Kate stood at the window and peered through the grey grimy film that years of traffic passing underneath had left. She pulled back the dusty blue sheets hung as curtains a little further, and for a moment the night sky made a mirror of the window, and her face, neck, and hands glowed slightly, her hair and clothes blending in with the dark room behind her.
She quietly opened the latch and slid the metal window frame across to the right. The pigeon shit encrusted inches thick on the widow sill gave off a strange smell in the rain, something she knew should disgust her but merely reminder her of home.
'Hello there,' she whispered to the small terracotta flower on the sill, concreted in by the resident rock solid muck that the birds left.
'What kind of life is this for you hey?' She smiled at the idea that flitted through her head; that the cactus and pot had once dreamt of living on a fancy apartment's kitchen window, and not here living out its later years as her ashtray on a noisy city street.
She lit a cigarette and leaned her elbows carefully on the clean inner side of the sill. Resting her chin in her left hand she took a drag of her cigarette and making a whistling face she blew the smoke away from the window to stop it from coming inside.
Looking down to the other side of the street she waited. Something would happen if she stood here long enough.
The voices of men coming down the lane beside her building reached her and she watched as they came into view, crossing the wet quicksilver tram tracks and shouting loudly about who was at fault for getting them kicked out of the bar down the road.
Entering the late night burger joint across the road the men half collided, half pushed past a man coming the other way. Her heart caught in her throat and she froze, waiting for the choose your own adventure moment where she got to pick up the flowerpot hurling it with perfect aim at his head and killing him, followed by the next option which was to duck back into the darkness of the room without being seen. The third option was to just freeze, stand there and pray to god that he didn't look up.
The neck wasn't thick enough though, and this man, this almost-him, was too short and too well dressed in a dark leather jacket, something he would never have worn. It would be great if her heart would stop pounding. Even better if the fucked up niggling idea that part of her was actually disappointed that it wasn't him which was doing battle with an even more mentally deranged feeling that, it it had been him, she may have run downstairs and called his name.
She watched the almost-him stagger past. He paused, stared intently at his burger and took a huge bite of mostly paper bag.
After he was gone she looked up at the billboard atop the store opposite, its floodlights illuminating five images of the same skeletal thin auburn haired girl wearing tight dark denim lee jeans.
The city in the distance with its faint glow of orange hid the stars that she couldn't have seen anyway through the dark clouds.
She’d taken a photo almost identical to this night about a year ago. It had been one of the first photographs she’d sent a friend in New York City. The photo had included the bright pink neon light from the Polish restaurant next door. Scheherazade. It seemed fitting, at least she’d hoped, at the time, that her friend would notice and point it out.
Tonight was colder, autumn, had come and gone and winter was sinking its teeth into the street. Wine had gone from white to red and the nights of sitting outside in to the early hours of the morning at the bar that ran alongside the park had moved inside to the couches and the smokers now made little exhibitions outside to stamp their feet and huddle together.
Earlier that night Kate had known it was time to go home when sitting on the toilet at The Vineyard, she’d felt the sudden urge to rest her head on the large circular toilet role holder attached to the back of the cubicle door. She'd left without saying goodbye, afraid she'd slur her words, or worse still order another drink.
Pulling her coat around her, instead of feeling less drunk the briskness and sound of car tires swishing through the wet had made her feel unsteady.
Swaying slightly on her way home, running a hand along the closed shopfronts to steady herself, she had remembered how, when she was a kid, she would pretend to be blind when walking home from school. She would close her eyes, and running her fingertips against front fences, against the large hedges that grew in her suburb she would know how close she was to her street.
When a guy had gone on his pyromaniac hedge-burning spree in the neighbouring suburbs she had totally understood. She found them menacing, huge dark green fences a meter thick that were up there as the the ultimate horticultural gold medal of wealthy suburban life,with massive oak trees and potted camellia bushes beside the front door.
The hedges had said to her, “We’re richer than you, we’ve been here longer, and we win.”
Fumbling for her key and letting herself in she reached behind the counter of the shop and stole a chocolate frog and making her way down to the door that led up to their apartment, being careful not to knock anything over she stopped to grab an apple juice for the morning. Her head felt cloudy and there was a fifty fifty chance she’d wake with the taste of bile in her mouth and a splitting headache.
At the top of the stairs she unlocked the door of the apartment and saw him in the dim light of his clock radio. He was asleep, on his back with his mouth open and snoring lightly. Hands folded across his chest, the light making his sharp features of his face even more pronounced he looked like a corpse.
‘Like the vampire guy, the one who wants to eat the script writer later,‘ she thought, and held a giggle in whilst slipping off her shoes and tip-toeing past in her socks.
Her cigarette finished now she pressed it into the flower pot and closed the window making sure the latch clicking into place didn't wake him.
She let the sheets fall back and standing in the dark noticed he’d left the heater on for her.
Watching the glow of the two red lights she began to undress and when she was done she lent over and clicked them off.
In the morning, Kate’s first thought, ‘Thank god I’m not hung-over,' was followed closely by the awareness that she’d not brushed her teeth the night before. Her mouth felt like all sorts of bad, and then, stretching her legs out she rolled onto her front and then to face him and said,
“Ten thirty five.” Opening her eyes and she peered over his chest at the alarm clock. ‘Ten thirty seven.“
Without opening his eyes he smiled and said back, “No dying for you today then.”
Kate had come up with a series of theories when she was a child, the morning time theory hailing from the first time she'd travelled overseas to a different time zone. When traveling out of the time zone where you were born, if you were to accidentally die then you’d end up a ghost until you made it back to your time zone.
Her and D had never worked out if this was a good thing or a bad thing.
Her theory for some reason also extended to what time her ‘body clock’ thought it was when she woke up in the morning. If she guessed the time correctly then it meant everything was in sync, and thus she could die.
It didn't stop there though. Cleaning up the house also somehow factored into her being able to die because, as she had always known, piles of clothes on the floor are the best place to hide from robbers who happened to be in your house and who for whatever reason, accidentally or with evil intent tried to shoot you.
The pile of clothes on the floor or spilling out of the cupboard would be perfect cammoflague. D had made her clean up the spare room where she kept her clothes once. She had sat on the half folded futon that they kept on the floor and sobbed. D had found her curled up asleep in mountains of clothes, her face puffy from tears, and had resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to spend his foreseeable future with a woman who had, what she proudly referred to as, a ‘Floordrobe.’
He’d been angry at her for winning that one and when she had opened her eyes, sensing he was there, and meekly looked at him he’d said before turning and leaving the room, “Maybe you should take a photo of that and send it to your friend in New York City.”
previous - next
