Stephanie Johnson

In a Language All Lips

The window is jammed. It won’t open or shut, and the sun struggles to pierce the greasy glass.

As usual, when I wake she is still asleep. She sleeps through anything. A fly rubs its paws on the bridge of her nose. One morning I entered her and she woke up only when I started moving. She is a stupid woman, but I like her red hair, white skin and lilting voice. She says she loves me.

There were tears last night. There will be tears again this morning when I wake her to ready her for her journey. I will prepare her in ways she will not know until it is too late.

She rolls over, her hair shifting on the pillow like weeds in the Sargasso Sea. Her violet eyes open and look at me. I bask in the purple light for a moment. I can’t help myself. A small white hand threads itself through my chest hair, she nuzzles her moon face into my breast, and soon I feel the tears slip over my skin like silk. I turn her over, and we dampen the bed another way. Towards the end she smiles at me, fleetingly.

I smile at you because I love you. I smile at you because I don’t want you to know how heavy my heart is — how I’m dreading this separation even though it’s only for a few days.

But I will be home. Home in Ireland. And you will follow me there. If only it could happen as quickly and as fearlessly — this flight from living death to something I can scarcely remember. As quickly as conception, that confident leap to existence. That happens all too fast. I amaze myself. Even among this heat and misery, with no money of my own, I’ve held on to my resolve not to tell you. Not until we are at home. We will visit my parents in Armagh, and my angry, always angry sister in Belfast. Perhaps she is still in Belfast. Perhaps she is in another country, her red hair stinging the air in hotter streets. She talked once of going to Australia, where her eldritch voice would captivate, and her anger calcify into white turds of boredom. In my experience angry women are the most bored of anyone when they give up. If it were to happen to me, that calm, I would float in it like seaweed in a pool, different cool lengths of me fingering different depths, and too pliant for even the sea to enjoy manipulating me. Your hand on my stomach is so heavy I can hardly breathe. It’s as if you already know I am inhabited and would press it out, a pulpy mass on the sheets.

Ah, my lovely — you have seen the stupidity of the situation. I saw it flash through those lilac depths, a tiny silver fish. You are onto something.

You are wanting to take coals to Newcastle, as the English say. This is sillier. Place us in the same fireplace and one of us would refuse to burn. We would never burn together.

Your father was a fighter. I could’ve talked with him, hey? After the silence, the sizing up. You know what they will say afterwards — only an Arab could’ve done that. The paradox is that they won’t know what I’ve really done. They will know I have killed you, and others besides, but they won’t know why. Your death to me is a tool, for them an instrument they scarcely know the use of. But I will make myself clear, and will not be regarded as a fanatic. Perhaps we will lower them all to a crouch, inches away from falling to their knees.

You are out of bed, looking for your clothes, complaining once again of how filthy you are. You don’t know what filth is.

I know you are looking at me. I know what you are thinking, but I have turned my back. I have never known a man with such resistance in his eyes. If it wasn’t for the warmth of your hands, the beautiful things you say in a language all lips, the shift in your voice when you speak of the future — I wouldn’t believe you love me.

I close the bathroom door. I don’t know you well enough to piss in front of you.

I must move quickly to check your bag, make sure everything is in place. We will leave for the airport in fifteen minutes.

In the bathroom you — what? Surprised there is still no blood? Do you think I haven’t noticed you haven’t bled, not for eight weeks or more?

My shirt is damp from yesterday’s sweat. My skin is crawling.

No matter where you are in the world you continue to do some things in the way you always have. I brush my hair in long lopes, from my scalp an orange slide to my waist. As a schoolgirl in front of the kitchen mirror I brushed my hair like this to catch the light. Now I do it to remind me of who I am. It reminds me of more than a dim reflection.

Once we were on a cliff top. The wind blew my hair into your face. You said my hair was a simoon, hot and laden with dust, a gust of Arabia in the salt air. You caught it and held it against your lips.

The walls of this room are pitted grey, made of something that used to be shiny. I dig the brush into my scalp and leave it there. I will have a pitted head. And my heart is pitted already, the bomb site of the soul.

At home my grandmother will talk to me of souls. She will talk of her immortality, then clasp my hand and tell me she is afraid of dying.

The Irish are so afraid of death, having been at close quarters to it at its most violent for so many centuries. Its familiarity has bred terror. If only it had bred contempt, then perhaps the fighting would have stopped. Contempt is a narrower emotion than fear and eventually gives way to indifference. It could become more of a torture to keep one’s enemy alive.

It’s quiet where you are. Have you gone? Perhaps to buy coffee, perhaps to escape me. I can never predict what you will do next.

I open the door quickly and you turn from the window, my carry-all in your hand.

‘I was looking for cigarettes.’

She hands them to me from her pocket.

‘I have given you some money,’ I tell her. ‘Enough to get out, enough to get home at the other end.’

She is staring at me, tapping her hairbrush against her thigh. She wants to ask me where I got it from.

‘It’s here.’ I touch the side pocket of the bag.

She turns away from me, picking up pins and combs from the table and twisting her hair in the English-lady way she has. There are too many ironies about her for me to take her seriously.

‘I’m hungry.’ She looks up at me from under those white eyelids.

‘They will feed you on the plane.’

‘I’m hungry now.’

‘Too bad.’ Now she’ll cry.

But I won’t. I will just pick up my bag and go through the door ahead of you. I won’t even look back to see if you are following me. Just this once I will trust you to be there.

The cab stinks. Someone has vomited here in the early hours of the morning. Someone drunk and despairing. The driver notices her quell a retch, and smirks.

I didn’t mean to give you more life than you already have. Sometimes among all the changes, running from city to city, I have almost felt sorry for you.

This is the last time we will ride together. You and l have done rather well. But you would thank me afterwards, if you could, for this solitary flight. For the release, the ticket to a quiet place.

People will look up between the buildings and see a knife flash in the sky, a red slash in the belly of God. That will be you.

Later on dusty streets I will think of you and wonder if it is you between my toes.

My brain is clogged with hormones that make me bovine. I can’t think clearly. Your face has a strange sheen to it, lilac through the brown, like the dark face of a stained-glass saint with the sun behind you.

Your neck has the feel of steamed fish, a delicate meat. I would like to bite it, but we are surrounded by sweating bodies in cars. If we were alone I would do it, and you would scream. Women like you like pain, each spin of the clock to be a rimless wheel.

I lift the coins from my pocket and pay the driver. They fall into his palm, disappear. I carry your bags, your glittering death.

I am strapped in, numbed from the long wait. I ask a hostess for water. There is dust in my mouth.

I will go home and stand in the rain, be polished by the tears of God. When the sun comes out I’ll watch the limpid hills, and wait for the fiery blast, the simoon.

You will never come.

You would not survive in my country with its mad, old war, and I would never survive in yours.