Knock, Knock…

When first he came to call for me, he knocked so softly on the front door that if it sounded at all it was just a whisper echoing through the hallways but never reaching up to my apartment on the top floor.   If I hadn’t been sat waiting at the bottom of the stairs, listening intently to the distant hum of the street traffic outside, I would not have heard him at all and I imagine he’d have stood and waited for just moments before turning from that impenetrable oak entrance door and disappearing into the street crowds.

The doorbells were arranged in a haphazard row, each one covered with a paper with the number of the apartment scrawled across it.  When pressed they rasped with a shocking clarity in my tiny attic, so his gentle ‘tap, tapping’ felt like ambivalence even then.  But as the spring wore on and became early summer he grew bolder; banging on that door until a shudder went all through the house, and every occupant knew he had come a calling.  I liked that. I began to wait in my apartment; feverish and then on hearing him I’d sashay slowly down the stairs; passing my neighbours who had come out at the noise and now waited to watch me leave with him.  Maybe they would smile at our backs or stand there, arms folded in the half dark of the hallway, frowning after us.  I badly wanted them to envy us, with our sass and our chins that jutted upward and butted away any kind of cares.

One time, as I reached the bottom of the stairway I heard a whisper from the shadows in the hall.

‘Take care, girl.’

An old woman stood staring at me.  She had on a cotton dress too big for her, and the wisps of white hair made an unruly frame around her head like an oddly shaped halo. Her spectacles had frames too large for her tiny face and thick lenses that distorted her rheumy eyes, making them huge, though they were still a bright, cornflower blue.

She stood there a moment, her face blank of all expression but she said nothing more before she blinked a few times and then turned back into her apartment, shutting the door hard behind her.

Would I have stopped and listened? Would I have taken her advice and been careful?  Who knows?  Even then, in my fire years I was polite and cheerful in my nature; though it was true I had no concern for danger and could not have recognised a life of misery ahead in the shape of a callous if handsome youth.  So I listened, then dismissed her warning and went about my business, thinking her typical of the old; lost in some kind of muddle.  Then, I turned my pretty ankle in its soft slip-on twenty dollar pump and took his arm, kissing his suntanned cheek and whispering in his ear ‘folle’ before we banged the door behind us, leaving it swinging in our wake.

I left with him that day, and again and again on the days that followed, my face close and enquiring as I hung onto his arm and every clever, funny word that tripped off his tongue.

Later I would close the door softly as I left his apartment, after that salty tongue had snaked its way around my mouth and down the length of my body. I would shudder remembering how it had slowly, deliciously made its way to the place where the heat of me lay simmering, and then it flicked and flew, darting in and out of that beautiful mouth of his until I boiled over, spilling like the sticky juice of a sweet, late summer plum.

Leaving him snoring lightly, sprawled in the creased sheets, I would smile at our secrets, then carry them carefully, all the way home to my own bed which waited empty, its sheets crisp and cool as I slid into them exhausted.

I rarely saw the old woman after that first time.  Once or twice I caught a glimpse of her, entering her apartment, her key scratching in the stiff lock, or stepping out into the front hallway where the dust motes floated in the afternoon sunlight from the windows, but she never spoke to me again or came to her door when I banged down the stairs in reply to his knock.  I had no time for her anyway, for I could give little thought to those who were not like me with my urgent need to live, to exist only in the moment, to ride in fast cars and feel a rough skinned hand ride up the inside of my thigh.

The summer wore on and a sudden blistering heat made the hallways smell bad. It was as though the years of boiling and stewing, roasting and frying, on all the stoves in those tiny apartments had created one god almighty smell that sweated through the walls and hung stinking in the air, leaving a stain on the shabby, peeling paper.

After that, people did not leave their apartments much at all.  It was as though the heat had brought with it a sickness that left them stricken, listless and unable to go about their daily business or visit friends for mid-day lunches or meet for cocktails before a theatre show, or a late supper.   They lay helpless on their beds in dark shuttered rooms waiting it out, waiting for the big warm drops of rain to fall and cool the sticky air.  Others, the impatient had already left the city and headed for the coast with its sea breezes and big hotel rooms with double doors that opened onto balconies overlooking the ocean.

As time went by he called less often, and I spent less and less time writhing in his sheets and sharing a forbidden smoke with him as we studied the stains on the ceiling over his bed and laughed at the fat, sweating neighbour who banged on the thin wall at hearing our pleasure.

But eventually I too lay on sweat creased sheets tossing and turning, the fire in my belly un-stoked, with a terrible dread in my heart and when after two weeks he did not call at all; I began not to eat, but to drink instead.  Not the Bourbon from the bottle I had kept since the last July Fourth, nor the sickly sweet liquor that my mother had advised in case of oncoming cold, but endless glass, after endless glass of clear cold water whilst I listened to the hum of the refrigerator and watched the flies dance a doomed tango around the broken ceiling fan.  Occasionally I left the rickety bed to wander to the bathroom to pee or to the tap to pour another glass of water.  Sometimes I squeezed a cloth under the running water and wiped it over my face and neck and down between the breasts that ached so acutely for his touch, but other than that I did nothing but lay there, the old woman’s words running over and over in my head ‘Take care, girl.’

Each time I closed my eyes I saw her staring back at me, her gaze intense.  Her eyes were still blue, still watery, but this time I recognised the grief that lay deep within them, and realised that her words that day had been a warning both to me and to the girl she had once been, even though it had come too late for both of us.  Finally, my eyes were open and I understood.

Days later I packed up my things and left the faded, forlorn apartment building, and made my way to a small town nearby to stay with a friend for company and to recover my senses, before I headed for the wider roads of the West Coast and the sea breezes that blew in from the Pacific.  They were warm winds but they gave me some kind of comfort.

I did not return to the city.

Dinka

On the News At Ten a woman sat beneath a sparse leaved tree
a dust-bathed slender stork
her spindle fingers at her gathered brow
she rested on her haunches
toes splayed she beckoned, invited me close enough (almost)
to stroke a bitter chocolate velvet
if incurvate cheek.

Taking a bundle from between her bony knees
skeletal arms outstretched
she proffered it to me
a baba wrapped in a prayer shawl
bleached by the sun
its faded, fancy patterns shouting ‘Thanks to God’
wounding me.

I gazed at the dull eyed and indifferent child
then with my mothers nature
reached out and to the screen to save the child
but the woman drew back
and keeping it close she swaddled it tighter
one dismissive hand waving me away
shaking her head.

It was then that I understood
she had wanted only to move me
and that from sofa to screen
is not a journey and as I hesitated
she rose slowly, resolute
seeming giant like
as she turned her back and ambled languidly away.