BEDROOM EYES
Published 'After Hours' 1995
They would have been together twenty odd years.
Ruth's husband maintained that couples like them grew alike, physically as well as mentally. They debated the subject like a pair of screeching puppets. But eventually, in the long drawn-out nights, when neither could sleep, she accepted his point: that the rising of the same words, the same mutually confessed thoughts masquerading as the most odd coincidences between them, were merely ingredients in the inevitably bland stew of existence. That said, she manufactured squabbles for seasoning such a stew. She refused to believe their faces and bodies were also, bit by bit, coming together in full-blown skin to skin, socket to socket contact like grafted plants; this she could not countenance, let alone the remote possibility they could be taken as siblings: husband and wife twins. Her mind?s inevitable crumbling away, however, fetched flinching spasms to parts of the very carcass wherein Ruth lived and which she had tried to defend against all marauders, summoning the appalling visions of a single tiny peppercorn lost in the coldly insipid slime of Hell.
In a quiet corner of the city, to which she fled in a fruitless attempt to escape herself, Ruth felt the street lights were dimmer now than when she was a house-bound child. Hunters of the small hours, with no more than the dark slots of summer to tour the up-market estates of the city's outcrops, the shadow-shaped dossers hoped against hope for imperfections in the suburban mansions where Ruth used to live: a catflap or pigeon hole or rabbit hutch . . . but returned with worthless swag. Ruth couldn't make ends meet, if the cull was just a darts trophy or a clapped out video machine that nobody even bothered to clean out come morning or a toaster with a plug that didn't fit the sockets in the city pavements or an astrologer?s almanac that contained the wrong positions of the planets for the inner city or a gold-framed wedding photograph showing the drunken faces of two rival families beaming on either side of a bride and groom.
She shrugged. It was about time she had a go - no point in dossing round here much longer, beneath the houselights that flickered on and off from the high-rise windows. One day, she thought, the families would leave this forest of towers, their queer belongings like growths on their backs, for the relative safety of the tube station platforms: like a reenactment of an era of joy and privation a war had once brought.
Ruth and her adopted kind lived off the scum slowly sliding along the gutters of the street or off the more sluggish birds having inadvertently spiked themselves on park railings: and, when the towers were abandoned, the older dossers would be able to uproot their feet and bottoms from between the gently hissing office heat-vents and enter, en masse, the tall buildings that even now were busy disguising their brick and mortar as mocking scrawled abstractions of art.
As she thought over the various repercussions of evolution without selection, Ruth wandered into the outer suburbs where trees still grew, nourished crap and root; but they did not conceal, even from her blurred eyes, the detachments ranged like armoured troops with wide bedroom eyes. Their front doors were raised like drawbridges and, sure, she felt, their owners were literally trapped inside, like costly characters in an organic soap opera that still had an eternity and a half to unhatch its multiple Chinese-box dreams.
She later told the story to the creeping, mumbling shadows on her return from the outer parts. Her education had been nurtured by a lore more articulate, if shallower, than that of the streets, so she found the words:
"There was an ancient air-raid shelter in one garden, with a secret cubby, a nun's-hole, where the bones still stuck out of the ground like spring saplings. I followed the smuggler's route, at first, but no whiff of seaweed nor tang of salt surf, only the sound of TV channels, filtering along these underground inlets, like babblings of water along pipes to the boxes they fed - a twittering aviary in my head. I made entry shortly and stared at them through a tightly hatched square grill. In real colour they were - evidently a married couple, with hands joined. They stared glassily at me, and I was amazed to see that their two hearts pumped as one, outside their chests, in unison with the love-making which went on behind their backs, in a stretched sausage sort of way. They soon grew bored with me making ludicrous faces through the hatch, which I had done to scare them off to other parts of the house - to allow my itchy fingers to scuttle like spiders among their keepsakes. But they got up, as one, and without even a glance of communication between them, prodded one finger downwards in the most obscene gesture imaginable and pressed something just below the hatch. And all went blank . . ."
Her story tailed off, since she could not exactly recall her comeuppance, though she vaguely remembered meeting various other people along the tunnel systems, including those two-dimensional cutouts masquerading as chat show hosts.
She had returned to her confreres, with jagged shards of glass sticking out of the top of her head, like a prison wall. All she had for her trouble was a flask of deodorant in one hand and a sauce bottle in the other . . . both of which dissolved into wafted motes of thin air when she reached reality amid the towers.
Her husband was there, listening to her story. Having tracked her down to this innermost pit of the city's soul, he kissed her. They had grown closer by means of separation and, later that night, he lovingly prized out the splinters from her scalp, before they became embedded deeper towards the brain. And then they prepared themselves for an eternal rest in a vertical punch-and-judy coffin. The slots of darkness were thankfully lengthening.