Not
alone in the previous evening’s a.m. heeltaps, all three slack in their chairs.
Skunk:
How can you not understand?
frustrated
in what is already a prolonged and laboured attempt to communicate his upset.
cog:
What is there to understand? You’re treating it like a, like some major
event, but it’s just
cog:
He’s right, it’s all relative. I don’t want to
approaching
the uncrossable line, aware, and retreating.
cog:
Maybe I’m just not that compassionate a person. That’s what it, isn’t that what
it’s supposed to mean, that if you’re compassionate you, it’s a nnnn
his
hands at his skull
cog:
Isn’t that the idea? That you can sympathise or empathise with
cog:
Get the dictionary out.
Skunk
(unaware): How- I mean... How can you not understand that, that sense of
hope, and hope relinquished, just... that need... such a need for something to
come through and, and and and, and buoy you up and uh, ehh, something to
elevate you and carry you through, through a time when you don’t know, when you
can’t see anything else, you know, it’s such a simple thing. It is such
a simple thing. Or, it isn’t, it isn’t simple. Maybe that’s the thing, that
it’s...
yawning
cog:
I think maybe... I think maybe it’s more to do with your having... You’ve
Skunk
(emerging from the yawn, unaware): the actual... The cons-, not the construct
of it, what is it? The... the, the s-, the ingredient of it is simple but,
maybe the... I don’t know, but you will, you know, you will know, you’ll
know when you know, one day you’ll have gone, like, this will be when... you
and Erica have been married for years and years and years, and and your kids,
they’ll be grown up and they’ll have gone off to college and, they’ll have jobs
and they’ll have kids of their own, that’s, I mean, this will be when
you’re old people, when you’re really old and you are
grandparents, and
yawning,
swallowing
Skunk:
and you’ll be grandparents, and you won’t see it in each other, it’s not
something you’ll see because you don’t see what you, you don’t
see what’s, you know, those incremental changes on a daily basis, but you’ll be
growing old together, and then one day you’ll be out, you’ll be out at the
shops buying your groceries or, wherever it is you’ll be to just be out, but
you’ll be, you’ll come back in early, and Erica won’t be expecting you, and
sh-, and you’ll find her sitting, she’ll be sitting reading a magazine
yawning
Skunk:
she’ll be sitting there on your sofa reading a magazine, sitting in her chair
reading a magazine, and you’ll come in but she won’t hear you, maybe she’s not
hearing so well, or maybe it’s just that you’re being very quiet, and so you
can stand there and see her reading, but she’s not, she’s not really reading,
she’s flicking through the pages of hairstyles, the photographs in this ladies’
magazine, and it’s a magazine obviously aimed at women in their twenties and
thirties, less than half the age of, of your wife, and she’ll still be
looking at the hairstyles, and, and when you come in that’s what she’ll be
doing, she’ll be looking at the hairstyles in the magazine... and as you watch
her looking at these younger women, with their hair done just so
the
words come slow, decelerate and drift from each other as their voice loses
focus
Skunk:
your wife will, raise her hand to her own hair, and she’ll put her
fingers to her hair, and the actual, just the gesture of that, in contrast to
flipping through the photographs, just the simple gesture of touching her hair,
and its texture, will break that reverie, and she’ll look up, and there’ll be
this tiny, tiny, not even... it’ll be just, the smallest understandable
fraction of time, between her lifting her head, and, the actual fact that she
sees you registering on her face, and in that tiny tiny moment of time, that’s
when you’ll know. That’s, that’s when you’ll understand, about that
woman, and the dress in the window. Oh Jesus. Jesus?
but his
Jesus, like the others, is asleep.
