Story: 'After the tone'

I wrote this a long time ago—I can’t remember when. We cut it from my collection, I Would Haunt You if I Could, which was the right decision, but for some reason I can’t let it go. I also cut it from the draft of my second collection, The Last Crisis, which has yet to find a home.

It may not be very good, but I like it, still, and so here it is.

AFTER THE TONE

1.

This morning, weighed down with sleep, as I waited for the kettle to boil, I realised I could not remember your voice. In that moment, I dropped the bottle of milk I held; as if from some great and unbridgeable distance I saw the bottle fall, slowly turning as it left my hand, then unmoving watched the milk spill and pool on the linoleum floor. It seemed remarkable—I had not known I could exist outside our dialogue. Dumbfounded, I had to call your mobile, and hear you on the answerphone.

“Hello,” you said, as you always say, as you only say now, “evidently I am somewhere else.” Then you paused, as you always pause, and I gripped the phone tighter, clasped it to my ear as if to lean in closer to your lips.

2.

I listened to you breathe, then click your tongue off the roof of your mouth. “Leave a message after the beep…” And I tried to picture the shape of your mouth. I tried to remember your lips. In every photograph I have of you they look different, thinner and pursed, somehow wrong; the meanness I see there must be a feature of the photographs and not of your lips. I wondered where you could be.

Afterwards I went back to bed—I couldn’t face the day, and slept into the afternoon—and in the early dark awoke to find you sitting in the chair by the curtains, backlit and haloed by the orange streetlight outside my window. Hello, I said.

3.

And I listened to you breathe. In the orange glow I saw how you were leaning forward in the chair, holding your face in your hands, your face in shadows, watching me with empty and unblinking eyes, and I knew then that you were in some other room.

You clicked your tongue off the roof of your mouth. Suddenly I saw again the spilt milk pooling on the floor; I saw the bottle falling, turning slowly as it left my hand. When you spoke, your voice might have been an echo in the stairwell.

Later, I awoke into another house, another bed, another dream.