebbing of cars as they cut through air. She had paused as she had passed some brambles that rose behind a wall, glimmers of moonlight caught upon their edges. She had stood there before. Adam had stood beside her. So close that the hair on his arm had brushed lightly against her skin. They had stood there, way back when, and had wondered whether to do nothing with their day, to just lie beneath the sun. That was then. All alone this time, save for a car at the street’s end, a single light on inside. She had passed it by. The man within had been old. A bell had rung, in a tower somewhere. She had checked her watch, thin silver glinting slightly against the street lamp. It had been given to her on her twenty first birthday. From her mother, her lonely mother, in a little black box. One day she had broken it, and it had never been the same again. The time three o’ clock, the night ablaze with black, and the man still in his car, still there with silver hair and dying skin, like a suit... what must he have been, eighty, ninety? And still in his car. What must he have seen? She had cast one look back towards him. Sophia had then gone back down the road towards her old college. Rang the bell. The porter phoned an ambulance in the end. The old man had died some hours before, sitting there for a reason that would never be known, waiting for something that had never arrived. Something insincere like this.

  She went to sleep.

  When her eyes opened, they were just close enough to the picture upon the wall to see it without loss of detail. It showed a gaunt lady with very red cheeks looking down at the corner of an ocean, her bare feet upon the sand, incongruous with her blood-red dress, loose upon her bare bones. She peered down unnaturally. There were dim suggestions of a reflection that Sophia had never noticed before. There were other things. Children digging mysterious holes. Birds bleating against the blue-red sky. Even a dog somewhere. Sophia would have quite liked to have had a dog for her son, but they were not around enough. It would have made them three. What had happened to her, she wondered. Rope holding, almost snapping, in the blink of an eye, in the rustle of a curtain, in the swinging of a lawn mower somewhere as it was folded up and there were just faint whistling birds and a buzzing from a bee (you did not see them much, now. She had enjoyed watching them dart, to and fro). Her eyes almost shut. Lying there. Telephone rang.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Yes, speaking... ... ... ... No, I’m very happy with my current contract, thank you. Goodbye.” And when she placed the phone down upon its stand, and the beep came as electricity flooded to recharge it, her fingers settled for a moment, almost still, against the plastic. She remained there for a moment, her face feeling like a weight hung against it. Sophia stared at the buttons and the numbers, thinking of the number she used to have. She couldn’t remember this one. For the life of her, it did not feel like home. She pulled her hand away, and still sat there, perched on the arm of the old sofa. Some time later (she had not heard the door open), her son was standing a few metres away, taking off his jacket and casting looks around the room for letters or remotes or whatever else. His name was Simon, and he had been fourteen for several years.

  Her greatest pride, the sort of happiness that comes only from the validation of the world, not from birth or death or a carousel of splintered memories and holidays, not from a son... that pride had come the day she had finished a novel. This was three days ago, a wound healed as if it had never been.

  “How was your day?” he asked. Then they did not speak until dinner. He sat there with his laptop, playing some game as night emerged. She brought him pizza. “Could I have a friend round tomorrow?” She said yes.

  When they had first gotten the internet, Adam had been there. When they got the internet, there were those noises, beeps, and screeching, and they could not phone anyone. Then Simon was only allowed on for a little while. Then they paid a little more, and could go on for longer. Simon made a little web page with things forgotten now. He got an email address. By this time Adam was departed. He was dead, although they would never know. Time passed, and now Simon could speak on the phone at the same time. All the same, the phone went mostly unused. A man started to exchange emails with Simon. He sent a few back, and would close the window whenever anyone (it was only Sophia) entered the room. There was no beeping now, and all of it was fast. One day he searched for his father’s name.

  And later Simon kissed his mother goodnight, as he had always done, and then Sophia was once more alone with her thoughts, the plastic clock above the television screen ticking away. She wondered whether she might read. She had not read a book for a long time. Surrounded by them all day in hell and stupor. The bookcase was a little messy. Full of Adam’s books. He hadn’t taken many of them with him. A grand pastiche of classics and crap... with half of them, half of them with half-torn covers and well-worn pages with the hue of desert-sand. She read one until she fell asleep upon the sofa. The book was old. Older than anything else that was there.

    When her father had hung himself, she had been nine and had been playing with some sheets out in the garden, draped round the washing line to form a strange sort of tent. Inside there had been dolls and her brother’s toys, all mixed together in a deluge of monsters and ladies. The dog was out of the house then. It was as if it had never been there. She had found him in his bedroom. She had gone there to get some more sheets and some of her mother’s clothes to try on, and all games came to a close.

  Sophia had caught her mother one day talking about her to a stranger, almost, practically a stranger. Her mother had said that she was taking it badly, that she had been acting silent, that she was not over it, that it was more than sad, that it was the end for her. Her mother did not know that Sophia had heard all this.

  The next day Sophia experienced her last moment of greatness. It was in the words of a woman at the library. The funny thing was that she had forgotten them later, and had troubled herself greatly, despaired over the wording when she had tried to write it down in her scrap book, hadn’t even touched her book in months but she couldn’t get it right, and she started crying.

  The mother of man went upstairs and did it.

  When Simon found her, he saw the legs dangling first, as he walked up. As he entered the room he saw a man standing in the shadows, his face in shadow, smiling. He saw his mother, and the rope, and her swinging slightly, and the man smiling, and he moved a little forward then a little back, and then more back, until he was back round the wall, out of sight of the both of them.

  His phone began to ring then. It was Ophelia. He answered it.

  “Hi,” she said. He said nothing. “Hello?” He pressed red on the phone, took a lot of effort to do, and dropped it down. He stalked round the wall, until he could see her hanging shape again. There was no man there now. He felt tired. She was swinging a little. His face had a shiver, a tremble, and the phone was ringing again. Downstairs. Simon left to answer it at once.

  “No, we don’t need a new contract.” And then hung up.