from within

1

It occurred as I was walking across the floor of Liverpool Street station. A series of thoughts. All I could hear were the thousands and thousands of feet echoing their way over the tiled surface. A cacophony of small noises.

I took the escalator up towards the café where I would quickly drink a double espresso before starting the day. Then I caught sight of himself while passing a shop display. The handrails of the gallery shone and there I was, my face slightly distorted in the glass, eyes staring back at me questioningly.

I looked different. With the collar of my jacket pulled up against my neck, the heavy woolen turtleneck sweater underneath, it appeared that my face was emerging from a darkness. And that too, was how I felt. Ever since I met her. I was aware there had been a subtle change in my life. It was as if there was something happening somewhere within me, something pushing toward the light.

Really I could not be sure how long I had felt in the dark. Perhaps it was a gradual. The sky slowly growing thicker with cloud until every day was a little darker and then I no longer noticed. I went about my business as if there was nothing else to do but go about business, nothing else to do but follow some common pattern that was never clear but I followed anyway.

Even as the train pulled into the station, I was wondering to myself why I should feel that way. After all now she was gone. She left, just like that. No word of explanation; simply went. She was there the way a bird lights on a branch, the way you are aware of the rustle of wings among leaves and you look and for those few seconds the sun is brilliant, the breeze is warm, is like a hand being placed gently on your shoulder and everything seems clear, everything seems to have found its place, be at ease with itself. Then there is sudden movement and the bird is in the air. A cloud floats across the sun and the breeze gets a little cooler. So you wonder about the transience of things – the sense of being left, of there being some things that just cannot be grasped.

I stood against the door among the other commuters and noticed the way the walls lining the entrance to the station were crumbling, were overgrown with weeds along their tops. They were lined with black, with dust and soot, were standing like a rather sad reminder of passing time. Above them rose a large office building, its steel archway, its marble finish, its rows of windows catching the breaking day. And something inside said me that this was just the way it was and the pale winter sunlight streaming through the train window was part of it, the anxious looking face of the woman in front of him was part of it and the eighteen year old with spots on his face was also part of it. Which made me think of her again. Made me wonder why she went like that till I thought that maybe I misread the signals, maybe I wanted so bad to see those signs that I found them in her eyes, found them in her smile. Then I had an image of her as a lonely woman sitting in the corner of a room somewhere, her lovely long hands holding a magazine, her half-length hair falling over one side of her face, knowing life was outside her and wondering how she could stop it being outside her. And her gaze seeks out the eyes of every stranger in the hope that one of them will light the fire and she will open like a flower. Or perhaps she has already opened like a flower. Opened and been hurt and closed again.

When I thought of her like that, I understood I had wanted to be the one to make her smile, wanted to be the one that took her out of herself, into the stream of life, that broke apart her solitude.

It was the solitude that hurt. The sense of her sitting in the shadows, her life buried, her love a fire that burned only her instead of something that lit those around her. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps this was only something I imagined. My own darkness getting the better of me. From within the dark days I wanted so much to see the light that any small glimmer was enough to fire me up, enough to get me dreaming. And perhaps she never would sit alone in some room waiting on a stranger to pick her out. Perhaps her solitude was not solitude but simply her own way of being so I asked myself where dream ended and where reality began.

It was as I climbed, pushed past the other commuters on the escalator it occurred to me. Coming through the ticket gates I attempted to shove it from my mind. The thought that it was only something I was imagining filled with me with a sudden falling feeling. Like my stomach was completely empty and knotted. A surge of irritation seized me and someone pushed in front of me. For an instant I was seized with the impulse to say something, to make some comment but knew from past experience that the anonymity of a crowd offered even the most timid of commuters the chance to bare teeth, the opportunity to vent myriad small frustrations.

Why should what I felt be somehow unreliable? If I was imagining and what I imagined somehow connected with what I felt then maybe imagination was the better guide to reality.

Here she was again, her face in front of me and me looking for it. I am in a novel. Post-war Berlin maybe. East or west. I am moving across the floor of a nightclub. It is dark. The air is thick. The air one always imagines when thinking of that era. All the bitterness of defeat. The sad realisation that dreams of glory have ended where they were always to end. In fire. In destruction. In sorrow. She is sitting back in a booth. Service men dance to black music. In my hand is a glass and I am wearing military fatigues. She is wearing a long dark dress and the skin on her face has tightened somewhat. It only adds to her bone structure, her special beauty. And now she is gazing at me, watching me approach. I am is older and she is older. Yet I still see the woman I have always been able to see. Her eyes still hold that quiet intensity and her face with its elegant shape, its paleness seems to reach out of the shadows to me. I stand in front of her and she looks at me. She invites me to sit. I sit and my hand reaches out and takes hers. “What are you doing her?” she wants to know. I wait. I am not sure how to reply. Then I say, “I was told this was a place for angels with charred wings.”

It was when I caught sight of my reflection, my face staring back at me from the window of a telecoms shop and the feeling it conveyed of something emerging from the darkness that I felt strong again. There was a tactility, a soft edge to the darkness and my face seemed to be mobile, to be shifting even as I watched, as I stepped away and toward the door of the café.

No, perhaps I was wrong. She left because she wanted to. There was no question of her denying me. Why was I so reluctant to let it go? What part of me refused to admit that feelings like this could be one way? Was it possible to pick things like that up and be so wrong? Or maybe I was just blind. Or simply stupid. In a way that was a relief. Yes, I was simply stupid. I was stupid enough to have imagined it or stupid enough to have got it wrong. Yet even as I accepted this, as I assured myself I had got it wrong she came back and I remembered. I remembered one evening standing beside her in this very station and feeling her next to me, sensing her the way the earth can be sensed after rain. Opened, asking. Calling for the sky. Calling for completion. It was a true memory. It reminded me of when young. On the long grey avenue of childhood. There was a house and a neighbour. An old woman, a widow whose daughter rode horses. In their hallway there were always riding hats and crops. Everything had an equine feel or a leather smell. I was an adult before I understood behind the riding boots, the saddles, the pictures of hunts there was a dead father and a daughter who had grown alone and was nearly a spinster and the sorrow of a mother made companionless too young. A daughter who had probably never known the touch of a man. So I understood what happens when life gets blocked. When there is only the evening light getting dark over blue mountains. In those mountains it is winter and the leaves are all fallen into the fields and on the roads, are curled and withered and the trees bare and exposed. The valleys are quiet as if touched by some strange spell. Rivers that in another’s summer flow lightly are heavy, their motion held down, their dash checked.

Standing beside her that evening waiting to take the train to the airport, I wondered if perhaps I was reminded of this, if perhaps I should say to her what I was thinking. But she was too concerned with her ticket while I carried her suitcase and in any case she was still a young woman and I was older and perhaps it was that and I was really seeing it from my perspective.
Perhaps I was trying to recapture time for myself. There was life. There was this emptiness. Nothing more, nothing less.

And if I was imagining it, then what did that say of me? It was still the dark days. I was not in fact clear of any darkness, of the forest. The reflection was an illusion. There was no growing back into light. This fleeting moment was just the turn of a shop window. In that reflection I was seeing something that did not exist. It was only my face. The high-necked sweater was the sweater I had hurriedly put on that morning; the dark jacket pulled over it, its collar up to keep me warm. I was on my way from a to b. Life was just moving along and I was just moving with it.

No she was not here. And I did not know exactly where she was. I had no address. Was she right at that moment waking somewhere, stretching after a night’s sleep, the white of a pillow softened in the transparency of this winter morning? Or crossing a street, the traffic lights flashing over empty tram tracks, falling into the space across her eyes, lightening them, showing the sadness I could not figure out.

I did not know. It was beyond me to know. Why had she not spoken before she left? I would never know. Thinking of this finality, I felt sad. Was it that what went over a certain line, what moved beyond a certain point had to be thrown away if it did not succeed? The door had to be closed tightly after it left. No shadow was allowed to fall across any future street. And yet in the night it was there. When you awoke and it was quiet, when the streets were empty, when the streetlights fell in over the floor, it was there. It whispered lower than you thought possible and there was no detecting it at first. Up through you body it came, working its way under your skin, until even with your hands over your ears, your eyes tightly closed it was there. In the silence of the room, in the beating of your heart in your chest. It never really left. Only that in the light of day, it could be forgotten. You could push it aside like the headline of a newspaper, leave it on an underground train until that train rode back like a ghost through the small hours of the morning, its rattle jarring into your sleep and its incessant words, that no you had not forgotten, could not forget, did not want to forget.

Then you knew where you were. In that space within where questions had no answers, where all the tricks of daylight, where reason failed. There was no escaping. You knew what you were missing, knew that voice inside that asked why you could not forget, did not want to forget and yet each day tried so hard to forget.

She was gone. It was that simple. And yet the change was there. Why else was I thinking of her? Why, this morning, were these things going through my mind?



2

I stepped through the door of the café. There was the smell of bacon, of eggs of toasted bread. In front of me a coffee machine hissed. A waiter, his skin sallow, his eyes moving quickly about stood joking with a dark haired girl. When she smiled she showed a row of uneven but brilliantly white teeth.

I took my cup and paid the cashier. I found the line of high stools that looked out over the rail tracks and sat. I pulled a newspaper from under my arm, I placed my shoulder bag at my feet and look down onto the platform below. Two porters stood talking and a man ran to catch a train. His briefcase knocked awkwardly against his legs. Somewhere among the rows of trains, the line of platforms was the connection to the airport.

Again there she was, her face tense that night, and me trying to close the gap, wanting to tell her how lovely she was. I could see this other woman in her, a woman who wanted to step out from the shadows, a woman who wanted to live. Yet she would not let this woman out, would not give her, her freedom. I was wanting to say I would be there for her, I would be with her. But then she was gone. Her suitcase was in the baggage rack and I was walking back my hands in my pockets, the sky above the station endless and cold and the stars just hanging there.

I opened the newspaper, then stared absently at the headlines. I lifted my cup. The coffee appeared blacker against the white china.

She was gone and she was not gone. And my heart felt as though it was suddenly going to burst. A smile spread over my face. I was thinking if she were to be beside me, to be standing there right beside me and asking could she still, it would be like the passing of a storm and I would be saying, . . . yes. . . , yes. . ., yes, of course, yes.

Copyright © Peter Millington. London. May 1999