It
has the precision of surgery, her short fingernails moving amongst the queer
alopecia of the doll’s back, examining the remnant covering vinyl, folding it
over upon itself to comprehend the odd and brittle texture of the material. Her
eyes leave and shift at their own notion. Throughout what follows she will
barely alter her posture or postion from where at this moment she is now
reaching for the bedside telephone, still abstracted from the concrete and
ineluctable embrace of home, and this abstraction with only minutes left it.
Mange.
Between
thought and known thought: wondering at the possibility of peeling E.T. wholly
from out his broken skin, the resultant naked amorph and now the handset
uncoiled onto the floor as she folds his webbed hand double to itself and has
it key up an outside line, the dialling code and the old familiar number.
Not
just his back but across his arms too, this active one moving over the keys
producing each related tone tiny and distant down there on the carpet, small
noises she must strain to hear until their joint cancellation of the
enterprise, telephone and doll strewn both upon the carpet, and ache1
with her head thrown back, tears streaming down across her face to run and drop
from the lobe of either ear.
Unable
to locate the incomplete number, the line reverts to dead tone, and then with a
designated time elapsed, feeds into an auto-alarm system tripped by the
handset’s absence from the cradle. ache1, lost in her first real
awareness of this financed and, initially at least, not unwilling diaspora of
the self, takes some minutes to even sense there is something amiss, the
realisation opening a temporary breech in the otherwise sustained and
relentless weeping in which her heart feels to rotate a quarter turn in her chest,
and then back.
She
cannot reconcile the screaming degree of volume rising from the carpet with the
telephone’s recognised output, removing her a further stage from where she
thought herself to be and precipitating violent swallowing at the air before
her face.
By
the time the night manager lets himself into the room (following up on actual
registered complaints from other guests residing on the third floor, and
another from the room directly above), the alarm has become the audio
equivalent of a visual blind-spot, the frequency intense, incessant enough as
to create a known void in the sensation of hearing, and to leave her still
deafened now with the handset back in place. There are no words, therefore, and
while regulation might not allow for anything beyond the professional
relationship between staff and guest, there are some amongst the former
prepared to re-allocate constituent boundaries because she is so young, is
so obviously central to a situation beyond their awareness.
The
night manager with her now in less than the span of a single arm, the other
hand to pass her tissue after tissue as and when, or to maintain hold of her
hand at the times she reaches for his, while the final heaving throes of her
homesickness exhaust themselves, and cease.
