Having
slept through so much of the afternoon and early evening, it was inevitable
their habitual bedtime would find them unsettled, both crawling with an
exhaustion to which they were desperate to surrender and irritable at their
absolute inability so to do.
The
day had begun well enough with an early breakfast of coffee and doughnuts, but
in terms of food consumed had gone downhill from there, with unspoken between
them the absence of cake, and the ingredients for the planned Christmas meal
untouched in the refrigerator.
Skunk: Next Christmas we’ll do it right.
spoken
from the awful empty perspective of post-drunk sobriety that registers as a
persistent hunger no amount of food would quieten.
ache1
(laughing): That’s exactly what you said about Hallowe’en, remember? We
made a mess of that as well.
Skunk:
Well
ache1:
I’m not complaining, Skunk. I got my, you know, I’m all happy ‘cause I got my
chocolate coins.
Skunk:
Of which you ate your weight.
ache1:
Said Elvis, a goddam fucking gutful.
Her
yawn was infectious, eliciting from Skunk one at which he strained hard enough
to have his eyes water.
Skunk:
Oh Jesus God let me sleep.
ache1:
Do you want me to put these lights out?
Carefully
unwound from his absent landlord’s Christmas tree downstairs, alongside the bed
lay coils of tiny bulbs glowing in their haphazard constellations of coloured
light.
Skunk
(yawning again): It won’t help. Nothing… Dammit.
He
reached out to the new walking stick propped against the wall at his own side
of the bed, lifting it until the top section of broken antler ground against
the ceiling. With the next hard yawn his eyes overbrimmed, and tears of fatigue
ran down to each ear.
The
play of shadows overhead furnished his mind with an alternative to thoughts of
sleeplessness, while beside him ache1 turned in her fingers one of
the tiny plastic cowboys bought for her with his jar of found money, the
silence they shared as individual occupants of their mutual stasis underscored
by its lack of routine comfort.
In
her reverie ache1 was thinking back not to her family and their
Christmases of previous years as might have been supposed, but to her
termination and the attendant impossibility of knowing then how things would
play out, how unimaginable even one single second of the life she now lead
following on from her abdication of choice, and the restructuring of life
within those new parameters as if waking from a dream with no remaining
knowledge of that life from which she had entered sleep.
Faced
with the choice of speaking or not, she spoke.
ache1:
I thought, back… I had this idea, or I you know, ahm… Even
Skunk
rolled round to prop himself up on an elbow, clearly aware she was making some
kind of revelation.
ache1:
I thought that this, if things had gone, or if things hadn’t…
sighing,
before another attempt.
ache1:
Today would have been the day I had my baby. Or or or… I imagined anyway, I
thought it might be, that on Christmas night I would have
He
lay back down again.
ache1:
Hmmm.
He
felt himself consigned to the periphery of his own existence.
ache1:
I suppose… I mean back, just in that… It was a very brief moment where I ah,
where I allowed myself to think about what might
Skunk:
I thought you were, I mean, didn’t you say that was… Isn’t that what you
wanted?
ache1:
Don’t spoil it.
Skunk:
But you are pregnant. You you… you’re pregnant now.
with
identifiable in his tone the sentiment that he was now engaged in some
undertaking to sour out the day, to pull the whole thing down around his own
worsening mood.
Skunk:
So what are you saying, are you saying… Are you actually telling me that if you
could go back you’d have kept that child?
In
the serenity of her response she both accommodated and defused his provocation,
allowed as symptomatic of his bereavement and the measure of his this Christmas
against those past, a courtesy he did not himself return, ignorant as he was of
these being the last hours of the only Christmas they would share.
ache1:
It’s the same child.
spoken
with such conviction in its own odd logic as to quash any confusion on his part
as to what she might be trying to communicate, and then
ache1:
Fucking beer, all it was. Fucking beer.
