The Holding
The mute manager at the call centre where the operators sell lies sees a woman on Talbot Street sleeping on her tiptoes. She is arabesque, alert. He tells her all about the missold PPI, how she reminds him of the music box heroine from his youth, along with Galina Ulanova of course, but she is too busy wake-walking to respond. Sedate, her mulberries-in-the-snow pout reminds him of tulips.
Crowds of commuters en route to St Pancras shepherd up close to observe. One man photographs her face as though she is a live exhibit.
The mute manager takes to his own toes, chucks his man bag on the concrete. He stands beside her, a paramedic playing ballet at an emergency scene.
Close up: There is literacy in the sleeping face. She has lashes like parenthesis. Mouth a hyphen. Spittle dots across her cheek make a narrative arc. She is a silent orator. Her lips are parted gently. She exhales completely making a breathy whoosh sound. When she inhales again, he counts for four seconds watches her ribs rise like an accordion. He holds his breath for a count of seven seconds. When she exhales again, he breathes out with her. They are incongruent strangers breathing to the same non-funk jazz.
Across the way on Fennel Yard the church clock chimes new life, two burials, another day at dawn, and some April morning back in 1998 and still he stands. His feet are great puffs of anguish. Every muscle seized is a fight.
She has pale blue hands he wants to give his thumbs to.
Her wrists are pale scythes.
Rarely has witnessing another person’s sleep affected him so metrically.
He memorises the number of birds across white skies, the bag styles of passersby, the push-pull nature of flirtations in the window of Bar Woo-Woo, the number of times she breathes out, her micro blinks, each miniature spasm in her hands, the pulse in her poised thighs.
Evening sniggers in. The black streets become liquid amber and smudged with rain and the people passing start to jibe, to slur, and when the woman loses her REM rhythm; she startle-wakes.
She jerks.
Her eyes: the precise colour of tigers.
The edge of the cliff fall is far-flung and milky with peacock waters.
It takes them from Beachy-Head to Bempton.
Rachael Smart writes short fiction and memoir. She has so many stories, so little time.