Tuesday, October 25, 2005
My next story. Any comments, especially critiques, are gratefully received. Oh and - if any of these characters seem familar to you, you're probably right :-.).
Desperado
She feels as if she is about to drown in a tide of humanity, one that surges out and threatens to swallow her as the sliding doors roll open. She forces herself to take a step onto the sea blue floor. The dots on the carpet blur, seem to whirl around her sandal. First one step, then another. The vortex of voices suck her in.
-if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you -
- crazy? I can’t take that through -
- hold this while I find the –
She does a clumsy breaststroke through the bodies, feels her way along the ropes dragging the heavy bag behind her. Faceless voices. Voiceless faces. A sudden space in front. A man waves. He seems very far away. “Excuse me!”
He’s wearing a gun-gray uniform, standing to attention behind a wall-like counter. He looks like a cardboard cutout. She wonders idly what would happen if she suddenly reached up and gripped his shiny satin tie. The numbers flicker red as she places her suitcase on the slick steel scales.
“And where are you going today?” the man asks. He sounds forced and jovial.
“Auckland,” she says. She finds her passport at the top of her handbag and places it on the desk.
He ruffles briskly through it. “And what are we going to do there, Miss –“ he finds the right page, and flickers his fingers over the computer keys. “ – Wu? Going back home?”
Home. The word floods through her, mocking her fragile defences, threatening to collapse them like so many sandcastles. Only a few hours ago she had clung to the anticipation of this moment, ached to get on the plane. Home, as if it would solve all her problems. As if it would wake her up from this dream, as if it would bring him back.
Luckily the man doesn’t seem to require an answer. He is already bending down, looping a long coded label through the handles of her suitcase. She hears herself speaking, as if down a long tunnel. She can’t even hear what she is saying, but he answers and then she marches away as if an invisible hand is pushing her.
Bodies surge around her, catching her up and depositing her in a front of a coffee counter. Someone in a stripy black apron, a wisp of blond hair straggling from underneath a black cap, takes the order that she gives automatically. The coffee machine stirs into a suppressed shriek.
“Would you like marshmallows in with that miss?”
“Yes, please.”
She takes the paper cup, hot and heavy with aroma, and takes a seat beside a window. The aluminium chair seems too fragile to hold her weight. Outside, the light claws its way along rusted benches, stalks parched gum trees, spearing them with long shadows. There’s a shipwreck in the courtyard. The things people will call Art. Sawtoothed prows erupt from a sea of pebbles. The wreckage claws impotently at the sky.
She finds her fingers at her throat again, fingering the smooth stone of the pendant. Its firm curves reassure her, tell her that she still exists. The stone gives off a faint heat, as if it’s stored her warmth.
She hadn’t wanted him to go to the airport with her. “I think we should say goodbye the night before,” she had said, firmly.
“Using your lawyer’s voice on me again, Tess?” he teased, touching her gently on the nose. She felt an answering tingle in her belly. Typical James. He had always been able to wriggle around the barriers she put up.
She tried to make her voice flat, emotionless. “I just think it’s better if we don’t have to say goodbye at the end,” she said. “You know why I need to go, if I don’t take this opportunity –“
He had touched her then on the lips, and laid his long body alongside hers on the mattress in his small cluttered room. The single bulb, painted last year during her glass painting phase, cast a fractured pink glow on the walls. She turned in his arms, ready to give in, but he hadn’t wanted to kiss her.
“I just want to hold you,” he said. He touched the greenstone pendant at her neck, the one he had given her on her birthday several years ago. His long fingers traced the curves delicately and then lingered on her skin. “I’m going to miss this,” he said.
Tessa sits and stares at the foam in her coffee cup. Rims of dried flotsam circle down inside the cup, towards the melted wreckage of the marshmallow. She raises the cup to her mouth and swallows, tasting the biting sweetness. Its sugar clings to the inside of her mouth.
She had seemed to settle in well. The partners at her firm had given her brief appraising nods when she had walked in that first morning, and she had taken that to mean they would give her a chance to prove herself. So she worked, often into the evening. She would emerge from the stairwell to find her car the last one left in the carpark, and drive along the lighted streets of her new city, watching the couples on the sidewalk who leaned against each other as they walked, their laughter audible even through the closed car windows.
The people seem to hurry upside-down around her, reflections on the polished floor of the food hall. Their coloured shadows billow and surge like shoals of multicoloured fish. At the next table an old man is hunched over a plate of crumbled slice with custard oozing from its pores. He has watery grey eyes like tepid pools. There’s a blanket draped around his thin shoulders, as if hiding a pair of wings. She picks up the empty cup, squeezes past his chair to get to the rubbish bin murmuring, “Excuse me”. He stares right through her, as if she is invisible. She shoulders her bag, and looks for the signs to the departure gates. There’s a silent flow of people ascending on the escalators ahead.
The phone call had come while she was asleep, rattling through the thin walls of the apartment she had now rented for six months. “Is this Tessa Wu?” an older woman’s voice asked, pulling her out of a dream in which she was lost in the middle of a grey city.
“Yes. Wha –“
“I’m terribly sorry to disturb you. I’m Sarah, the supervisor of the Intensive Care Unit here at Auckland Hospital. Are you the girlfriend – I mean ex girlfriend – of James Green?”
The hazy reality of the dream jolted further away from her. “Yes, but –“
“I’m very sorry, this is going to come as a huge shock to you. James has been involved in a serious accident. He is…he is” – and here the voice faltered slightly. A pause. “He’s not expected to last the night, and his family asked that I call you.”
She could feel the breath squeezing out of her lungs, the world simultaneously expanding and contracting around her. She hoped she was still asleep. She wanted to be still asleep.
“Tessa?” The voice was gentle. “Tessa, I know this is very hard for you. Take your time.”
She’s a tiny speck floating in an enormous ocean, invisible to the people on the shore. As she tries to keep her head above the water she can see them walking around on the beach, looking into the rockpools, searching for treasures. She can’t feel her arms and legs, can’t raise them to ask for help. Somehow, with great effort, she drifts towards a rock which becomes a uniformed man. She hands her boarding pass and passport to him. “Good afternoon and how are you today?” he says without looking up. He has short close cropped hair. He looks exactly like the stern unsmiling photo on his identification badge. Stamp. Stamp. His eyes flicker summarily over her face.
She takes the passport from him, moves toward a bank of machines attended by more uniformed men. She lays her handbag on the conveyer belt and unslings her passport pouch. The red light on the XRay machine blinks on and off.
“How was he hurt?” Tessa felt her mouth moving, but the voice didn’t seem to be hers.
Sarah’s voice came emptily down the line. “Another car hit him. He was thrown from the vehicle. He has a badly fractured skull.”
“Is he – is he …..” Tessa struggled to pull a voice from out of her nightmare.
“He’s on life support, but we don’t know if he can hear anything.” A pause. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
Tessa fingers the pendant again as she sits. The greenstone spirals smoothly under her fingers, its shape that of an embryonic fern frond. The air hostess stops momentarily beside her seat. She has a tight smile, the edges of her face stretched like a balloon skin. She’s close enough for Tessa to see the mascara on her lashes, a spiked fence around drops of ice blue iris.
Her body seemed to want to turn itself inside out. Her mind was screaming at her, ordering to her to wake up from this impossible dream. A hundred questions fought to be heard, to be voiced, yet she stayed silent.
“Tessa?” Sarah said patiently.
“I’m getting on the first plane in the morning.”
“I know dear, but – he might not make it.”
The room seemed to constrict on her like a cage. A sigh came out of her, a sigh that gained voice until it became a cry. Her breath started coming in great sobs.
“Can you tell him something for me?” This, high pitched, so wavering she was not sure she could be understood.
“Of course.”
“Tell him –“ the image of a nurse bending over James’ sleeping body came to her. It seemed oddly incongruous, clichéd, just like what she was about to say. But now she meant every word. “Tell him that I love him.”
The engines whir into life, their energy seeming to surge through her as the plane gains speed, hurtling faster and faster across the tarmac. Tessa hunches into the seat, her shoulders clenched, eyes closed. As she feels the plane leave the ground she opens her eyes and the tears come. The world beneath her is tilting and shrinking, the buildings fading to tiny raised squares. The sea seems to spill over the rocks guarding the grey harbour. A wisp of cloud slides past the window, momentarily obscuring her vision, and when it clears Tessa sees the sun again, shining weakly over the sea.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 10:27 pm
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