That one night, that one morning: that will remain, I will
have that. That clean, crisp memory, as
fresh as a new banknote, it’s details always precise, not dog-eared by the
obscuring airs of time. It’s sensations
always so easy to summon, free from the hazes of night or alcohol which mark
our other encounters. That morning we
were divine in our unforeseen ability to be ordinary. I had conspired with the sandman, lulling her
to sleep so that I could remain beside her.
Watching, for hours. I had played
a trick with the night and slipped us so briefly but so preciously out of
deviancy and into that warm light shone so generously on the mundane.
For the first time, I saw the other side of the night, after
the commotion and the heat, when the rumpled sheets are pulled from the floor
and made functional, dry and straight and innocent. The single pillow recovered and placed below
her head. The young body demands so
little for comfort. Even the curtains, unintentionally
left open overnight, were guiltless, and as dawn came her unknowing flesh
enjoyed a rare bask in the sun, though in its whiteness, its translucency, it
seemed it might evaporate.
I stroked her until she slept, running a finger down the
bridge of her nose, and then moved my heavy body away from her. I let her lie alone, a thick white brush
stroke curving down the mauve of the bed, twisted at her waist, finishing at the toes of her tightly bound legs. She lay like a furless creature upon a forest
floor. But she did not rest, she was constantly
tugged at by a furious imagination which brought on sudden, desperate breaths
and jolted her unconscious limbs. From
outside of that hot little head I saw her body losing its ability to soar
mid-flight, and the sudden arrival of abysses along familiar-seeming pavements. I saw her fingers flicker, hoping for an
outreached hand from across the cliff-edge, or for some opportune weapon to
wield before intruders. Her dreams were
not kind. When I asked, she told me that
sleep never treated her gently but also that, since she never remembered the
details, it was only her sleeping body which suffered. She thought this healthy, a sort of purging
of evil chemicals which might otherwise afflict her conscious mind.
It was always chemicals.
I supposed it was symptom of her upbringing, the world has come to a
level of devastation where the emotionally crippled adults have come to look at
the young with pity rather than envy. In
the heat of the increasing wreckage someone, somewhere deemed it necessary to
educate all subsequent generations in a resolutely clinical fashion, gradually
but efficiently eradicating the legitimacy of ‘emotion’. The education that the new generations received
was built around the objective of conceptualising ‘emotion’, making it seem elective,
rather than an explicit feature of humanity.
I remember the days when it first became clear that the term ‘emotional’
was derogatory, synonymous with immaturity and degeneracy. Also, paradoxically but unavoidably, it
became associated with those very elders who were their educators, those who
still pandered to their ‘gut feelings’, those who cried when the bombings came
closer and closer to home.
To her, it seemed perfectly appropriate for her sleeping
body to thrash as it did, practical even, for the idea of even a trickle of
such intensity entering into her conscious mind appeared, to her, like the
manifestation of something perverted. Of
course, I had never witnessed her nocturnal throws before that night, but she
was well accustomed to the idea as she had been violently woken by many a
concerned friend over the years, and had soon given up on sleeping partners.
This notion she also presented as a show of her maturity, her progression from
the lowly ‘dependent’. A human companion
was to her as a nightlight to a crying baby.
Not that it mattered, for the curfews had come in to place when she was
twelve and the practice of allowing one’s children out of the house – even to
be stowed in another, familiar household – was lost to paranoia.
Over the years she had spoken of her ‘energetic body’, her
‘active bedtime’, in youth it was naïve and endearing, yet with age came
self-awareness and an increasingly ambiguous tone that suggested both humour
and frustration in such equal measures that it expressed neither, and always
left the insinuation of carnality too palpably hanging in the air. This tone would always incur a firm silence in
Charlotte, while Tom would chuckle as if in on the joke and for the hundredth
time recommend a good hit of valium, “like back in the desert” and grin at me –
cue: a heavy sigh and hasty exit from Charlotte. Years later it occurred to me that these
comments may have been for my benefit, and that perhaps these statements were
not made beyond my presence. This would
explain Charlotte’s severe reaction, and Tom’s stock answer which somehow
seemed to be attempting to bind him and I together as a unit, hoping to
obstruct his alien daughter. She was
never in the least perturbed.
And so that night when she turned abruptly and her arm flew
through the air to land on my chest, hard enough to make me choke, I was
unsurprised, but I feared waking the other slumbering Ardens as I spluttered to
catch my breath. I didn’t think to shake
her awake and untwist her form to lie flat.
In fact, the offending limb shyly withdrew from my chest, furling up
under her breast like a snake that had falsely struck out at a quivering leaf
thinking it a mouse. Later on her dream
had suddenly demanded that she face east rather than west and her hair was
thrown across my face, flicking my open eyes, I had picked up her mass of hairs
and placed it on her shoulder, noting the changing scents from base to tip, the
ends smelt of Charlotte’s coconut shampoo, while the tangled middle held her
scent. I’ve heard of this done in
perfumeries I’m sure: spraying the centre of a length of rope where it is then knotted
and kept in a cool space in order to hold its fragrance.
I speak of our nocturnal activities as if they were
habitual, as if we were legend, but in truth there was only that night. But that was the only night and the only
morning that I need ever know. For those
eight hours her and I were, we simply were. And despite all my schemes, I did eventually
sleep, I let my guard down when I saw light through the exposed windows and in
that instant I fell. I dreamt of sand in
my gums. And against all logic taught by
fiction or myth, she was still beside me when I woke. I had only slept for an hour or so, and in
that time her throes had arranged the sheet in a crumpled line between us,
while she lay on her back with her arms by her sides, and unmoving, her eyelids
still and her head tilted up to let her heavy breathing be easy, she was
finally resting.
In that moment I quickly thanked whatever almighty power that
she could not see herself from that angle, and monster could be born from such
arrogance.
In that moment she could not have moved, as I pushed down
the creased sheet between us to gaze at her.
A siren snoozing at the bathing pool.
Her skin was coated in a thin sheen collected over her feverish night. She had been embalmed for me, the sort executed
by some expert hands which had been kept for a lifetime in air-tight gloves,
reserved for the one occasion which marked their lives as significant – the
embalming of the holy body of their queen.
That was the only night we spent together, the only time our
sleeping bodies met and were finally allowed to acquaint themselves fully with
each other without the tedium of minds and speech disturbing their
conversation.
