Folllowed
She didn't remember the exact day she started to follow him. She remembered the sun in the morning sky and that birds sang, lots of birds, from hedgerows and telegraph wires. Their songs, she thought, were sonnets, zipping back and forth between the sounds they let out and the ones they pulled back. She noticed, as she flitted over the lawn, how thick the grass under her bare feet had grown since the year before when they'd pulled up the weeds and laid the new turf, careful to lay it quickly in case it yellowed in the early summer sun.
She remembered on the first day she set out, how the gate needed a lick of paint and how one of the bars could do with being nailed back on to the frame. The wood crumbled in places and paint the colour of the shoe polish in the set she'd been given for Christmas by her sister, flaked onto her hands.
She remembered the sky. An autumn sky, not a thin sky like you or I might remember, but one made of nacre, and in its centre, the sun, an opal maybe, or maybe it was a pearl. She read once the sun was like a diamond in the sky, but this one wasn't. And because her head just happened to be facing up as she reached the front gate, she noticed there wasn't one single, individual cloud that day. There was her, a lawn, a gate, a street ahead, a field of sky and a pearl like a dull eye. She knew, as she watched him turn the corner of the house next door, how easily she could lose him.
She'd woken up that day, like any other day, at eight-fifteen. She showered the night out of her hair and skin. She'd not slept again and her face and head itched. In a bath you can hear your heart beating beneath the water, but not in a shower. The water drones. If you sing in a shower, your voice will be carried on the steam to other rooms and laughing, loving ears. If you cry in one, the sobs are carried down into the drain with the droning, soapy water.
For breakfast she had something toasted, bread maybe, maybe croissant. She still wasn't back at work fully, just a day here, one there. That morning she had dressed properly, even this had been hard for a while, and needed only to put on her shoes to start the day. She'd left half of the toasted thing on her plate, melted butter congealing in its grains.
He stood up from the table, picked up her plate and mug, the tea she'd drained, and took it into the kitchen. He was smiling when he asked her as he left the room if she wanted him to pull a sicky that day. Yes, she did want him to, she wanted to spend the hours looking at him as he watched telly or read, she wanted to curl into the space where his stomach dips into his pelvis, wanted him never to leave her sight. She said no, she'd be fine. She said she'd just slept badly. She said she was a little cold that's all. He came back from the kitchen with a wheat-bag he'd warmed in the microwave. She'd bought her sister one in the summer sales, it was waiting in the cupboard for Christmas. He had their wheat-bag tucked under his arm, along with her trainers.
Putting on shoes, especially trainers, was never easy for her, even before her sister died. Or rather it was easy because it was an automatic action, but it gave her mind space to wander. She would sit on the edge of the bed, or on the settee, and, leg crossed over her thigh, slip the shoe on — then she was away, writing copy or taking walks or more recently remembering Christmases and parties and how it felt to sleep as one of three children in a bed. Then something would call her back, she'd tie the lace and lift up the other foot. She'd been known to take twenty minutes to put just one shoe on.
He asked her what she was going to do today. She said, holding the first shoe in her hand, she thought she'd go into town, she wanted to pick up a few things Ñ a newspaper, some bath oils, she'd run out of geranium already. He told her to make sure she took her keys. She kept forgetting them and he had to come home to let her in. In the first weeks following the funeral she never left the house. She was in bed for days, eating hardly any of the rice pudding or shepherds pie he made her. He fetched the doctor out twice who said she was depressed that's all, she could see someone if she wanted to. She didn't. After the second visit she got up every day, bathed a lot, watched television and stared at photographs. She knew she was being clichéd but she didn't care, she wasn't a poem.
Before he put on his parka and left that first day, he kissed her and told her to call him if she needed to. She watched him through the living room window. From where she sat on the settee, she could see the dull sunlight following him. It was inexplicable but it tracked him as he crossed the path and opened and closed the gate scraping paint from his hands. He paused to wipe more paint off his trousers. The sun was directly above him. For a second she saw in the cloudless sky the pearl disappear and return as if it blinked. She didn't stop to wait, to consider what a sign like this, if it was a sign, could possibly mean. She grabbed her keys, her purse and a light coat and quietly left the house.
He was at the corner of the street when she opened the front gate. He turned back, looked up and around then carried on to the bus stop; she hid behind the hedge. She edged closely along the wall, salmon brick smothered in thin moss and ivy. This close she could see spiders preparing for winter Ñ but these were distractions, she had to keep her eyes on him. At one time, he looked back when he was crossing the road and she slipped into somebody's neatly kept garden. Above him the pearly sun traced his steps. From behind a pillar box, a Georgian box with six collection times embossed on its body, she studied him as he waited at the bus stop. On the bus he would be safe, enclosed. It would take her days of reading magazines and watching the news before she re-evaluated this and followed him further. The garden-owner's cat leapt down from her place on a nearby window ledge and slunk off along the pavement.
He walked up to the timetables. Walked back. Perched on the yellow, plastic seats for five minutes until he lost feeling in his left leg, then checked his watch. He checked the time on his mobile phone, removed his watch and fiddled with it, holding it up twice to his ear. She smiled. She'd bought it him last year and it had never worked properly, she couldn't understand why he still wore it. He asked a strange man the time. Her heart, like the watch, stopped as the man, a rangy, scruffy man, reached into his pocket to pull out a knife. But it wasn't a knife, it was a phone, thin and silver. The stranger said something that made both men laugh. Bastard, she thought, bastard. Scaring me like that.
The bus turned up and she watched him board behind a line of small women. It drove off with him at a window seat, looking out. She sat on a stumpy pebble-dashed wall and sought out the sun. It was low on the eastern side of the street, slowly working its way up the morning. Today, she thought, I've beaten you. For a while she watched the traffic on the main road buzz by. She noticed a pain somewhere. Thin and sharp. She picked up her right foot still naked, she'd not even managed socks, and removed a splinter of glass from the arch. A sliver of green from a beer bottle broken on the kerb the night before and scraped into the gutter the following morning.
© Copyright Jacqueline Gabbitas 2006