Blue Windows

She doesn’t hear his key, the latch, the charm-like jangle of the forgotten chain. She doesn’t hear the back-and-forth rasp of boot soles on brown bristles, WELCOME trampled underfoot. She only realises he’s home with the bark of a televised shout, and then an eruption of orchestral strings that crest up through the living room ceiling, through the bathroom floorboards, an exultant fanfare for a shiny new car, or a packet of razors –

The commercial thrums in the gaps between her toes.

It’s more than enough. She throws the test into the cupboard beneath the sink and slams the door, catches her grey face in the dusty mirror. Her lips in the twilight are almost blue.

Her hair splashes over them as she swings away. She’s been in the bathroom for long enough. She’s thought for long enough. Nothing will change unless she starts it. And yet everything is different no matter what she does –

But before she can barrel downstairs, before she can rush him, the sky snatches at her. Blind-less, it forms a perfect panel in the neat white tiles. Not a true blue this evening, but a silky, opening mauve. Veined and deep and delicate, like the layered heart of some tropical flower. She feels a chill dab her collar, though the dusk doesn’t appear cool at all, but warm, and secretive.

Like flesh, she thinks and then hastily un-thinks it, drawing back the bolt and crossing the landing, but walking – walking now, not running – down the stairs.

She supposes that this is better, to appear calm. At the living room door, she pauses. Rakes her fingers through her hair, the strands more silvery than blond in the bleary, static light.

Not that it matters; he scarcely glances from the screen. She perches on the armchair at his side.

The programme is familiar. Yet another narrative about people circling their dreams. Every week, the same formula – a bright young couple or sometimes a family with mysteriously disappearing children, strive to build a house. Along the way, inevitably, things go wrong, with building supplies, and with builders and architects, bills flutter out of control – except it is almost at its end now. It’s the moment when everything’s resolved and the mellow-vowelled presenter (Cloud, she thinks his name is?) is led through a glittering palace of glass and clever, winking halogen. The fantasy-house (they’ve done it! Against the odds! What a surprise!) is revealed, as it always is, against a backdrop of incoming night.

The surrounding trees smear beside the building’s gleam; they bow respectfully, shuffle back. And it’s not the vast windows that are blue of course, but the world beyond their clean-cut gold. It’s as beautifully shot as ever and yet she thinks how her own bathroom sky was so much more palpable, a living thing –

"What now?" he says, and she jumps.

The remote’s clenched fatly in his fist.

"Shall I switch channels?" he asks "Or d'you want it off? Do you still want to talk..?"

She opens her mouth to begin it. She needs to explain.

About the test tossed with the unopened tampons beneath the sink. About windows, changing colour. She tries to imagine how his face will transform too, with her confession, but instead becomes distracted by the TV’s glow, the way it slides across his well-known features, remaking them already. And that blue flickering in his eyes. It brings to mind her Nana’s gas fire – the one she reached into, when she was five. She remembers how, because it danced so prettily, like water, she’d kept her fingers there, unbelieving, even as her skin began to curl.

"I," she says, but finishing off, the Cloud man interrupts her.

"This home," he says, "is an act of faith."

And for a moment, she watches her lover's thumb hover, considering Mute, before he shrugs forward. Breathes out. Turns over.

On trains. And beauty. And things that happen

A beautiful woman sat beside me on the train, although I didn’t realise it at first – her beauty.

Because she wasn’t young. Because the colour had slipped from her hair, and yet it was her hair that caught me, tugging at the edge of my vision so that, again and again, I found myself glancing up from my novel, my notebook. Shifting in my seat.

Hair that clouded past her pale, lined throat, misting where it touched her shoulders. And when she bowed, brushing her lapels, I saw how thick it lay against her crown.

Luxurious.

I thought of down then, and purity.
Plump new pillows in a hushed hotel room. The untouchable place where a swan’s wings meet, tucked against its back.

No wonder I kept looking.

There was the smooth, lifted line of her jaw. Her elegant shoulders and long lean torso, acknowledged but discreet beneath her coat. She was all poise and posture and pleasing angles. I pictured her spine falling with the fluid certainty of a Jacob’s Ladder; she seemed so contained. Complete.

I slumped, a sack. My fingers fumbled with my fraying pages. My pen lid dropped anyway, skittering too loudly towards the aisle.

Her hands had come to a careful rest across her lap. Perhaps, after all, the most beautiful part of her. Those tapered fingers and pearly nails, a single ring. Skin so thin it made me wince. The veins beneath so delicate, frail threads winding towards neat knuckles, a spreading, silken blue …

It took me a moment to dare an "Excuse me". To reach across.

She drew her knees high as I leant past. Her coat whispered. Sharp folds with something softer underneath, and a whiff of rose water, and talcum powder. The scent of baths from long ago.

But beneath her trailing hem, her feet –

Without shoes or stockings, without socks. They were small enough, streaked and smudged enough, to have belonged to a young girl. If it wasn’t for their pallor, and the tiny cuts.
Nonetheless.
Her stripped heels and toes remained almost as elegant as her finely strung hands. One ankle bound with a plastic tag.

And in the moment before I sat back up, abandoning my pen lid where it had dropped, I recalled the commotion back at the station.

The ambulance parked in the damp outside, doors wide. Police and rail staff converging on the platform, radios buzzing. Yellow jackets against the grey …

And when, drawing breath, I straightened, she was staring at me. Eyes lit with mischief. She raised one finger to her lovely mouth.

"Hush," she said.
At least, I thought she said.

Before she looked beyond me to the window. To the black rain, black glass. Another carriage rumbling past.