A mother and young daughter: her only living companions at
any stage of the entire journey though they travel together between just two
stations, their arrival and exit both welcome parentheses of air squalled fresh
and cold about the carriage.
They
occupy the table diagonally opposite ache1, the little girl kneeling
up on her seat and her fists filled with a toy monkey whose plush face, fixed
in a grip so tight as to render evident her tiny knucklebones bright beneath
the flesh, twists across the window’s glass to watch the station recede around
the tracks and disappear, and back, enduring such continued support
with its involuntary glimpse and hold of interest in the outside everything
through which they pass at speed.
From
out her satchel ache1 hauls E.T. and sits him upright on her
pregnancy, a portentous reflection of the marsupial familiar beneath the axis
of her belly’s curved flesh cut crosswise with stretchmarks and fading scars.
Her
thumb-nail displaces a large flake from off the cracked skin of his crooked
elbow; she has him set to a maniacal waving, his limbs’ vinyl sounding brittly
thin off itself as the skinny arms rattle at the long forward arc of his skull.
Concomitant
now with the girl’s stare comes that of the monkey, eyes real and lifeless both
drawn unblinking to the demanding clamour enacted between her hands. Her face
colours, the blush thickening as E.T. begins a game of peek-a-boo: both eyes
then not; one eye then not; the other then not concealed behind his flat and
webby hands until his dissociate host joins her own in a newly-adopted gesture:
a cradle woven from fingers and inverted, placed upon her forehead and pulled
hard over and across her scalp, bare elbows brought together with a clap when
her hands reach her neck. She might count the individual hairs from her bangs
on back as each taut follicle returns to its habitual slack.
There
is to bereavement an awful unsharable loneliness and so how ever many find
themselves in any way affected find also their grief to be a singular thing,
designated them by this climax of accumulated elements intimate, random, and
without number, the mourning thus connected each to each other only by the name
of common dead: his mother, whose grave she goes to visit; the dissipated soot
of her own body’s clinical waste.
As
the train decelerates into the opaque weight of station light filtered through
glass either side of which is thick with filth, ache1 experiences a
momentary visual confusion: the adjacent carriages pull out concurrent to
create or prolong a near hallucinatory momentum negated by the opposite
window’s give on the platform, stilled. Mother, daughter and monkey all
disembark into the fading trainsong, and crawling faint behind all this absence
sounds the broken calliope of an ice cream vendor, unseen through the local
streets, a collapsed mechanism rendering elegiac the hurdy-gurdy whose music
travels no longer buoyant upon each evening’s air, rather now its every note
wrung out and into being augments some abstract grief that nothing follows, not
even ghosts of children.
E.T.
waves to the closing doors and nothing and no-one and her final year yawns on
toward the end of its spring.
