In the square
A red-head walks to the cafe. She wears black-and-white trousers and a fitted jacket. Her shoes sound out from the stone floor, each step like a wave telling people she’s there.
She sits under the canopy. Empty tables surround her and she looks down at her hands, fiddles with her phone.
Staring at the cream stone statue in the square she wills herself to get lost in the history of such a thing. She wants to go exploring, seep into the outside world. But she flitters inside as if her heart’s beating wings as she imagines Julia arriving, her soft voice vibrating in her ear, kissing her three times and saying sorry for being late. She imagines what Julia will talk about - Harry most likely, and what he’s neglected this time - and wonders how she might respond. She can see Julia’s long, brown fingers tapping her cigarette over the ashtray.
Checking her phone, she is met with a blank screen. She bites the nail of her middle finger too hard and it hangs, half torn, exposing a fleshy part of her.
*
Number 44 is a green-tiled building on the far side of the square. It looks like it was built in China, shipped over in parts, then reassembled. Its roof is thin and covered in yellow moss, with a narrow wooden door reaching all the way to the top.
A family lived here once who came from a country no one had heard of. They spoke to no one, but kept the front door open all day so that if you passed, you could hear music coming from inside. The music was quick and spindly like a spider spinning its web, with lots of strings and jumps in melody. The youngest boys would poke their heads out and follow your steps with watery dark eyes. If the day was light and you felt it in you, you could go up to them and give them a sweet. Often you would miss your chance, as a hand would come and grab their necks, pulling them back into the dim-lit room.
It wasn’t until the music stopped that anyone noticed they had left.
*
Brie - if that’s her real name - leans her elbows on the table. The mint-green of her painted nails matches her earrings.
‘I was thinking about you last night.’
As she speaks, she looks into the distance and frowns. Turning back to the man opposite her, she blinks in slow motion, her eyelids lingering closed for a moment. It is an attempt to emphasize her point, to let the last word linger too.
When she opens her eyes she opens them wide and imagines that her stare is penetrating him.
He shows no reaction, only nods.
To push her point further, she screws the pointed tip of her shoe into his shin, staring straight at him. He doesn’t move.
They stay like this for minutes, her screwing the tip of her shoe, him defiant and still.
Eventually she gives up.
‘Do you like my dress?’ she asks, her voice curling. ‘It’s new. I bought it at the market.’
‘Too small?’, he says.
She turns away, resting her chin in her hand, and smiles. It is the kind of smile where the bottom lip slightly overlaps the top, the kind usually accompanied by a sigh through the nose. It is a kind that says, ‘funny, isn’t it?’
‘Why didn’t you come and play on Saturday?’ she says.
‘I was busy.’
‘Too busy to play?’
He grabs her ankle hard. She raises her eyebrows in surprise. Once again, they remain frozen like this. After a few beating moments he says to her slowly, ‘This is not a game, my sunshine. You understand?’
His voice rolls across the table straight into her lap. She looks down, suddenly shy. He lets go of her ankle, seizes her hand instead. He kisses her knuckles one by one, scratching her skin with his stubble.
*
An old man crosses the square, dressed like a teenager, a green ‘M’ stitched on to his baseball cap. Though Marni is well over sixty, he has the assured stride of someone much younger. He throws and catches a pair of keys, looking about for a familiar face, anyone to catch his eye. He is on the way to the garage owned by his friend Gustav. They have arranged to play cards and drink beer in the back room, but Marni has other plans. He wants to drive to the lake where they spent summers building campfires and strumming guitars. He knows Gustav will agree to anything as long as there’s beer involved.
He watches two boys ride their bikes. They wear similar caps to him. One goes up on his back wheel and shouts at his friend to look. Marni curses them through missing teeth.
Marni could tell you stories that would make you blush and pull at your skirt hem. But he is off to find trouble with Gustav, so he turns and leaves you with a wink.
On the beach
Pandora feels like a honey-soaked apricot, all juicy from the heat. She could melt right now and she would taste like a burnt dessert. Her boyfriend sits beside her reading a newspaper. He eats a sandwich and chews it with his mouth open.
She likes that he is rough and messy. She likes watching him play football and cheering from the sidelines. She knows all his friends look at her and whisper to each other when they pass. She likes that even more.
Pandora knows the girls at school look at her funny when she wears her favourite denim hot-pants. Her mother says people like that are just jealous.
Pandora was six when her mother first painted her nails. There are times when her mother looks at her as if she were looking in a mirror.
Sometimes when she rides the tram, she can sense a man’s stare on her back. It feels like the compressed heat from an open oven door. It gives her a forbidden rush. Occasionally she will feel the touch of a man on her thigh, a faint brush, and the tingle of it stays with her for minutes.
*
Children play with monkey nuts on the pier, their feet dangling off the sides. They bite each one open by cracking the shell, discarding the woody fibres on the concrete floor. Chewing the nuts into an oily pulp, they spit them at each other, aiming for the head, or even better, the eye.
This game does not necessarily end with swallowing the nut. It is not nourishment they are looking for, it is the prize within the shell. Once the prize is found, that is the end of it. The nut is used only as a vessel for saliva.
Some of the shells fall into the foamy edges of the sea, and by evening there is a family of them floating, bobbing like overturned boats.
*
A green headband pulls back Karina’s hair with a strict force. She is reading a book on Michelangelo and is so exhausted that the words jump around the page. She makes notes with a black biro. She doesn’t see anything wrong with that; books aren’t sacred. It is dangerous to put such high esteem onto pieces of paper.
Things that perish do so unconsciously. When a book is thrown into the fire, it does not scream or try to resist. Even the human body does not resist in the way we think it does. Yes- it holds its hands up to threat, and turns its head away from destruction. But the body perishes in an unseen way, unaware.
As she reads, she pouts and un-pouts her lips, an unconscious motion. Her lips are moving with her heart, in a way that reminds her that they are still alive, that they are still with the body, yet are unaware of their own inevitable ceasing, of how one day they will part in an accidental surrender, an outlet for the last breath.
She is on the chapter about his upbringing. Thirteen-year old Michelangelo is being punished by his father because he does not understand his son’s obsession with art.
Karina once met a man called Michelangelo but he was a plumber and bore none of the immortal quality of his namesake. He had long, curly hair and spoke with a nervous giggle at the end of each sentence. When she told him that Michelangelo was her favourite artist, he responded, ‘You know, I too am an artist. It’s only because people cannot see pipes and drains that I don’t get credit for it.’
She smiled, touched by the innocence of his joke, saddened by the way it sounded rehearsed.
*
Life on one side of the lens is different to that on the other. It is a life behind glass; the panting of breath amplified in a small box. Outside the lens is colour, noise, commotion. Inside, on the first side, it is still and innocent. It is mere projection of light, the projection of light which has not yet reached its screen. It travels, innocently, then reaches the lens and is met with a clear image. All the eye wants is to be met.
Grayson has worn glasses since he was three. Sometimes he thinks about what it was like for those three years and is glad he can’t remember. It was life without the lens. It was innocent projection that wasn’t met, left stranded in a space without borders or outlines.
Grayson still has moments when he wakes up from a bad dream, and feels trapped again in that space. His dreams spread themselves so thick that he forgets to reach for his glasses on the bedside cabinet and all he hears is his breath, slowing and fainting.
*
The book is covered in wrapping paper (African print: red, yellow and green). Old Mister’s hands shake slightly as he turns the pages, awaiting the next word, savouring them like he’s sucking a boiled sweet. The paper is starting to crumble.
He reaches a paragraph on page forty-two and stops, reads it a second time. It seems familiar. It describes the heroine placing a flower in her hair, getting ready for a dance. The flower is red with yellow seeds.
He reads the first sentence again- ‘She held the flower, and stuck a pin in its stem as if she were making a daisy chain’.
Why did it strike him? Where had he seen this before?
He remembers his sisters making daisy chains when it was summer and the grass was long. But that wasn’t it.
The words were tugging at a deeper memory, one that had become lodged under the rubble of other, more painful memories.
He doesn’t notice but his grip has tightened on the pages. The image of a red flower being fastened on to a pin...It was so clear to him. He couldn’t imagine any of the women from his past doing something so exotic.
What it stirred in him was like love in a dream; a tremor from an earthquake, leaving no mark, but felt in the body.
He scratches his neck, the folds of his skin tremble slightly at the touch. His throat feels dry and scratchy like he’s swallowed a hair. He makes himself cough, it only gets worse.
In his mind, the woman fastens the flower on to a thin scarf tied around her head and leans down to check herself in the mirror, lifting her eyebrows to get a better look. He watches in the background without her noticing.
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