| The Siege |
| Forty days ago you kissed my eyelids to wake me. Forty days ago you shaved in front of the steamed-up mirror in the blue bathroom we designed together. Some old big band tune played on the radio, reverberating into nostalgia as it climbed the stairs to our bedroom. Forty days ago the bed still bore the imprint of your body. I wanted you to come upstairs and ease me back into the muddle of bedclothes. I wanted to kiss your neck and shoulders. Forty days ago I went down our stairs - as I still do - through the beam of sunlight that fell from our window - as it still does - and saw you hunched over the last step, your head impossibly bowed, like a rag-doll. The radio continued its song. The fierce children next door still whooped and shouted. A lawnmower still droned somewhere in the estate. I stood there for an instant, intensely calm, registering the everyday sounds, absorbing the ordinariness of the morning. And then the air frayed and disintegrated and everything tumbled to a scream, which was mine. My love, I've locked the world out. I'm building a citadel for us, a stronghold. England's castles were built faster. England itself was born with less pain. This is our country I 'm building, turning our things, that love us, into our landscape, closed to intruders, fragrant with love. You are written into the fabric of this house. Each room grew from you and you remain in each room. I feel you near. But at night the house creaks like a ship out at sea. I know everything is on loan to us only. Wood yearns for forest, bone-china for dark earth, silk for the worm, pebbles for sea-wrack and salt spray, the quartz and the marble and the Purbeck stone for the slow siftings of Time. Time passes slowly. The rain falls, the sap sinks, the world grows heavy with wet. Your mother calls every day on the phone. Worried about me, she weeps for herself. You've broken the rules again, my love. Remember? Parents die before their children. She says she talks to you. I don't have the heart to tell her you're here with me. The house is besieged by damp and dark. I remember our winter together in the mountains, so cold that the wind was white, when we woke to find the drift heaped upon our doorstep. We braved the worst of the weather, stocked like a garrison lost in the uncharted wilds. The lines were down, the car was hiding under its cold blanket. We laughed like children in a secret place. I wrote letters to half-forgotten friends. You played the guitar and fed the hearth's hunger. We went to ground, like animals in the winter, sheltering in each other. My love, my other, I'm hoarding you. Time whirls outside the house. It buffets the windows and calls through the chimney, it licks at the doors. The wind sweeps in its leaves, the days sweep you away, slowly, each eyelash, each crescent of fingernail, each fragment of skin. When the front door opens I imagine the particles of your dust sucked out into the long, echoing street. Perhaps you would like that, for the world is carpeted bv the season and you loved to walk through the leaf-meal. Dry, it was crisp as the sun in winter; wet it was cereal left too long in the bowl. You too are returning to the earth's embrace. Even alive, trudging through the leaves you felt it tugging at you, its dull desire. I cannot stop this drift. I cannot stop this drift. Forty drifting days on, our neighbour, ageing Eileen, smelling of pies and flour, bearing home-grown apples and pears, tries to get me out of myself. She means well. Her face is haggard with worry, though not I expect for me. I don't think she has any family of her own. I should try to like her better. She suggests support-groups, counseling, asks me if I believe in anything. I reply as you did, whenever the question arose. I believe in the God that courses through my veins and makes me want to live. And, clumsily, she hugs me. I feel embarrassed. She wants me to do something fitting, like break down, like sob, like tear out my hair. I want to be alone in the house with you. Without you, its twin, its mirror image, my smile has left me. I search for it in photographs of our birthdays and holidays and slow Sundays spent with passing friends. Will I find it again? My face has lost a dimension, fixed into lonliness. And somehow I want it this way. It's often this way. Lying still in bed, listening to the rain on the roof, I cry. I'm afraid of desire, I want to be free of it. I remember my earlier lovers - Daniel, Michael, Sanjay, the hockey player whose name I never recall, who made me cry when I was sober - and for the first time, rightly or wrongly, I feel ashamed. I want to cry for you. My lover, my co-conspirator, my straight-man, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I wish I'd only known you. I love you, I hate you for dying, I'm sorry, forgive me, I want to be dead too, I will hide with you in this house. We shall sit out the seasons amid the tokens of our love. Our love was never hurried, luxuriating in the glow of the coming years. Slowly we drifted into each other, slowly our landscapes shifted. You grew as free with my body as I could be. If there was a speck in my eye, you took it. If I cut my finger, you kissed it. If I hurt my head, you soothed it. That's what it means, to say "I am yours." To stroke the dandruff from your shoulder without a word, without a thought. To accept each other's smells. To think as two, as twice yourself; to be complete and more absolute than the face of a child. "I am yours." As if we could confuse ourselves in sleep and wake up each other. Awake, wanting to sleep, forty days on and I'm in bed again. I have put your glass of water by your pillow. I have put your book - dog-eared, page eighty-five - upon the blanket. Your bedside lamp is on. Everything is blurred by tears and tiredness. How can I go on without you? I will go on. 1 will be a home where you can live. Lost in our home, forty days on and I reach for the light switch. Suddenly I see it on the carpet, the spider. Its body is small, button-like, suspended from giant tendrils. I freeze. I fix it and imagine it fixing me. I am afraid. This is your job. I need you to scoop it into your hands and throw it away. |
 |