I have chosen words for my picture. You know the place, you’ve passed through on your way to somewhere else. You didn’t stop and if you did it was just to buy some food before you drove on. It was nondescript, home to no one you know. You can’t even remember its name. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t small, it was just a town. Who lives somewhere like that.
In the darkness she touches herself. There was boy once, when she was young. They fumbled behind the shed, each eager to make a new experience. She adored him. And then he met the other. Her, perfect skin, long hair and that was that. She had stoically remained friends but he never answered her hello’s again. It was like she had ceased to exist. Her feelings she discovered had been hers and hers alone. She buried that humiliation and never let it near the surface. Perhaps the other girl was dead by now. Died young or something.
There had been another boy after that but then perfect skin, perfect teeth, long hair had intervened again. She had at least the thought of that one never having seen her near naked. No one had ever seen her fully naked. She wondered if she had ever been beautiful. In any event it was too late for that now.
She often walked past the same younger woman in the street. She always said hello. She wondered if she should have gone in that direction, but then that direction had never been allowed when she was young.
There were two brothers and a gaggle of nieces and nephews. She tried to help, to be part of their lives. One was married to a perfect skinned, chiselled cheekboned woman who never wanted the help. The other brother, the one she almost never saw, she thought he harboured a dark secret. He didn’t want anyone to know. She suspected but stayed away. The door would always be open to his daughter, no matter what. Families were difficult.
She was the second daughter, the one born to look after parents in their old age. Parents who had in the end, died regrettably young. The other daughter, the sister so close when they were young, is gone, somewhere far away. Married. Happy. She doesn’t hear. There is family in the old country. She has meaning there and yet the walls are filled with smiling faces who have never visited.
She is not unhappy but happiness has eluded her too. A sheltered life, she wished she’d been braver. What if she’d taken off her knickers behind the shed. She thinks that now, but then it was a sin.
There never seemed to be a time when the opportunity was there and the morals noose she had been brought up with had loosened to allow it all to happen. She had been ready to fall in love when she was young, but could not bring herself to ‘give in’ too early in the game. Now she was ready for the physicality of it but the opportunity never presented itself. The moral noose had loosened, long after the body had its day. She looked at the men on the train in the morning. At hands with wedding bands and hands without and tried to make sense of why some had found love and some had not. She remained perplexed.
The house was hers. She owned it and she was proud of that. Her own space. No one, not even the government could take that from her. It was small but with only her it always felt bigger than she needed. The immaculate dining room that was never used, she ate in front of the telly, dinner on her lap.
The kitchen where she cooked more food than she could usually eat. Her clothes always washed and ironed, what else was there to do. The abandoned exercise bike in the room upstairs with the empty bed for the people who never came to stay. She enjoyed her job, thank goodness she enjoyed her job. The grass was done, the garden done, she paid someone, couldn’t be bothered to do it herself.
In the mornings she washed herself deliriously in the shower in the morning, full of life and vigour –maybe once but not anymore. The bones creaked more often now and the hair had more signs of grey. The home done colour would not last for much longer. She struggled into panty hose a size too small and told herself no one noticed the lines cutting into her midriff. No one did, it was expected of a woman of her age. Her hips were built for mythical children that belonged to a mythical man. All she could tell you about him was that he had a moustache. She liked the idea that it would tickle. There was nothing else about him she could really envision anymore. The perfect sculpted boy of her youth had eluded her. The gentle aging with children at her feet had passed her somewhere in the night.
She was not happy. She was not unhappy. There were friends and holidays and her job. There were box sets and movies. It was simply not how she expected it to be, there was no narrative that had prepared her for this life. The spinster aunts she had known had all found a way of parenting another’s children. She had not. She touched herself in the darkness, it made her happy.
A Tuesday Latte 