Black Night
As she gets off the bus she lights another
cigarette. She tries to light another cigarette.
Her fingers fumble its shape to her mouth. Jabbing
it between the red of her lips. The matches slip as
she tries to strike one. The flame goes out, blown
out by the slipstream fumes of the bus as it
retreats down the street.
She doesn’t know where she is. The street is dark.
The lamps are broken, unlit. Watching. She knows
when someone is watching. Someone is watching her
now. But nobody is here. An empty street.
She strikes a match. She lights her cigarette.
Clings to it like a stick. For protection. To
guide her. Its glowing tip the only light as its
ash spills down her dress.
“The sky’s full of rain…I can feel it in my
head…in a cloud shaped like pain…”
The pain has led her here. She is not in the room
where the pain lives with her. Beside the empty bed
where she never sleeps.
“It’s cold…and it’s dark…so I don’t want to go
out…so I get on the bus…okay?…OKAY.”
But the bus has gone. Its lights have gone. Its
warmth has gone. The other passengers who looked at
her but did not look at her. Were there. But are
not here now. Nobody here now. But someone is
watching her.
She can feel the eyes.
She knows. Most people do not want to see her.
Look away. Or they stare. And she knows.
Now no-one is here, but she knows.
The road slopes away. Uneven paving stones.
Slipping between the terraced houses, down towards
the river. Waiting like a darkness, like a
stillness at the bottom of the hill. She cannot see
it, but she knows it’s there. Can feel its tug.
Feel that chill.
Maybe it’s only the river that watches. She shrugs,
shivering, going that way. But no, she knows.
There is someone else. Not eyes behind the
curtains. They don’t count, they are always there.
No, there’s someone else there, out here, with her.
Someone in this street.
She stops. Her feet miss a beat. Are those the
echoes of other footsteps? Is someone keeping time
with her? She turns to look. A swirl of smoke from
her cigarette’s stub.
There’s no-one here.
Distant sirens. A riverboat’s moan.
She hugs herself. She would like someone to.
Someone to hold her. Anyone would do. Just to be
held. She looks again. Her eyes pulse pain, like
the pain in her head. She smudges red lips with the
back of her sleeve.
In the doorway, in the darkness, where there is no-
one, where there is nothing. There is someone
there.
He does not surprise her. She is not startled. She
always knows when someone is watching. But she did
not expect the eyes. The eyes that see her without
seeing her. Which look at her and through her and
do not see.
But see everything.
And she wasn’t expecting the touch of his body. So
moist, so warm. Like a day-old baby, but fully
grown. Wrapped in long darkness. Like a cloak,
like a coat. To protect them. As they dance, in
the silence, in the darkness.
And what did he expect? As she brushes his skin
with two rouged lips. That skin which feels so
thin, so frail. A web of colours which shift and
break.
He takes her to another place. She does not know
where she is now, though she did not know where she
was before. They dance through darkness, through
hidden walls. Through gardens of light.
A dervish waltz, to and fro, to and fro, feeling the
salt, the oil, the flow, till her skin seems to glow
in contact with his own.
They dance through cities beneath this city, where
sunken rivers run.
They go there.
He takes her.
She is not alone.
Page(s) 15-17
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