Irked with herself, bothered faintly by the cobwebby rain that by turns films her skin and peels off it, she hastens up the street.
Her stride is palpably jerky: one leg is prey to a sporadic twitch, its ankle apt to catch. The drizzle has turned the macadam underfoot into a glossy slate, lightly pinpricked. The street is bestrewn with the fresh corpses of leaves, twigs, sprigs: the wrack created by this evening’s storm.
Not one of those journeyman little squalls during which little of note happens, she recalls with pleasure, but an hour-long apoplexy of thunder, lightning, cloudburst. The storm had petered out a couple of hours ago but the sky, though no longer louring with menace, still hangs low, fleecy as a kitsch ceiling.
In the wavy mirror the wetted tarmac makes, she catches downside- up glimpses of herself. Her pumps’ kitten heels tap out a brisk tattoo: the wide, flowy maw of her skirt now yawns away from her shins, now snaps in at them, screening off the upper reaches of her frame.
Deep below the tarmac there gleams a gibbous moon, just as much in a hurry as is she, scudding past armadas of ragged cloudlets. How semisolid and malleable it looks, as if made of curd. Every bit as semisolid and malleable, she muses wryly, as she herself will be in about an hour’s time, yielding herself up to another’s will.
Which flicks to the fore that inner voice she’s been trying continually to fight down out of earshot today: Caved in yet again. Spineless as ever. How much longer can this go on, how far...?
A sudden upcurl of music – no, not music, a species of muzak ubiquitous these days – causes her to start, then to misstep, her ankle turned into a Diwali sparkler of pain. Her ringtone. Muffled yet insistent, it thrums out and up from the innards of her bag. Rummaging through her menagerie of late-evening necessaries, she fishes out her mobile.
‘Tell me.’
‘On your way?’
‘Started out.’
‘Can’t wait, you know.’
‘Sweat it out, Al.’
‘Make it fast.’
‘I’ll be there when I’ll be there.’
‘Have you ... umm ... you know...’ The voice at the other end is
well-nigh frizzling, as if getting sautéed in the throat before it’s let out. Yes, I know, she says inwardly, just get on with it. Which her caller does, in that exigent hiss again: ‘Have you deigned to accede to my
request? My trifling little...’
‘Well,’ she says, snapping him short, his urgency starting to infect
her, ‘you’ll soon be seeing for yoursel...’ She in turn is pulled up short by the phone sounding a doublet of sharp bleats. Lowering it from her ear, she eyes the screen.
‘Of course I will,’ Alain’s words, damped now, are yet more crackly for that. ‘I’m holding my breath, as you can well...’
‘Listen. I’ve a call waiting. Can’t not take it. See you when I see you.’
Cutting him dead, she stabs at the untaken number, even as, eyes flickering, she surveys her near surrounds. Deathly quiet here on the road, can’t be any too chancy calling him back now. And when it’s one’s own son calling, one can scarcely turn a deaf ear.
Her call’s taken before the first ring has played out. ‘Ma,’ rasps a tongue adolescently brusque. ‘Need to talk. You at home?’
‘Good evening, sunshine, and thank you for yours,’ she says, in light but meant reproach. Pleasantries may not be his strong suit – when were they ever? he having inherited his dour, laconic ways from his father – but persevere she must, try and instil some modicum of affability into the stripling.
‘Evening, yeah. You at home?’
‘Where else would I be, dearie, at this hour?’ she parries. The deft little sidestep – safest tack to take, by her lights. Any number of times over the clutch of years past, when she’s been out on one of her sallies and he’s called, she’s had to press into service some alibi or other – premeditated always, and one she can only hope is more or less impregnable. She’s out at an office party. Or at a restaurant with a woman friend: a new one, one he hasn’t yet met. Or she’s working late: demands of the darling job, all that jazz. To this last one he, knowing beyond his years, has more than once asked, incredulous of tone, ‘This late? In a government job?’, and she’s had to stave him off with such protestations as, ‘Well there are government jobs, beta, and there are government jobs’ – something not without a tinge of truth to it.
Date 04.05.2024