The Way It Is
This is the way it is. By day he worked on the building site, the alkaline lime burning flakes off his bare hands. By night they rubbed against each other, struggling to ignite their excess energies. Hard scales of skin press on her soft thighs. Abraded fingertips probe, blunted with calloused skin, capable of perceiving softness only. In the small hours of each night the hot struggle would begin anew, reaching further uncharted depths, until the grey dawn bothered him and he swung out of bed to pull across the curtains wondering when he would get a decent sleep. Wondering if everything he saw and felt through the day was distorted by an intoxicating sleep deprivation. Two hours later he was sitting on a crate in the back of a van, being rattled and shaken down lines of traffic. The morning dampness evaporated from his limbs, though there was no sun to draw the dampness from the streets.
At the site there were three of the robust and three of the gracile variety. The robust have a thick sturdy torso, rounded limbs. A red blush rises to their cheeks and throats when the wind blows wet and blustery. Over mugs of tea they talk about a game of football they played. They are ashamed of the sound of their own voices except when they are drinking. They have large bushy eyebrows and their strong, pungent morality repels him.
The gracile are graceless actually, they lurch along hunched over, always watchful. Lantern jaws, pursed lips, veins that stand up on the back of the hands: these are their features. They have strong accents which they make no attempt to disguise, and they speak in ciphers of sarcasm. In a cold breeze they pull their jackets up around the blue of their throats and suck on a cigarette.
One type is descended from the forest dwellers who dragged firewood along the ground. The other ran with the wolf, loped along the savanna to a drum beat winding in and out of mind.
It's a game of classification he plays to keep his mind occupied. If your mind falls asleep for a whole day, so you have done nothing to mark off that day, so you never have a special thought, then that day slides away and is gone, and it adds to the waste, all the multitudes of lives since the pyramid slaves in Egypt.
But it is a good feeling to hear the rumble of the delivery truck, pallets loaded six high with fifty kilo sacks of plaster, and to know that there's nothing you can do, the decision is not yours, and for the next few hours there will be no loose moments and the obligation to think is lifted from you. That's a time he can allow himself to chat at ease with Martin the Poke and James Bungalow, and North Strand, and Mark the Portugal Lad.
Martin comes from the northern suburbs. He cheerfully boasts of how his father has been unemployed for decades. Only two of the old schoolmates on his road have jobs.
"I have an hour trip in here every morning," he says, dropping his hands in amazement at himself. It's a mystery; by rights he should be on the dole like everyone else he knows, but there you are, sure it's good crack. He laughs in indignation. "All hanging around there waiting on training schemes and they could just go around a few places like this and pick up work. But they couldn't be bothered their arses. Lazy fecking bastards shouldn't get any dole at all. They think I'm fecking stupid for getting up in the morning to come here! They don't like me for it. I'm letting the side down." He grins, says it with no malice. "I'm telling you, they should all be put on a boat and sent off somewhere. I don't know where, maybe Russia."
He is delighted to see you laugh, he starts to laugh too, a sneer that has boiled over. You wonder if he is leading you down a path and will abandon you there, your latent prejudices exposed. But is he that wily? Is he able to hide his true self like that? There is not much light of intelligence in his red-rubbed eyes. His slow voice seems to always end in I don't knooow or else he'll be back by four. Yet his laugh sounds like a sneer.
And is he gracile at all? Is he not rather a starved robustus? For he too turns brick red when the foreman calls him over. He scrapes the soles of shoes and nods rather than speak. Not like Mark the Portugal Lad who jabbers in his foreign accent.
"So they came around in white hats, we were all told to stop work. You you and you, come up here. I thought this is it now. Jesus. Maybe I can pretend to speak no English. Where are you from? the man asks. Portugal, I tell him. OK so name the most famous beer in Portugal. Me? I don't know. I don't drink beer. I don't go out to pubs. I drink Coca Cola. OK then. Tell me your favourite football team in Portugal. I don't watch football. Tennis is my sport. All right all right. Tell me eight cities in Portugal. Lisbon, Seville, Oporto, oh no, not Seville. Fuck it. OK says the man. Now you tell me where you are really from, which is it, Romania or Albania? OK Romania, I said. Do you know this boss is paying you lower than the legal minimum? Yes, I know that. I heard that. OK what he's doing is illegal, it doesn't matter if you have a visa or not. Nobody said anything until they wanted to pay the Irish workers the same amount. Now listen, you tell the truth and I'll be able to get your visa sorted out. You tell again that you're from Portugal and it will all go zilch, nothing. And then he goes and asks the others, where are you from, and they say Portugal Portugal Portugal. Because they are afraid. And he says, OK I can do nothing for you. I can't understand your language anyway."
Marcos grins like a schoolboy grown five foot tall and round to match. Nothing gets him down. The sandwich-makers love him. But today he replies so so, only so so when they ask him how he is. The problem is, he wants to get three weeks off in the summer, which is coming soon. Soon? It's only March. That 'soon' is worth thinking over. This is a man for whom the months fly by unaccounted, putting in his time, and then in a single rush he lives for three weeks, back in the outskirts of Bucharest where they slaughter a pig in a corrugated shed. It must be good to simply fill in time, all you have to do is have a laugh and make things more bearable. If all time is cursed then all that is required is to get a laugh out of things. There is no standing obligation.
But for the other workers the summer is just as much in the future as next Christmas. Things will be different then, things will change of their own accord. Come what may.
"Tell him you're taking the time off and he can do whatever the hell he likes about it. He's all mouth. He won't sack you, you're too useful."
"Really? You think he won't?" Marcos sounds surprised. "But I can't say that to him," he giggles, shocked at the idea of being wantonly rude.
"Do, do," Martin urges him with fanatic enthusiasm. "Tell him look, this is the way it is, you either give me those holidays or I'm out that gate."
Marcos stomped up the wooden steps laughing.
"Do that or I'll fuckin go up there and tell him meself I will," Martin roared.
Marcos blew a jet of air like a whale surfacing.
"I bet he won't fuckin tell him." Martin shook his head bitterly. "I tell you what, someone's gonna tell him pretty soon. You pay peanuts you get monkeys. Someone's going to tell him."
"No brains," Marcos sighs at lunch. He takes a tissue from a packet and flaps it out. Wipes his mouth gingerly. "They smoke dope all day and don't think about what they are doing. You, bring that from here to here. Stand there with this in your hands. You could tell them to hold up a light bulb and stand like a lamp-post and they'd do it."
And yet he laughs with them at their silly jokes. When he laughs his cheeks turn red like he's been drinking and they slap his back, their protegé from a distant land. When he scorns them there is only one to listen. But if Martin and Bungalow and the rest are stupid is it right to speak to them? Is it right to pretend to be their friend? There are pressing questions here, and he can't ask Marcos directly.
"No brains at all," says Marcos, "In my country if you don't have brains you go whit." He makes a downward motion. "You need brains to survive.". Robustus and Gracile needed brains to survive on the savanna of the rift valley. There the theme has cropped up again. He doesn't ask if other people think of human evolution, the invention of tools, the rise to consciousness. For days at a time (and without a proper night's sleep they blend one into the next) he can hold steady to the interpretation of the building site from the perspective of evolution. Other people don't think like this, he feels sure.
They stand outside the shop where they buy their breadrolls and slices of cheese. They dig their thumbs into the French rolls and split them, stuff in cheese, squeeze them flat. The other workers have gone to the chipper. Marcos doesn't eat chips and burgers, shit food he calls it, yet he is as round as a barrel.
"So how did you get the three weeks off?"
Marcos' shoulders heave in chuckles before he answers.
"I told him, look I need three weeks off in summer. No, he says, no way. It's for family reasons, I tell him. He looks at me, what family reasons? Ok, it's like this. I'm getting married to a girl in my village. Then you should see him! Good man good man, he says, and jumps up and slaps me on the back. Good fucking luck to you, he says." Marcos repeats this with gusto. "Good fucking luck to you! And then he gives me a look and says, hey, you told me you were not back in Romania for two years. You haven't seen this girl for two years and now you want to marry her? My family arranged it, I tell him. I never saw the girl in my life, not as a woman. The last time I saw her was when she passed by me on the way to school and we made fun of the girls. Fucking right he says, that's the way to have it. And they sent me a photograph of her so I know she is good-looking. I should have stopped there but I kept the story going. He was believing everything. Is she? Is she hot stuff? he says. Will you bring her over here? No no, I tell him, she'll stay with her family, I'll work another full year here to get some money together. Fair play to you, he says the old bollicks," Marcos laughed again, "give me a look at her. You must have a photograph there in your pocket. Go on you do, a wee photograph of the sweetheart. Of course you have one. And I said I'll bring it in tomorrow. Shit!"
"You can cut one out from there and give it to him." He indicates through the door of the shop, to the row of magazines on the top shelf. Marcos turns his head to see and several seconds later bursts into laughter. People stop on the other side of the street.
"And what about the wedding ring when I get back? Jesus, I have big problems. Now I'll have to give up the Irish girlfriend. Every morning he'll be winking at me, how is the fucking wife, hey?"
They lean against the wall, it's as good as sitting down. The women who pass in and out of the shop concentrate on their bags of shopping. They are not the type of woman anyone would be bothered looking at, but they avert their eyes and hurry past. A young man, Indian or Pakistani, serves behind the counter, smiling politely at everyone who comes to the till. For long periods there would be no customers, but he would keep himself occupied, wiping the counter or rearranging the display, out of pure habit. It's an easy job, he's inside out of the weather. Just have to nod and smile. You could feel envious but only for a few seconds, then contempt takes over.
"Pakistani," confirms Marcos. "You never see them on a building site. Too much brains." But he doesn't say it in a tone of admiration. "And you? Where are you from?" he asks.
"Can't you guess from my accent?" he asks surprised. They have been working together for several months now. "Did you never wonder before now?"
After lunch a pallet of forty-eight bags is waiting to be lifted up to the fifth floor. If a request is put in to the banksman the crane might get round to it before three. But the pallet would be dropped on the top floor, flat on the concrete. They would have to go down on hunkers to hoist the bags onto a shoulder, then rise up with the full weight. With the change to metrification the bags had increased in weight to fifty kilos. This strikes him as a slight anomaly. Usually the building site becomes an easier place. Rubber-handled tools. Hand cream in the washroom. There were signs advising on how to lift heavy loads. Bend the knees not the back. Signs to tell you to wash your hands. Soon there will be signs to tell you to wipe your arse.
"Fuck the crane. If we stand around waiting for it he'll only find some bullshit cleaning for us. If we do the bags we can take it easy, do it at our own pace. Three of us is only sixteen bags each. We'll have the whole afternoon for it."
Cleaning is a pointless activity; the dust gathers again in hours. And sweeping with a brush doesn't take any concentration, it leaves the mind free to wander, liable to be interrupted by a harsh voice. Better by far to have your time fully occupied than live through three hours with your mind just whisking back and forth like the brush.
Is it wasted time to talk with Martin? There is nothing to be learned from him. He is one of the millions and seeks only to settle there more comfortably, a smaller stone jostled with the others and sinking to the centre. Just as well talk to anyone else as talk to Martin, because that's what he wants to be, just another person, but was that enough reason not to talk to him?
He must steer a course between arrogance and submersion. There is no-one to guide him and no measure or mark of where he goes wrong. That's the cruelty of it - nobody will ever know his failing, or ever spot the final point of submergence. In twenty or thirty years he could be talking the language of potatoes and rain, be a sound man, fondly remembered in the local pub. Words which once were bullshit would now fit comfortably in his mouth. And the more complete his failure the happier he would be, unbothered by taunts from memory. Lose your mind and nobody will ever notice, that's the way it is.
Or if he resolutely refused all compromise? Daily life would grow more and more into a grotesque pantomime. He cannot play above it like Marcos does. He cannot resort to irony. The pleasures will turn dry - the hearty welcomes and how are you and look at the state of that. There would come a time of long walks through suburban streets, nights of fierce pressure behind the eyes. He would be blind to learn anything from others, perpetually standing to one side with a covering smile. The seductive pull of silence was drawing him in already, the power that comes from sealing in all thoughts, closing them in like in the boiler of a steam engine. Words are an indecent clamouring for attention.
But if he held himself too distant some day he would tire of the charade, buy a forty kilo bag of rice, pull the curtains over, and wait for the days to stop going by, still holding on tenaciously to that hard nugget: "I did not acquiesce." What now required immense tension to hold still within him would become a habit. When all choices were gone pride would remain.
For the couple of hours when they are unloading the truck he is relieved of this dilemma. This time is not his own, it is bonded time. And so he is free from the play of argument and counterargument.
Free of the need to envy, the envy of becoming what he would detest to be.
One hand curls around the back of the rectangular sack. A short tug and it slides forward on the layer of grit. Then a sweeping movement gathers it on his shoulder. The body learns this. It becomes easier after the first few weeks. Some day soon they will teach this in courses for workers. They will have lessons in how to make small talk to pass the time. More lessons in how not to offend each other. Extra lessons in how to smile.
A straight six strides to the bare doorway. Then the ascent begins. Two flights of stairs, a pause leaning against the window frame, then another two flights, and finally the last two. Six flights in all up to a landing where the bags can be dropped without ceremony. It matters little if they split, the concrete floor is dry and clean. Off the landing the rooms are bare, open to the sky. No windows have been installed yet. They stagger into the clear air away from the dust. Here they can take as long as they like to get their breath. No-one can see them; no-one would dare hint at laziness after that burst of effort.
Martin and he exchange a code of grins and nods. They have this in common: both are volunteers and not conscripts to this game. At the conclusion of each round trip they keep up a nonsense conversation.
"The worst is when you take off your socks in the evening and you know the way they're a bit damp, and in the morning they've set rock solid. I get out of bed and my socks scare me. Standing up in the corner looking at me."
"The cure for that is to batter them out. There's as good as new after. Did you ever notice the way the dust gets in the corner of your eye and turns to concrete there? I keep picking these hard little lumps out of my eyes."
"I swallow so much dust my crap sets like concrete. I'll tell you one thing, it's been a long time since I had diarrohea"
This was the way it was. The words they exchanged were a code of the first order, incapable of communicating thoughts of the second or third order. But not utterly incapable. Sometimes meanings escape between the ordinary words. Keep it normal, nothing unusual ever happens, we are all the same - that is the basic principle. But even so meaning breaks through. "It's weird to see all the houses so close together, people who don't know each other living right beside each other," Martin, even Martin, had said one Monday morning. He had returned from a weekend in Clare.
And what had he said to this? What sign of recognition had he given? Nothing. He had grunted a banality about the weather.
Yet when Martin drops another fifty-kilo bag onto that unsurfaced floor he sighs profoundly and gives a knowing wink. They are two agents submitting to a ruthless discipline for a mission they may not acknowledge.
The building site is a scar in the earth. Bands of shale in the brown soil, the layers turn to smooth grey the further the eye sinks. There is an incongruity between this dirt and the final smooth-surfaced hallways, sound investments worth millions of euros. This is as close as he will get to being in the luxury apartments: walking down the parquet hallway, into the bathroom, turning the gold-plated taps.
There are questions to consider. Does Marcos despise the others, the three slow-witted fat ones? Does he know real contempt? How can he speak the way he does about them and not be consumed with contempt?
Perhaps these questions have already been considered, in one of those tired muddled breaks in the day. It is Thursday now, he calculated. If he could get just one good night's sleep he would see the days behind him like a row of doors along a corridor. He could open one at will to see what had happened that day. But with the tiredness that is on him now, tomorrow could repeat and he would not notice.
Waste of space, Marcos calls them. And laughs. He will tell his absurd tales when he gets back to Romania. His friends gathered around in a corrugated shed talking about this damp, windy place. One of them throwing fistfuls of black pepper into the clotted blood. The newly slaughtered pig on a slanting table, white and dimpled like a fat girl's thighs. The entrails lying in a galvanised tub. An old neighbourman takes them away in a bucket. Marcos has described it all over several breaks, picking his words one by one. He'll be talking the same about his life here when he goes back for good. How they got so much done, and really knowing nothing about it. Maros will laugh and it will seem at heart that he loved them all. Yes, he'll say, I miss it all.
When he was young did he lie awake thinking, how do you fall asleep; and then a next night, what will become of me ten years from now? And does he look at himself and wonder at what he has become? And do the years of containment build up to something? Is the pain of effort accumulating somewhere towards a conclusion?
For Marcos the equation is clear. Every week another installment accumulates in the bank. Back at home he will buy an apartment straight off the plans. He will rent it out and, along with his brothers, invest more money in a hotel.
If these moments are not building up to anything, then why this constant feeling of preparation? He is holding himself ready for the hard fall that will expose the knowing and the sleepwalker, but it will never arrive.
Up on the fourth floor he loosens the hem of his shirt and shakes out the lime dust. His legs feel comfortably tired. It was decent work today, not like being stooped over sanding for hours. There will be no backache tonight. Someone on ground is coiling a flex lazily. The clank of a lock-up door, a sudden diminishment of noise from one or other of the compressors being switched off. Time to take a look around to leave nothing out for the night. The three robust labourers slap their dusty trousers and spit wads of phlegm. The thin ones snivel against the wind, glad another day is nailed into place.
"Where is that new Chinese guy?" asks Marcos. "He's the first Chinese I've seen on the buildings over here. Fair play to him." He laughs at these phrases he has picked up.
"A Chinese fellow? What's he like?"
"What do you think? Like anyone else. People are the same wherever you go."
"Are they?" he asks, interested, here is something. "Do you think they are? Do you think we're all much the same?"
"Sure," Marcos assures him, the weight of his hundred-and-thirty kilo body behind the statement.
On the way home he picks up a twenty-euro call card for the dark-eyed Latvian girl who moved in three weeks before. All day she studied English from pulpy Latvian books with ragged edges. Her eyebrows arch closer together as she reads. In a certain light, when all you can see are those eyebrows and the shape of her nose and mouth, she looks beautiful. The rest of the time she looks like a different person.
He puts the card on the table but can't begin to talk. To talk, chatter, say anything at all to keep the conversation going. It's a low low thing to do. She looks over her book, she sees there is no need to speak. There is a pain above his nose. It is the tension between the space behind the eyes and the outside world. He is too watchful, too much aware. Sometimes his nose bleeds with the concentration, but it can't be that, realistically. It must be the lime dust. He touches his hand to his nostrils but there is no warm smear.
Hello, he says, there's a card there.
Why? she asks.
No reason, he says.
In a pot on the cooker he sees peeled boiled potatoes. The water is still hot. Perhaps they have been left for him but he can't bear to speak just yet. He fries some fish and opens a tin of bean. It's too brutish to sit and eat at the table while she reads. The chomping noises might disgust her. It's been a long day, he needs to eat quickly. He takes his food into the bedroom. When he has finished he is full and feels better.
Did you leave these for me, these potatoes?
Yes, she says.
Thanks, he says. She looks up sharply. Already too many words. This is making too much of things. If she cooked food for him it was for her own reasons and he was not to presume. He wants them to be content to orbit each other like planets, and not pretend that a closer connection is possible. Pretence is odious to him. He wants to have respect for others.
He folds back the undersheet and sits on the exposed section of mattress. This is to avoid getting grit between the sheets. When he flops down on the bed the motion continues in his head, an effect of extreme tiredness. He tries it again but the effect is gone. The room has lilac-painted walls. Nails stick out in places, there are traces of sticky tape and bluetack from a previous tenant. A two-bar electric heater gathers dust. A wardrobe, and beside it a dresser with three rows of shelves on top. Several library books. The dry skin of his fingertips fails to grip the page to turn it. The paper edge catches in a scale of skin. He breathes moisture onto his hands, clasps them together.
Neanderthal man hunted in small groups on the steppes of Europe during the last ice age. He had a language, bodily decoration, musical instruments and burial of the dead. Their voicebox structure was different. Probably they spoke in a high-pitched nasal tone. There is a theory that they sang all the time. They were people, certainly, but not humans like us. A species apart. No word from their language, no riddle they may have posed has been passed down. Their line is extinct.
We must not suppose that thoughts can emerge and vanish without trace. It is better to think of the Neanderthal as a lumbering, dimly-aware creature.
He looks again at the evolutionary tree. Robustus, Ergaster, Habilis, Erectus. The others are only of passing interest. With the Neanderthals it is only time that separates us. The artist's impression shows a brutish set of the jaw, eyes sunken in, a massive frame. In his hands he bears a carved spear.
How can you get a job without English, he had told her. Learn English first, two months. Then you can look for a job, pay back the rent if you want. Give yourself two months.
She had approached him on a street to ask him if he knew of any jobs. Jobs? he replied puzzled, what kind of job? It was eight o'clock on a Tuesday evening on the outskirts of the city centre. All the offices and shops were shut. She said a few words in a foreign language, maybe several languages. He shook his head, I speak only English. You can go to the job centre in the morning, do you have somewhere to stay the night?
At the crossing of a road she got a few steps in front of him and he watched the neat bulb of her rear swivel from side to side. If he'd seen it earlier, he thought to himself, he would have been conscious that this was a pick-up. He would have tried to smile at her and she would have walked away. But she was there now, walking with him, to his flat. Coatless, dressed in a pleated skirt that flapped against her knees. They walked under the outstretched arms of cranes and past red and white hoardings. Building sites all around. The dust underfoot was the same corrosive lime that he worked in every day.
Back at the house he made tea and toast. When he turned on the television she was content to look at it for the rest of the evening. After midnight he pushed his bed sideways against the wall. Now there was a four-foot wide strip of floor space alongside. He rolled out a sleeping bag and stuffed some t-shirts together to form a pillow. There, he said to her, indicating the bed, or you can sleep on the couch inside if you prefer. He lay down on the sleeping bag and pulled a blanket over himself. Leaving it up to her where and when she chose sleep. In his half-sleep he was aware of her in the next room. The television was turned to silent but flickers came through the door jamb. He drifted off thinking of a pornographic film. At times during the night the cold woke him and he lay there, pulling a stray limb back in close under the bankets. He felt he could keep still and turn his mind inwards to the warmth. Sleep came over him again. Much later he got up in the pitch dark and lay down on the near side of the bed, pulling the blankets up over himself. In his half sleep he had heard her come in. Maybe she had only looked. He was past caring anyway, he just wanted to sleep.
All day she watched enthusiastically the videos he borrowed, laughing at the parts where people shout at each other. Mornings it was cold in the flat; he had turned off the heating some weeks before. She took the television into the bedroom. Pulled the blankets around herself. Most evenings she rang her own country on a reduced rate card and talked for hours. Other times she might lock herself in the bathroom for hours, passed silently by him with earphones plugged in. She never went out, seemed to know nobody in this city. Even on a Saturday she stayed at home. He doubted she had seen the city centre more than once. It was good so. Something was keeping her apart.
She was reading now, her eyebrows as sharp and abstract as the curvilinear script on the letter she had just written. She snatched it from the table in front of him. Her eyes burned with resentment.
"I can't read it anyway," he protested. "I can't even read our address at the top."
He stops, conscious of the 'our'. There is no 'our'. There is no 'we'. He and she in this room; there is nothing to explain. The ordinary obligations and assumptions have no validity. People want to repeat to each other every single non-event in their lives. He has lost this habit. How could he explain to her how odious the expected phrases have become to him? Words like I'm so happy for you, this is nice tea, please be my friend.
He wonders if these are the phrases she uses in her letter. It wouldn't matter to him anyway. There is a contempt that rages, but it would never alight on her, nor even touch her periphery. How could it, when she can sit quietly for hours, accepting his presence? Or at moments push him aside with a look that is the mirror of what burns him? He wishes he could he could borrow the quick violence of her glance. His face is a mask that was set upon him.
Yet sometimes when she stretches across from him in the bed his mind strays to the ultimate taboo. There will be no barrier when he falls. There is no way out only when you see that there is no way out. To live on he must change to become the person who does not see there is no way out. Give yourself two months, he had said. Soon she would leave. There would be no further contact. If by chance they were to run into each other on the street it would be an embarrassment to acknowledge each other. That's how it would be.
The television blared from the bedroom. She was lying back smoking, looking hard at the images. He pushed in a video. It was a 1950's movie. The dialogue was clear and simple. He kept rewinding and playing the same scenes again until she nodded that she understood. Sometimes she did a mimicry of scenes, talking back animatedly at the screen. At these times she was capable of ignoring him completely. He felt himself a dead weight beside her then, not even a cause of embarrassment. He leaned back and closed his eyes. She jabbed him with her elbow, not consenting to have him fall asleep by her side. Her hair fell to her nape and ended in a horizontal fringe. Sometimes he looked at her rather than at the screen. She was indifferent to this. When his legs touched against her she kicked them away.
The black and white hero stopped the wrong blonde on the street and got a slap on the face. She fell sideways on top of him with laughter, pushed herself back up straight like his leg was an armrest.
When at last in the small psychotic hours of the morning they both fell back exhausted on the sheets, the second phase would begin. His hand went over hers, at times she was asleep, at times he was. At a certain hour they gained access to a place that would remain unknown and unmentioned in the daylight hours.
Do you think I am an object waiting for you? she whispers fiercely, a hot breath against his ear. Her voice shocks him. Neither has spoken since the film scrolled out hours before.
No, he whispers back, you are . . . someone I know.
An object? How could she think that? Even when sitting still, unaware of him in the room, even then she glowed with energy. Only with great difficulty could he imagine her as a thing - a bag of bones, a body to be thrown over one shoulder. Not quite fifty kilos. A sack that a spade would split open.
He felt an obscure resentment that sleep was allowed him only at the last pitch of exhaustion, when the light turned grey through the windows and whatever stubborn songbirds were left in this city began their chirruping again.
Some time later, bothered by the grey light, he would realise he had been asleep. The dawn had come, spread pink and grey, and then only grey, and with the dawn came the questions.