|
Member
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 12
|
The Unmatched
THE UNMATCHED
Fourteenth Street. Red clouds exposed across the sky. I toss away an end of sausage, and I’m thinking red evenings and raw nerves. Street dogs can chew on it but I’ve had enough of sausage.
And she’s late.
Sunday’s newspaper’s just fluttered down between these tenements and washing lines – and by coincidence (surely) the picture of Judge Quintox has landed in the puddle – no doubt tossed with distaste from one of the high windows like all the other things that have settled on this broken tar. His headlines have shamelessly covered the city like graffiti during this week: the Judge it seems has been sparing on the truth – diverting justice like he’s a blockage in some gutter.
Shameful, yet can this be cause enough to judge him? To send the suicide blond?
Well it wasn’t us. She chose for herself.
She’ll be here soon if she’s coming.
Fourteenth Street in the fallen season. The cantilevered washing hangs grey no matter how much soap you use. A time of steaming stews, of slowing down; with summer past (its sentence done, it’s freely moved to warmer parts), the tourist jobs have folded. The eyes have grown dim around Fourteenth Street and doors don’t open much. Wet footprints overlap like stamps in a welfare book and the drains don’t work. The puddles lengthen.
We told her: “You take it too serious!” and she said, “They’re all scum!” And the fist as it fell was petite and weightless, but she said she’d have more weight if we waited. We’d heard it before.
If she doesn’t come soon I’m heading home.
Ah! Enter Lena. Dedicated lady. Next year she and daddy no doubt will be off to another of his postings and this will be last year’s little thing. I withdraw into the shadows.
She’s passing through this tar and bins place dressed in her most resolute face. She wears her deepest eyes. I think she’s coming this way because she’s doubted our belief. Step around the mud, Lena. We didn’t think you’d come.
Is this you here to do what you threatened your father you’d do – to ease this bitterness of dissimulation, as you called it?
You’ll be remembered, remember that.
Mind you, they’re hardly going to think you’re a blond the way you wear the scarf of respectability tonight. Symbolic meaning? Those colours that you’ve chosen? Newspapers mention things like that and your father will be proud. Thankfully he won’t be there. Once you start there’s not a lot will stop you – that’s what he said.
You must feel a scrap uncomfortable, but you don’t have far to go. You could have taken a cab but how noble to have chosen the harder way. You could be reclining at your father’s covered pool, sipping from the bowl you’ve been fed from all your life; yet here you are helping the cause, risking it all – but did you need to come this way? Down Fourteenth Street, making the rest of us look bloodless.
The sky’s faded, the blood is drained and a few old stars might show up later. The judge will be impatient for his soiree to unclog a lot of money and we may be sure his smile will cancel any shame left there from Sunday. Hurry Lena. Battle on.
When he bends to peck that pretty cheek, along with all the other young women – who’ll have come by cab – you’ll do it then I suppose. Is that’s what you’ve planned? Symbolic. Blow the lips off the bugger!
She glances over. I move into shadow but I fancy my chewed sausage sits like a finger, pointing.
It’s no street dog I see stirring from the alley, looking worse than ever: enter the smudge called Wallis. He won’t have seen the Quintox revelations because he can hardly read, but even so Wallis might well have seen the judge’s powerful finger pointing down at his unworthy nose as if for a brief moment he was deserving of the notice of so tall a man. Upstanding. Wallis has seen a lot of judges but it looks as if this evening Wallis will become one. He will be the crime as well; he’ll be the punishment. All he waits for is the subject – Wallis never thinks of victim. Wallis is the victim here. Wallis is the puddle that in a moment you will step in, Lena, during this unfortunate osculation of the paths of the unmatched. I ought to go and help.
I remember when we squatted briefly in these tormented buildings, leaving dry crumbs and scrawling messages with friends. What fun! Is this you passing through for old time’s sake? Or something in your past you never told us? Anyway, it’s been a privilege, even if what you thought we needed were heroes rushing what’s left of the defences of tradition – which clearly your father failed to impress enough throughout your youth. (“Protect it, or they’ll take, child.” He probably said that, but you didn’t listen.) He blames that boarding school.
Let me say that your ruin is uncharitably drab tonight considering your own bright aims. I see him sniff the air like the dog he is. Smudge and victim, wound and weapon. Victim face to face with victim and Fourteenth Street has become solidly quiet. The wind has stilled along the lines, the curtains flicker like the tv screens behind them. Cracked things rattle in the odours of the sinks as evening meals prepare themselves for sacrifice. Stained dollar bills in wallets stretch elbows with a yawn. The attack is silent.
She does not scream. Wallis has this practiced and there’ll be no let-up just because of thrashing legs and scratching fingers till he has her down behind the stinking bins, limp and lying, shocked and stunned. I ought to help. I should have warned her.
It was the only way to stop her.
Does she think it matters to Wallis if Judge Quintox lied when he offered his oath of protecting what’s left, lancing the boils of infraction? Wallis doesn’t know what all this means. People like the judge have let Wallis rust in cells and let poor Lena twist herself so out of shape that her mind no longer fits inside its shell at all. Now her resolution’s dammed and this just the third day after Sunday. But is this smudge less worthy than the man for whom you’ve pledged yourself? You’re resolved for sacrifice; you with the mighty weapon of self sacrifice. For ruins like this you were a soldier tonight.
No way! And I bet this isn’t what you meant.
Is Wallis hurting? If that’s what he thinks kissing is you’d better do something before the rest of him gets going, but how can you talk rationally with all the grunting and the tape flattening your nose? How can you start telling Wallis what you’d resolved to do tonight somewhere between the peck on the cheek and the champagne sorbet?
I have to say, none of us expected you to go this far. Words are easy with the indignation of the liberal, but the rest of us… We’ve done the gutter work all these years. We didn’t need a hero.
I withdraw further as Wallis finds the wire around her waist. If he presses it that will end what he thinks he’s started. But I see he’s paused. This strange ambivalence has shocked him back into the alley off Fourteenth Street, back from whatever reverie he’d found, and he’s grunted.
Perhaps you understand it to be a query, Lena.
Don’t you hear in the voice the surface texture of the alley? Same damp and sludgy edges? Don’t you feel for him? Weren’t the messages you scrawled on old fireplaces meant for him? But he can hardly read. How can he have ended up like this after all you did? What on earth was he doing whilst you were resolutely throwing yourself out of university and as far from family as umbilical cord will allow, shouting at your poor father all those threats and promises to keep. Anyway, he doesn’t understand and you don’t have much time. If resolution fails then detonate him, let the worthless lump of alley stuff stay on his walls so the rest of us can carry on the fight and honour you.
With that grubby finger following the wire he feels your soft tan from the summer that was hotter than his. I expect the finger leaves a trail and… Does the nail have cracked edges? Is the fingertip ridged and sharp? Brave words never left trails like that.
Yanking your scarf and… is he seeing? – opening your skull, Lena, exposing wishes and seeing everything! Your little nightcap, good-bye cap, I’ll take-you-all-with-me type of thinking that a twisted wait for some worthwhile thing must have moulded like plastic curls into your skull and which, quite frankly, wasn’t really what we needed in the group. We were doing fine. Just the merest whim, some offhand comment that none of us took seriously, and… It was a joke!
“!”
A second query, more urgent now that his fingers must have reached the plastic. What kind of credit will he make of that? Lucky Wallis. Do something, Lena. Don’t waste it. Look into those grubby eyes and offer the smile that was to be for the judge in that moment of discharge. This person of the alley is surely just as worthy; isn’t it for the likes of him you told your father you were leaving: “Go then!” I recall him shouting at the time. “Don’t expect a cent!” Remember.
Sorry dad, you said. I expect he’ll change his mind; you’re used to getting what you want, and anyway you didn’t think you needed cents. You certainly have plastic enough of your own now to make a splash in any puddle.
Is this you offering a chance? Tearing tape from a face that’s the same smelly colour as mud; but I’m sure Wallis is not used to this new way of doing things. That arm must feel half broken as you draw it back.
“Ten seconds!” you say. Is that all you offer?
With trembling finger and your face made up – because I’ve seen that look turn inches from my own – you wait for his decision. Still, it’s more than your father offered when he demanded immediate withdrawal that time he located us in the bedroom, remember. Such uncharacteristic and desperate threats from a quiet man, but we could laugh about it later.
Uneducated he may be, unskilled in the way he handles women, but Wallis understands a deal. Wallis nods. You nod back as best you can from such a low angle. Does the pain ease, Lena? A little. Enough for now, and certainly Wallis is gone in plenty of time from Fourteenth Street.
Phew! Would you have pressed? You had us worried, but take a moment to straighten yourself and put back the scarf. You’ll need something to wipe off the mud. You can tell them you were mugged, although I don’t think they’ll want you at the ball tonight, and we were expecting so much. So easily deflected. The rest of us have become hardened, but no doubt you’ve learned from this.
Torn between alternatives? You’re spinning. Has this man from the alley taught you nothing? Get the fog from your mind and be focused, otherwise you’re no use to us. Be resolute.
Oops! Have I been careless? She’s glancing over. Like the dead end of my sausage she’s pointing. Staggering . . . needing my help, needing firing up again and a good cup of tea. Needing . . .
“Hi, Lena.”
“One second,” she says.
Last edited by crater : 05-04-2006 at 01:40 AM.
|
