|
Castle Street in June
Teresa
Kelly had not given up on life entirely when Ron died of a long established
creeping disease of the blood. She came out of her house in Hendred Street
every Wednesday like a snail after rain, and walked with her eyes almost
closed. She knew every jagged fissure, every cracked slab along the way to the
post office in Castle Street. It was as if she was still cocooned with the
ghost-echo of Ron’s cough in her tiny front room, where the drawn curtains kept
the fierce sunlight off her carpet of hypnotizing brown and red swirls.
She’d have welcomed visitors sometimes, even if they were only moving-on men
with something to sell. When she was young they came to the house often with
clever gadgets and men’s handkerchiefs and hairbrushes. They came with their
strange vacant air, courteous but guarded, as if they’d seen too many things in
the world that didn’t make sense. And they’d be glad to eat ginger cake and
drink tea in the mint green kitchen with her and Ron, and talk of the war
before moving on.
Now, the world kept wanting to tell you something meaningless, with unnatural
enthusiasm, - but only on glossy paper thrust through the letterbox, the words
ant-like in their tiny-ness. The two people who had come inside that year
didn’t count because they were the man to read the gas meter and the one from
the water board. Neither had stayed for a cup of tea.
Teresa felt as if she was nobody, and as she walked she didn’t look at the
people around her, whose faces she knew were drained of colour and not
handsome. No remarkable things happened any longer in the neighbourhood
around Castle Street, everything was bland. She could creep from her house to
the post office without the slightest jolting of her inner thoughts.
At the crossing her mouth was always ajar, and about her was a vacant look with
the effort of walking. She stepped straight onto the road with no hesitation,
for she recognized that she herself was as intrinsic to the neighbourhood, and
as visible, as the beautiful elm tree that burst through the pavement by the
tower block.
Lee
Goodhouse lived in the tower block on Castle Street. He’d been there, on the
fifth floor of Balfour House, for eleven months. No one else had been inside
his place.
He’d lived in the area as a child in the same nervous way as the pallid kids
that hung about the staircases now, bloated with bravado like plastic bags in
the wind. Wealth had oozed into the surrounding streets, but it was a thin
dribble that made no impact. The shops still sold trash, girls still trembled
on windy corners, their business obvious, and moneylenders scuttled as ever
before. And inside Balfour House in particular, poverty was corpulent and
triumphant.
Lee
had started moving on early in his life, dwelling amongst rotting faded
cast-offs, bewildered by his misfortune and the senselessness of things, then
leaving abruptly for new places, dragging with him his simple hope.
He had few memories left of life in Hendred Street, and those that there were,
- like his mother’s jabbing fingers - arose of their own volition and could not
be diminished by the solace he recalled as someone down the street scrapped his
hair off his forehead, and gave him cake.
He went out at night sometimes to wander about. There was nothing to do other
than sitting too long in parks amongst old people. Sometimes he pulled aside
the blanket that covered his mean little window to keep out the vicious light,
and watched them as they gathered at the post office across the road where they
queued cravenly for their few lousy pounds.
There were no coincidences, no lucky things left He’d once found close to three hundred pounds in a wallet in
the gutter. He’d spent it on a pair of trainers, a red jacket, and a meal in an
expensive restaurant; no one in there noticed him, he’d felt as pointless as an
ant, as if he was nobody.
Returning to the neighbourhood had not been his intention, but he knew without
thinking about it that he would not move on again. Life had pitched him back
and forth long enough, and his naïve hope that an ordinary man had the chance
of a good life had died in the savagery of it. He’d come to know finally that
he’d never had anything to lose right from the start, and in that thought was a
strange and bitter irony that would not leave him.
A
strange and bitter irony had arisen in Teresa’s thoughts one Wednesday as she
listened out for familiar ghostly sounds; the mourning of Ron was killing her.
Since his death she’d done the same things in the same order on the same days.
She drew aside the heavy red curtains and found that it was summer. The pattern
on her carpet came alive, its vivid colours no longer clotted and dark. She set
out for the post office earlier than usual as a gesture towards a new
beginning.
Lee woke up in a silence so profound he could hear the noise of it roaring like
a wild sea. Everything had finally settled into place, and he let his thoughts
surge without restraint.He
tore down the blanket over his window. Every fibre of his body was alert.
The blood red roses in the tiny pocket garden in Castle Street were in bloom
and deeply scented; another winter had passed, the threat of cold winds gone.
Teresa’s sleeve brushed against the overhanging blooms. The petals fluttered to
the pavement behind her and lay like tiny crimson lakes; she did not notice
them.
Lee was aware of the rose bushes that grew in the scrap of a garden close to
Balfour House. Sometimes at night on his way home from nowhere, he pinched the
heads off them and pulped them until his fingers were darkly stained. He looked
around his sour flat with his mouth open, without seeing anything. He put on
his boots. The bunch of keys that opened nothing jangled on his belt, he picked
up the larger of his two iron spikes.
Teresa reached the elm tree by Balfour House as Lee set his foot on the
gum-splattered pavement. He looked slowly to his left and registered that
everything had turned yellow and flat. He was aware of distant noises and a
slight breeze on his cheek, - and a shambling movement to his right.
Teresa’s mouth was agape. She let her bag knock against her leg as she moved.
She saw Lee’s face briefly as she stepped onto the road, saw and recognized
something familiar about the vacancy in his expression.
Rebecca Lloyd began writing short stories for publication in 1999.
Her work has appeared in Mslexia and Quality Women’s Fiction
in the UK, Danforth Review in Canada and in Carriage House Review in
Atlanta, USA.
Most of her stories are about misfits bewildered by life’s expectations
and trapped in their own limitations. Some of the stories could be described
as psychological horror and others as magic realism, but together they do not
fall clearly into any established genre.
She works full-time running a project for a charity in London and taught a six-week
short story writing course in the evenings for her local library in 2003. At present
she is working on an anthology of short stories involving curious relationships, and contributes
as a short story expert for Writewords Writers’ Community.
Email: Rebecca Lloyd
Return to Table of Contents
|
