Fragment of new writing with working title Sequel to Another Life
We had lingered too long in the space between not knowing enough about each other and knowing too much. Flirting with time rather than each other, we had felt the inevitable, the pull towards what we knew rather than what we should have known, what we did know but refused to acknowledge. Our time together was always as if one of us spoke a different language, one unknown to the other. Even for us, as disparate as any two people could be, it was always difficult. Difficult and time-consuming and frankly, destructive.
How had we met and even thought we could do this? But we had been together for so long, we had had moments, maybe moments lasting years of comfort from each other. We had once held each other, close in more ways than one. I first saw her by the stream that runs at the edge of the open ground. Not quite rural, but not quite urban, not yet suburban but soon-to-be as a pregnant woman is soon-to-be a mother. It was an old factory site. Long ago it had provided for hundreds of workers in a little community where there was little else but agriculture. Now it was covered in an amazing selection of what are often called weeds. They grew from cracks in giant slabs of concrete, from the edges of brickwork and between the mortar in old walls. These plants were what the world would look like after we humans had gone. Tall and robust amongst the weaker, the less able but surviving against all odds. At the far end of the site, there had probably been a garden, a small space of respite, and it was here that I had seen her, sitting on a blanket sewing. Tiny, tiny stitches were recreating this plant paradise, mostly undisturbed. Here a hawkbit, a willowherb, toadflax creeping amongst them, chickweed and bramble. The whole scene, still slightly dusty in a very faint breeze that occasionally rippled the taller plants, the even fainter sound of the stream and this bright person, calm and unrippled. Stitching. It took my heart which was ready to be taken, after several heartbreaks which had healed, and then felt lonely. Not lonely, alone. Alone with a tiny longing was how I could best describe it. She didn’t look up as I passed along the other side and I didn’t look directly across. Instead I angled my gaze so it skimmed the top of her head and focused into the middle distance.
This beginning took months to become even on talking terms. I was shy, scared because of things that had already happened, she was maybe the same but slightly separate. It is as if she came from a different land whose culture only slightly overlapped with my own. This, though, was what was so attractive. I had had relationships where the overlapping was complete, where our shadows became one and it stifled me, and them. Here, there would be none of that, we would revel in our differences rather than our similarities. We would have a shared space between us but each would be themselves. That was my wish and maybe it was hers too.
When we eventually spoke, in a late afternoon, I asked about her sewing. Now she was making a large, bright patchwork which she unravelled just a small piece at a time from a bag. The rest lay tumbled in its dark inside as if the colours would fade in the sun. Each fragment had meaning, a dress here, her mother’s blouse there. The pattern was irregular, not belonging to any particular standard quilt. A crazy paving of a bed covering. I liked that. I thought, at first, it showed her wild, bohemian side that I could relate to, that it showed a generosity of spirit, a caring soul and a deep thinker.
She told me the stories of the different fabrics. This was not a patchwork that was regular but a gathering of stories in the way that stories are spoken not written and been handed down, that become clear with time as other bits are remembered. The pieces of clothing that made up the patches were like that. Whilst the clothing had been chosen by one person only, they were the result of generations. Maybe a shirt bought because it reminded someone of their father who had perhaps worn the hand-me-down of his father, a skirt of multi-coloured hue that was a festival outfit, bought for the occasion but out-of-place in the turmoil of the everyday.
When I was eventually asked for a garment, I chose my favourite. I was so honoured to be asked. By now, it was nearly finished, the ending of the story of her life, and I was part of it. It took me a long time to choose. She kept asking where it was and I suppose she thought I was uncaring, not wanting to be a part but it wanted to get it right. I knew things like this would be passed down a family, the family we didn’t have and maybe never would. I didn’t want a future generation to make guesses about what I was like, I wanted it to be the perfect choice. I would put a garment on the bed, still our bed, for a day then change my mind. The space that was to be mine was surrounded by others but, in particular, a small scrap of dress from the day I first saw her. Yellow, her soul was bright but always shielded under an umbrella of some, unknown to me, heartache. Should I match the yellow, compliment it in a way that I thought our lives together would go or should it be a perfect reflection of me, strike out for an independence even if it clashed, or, perhaps, a middle ground neither with her or with me? I had lots of those things. After days where I changed my mind constantly as if I had nothing else to do but think of her and think of the quilt, I chose. I woke, I went to the cupboard and pulled out the shirt I wore when things were going right in my mind, a happy shirt that accompanied the feeling whether to work, to holiday, to the shop and to do nothing in. I handed it over with a peace. The piece belonged to the corner, it was black, a beautiful, dense black. A black of the short night of a summer evening when the warmth seeped though, when it became a covering of velvet.
She made no comment. Did I expect one? Our relationship was quite new even if our knowing of each other was now quite old. She stitched it in place the same evening. The quilt was complete. As I looked for signs of the significance of this, I also began to look for a new favourite shirt that reflected the new stage in life that I thought would happen for both of us. Her story was completed, for now. She sat, a few days later, and retold the stories that I had already heard and added the new ones. She added our story.
She began seriously, ‘I sat in the ruins of capitalism amid the exploitation of workers with no other choices. I started by re-creating the plants in honour of those people who had fewer chances in life. Each tiny stitch, a repetition, like those men and women repeated the necessary movement that allowed the machine to produce the next step. Then I realised futility. My futility and their futility. My actions would be lost just as theirs were. The plant project is unfinished, beautiful but unfinished. It seemed right that it should remain so. But then, on that day, I noticed you, across the stream, walking not looking at me. I think you saw me but didn’t care to look closely. I integrated you into the lives of the factory workers. Their lives ending, probably prematurely, my sewing the same. I thought I would like to know you, a person who has a mind of their own, who thinks so much they cannot bear to interrupt their thoughts with a, perhaps, meaningless exchange.
I listened unbelievingly. I looked across the quilt at her, a divide. I wanted to believe her. I had tried to copy her, create those tiny stitches that she was herself had, just a while before, been sewing in the garden. She instructed me in the art of knowing, deeply, what each of those plants meant and how the stitches were part of the peoples’ lives who had left part of their soul there. I knew, that somewhere, I had those plants that I stitched on the day. I had not added to them, but maybe now was the time. For her, stitching was something she did as a way of expressing her desires and it was not confined to one piece at a time. Then she had nearly finished her quilt, but also making tangible the lives of others in these plants. Stitching the quilt, taking different parts of her life, was a place where she became one through this gathering together the stories of those about her. Her family was in different parts of the world and she had seldom seen them, even then. Her reluctance to put into things words suited me then, it still does but, I think that I have decided, we do need some words. For her, the words and emotions were in the pieces of cloth. Their joining as one, in the quilt, a wedding of multiple lives and feelings, was her way of saying, I have overcome these feelings of fragmentation, I am whole. Or perhaps, it was just a gesture, perhaps that is what she wanted to believe.
Her father, the scythed-shaped deep green, lying near the middle, almost a pivot in her life, but not quite. The centre was taken by the edges, the corners, of small pieces, irregular, never quite. But one shard I had never noticed, it looked as if it was almost a child’s garment. Seeringly bright, tiny, it touched what was almost the sleeve of a woman’s dress, tiny stems and stalks of flowering plants snaked along it, the flowers themselves not the bright insect attracting flowers of spring but the subtle that blended into the foliage. There were stories here that I had not heard before. I stroked the fabrics as if soothing them, it felt rough as if tears had endlessly fallen and then dried, time after time. Her ‘father’ touched the end of the ‘sleeve’ by the smallest, lightest finger. As if he had left the family without saying goodbye. But where was the mother ? I could see the pattern of her brother’s holiday shirt, not far from the centre but not near enough to have an impact. But her mother, what and wear were hers? She must have told me, how could I have forgotten? Was it the ‘sleeve’ and she the child, or, near the father or brother? There were too many places that I had not remembered or never been told. Was I still curious? I had ceased to care over the last few years. Rent had to be paid, work done to pay it. I did it, willingly, she contributed when she could. She worked in a library, where she didn’t have to say much. She complained that the volunteers chatted and chatted, disturbing her concentration, filling the space with tales of local people whom she felt embarrassed to serve when they came in as she, an outsider, knew their secrets, big and little. Mrs. P. had a breast enhancement, John H. a vasectomy, M had an abortion at fourteen and they say it was her brother’s, little S. liked escaping her mother’s house to go to her friends where they would dress up and go out at night, no longer little except in her mother’s eyes. All these tales, she recounted, I knew about all these people but not about her.
I knew about everyone but her. Had it always been like this? How had I not noticed , I was entranced by her stories, not her stories but her way of telling them. They were brought to life and they inhabited my life, I felt that I knew these people even though I never went to the library. She had warned me not to, she wanted to keep her life a secret, or to keep some secret place within her. Perhaps she didn’t work at the library but that too was a story. Perhaps all the stories came from the books on the shelves that she read when it was quiet. I knew hardly anything about her. The stories we weave about our lives never enables the truth but contorts it around our own minds. We lie continually. Perpetual liars, we are not proud of ourselves, underneath we know they are lies, or, more politely, versions of the truth but are unable to do any other.
She now sat on a small bench, her feet on a plain cotton rug that kept out the cold of the earth for it was warm but the ground had not yet absorbed it. Her needle was weaving in and out, the cloth just puckering slightly, then the thread slowly being jerked tighter and tighter. Her body responding in the same motion. A knot, in the side of her neck and in the thread, was just becoming tenser. I could almost feel what she was feeling. It took only a small number of seconds before the thread, and the woman, burst. The needle jabbed into her hand, her cry pierced the air. There was only that tiniest of a moment before she saw me, saw me watching her and I was pulled into that instant of tautness.
She looks at me and takes a quick, sharp breath, exploding the expletive with it as if it is I who have dug into her hand or at least, forced the needle down into her skin. I say this as though I actually wanted or wished I had done it. I am, though, strangely empowered and look directly, into her eyes. I seem to say, there is nothing left of me for you to take so I have nothing left to give but this moment of strength. The sewing fabric falls to the floor and she leaves it there, the thread loose, released from the now lost needle. The colour is vibrant against the plain rug. As she stands I move towards the rug, hoping to find the lost needle, its sharpness as I imagine it against my foot. For a second, I though she was going to stamp on my hand but she, even she, thought better. From that position, I wanted to bring her down, wrestle her to the floor like a beast of prey. I take the fabric and place it on the bench. The needle is lost. I turn and leave too, towards the house we came to together so long ago, and begin to laugh.
It began with no purpose but it has one, now. It is for me, for my sake. It begins as a little torrent, a gurgle in a far off stream. It is contained within me but I know that soon it will overflow. I have seen it all before and now, I must break free. The laughter cracks down the barrier of my own making. I have held off, held in for too long. But now, it has broken loose.. I maybe a meek person perhaps but not weak. I am not the person she thinks I am and I am not the person I have pretended to be. On the outside. I hold myself. Steady. I let the laughter out, it runs down the walls and along the skirting and then edges up out into the garden.
I follow it and feel the air move around me from the stifling inside. I don’t try to imagine what she is doing. When I first met her, she and I were young. We didn’t mean to be joined together. It happened without us noticing. Just slowly, insidiously we came as one, a unit. Born out of such tensions, it could never be forecasted to be a success and it wasn’t. But, somehow, we were held together. This blind falling felt, feels, now like a trap but who did the trapping? I am describing our life together and I say ‘we’ but it is not ‘we’. It is me and her, separate and separated. I would think that there are many such relationships leading nowhere right from the beginning but some force propels them further and deeper. Now I am in the chasm, the chaos that precedes big decisions. It would be right to think that ‘we’ are no more, not even me and her. I think back to the jab of the needle that began today. The needle, the sharpness of its point, stabbing deep making a wound that is not easily seen.
I walk, ‘I take a stroll round the garden’. The bushes are green but flowerless, the grass several centimetres longer than a lawn normally is. Everything is shabby. I look back at the house, it is the same. It is not my house or her house, it is rented at enormous cost. We have been here for years, longer than I would have liked. I know that to move would mean one of us moving, moving out first. Making a move is more than the physical act and it needs thinking about. It has been thought about for a long time with no resolution or resolve. Either by me or by her. We have been waiting for the landlord to push us forward. We pay, every month to extend our individual and collective tortures. Perhaps, I have said, when the leaves fall from the trees, it will be a signal for me to go. The leaves have fallen and grown again and again. Perhaps, when the rent rises the next time, or the roof leaks in the winter? I sit and look back at the house. The stone seat, cold to touch, is uncomfortable. It seems apt that it is, to be here.
I often have the feeling that I am making too much of these episodes. They are minor, aren’t they? I should be talking to her. I went inside and up the stairs careful to avoid even the tiniest glance in her direction. I stood in our room, what was our room, now her room, I suppose. The quilt on the bed was the same hand-stitched one and its colours glowed in the afternoon sun. I bent closer to look at the stitches, hardly visible, I realised that they were hither and thither. I took a step away, it looked the same as it always did, bright, wonderful even. In the same moment, I realised I shouldn’t be here, not my room anymore. My bed just had a duvet, a plain room and a plain bed. I could have made more of it but my heart, it wasn’t there. Outside, I could see that she had begun stitching again but on the stone seat. She must have found the needle or got another one from the sewing box that was full of jumbled threads, wound round scissors and bits of cloth and each other. Was it another quilt she was making? At one time, I would have known. Going to my room, I resisted glancing out. Seeing what I had never seen before, the chaos of stitches, had left me almost heartbroken in empathy for her. These moments, I realised, were what caused me to stay. They happened just close enough together for us to have stayed but far enough apart leaving space for anguish.
Sitting on the bed, head propped up by pillows, was the nearest I came to relaxing these days. It had to be alone and no fear of disturbance. Once, only once had she come to this room, to me. Did I go to her? No, I couldn’t, but also, I couldn’t have born the rejection. It was better not to put myself forward, to stay ‘in my place’. My place, her place. I crept to the window and looked out, she was gone. The sewing lay on the stone. In my own room, I wondered where she was, why did I need to know, why did it matter? This endless pulling backwards and forwards.
I had probably fallen asleep, it was a warm afternoon. That disorientated feeling when you wake up to a different scenario like when you go to the cinema in the afternoon. It was just going dusk. I stood letting the pillows fall to the floor, I looked out, the empty garden and the empty house. I felt abandoned without knowing why. I looked into her room. The quilt was there but a jagged hole lay in the corner. How long and deeply I must have slept. The corner where my shirt had been was ripped and only the backing, the deep blue of the sea backing, was visible. I felt as if my heart had been torn out. Now I looked at the covering more closely, I realised there was only that corner that was mine, how had I not noticed before? The vividness beguiled me into thinking I had a place, a part, but really, I was there because she needed me there then, and maybe, only then. The quilt was half made when she met me. The material had come from her and her family’s clothes. She had explained it to me once, here, was her mother’s shirt, the one she had worn for best, her brother contributed a Hawaiian type of thing, her father, where was her father? I must have forgotten. No, it is this scrap here, near the centre, a curving scythe of green, dark green.
© 2012