‘You that cancer guy’s woman?’
Sonia is distracted from her walking thoughts by a woman who is perched on the edge of a low stone fence. She doesn’t reply at first, she hadn’t heard that for years. Somebody’s woman!
‘Yeah,’ she says, and looks into her neighbour’s face up close for the first time.
Sonia has passed her anonymously many times on the street and is dismayed at the sudden interest. Her neighbour stands up and tilts her head like a bird, a sly smile parting her thin lips, ‘I’ll come and have a cup of tea with you sometime,’ she says.
‘Umm,’ Sonia’s face is contorted in a muddled smile as she keeps walking.
Her feet are sore and she’s puffing from the steep incline of the street. The plane trees are thick with growth, the green light cool and enchanted. Her neighbour could have been a sprite, thinks Sonia, someone who lives in the trees and appears out of nowhere to shake you up a bit. She slows down, turns her head, partly to catch her breath and partly to see where she’s gone. Surely she can’t know which house we live in. Sonia remembers her name, Annie, and knows she lives in the hostel at the end of her street. She can see her walking down the hill. Her trousers are too big and bag in the bum and the knees, her back bent to the ground, but she moves at puckish speed, long strands of white hair floating around her like ectoplasm.
If she put her arms out and someone gave her a straw hat she could be a scarecrow. Her voice, like a rusty old band saw, would scare the birds. There is a scattergun delivery to it. The young ears of corn would stay sheathed and their broad fluted leaves sway in the summer winds until harvest if Annie set to with her yelling and cursing. Sonia has heard her on occasion from the safety of a shop doorway or the other side of the street, railing against god knows what, and as quickly, quiet again, like a furious wind that catches in your throat only to die as you turn a corner.
Sonia can’t remember when she first started to become invisible. There would have to be an exception now for sprites, she supposed. It wasn’t as if she could place herself unseen in any given situation. She couldn’t overhear a conversation that was private and she certainly couldn’t walk through walls, but she found herself, more and more, contemplating these thoughts. The living and moving things in the world make an arc around her now, her own life seeming to leak out, furtive and silent. The silver necklace that glides between her breasts the only reminder that she has dressed carefully this morning. That it mattered.
Her work has become a burden, something to be carried on her back, all her dizzying thoughts and anxieties slung into her bag, jostling about, pinching her shoulders. She wears sturdy walking shoes. They are nearly ugly. Sonia looks down and wants them to turn into paws, padded and clawed. Then she would be able to fight. She could use stealth, her cold eyes watching and waiting to pounce. No words. She could just act. She wouldn’t have to listen to the empty phrases – the restructuring, the realigning, and the re-applying for the same job. There would be no bottom line, no in response to the global recession, no margins being squeezed, just the satisfying breaking of bones and ripping of flesh. Another meal successfully caught and devoured.
She reaches her door and slips her key into the lock carefully, so as not to disturb her husband who might be asleep. The house is quiet, breathing shallow breaths. She pokes her head around their bedroom door and sees the familiar but unutterably altered shape of him, lying like a crescent moon in the bed, the sharp ridge of his back jutting up like an insurmountable mountain range. She blanches against the terrifying weight loss, the distance he has travelled into his own world, where she knows instinctively he will stay until life enters his body again. It would have been unthinkable six months ago not to greet each other on arriving home, but she closes the door with a soft click and goes about her evening rituals lost in his illness and her own shifting thoughts. There will be days and days like this, both their lives postponed and their togetherness banished. No words to shore up the disease.
Occasionally, when the suffering reaches new heights, hardly a white blood cell left in his body and he is wracked with sobs, she can comfort him, but otherwise all is silent. The disease has come for her too and has isolated them both, save for the occasional plate of food left on the door step as she watches a friend step quietly away.
Sonia stretches out on the sofa, a cup of tea on a small table at her side. Her cat, Maxine, lies on her chest, her white paws crossed almost at Sonia’s chin, mimicking her own feet at the other end of the sofa. They stare at each other for a long time and the thrumming on Sonia’s chest seems to quiet her heartbeat. Sometimes Maxine puts a paw up to her face, the soft pad resting on her cheek as if to console. How does she know? ‘Oh my little partner in crime, what evil thoughts can we make manifest tonight?’ she says aloud to her. Who shall be blasted to buggery? What about that simpering little fool in accounts? His duplicity always manifest whenever she speaks to him, any request denied with a callous heart and an indolent smirk. Or that bus driver today, refusing to stop, pretending he hasn’t seen her. She has noticed him on other journeys, always grumpy, his foot always on the brakes, leaving passengers (or are they customers or clients now?) to lurch into their seats. Or what about her incompetent boss, whose ruthless ambition and ego far outweigh any skill set he brings to his position, his mendacity and mediocrity pitiful and demeaning day after day? She can feel her heartbeat quicken again and sighs. Is it always going to be like this now that she is a certain age? She has passed that stage in her life at about thirty-eight when she noticed the first real signs of ageing. The vertical lines between her eyebrows deepened and no amount of cream would see them fade. Her eye shadow lost in the creases of her lids, and the laughter where there is none at the corners of her eyes. She decided then she would age fearlessly—hoping for an enlivening sense of things being pared down, of one door closing and another opening—instead, she now has the sense of life’s inexorable journey overtaking her.
Sonia and Maxine continue to watch each other. The television hums in the corner of the room, the blue rays catching Sonia’s mood. Maxine lays her head on Sonia’s chest and Sonia closes her eyes. She hears a faint tapping at her front door. She waits and then it comes again, louder this time. Rousing herself from the sofa, Maxine safely tucked into its folds, she walks the length of the long hallway to the door. They replaced the old bevelled glass with a more modern textured glass the year before, and now she can only see the vague outline of who it might be between the panels of wood. Sonia opens the door,
‘I’ve come for that cup of tea,’ she hears Annie say.
‘You can’t,’ Sonia panics, ‘he’s asleep.’ Although she knows it wouldn’t disturb him.
‘I’ll be quiet,’ Annie’s raspy voice reassures Sonia in broken whispers, the cigarettes having robbed her of a full breath.
‘Come through,’ Sonia says, aware that she sounds like some imperious school mistress. Annie takes no notice and bounds through to the kitchen with almost girlish glee. She sits down at the table looking expectant but as she gazes around the room noting the various bits of china, the books stacked on chairs, the paintings and prints covering the walls, Sonia can feel Annie’s scorn. It is as if her eyes are contaminating everything Sonia loves.
‘Haven’t you got anything stronger?’ Annie says, as Sonia pours the tea.
‘I don’t,’ says Sonia, but she does. She decides to fiddle with the dishes on the kitchen bench rather than confront Annie’s addictions face to face. Michael would have been very matter-of-fact if he could have seen this. He would have ushered Annie out the door as soon as possible with some salving words firmly delivered. But her most potent excuse has been waived. What has happened to her that she can no longer feel her place in the world - a stranger in her own kitchen - her identity as faded as the colour of Annie’s hair? Annie is folding and unfolding her legs under the table, all bone and frailty, the loose fabric of her trousers sagging in a heap at her feet. Her breath keeps catching at something and Sonia sees, just briefly, in her face, the demarcation lines of sheer survival. Trouble has claimed them both, but Sonia’s grim insight is unwanted and will stand between them.
‘Here, some biscuits,’ Sonia says.
‘Have you got a smoke?’ Sonia shakes her head. ‘Can I borrow some money? I could go and get us some fags.’
‘I haven’t got any cash.’
Annie’s scorn seems to reach a climax and she puffs herself up, wheezy, as her face reddens and her rheumy eyes roam over Sonia with undisguised hatred.
‘Ya fucken rich…’ the words stop and she says in a whisper, ‘My cousin, she’d help me.’
Sonia’s face stiffens as she looks at the floor, her arms out in front of her like she’s playing blind man’s bluff. She finds the back of the chair and puts both her hands on it to steady herself. Unable to speak, she watches as Annie starts picking imaginary crumbs off the table. Her hands are expressive, the long tapered fingers swollen with oedema as are her feet.
‘I’ve got it too…the cancer. They’ve ripped me insides out. Cancer of the cunt,’ she chuckles, enjoying the shock of the phrase as a direct challenge to Sonia’s sensibilities.
Sonia remembers how it was when the oncologist told Michael. The careful words, the clinical paths they would tread, each agonising step, the unpronounceable names of the drugs that soon tripped off your tongue. First the biopsy then the results, the operation, the testing of the lymph nodes, the chemo, the steroids, the blood cell count, the hair loss even your eyelashes, your pubes, the hairs in your nose, and the waiting, the endless waiting, for results, for the blood cell count to rise, for the next treatment, for the end. Sonia couldn’t imagine what it has been like for Annie. Has she even been consulted properly? Does the beer and cheap sherry help? Annie’s frenzy stares at her now as Sonia asks about her treatment. She tells her the chemo makes her sick. She can’t keep the beer down.
‘Wastin’ me money but I can’t stop. What’s ya name anyway?’ she says, the sly smile returning.
Annie must have let herself out. Sonia can’t remember. She is stretched out on the sofa again, Maxine nowhere to be seen. She can hear the early morning traffic as it drones past the top of her street. The bright sunlight sits on the chair opposite as does a dark wet stain. She feels her crotch in panic but it must have been Annie. Her eyes move around the room looking for more evidence. She is damp all down one side and her skirt is wrinkled like crumpled paper. She remembers being outside, the smell of the dank earth and the scuttle of night creatures as she lay on the ground. A sharp pain in her knee stops her from putting her foot on the carpet. It hurts to bend it. With her hand she pulls up her skirt and can see the gash, dried black blood raised in the shape of a slug covering it now. Her palm is tender, the graze, like the weft and weave in the threadbare carpet, goes up to her wrist. She can feel herself falling, falling all over again, and can hear Annie, ‘And you, yah fuck!’ the voice swaying down the long narrow path at the side of the house that leads to the street.
The telephone rings and she raises herself cautiously to get to it before it disturbs Michael. Oh God, Michael! It’s their daughter calling from Germany. Her voice is husky. Her daughter asks what’s wrong. Sonia assures her all is fine. She’s coming home soon, her daughter tells her.
Michael is not in their bedroom. Sonia finds him, bristling, in the kitchen, methodically clearing up the bottles and glasses left on the kitchen table. He faces the sink, his back is arched and he’s up on his hind legs. There is nothing she can say. She pads back out and down the long hallway, her head hanging low, to the bathroom. She is panting, her fur is matted and she wonders when it will become sleek again.