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Unnoticed Colours
She hadn’t meant for it to happen. Not that the thought had never occurred to her, just that it was more of a gentle humming of a wish than a concrete plan.
So many times she had wondered if they would run into each other, picturing the moment as a romantic reunion. A Robert Doisneau post card of an embrace; how they would throw their heads back Hollywood movie style and laugh. Perhaps, she had thought, after the initial nervousness, and some talk, he would lean towards her and whisper that he was sorry. Tell her that not a day had passed since they had parted when he hadn’t thought about her. And yet here in the strangely summery October day he was looking at her with clear eyes, empty of remembrance, there were no clues of any previous intimacy and she felt erased.
Could he really imagine that nothing in her life was any different? Had he no understanding of the changes that she had been through?
And then she had a flashback so faint at first that she had closed her eyes to see it better, and she could feel him.
The hotel
bedroom and the smell of the burned down candle, their clothes crumpled
at the foot of the bed, the night falling blue on their guilty bodies.
Him behind her, his arms clasped to her naked body, the hush of his breath
slowing in her ears. Her long hair matted with sweat and flung over his
face, her back pasted to the rise and fall of his chest. She’d waited
for him to push her hair from his mouth, to speak, to say all the words
that she was thinking, voice her feelings, but he had stayed silent. She
had leant back harder on him, as if forcing words from his body.
“I love you,” she’d said gently.
They sat at the café table. He ordered their coffees and smiled a warm friendly smile, telling her again that she looked well, so grown up, coaxing her to tell him news of all the old friends in Newcastle.
His lips were moving, telling some old anecdote, his arms tanned. She pushed her hair away from her face with her fingers, and wrapped the length of a strand around one. Why didn’t he notice she wasn’t speaking?
His hand had held her hair tight behind her head in his fist whilst she licked and sucked at him, stopping the natural fall to witness her actions. And as he pushed at her head with his other hand, she could feel the urgency of his need for her; she had been breathless with love.
In the yellow glow of a sunrise he had kissed her on the cheek and tapped her bottom lightly as they said goodbye.
“We should do this again,” he had said lightly, jovially.
She had slipped back into her house through the bathroom window, careful not to wake her parents, curled up in her bed fully clothed and held herself tight.
She lit a cigarette, staring directly at the flame as it resisted the drag from her lips. As the smoke drifted past her eyes she brought her fingers to her mouth and let them linger there awhile; the better to remember the feel of his. She replaced her fingers with the cigarette and blew the smoke directly in his face, hating him. Laughing as he waved the smoke away, he asked her when she had started smoking again?
She had never stopped.
He had driven her home after a night of babysitting and told her that she was beautiful, that he had strong feelings for her. She had stared at her hands on her lap, toying with her plastic bead bracelet, until he lifted her face and asked if he could kiss her, his tongue tender on her lips, his hands slipping inside her cotton blouse.
He drove her to the park, led her away from the path to a grassy retreat, removed his long dark coat and shook it out wide on the grass. He took her hand and slowly kissed her neck, talking gently into her ear. “You smell so wonderful.” He lay down and patted the space beside him.
In the beige moonlight she had clung to his shoulders as he entered her.
“Oh Yes,” he had muttered into her hair. “God, Yes.”
“We should do this again,” he said, paying the bill, standing up to leave.
Lisa smiled, shaking her head and laughing a little.
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you come over sometime? I know that Lillie and the kids would love to see you.”
“Of course.”
So she had taken his new address and number and promised that she would be in touch.
In her bedroom, on the evenings before she was due to baby sit she had sung along to sweet songs of love. She practised different hairstyles in the mirror, making up her eyes and her lips; he loved her, he loved her. In the pink glare of her cotton clothed lamp, she had kissed the cold metallic lips in the mirror and taken her hairbrush from the dresser and tried to work out how best to perform a blowjob; she wanted to be good for him.
As he walked away across the cobblestone courtyard of the unfamiliar city, she watched him disappear into the rush of commuters and tourists, staring at the slip of paper.
‘Richard and Lillie Hooper, 97 Biddlestone Drive, SE24.’
That evening, as the darkness grew grey and distant around her she walked repeatedly along his street, slowing as she passed the house. The family car, the half open door of the garage, the four bikes parked cosily together along the front of the garden.
Then she sat on the wall opposite and lit a cigarette, waiting for something to make her move.
A couple had passed, without noticing her, laughing, chatting as they walked the driveway to their house a gentle clank of wine bottles in their hands.
He told her to call him by his first name, she said it aloud like a prayer. Each Saturday as they hurried out for the evening, she would wave them off from the door, ‘See you later Richard,’ she would whisper under her breath. When they returned she would say goodbye sweetly to Lillie and step demurely into his car smiling as his hand caressed her thigh before they had turned out of the street. She was proud of his pleasure at the short skirts that she wore at his request.
She lit another cigarette and stepped down onto the street, lifting the latch on the garden gate with care, levering herself along the side passage of the house and crumpling up behind the shed in the back garden. The rose hues of the lights in the dining room, stark shadows from the bright light of the kitchen. She watched as Lillie mouthed silently, singing along to some music on the radio in the kitchen and Richard walking in, a little pink from too much wine, his arms circling Lillie, his lips whispering in her ear.
He held her hands tight and told her it was over. Looked deep into her eyes and said she was getting too involved, that she would always be special to him, but that he loved his family; that he was too old for her, she should find a boy of her own age. He kissed the tears on her cheeks and asked her to understand.
She had called him the next day, sure that he would relent. He had answered the phone abruptly, talking to her in syllables, ‘Don’t call me here,’ he hushed at her angrily. She stood in the phone box and clung to the handset, repeating his name to the unrelenting hum of the dialling tone.
She stubbed her cigarette out on the paving stone, pushing the butt against the stone, watching the flickering fireworks burning out into black ash.
She had found a boy of her own age, found him half drunk in a pool hall in town, slipped out of her clothes in his tiny bedsit above the shoe shop on the high street, readily and greedily drank the Vodka he offered her. Lunged at the joint and his tiny penis as if they may be able to save her somehow. Colin Laidler had laughed at her. He stuck two fingers hard up inside her and asked her if she had come yet.
“You love it,” he had slurred, laughing when she told him he was hurting her. She had lain there and waited until he slept tried to imagine that he was Richard.
The garden darkened as the curtains drew across the dining room and Lisa crouched behind the shed. She didn’t know why she was there or what she hoped to see.
“I hear you come like a waterfall, wanna fuck me?” The note had been passed to her by Derek Ashcroft during Maths lesson; so she had. In a cloakroom under the school chapel he had laid down the celestial robes and limply and quickly fucked her. She had sat up after and waited for him to speak, her face was still wet from his saliva filled kisses, her lips sore from his rough teeth.
“Slag,” he had whispered zipping himself up, pushing her away from him, leaving her naked from the waist down.
The fumbling of the back door key and the padding of a cat running out into the night, then he was there, just a few inches from her face, lifting the top of the Wheelie Bin. He heaved the bag up into the air, letting it drop with a plastic rush into the bottom of the bin.
Turning back, walking towards the house he hummed a little bending over to stroke the cat circling his legs. “Nothing here for you catkins.”
John Dixon danced with her at the school disco, pulled her close to him and pushed himself against her as the music slowed. He led her outside behind the gym and pushed her to her knees. Her head was thick with cider, the ground too damp and his hand heavy on her hair. He unzipped his trousers and thrust his penis into her mouth, pulling her face into his groin. She couldn’t breathe, gagging she pulled herself away and tried to stand, leaning forward to kiss him. He sneered at her and turned her around, lifted her short skirt and pushed himself inside her, grazing her face against the wall.
Back inside the disco she had stood beside him and waited for him to take her hand. “Leave me alone, Bike,” he whispered. She walked home alone through the park. Thinking about Richard, about his kiss, his tenderness.
She had seen him in town a few days later, walking towards the theatre with Lillie on his arm. She tugged hard at her bracelet as he threw back his head in laughter at some shared joke. His eyes were shining, his long dark coat hanging nurturingly over Lillie’s shoulders. Snapping the thin elastic of her bracelet, she had crouched down to collect up the cheap beads spilling into the curb; he hadn’t seen her.
The groan as the heavy metal scraped the patio and then the spade was in the air, soaring down on him as he twisted around at the noise. The unechoing thud as the iron found its target and he slumped clumsily onto the ground.
She walked calmly back through the gate, unnoticed.
Leaving blood spilling out silently onto the concrete of the family home.
None of them had ever seen her.
