reading – Page 30 – three good words

August 4, 2014October 6, 2016

Ellen

It was almost ridiculous where they met again. Ellen was shopping at the deli for a dinner she’d promised her friends. She already had everything at home and now was looking for two or three fine cheeses to round off the dinner. She heard a woman’s voice right then, the kind of self-assured voice wealthy women had, and Ellen looked up to observe this particular specimen. The woman was a tall blonde, with perfectly done hair. She was beyond forty by a few years, maybe more, but she’d kept herself wonderfully well. She was stunning even now. Her makeup was perfect, her clothes of the best quality. The jewellery flashing at her ears, around her neck and on her fingers was beautiful, and her handbag was that particular kind where you did not ask for the price. She was beautiful, rich and powerful, it came off her like expensive perfume, and Ellen saw how others glanced at her admiringly and the shop assistants behind the counter stood to attention, smiling brightly.

‘Honey, what do you say? A little Beluga or would Salmon be enough?’ The woman asked this with a confident turn of her head and Ellen at first didn’t see who she was talking to. He was tall and had the kind of dark hair you knew was expertly taken care of. He was in a suit and there was something in the way he moved that made Ellen look again. She expected the man to be older, his hair dyed but his face betraying his real age – she saw a young, strong neck that had to be at least fifteen years younger than the blonde’s, if not more. Then again, you could never tell with these people. She could have been fifty already, but she did look marvellous, her breasts round (possibly with the help of some surgery, Ellen thought a little viciously) and her figure slender and firm. Ellen was sure she went jogging daily or had a personal trainer or something like that. And what was so bad about that, really? She had the means to keep herself very well, so why not use them? And she really did look good. Was it all that surprising then that she was with someone far younger than herself? Men did it all the time, and now women were catching up too, so why not? Ellen decided it was all rather nice in fact.

There was a short discussion between the blonde and her companion, too low for Ellen to hear and she anyway had to choose, the shop assistant was asking if she could help her. Ellen picked out the cheeses she wanted, hearing how the rich woman chose Beluga after all, enough to pay a fortune for it, but then, what was a fortune to Ellen was probably just peanuts for that beautiful woman. The young assistant packed up the cheeses in perfect wraps of brown paper and string, and Ellen couldn’t help think that the rich blonde would have been able to buy a piece of everything, but Ellen wasn’t her. She had a good life too, though. It just wasn’t as richly expensive, as glitteringly affluent as the blonde’s. Then again, wasn’t it nice to see that a woman at her age had such money and power? Everything about her told Ellen that she had worked hard to get where she was now, that she owed nothing to others and all to herself. It was in a way reassuring. The possibility, at least, was there.

Ellen smiled a thank you at the shop assistant and took the parcel of cheeses. Due to the sudden crowding at the counter, Ellen had to walk the other way, past the rich blonde and whoever-it-was with her. She said ‘Excuse me’ and ‘Pardon’ and moved past the people as best as she could, avoiding the stacked wheels of Gouda, the slim glasses of black olives and the exotic olive oils. She passed close by the rich blonde and her partner, and maybe it was curiosity, but Ellen did take a closer look. It was only a glance, a glimpse of his face, just as they too turned to leave. Ellen could not say if he saw her, but she saw him as he turned. By then she was beyond the shelves and walking without thinking. Her heart was racing so fast, she could feel it in her throat. She finally stopped at a shelf full of chutneys and breathed in deeply. Maybe she had seen wrong. Yes, maybe she had seen wrong. It was a reassuring thought. Yes, she had probably seen wrong. It would be ridiculous to meet in a place like this, especially if he was with that blonde. And who would she be anyway? But she had called him Honey. Maybe she was his mother, but Ellen knew that was wrong. The blonde wasn’t that old yet. Fifteen years at best, maybe twenty if she’d kept herself really well.

Ellen shook her head. No, she must have seen wrong. It was probably a trick of the light and it was really only a glimpse. Anyone could look like anything in a second. Yes, exactly. Ellen exhaled once more and went to pay her cheeses and the baguettes, feeling a bit like a mademoiselle. She had to wait in line and couldn’t help it, she looked along the other two queues. They were there. She was in her expensive skirt and jacket combination and he was in that perfect suit. She was talking to him and he was nodding. Ellen recognized the gesture immediately. It was in the shoulders and the turn of his head. It was in the way his hair fell and the angle of his face, showing a profile she could never forget. Just as the blonde turned to pay with her card he turned and their eyes met. Ellen felt everything inside clutch sharply, snatching at her breath. It was him. It was him. It was him. And he knew it was her, she could see it. ‘Miss?’ the young man at the cashier asked. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Ellen said, flustered, blushing. She paid her cheeses and the baguettes. They walked past her just as she was done. He did not look at her. They stepped through the sliding doors and were gone. Ellen saw that her hands were not steady when she took her card. She thanked the young man at the cashier and walked out into the rest of her evening.

It was him, there was no denying it. She had seen. He was not a figment of her imagination as she had come to believe over the past year, ok, seven months. Six and half. Those days had been too perfect, those weeks had been too wonderful to be real. She must have read it or seen it somewhere. It could not have happened. It could not have happened if she woke up alone that Monday and it was as if nothing had ever happened. Ellen had come to believe that, since it made it easier. She could think about it without wanting to cry if she believed it was a dream, a hallucination, a figment of her imagination, a vision in a dream. Where did she read that? Probably a blurb or magazine somewhere. Anyway, that was how she could bear it, by believing that it really never happened, it actually never took place. Now, that was impossible. It was him. She would have recognized that face anywhere.

Ellen arrived home quicker than she expected. She climbed the stairs to her front door and dreaded opening it, but she was in for a surprise. Her friend Tara was waiting with bags of shopping, grinning, ‘I got bored waiting and decided you need some help.’ Ellen smiled gratefully, and pushed back the sudden tears. She would not cry, definitely not now. No, she would not. And anyway, she had seen wrong. If she wanted to enjoy the evening, if she wanted to keep her smile, if she simply wanted to live in peace, she had to believe that. It wasn’t him. It was someone cruelly like him, but it wasn’t him. There was no one like him. He did not exist. And with that, Ellen opened the door to her apartment, stepped back into her life and started preparing the dinner, laughing with Tara who had new outrageous stories to tell, she really was a great friend, she somehow always knew when to turn up in time and make Ellen smile again.

A week later, Ellen came home from work feeling exhausted. The whole week had been draining. She had managed her dinner quite well, what with Tara making her laugh the whole time, and once Anne, Leon and the others joined, everything was great again anyway. But even after they left the memory was there, waiting like a bear-trap under dried leaves, snapping closed the moment Ellen walked into her bedroom. The tears were back, but she refused. She would not. No. She would not cry. She absolutely would not. She refused to. It would not happen. No tear would pearl and slide, she would not reach for any Kleenex, she would simply brush her teeth, change for bed and sleep. And Ellen managed very well until she was in bed, and turned on the TV and found a rom-com on one of the channels, one of those sticky-sweet movies with that young woman who had that face like a sweet young puppy and just got kicked like one by the bastard friend she had, shouting gleefully ‘He’s just not that into you!’ or something like that, really relishing it. Ellen saw the tears slide down the pretty face on-screen and clenched her teeth. She would not. She would not. But she did. Awfully. She cleaned out her whole box of Kleenex, she just couldn’t stop.

Somehow Ellen fell asleep. When she woke up she saw the massacre of Kleenex on her bed and floor. That was the beginning of the end. Saturday was… not good. It was so bad, she called Tara, but Tara was busy with her own life and never took her calls. Sunday turned up, and it got marginally better. Tara came over with coffee, cake and bottles of wine, and watched all kinds of nonsense with Ellen, one rom-com after the other, the worse the better, until they ended up watching Audrey Hepburn movies and singing drunkenly while draining their glasses and pouring out more wine. Tara really was the best friend Ellen had ever had, she always turned up with her emergency kit of sugar, caffeine and alcohol, coffee, cakes and wine, and didn’t care how long it took or what time it was, she stayed until Ellen stopped crying.

Monday showed up without asking and Ellen had a headache, a bad one, but she felt more like herself again. Tara had already gone home by the time her alarm went off. She had taped a post-it to Ellen’s forehead, Tara liked to do things like that. It was hugs and kisses and Need to talk? Call me!, which made Ellen smile a real smile. Tara was the best, she really was. Ellen crawled out of bed, showered, dressed and went to work, lying that she felt a bit chill when someone asked her what was wrong. It was snowing outside so they believed her.

Even so, every day was a trial. By Thursday, Ellen was exhausted all over again. She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want to remember anymore. She was starting to feel that anger she loved, that anger that she had met him, that she had been so foolish to ask, and listen and answer and actually believe it meant something, that she had been stupid enough to talk to him, to give herself away like that as if she had no brain in her head.

Ellen loved that anger, it brought her back into the life she knew, that life that was hers again. By Friday evening Ellen detected the beginnings of normalcy. That anger was growing and soon, very soon, she would spend her hours and days furiously living her own life, with her own thoughts, her own feelings, her own peace of mind. Maybe she would call David and agree to meet him again, her evenings and nights with him were always very nice and he really was a good man. Yes, she would do that. She would go home and ask David if he would like to come over for some pasta, Ellen was very good with pasta, everyone liked her pasta, people even asked her to make it again. Yes, she would call David and ask him if he would like some pasta and wine, she was sure he wouldn’t mind a few hours to relax and unwind.

July 28, 2014February 11, 2015

don’t listen

A blank page can be an awful thing. It seems empty, but it isn’t. It’s filled with possibilities, words written, deleted, rewritten, crossed out, thought over, emphasised, loved, hated, wanted, reviled – and it never ends either.

I think the hardest part is to not listen. You know, those ‘Are you serious’ ‘Are you sure about this?’ ‘Is that good enough?’ and ‘Is that it?’ that whisper from the blankness of the page, sounding out the words in your head. And then it happens, the whispers grow louder and louder, talk, yell, shout and scream and suddenly you’re saying: ‘No no no no no no no no!’ It’s wrong! bad! awful! horrible! blergh!

Delete. Delete. Delete.

And then you’re back to square one, that blank page, that empty space that somehow is already filled with all the things you don’t want to say, all the things you wish to convey, and really need to get on the page. And the whispers just won’t go away.

So many times, too many times, listening has made me do something stupid – that is, I deleted everything in sudden horrified shame, which also meant all the words were gone, never to be retrieved, never to be seen again.

I stopped that.

I keep everything that makes me hesitate, sometimes even squirm, even the silliest scraps of words on paper. I keep them for one reason: between those words, hidden among the letters, there is usually something real, a thought, a word, a memory that I can use later when I know what it is that I’m after. It’s not always like that. Sometimes what I wrote is just really, really bad.

It’s sieving through the whispers and finding my inner compass that’s so difficult. The whispers like to override that gut-feeling that 9 times out of 10 is accurate, and even the tenth time it was right somehow. The whispers that seem to come out of the emptiness, they can get too loud, and the trick is not easy but possible: just don’t listen. Write it down. Write it all down. Even that sentence you know is silly. Even that word you just don’t want to use. Write it down. See it written out so that you know why it’s so horrible. It’s helped me countless times. In a way, when I see it written out, I finally know what’s so wrong with it. Until then it’s just words swirling in my head.

Then I let it rest for a while. Sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, it can go into months and years actually, but eventually I go back, and read everything one more time. It surprises me time and again how different the words look and sound just becomes some time passed. If I’m happy with it, I edit what needs editing, re-write, re-draft and re-do until it’s roughly where I wanted to be. Then I start over until I finally feel ‘Yeah… that’s about right.’ This takes time of course, and it can be (very) frustrating, but what really helps me is reading the books, poems and short stories I love best. They’re the proof that someone successfully managed to silence the whispers coming out of the (apparent) emptiness.

At one point I had something of a database of crap sentences, horrible plot twists, stupid little dialogues I wanted to turn into genuine conversations and failed, failed, failed. I keep them though, and go back to them when I can overcome the inner cringe, and sometimes – I can’t tell you how or why, there is a mystery to this craft of ours – I find that seed of thought, of feeling that I was aiming for and work from there.

July 26, 2014October 28, 2015

words words words

Words are tricky. Each one has its own character. Some come all sweet and simple, and suddenly get complicated without you knowing how it happened. Synonyms you never heard of turn up like juniper berries and pepper seeds – the taste, the flavour, is overwhelming. Meanings melt down everything in that one second you weren’t looking. And then there are those words that look perfectly solid, wonderfully whole – and they can’t even hold a sentence. Others transform in one paragraph and won’t fit anymore, no matter how you try to squeeze. They’re too there, too present, sitting there, staring you in the face, daring you to keep them there like oysters on a plate … So after all the cutting and stirring, after hours and hours of tasting, testing, and rearranging everything … it all boils down to which word fits, which one’s the right pinch of salt, and which one’s perfect, exactly what you were aiming for, exactly what you wanted.

July 26, 2014May 16, 2020

Toni’s

rain-249872 ‘People are like raindrops.’
‘Really.’
‘Yeah. If they fall too hard, they desintegrate.’
‘Simon.’
‘What? It’s true isn’t it? Imagine someone falling from -‘
‘Simon.’
‘Yeah?’

Amanda looked at Simon and decided she didn’t like him. She loved him, but she didn’t like him. He went against her grain. But she loved him. And that was just about it.

They lived in something other people called ‘flat’. It was on the first floor. It had three rooms, if you didn’t count the kitchen: living room, bedroom, bathroom. There were times Amanda found Simon sleeping in the tub. He said it was good for his back. Amanda just shook her head and asked if he wanted some coffee. He would yawn then, stretch, and ask for tea instead.

When asked about their relationship, Amanda’s general answer was, ‘I really don’t know.’ Simon on the other hand leaned back, sighed satisfied and said: ‘Amanda and I, we’re two of a kind.’ Amanda looked at him then, wondering if they really lived on the same planet.

The apartment had small windows with deep sills. Neither had much for a view, except the one in the living room. It faced the street and a small patch of green with a gnarled old appletree. Amanda called it the Sad Old Man. Simon called it ‘visceral’.

Simon used words like that. When he said ‘pneumonia’ there was just the faintest hint of a p. He didn’t grow his hair long. He was afraid Amanda would one day creep up behind him and cut it off. He smiled when a woman cried in the movies. If asked why, he said: ‘Now she’s beautiful. It’s easy if all you have to do is smile.’ Amanda sighed then as if saying: ‘You see, that’s why I don’t like him.’ But she loved him. And that was just about it.

Amanda, who was still sitting at the kitchen table, facing Simon, Amanda choked her cigarette in a pile of ash-tray stubs, let out a puff of smoke, and decided that the whole raindrop business was entirely besides the point.

‘Are you hungry?’

Simon shrugged. Oh no. Amanda knew what was about to happen. But as usual, she held a horrible fascination for the needlessness of the following… discussion.

‘Are you?’ she asked.
‘Hungry? A little.’
‘Pasta?’
‘Again?’
‘What do you want then?’
‘Dunno.’
‘I don’t think we have the recipe for that.’
‘How about eating out?’

Amanda looked up surprised. After living with Simon for so long, simple things surprised her a lot more than they used to. Only two days ago she realized that the sky really was true blue.

‘Today?’ Amanda asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s Monday.’
‘So?’
‘You hate going out on Mondays.’
‘I do not. You wanna go?’
‘Where to?’
‘Toni’s?’
‘But Toni’s is pasta.’
‘No. Toni’s is Toni’s.’

Of course. Simon only ever ate pasta at Toni‘s, but Toni’s wasn’t pasta, it was Toni’s. Ok.

‘You know what?’ she asked then.
‘What?’
‘How about some Chinese?’
‘I thought you wanted pasta.’
‘It was only a suggestion.’
‘So, no pasta.’
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘But I thought you said you didn’t want to?’

Simon gave her an incredulous look, as if she had said, ‘I want to become a dentist’. When Simon answered, he spoke carefully.

‘I said: Again?’
‘Yeah, meaning you don’t want pasta again, so you want something else.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Then what did you say?’
‘I already told you: Again?’
‘Are you hungry at all, Simon?’
‘As I said: A little.’
‘So, what do you want?’
‘Pasta sounds fine.’

Amanda counted to five, then to ten. She remembered to breathe out again.

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ she asked.
‘But you know I like pasta.’
‘You like pasta.’
‘Always have. You know that.’

Ok. Enough. Amanda reached for the phone on the table. Simon asked who she was calling.

‘The Take Away.’
‘But I thought you wanted to go out.’
‘You wanted to go out. I just said ok.’
‘No, you said it’s Monday.’
‘Simon.’
‘What?’
‘Quit it.’
‘Quit what?’
‘I’m calling the Take Away.’
‘So no pasta.’
‘No. No pasta.’
‘All right.’

Amanda stopped dialling.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Go ahead, call up the Take Away.’
‘You really want to go to Toni’s?’
‘We can if you want to.’
‘Just give me a straight answer, Simon. Toni’s, yes or no.’
‘But I thought you didn’t want pasta.’
‘Simon!’
‘Ok, ok. Toni’s? No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s raining outside.’

Amanda got up and walked out of the kitchen. She didn’t call the Take Away. She put down the phone instead, put on her raincoat and trainers and walked the five minutes to Toni’s, sat down and ordered a pepperoni Pizza with extra cheese. She’d already drank half her coke before her phone rang. She didn’t answer it.

She got a text message: Whr r u?
She answered: Toni’s.

Fifteen Minutes later, Simon entered Toni’s with a wet umbrella and a plastic bag full of four boxes from the Chinese Take Away. He sat down opposite Amanda and greeted the waiter. The waiter smiled and brought him the usual, a tall glass of coke, a slice of lemon, no ice. The pizza came, Simon asked for an extra plate. They shared the pepperoni pizza with extra cheese, Chop Suey, Wan Tan and Chicken, Sweet&Sour. Nobody complained. It was, after all, Monday.