FAMILIARITY

FAMILIARITY

He woke, but didn’t open his eyes. Sleep was something so long and hard to find that you didn’t let it go easily and quickly. Nonetheless, he let his mind free to investigate and establish his situation. To his left there was a sensation of warmth, and an upward curve of the quilt not to be explained otherwise. His ears told him that there was a sound of level breathing. He assessed his needs.

Deliberately and consciously, with minimal superfluous movement, he eased himself from under the quilt and swung his legs out, over the side of the bed and down towards the floor. They were precise, segmented motions, the way a crane on a building-site delivers a pallet of bricks or a load of already mixed cement where they are wanted. At the same time as his legs moved down, the quilt slid back on to the bed as a formless, inanimate mass, which no longer retained the shape of his former presence, and his upper body, released, rose up, twisting and turning, but steadied and supported by his hands on the edge of the bed. As a manoeuvre in space the whole thing had a sense of co-ordination and balance which resembled a gymnastic exercise.

However, it was interrupted, before its smooth conclusion in his standing upright beside the bed, by a pause. His hands were placed palm-down on the mattress, but his fingers, extending further, had encountered the cold roundness of a metal bed-frame.

That’s the bed we had in Madeira, he thought, years and years ago, when there were thunderstorms every afternoon, and to start with we avoided them, made sure we could shelter somewhere with a beer, and watch the rain splash down and jump up again, and then walked back with the ground steaming around us and froglets hopping in and out of the puddles, but then – then – we let ourselves get wet, drenched, soaking, so the water joined us together, as if we had no clothes on at all, and we ran back to the hotel, dripping through the foyer, leaving a flood up the stairs, oh, the maids must have hated us! And then we were in our room, and our clothes were gone, but the water was still on our skins, and it had grown as warm as were, and it joined us together again, and nothing could have separated us, not even the noise that wretched bed made, all the rest of the afternoon and most of the night!

The interrupted movement continued, his feet expecting the welcome shock of cold marble in a warm climate – but what they encountered was something different, smooth in one way, but not in another, and of itself neither warm nor cold.

The hours I spent sanding those boards! he thought. And the knots stuck up, and the cracks let the draughts through, and wherever I stopped and started afresh I made a great gouge like some glacial valley, and the varnish was so shiny that the rugs always slipped, and then there were those three boards on the landing that creaked like Beethoven's Eroica, and always woke Freddie up, and when he started Jessica started, and after a couple of hours of that, when there was peace and quiet at last, and we were sneaking back to bed, one of us forgot about the boards, and it all began again!

He was about to open his eyes, to avoid a squeaky board or a treacherous rug, but as he turned to his left, and brought his right foot round, the surface he felt beneath it changed. Not stone. Not wood. Nothing natural.

It’s that hotel, he thought, at the conference, plastic, all of it, even the little cups for the drinks, too many drinks, too often, and disposable, all of it, all of us – no wonder people clung to one another –

That was when he opened his eyes, because he wanted to see where he really was, even if it was pitch-dark in the room – she could never abide the least bit of light. His feet told him. The carpet was soft, and warm. He wriggled his toes in it. It wasn’t grass. It wasn’t sand. But it gave him comfort, which was what he needed on his way to the lavatory. The cistern wasn’t some piece of exotic and antiquated plumbing, nor something cast-iron and rusting above his head, nor a button on a cupboard, but a familiar low-level one he could support himself on with one hand while he did what he had come for.

Meanwhile, in the solitary darkness, her back arched, her legs moved, her lips formed shapes that might have been words, and breath puffed in and out between them. She had a sense of absence, of incompleteness. But there had been absences before, and she had coped. She knew she had a world inside her, if ever she needed to explore it.

There was a disturbance, a movement of air, a shifting of weight on the mattress, a suppressed grunt, a shuffling, and the sense of a space being filled. Such small things gave a sense of presence. Some people, she supposed, thought they were all that mattered. Little signs, involuntary indications, hairs in the wash-hand-basin, the cap left off the tooth-paste tube. Reassuring and irritating at the same time. She smiled to herself, and was surprised at the movement of her facial muscles. Habit, she thought, as she re-asserted her grip on the quilt. How hard it can become to tell the difference between habit and choice. How hard to know which one you really want.

There they lay, side by side in the darkness, keeping one another company, as sleep slid over them, now deeper, now shallower, like a tide coming in and going out, rolling them together, rolling them apart, until, eventually, one day, when time had passed, they would, in the right weather, become what they looked like now: two mounds beneath a covering of white.

Frome, 10.45-12.45, 05.vii.2020