Sunglasses Sunglasses. The sun was shining hard angles upon the world as he passed into the shade of the bridge under the railway line. On the other side of the bridge, still in the shade, he followed a path alongside a row of trees which were growing out of the embankment. It felt hot. Next to the path there was a playing field and on it groups of schoolgirls were scattered about in the harsh glare, their forms hard and sharp against the grass. It was one of those days when the heat seemed to bring a clarity to vision, when relief was accentuated by the light and everything had an edge. Although he was still in the shade beneath the canopy of trees he kept his sunglasses wedged onto his face, the effort of removing them seemed significant and the fact that he didn't was something he considered for a moment without reaching any particular conclusion. On the other side of the playing field there was a children's park in front of a shanty of allotments and he could see the structures of swings and slides reaching up out of the landscape towards the sun. They looked incongruous, industrial, not child-like at all. Children's voices drifted out of the sunlight, dreamlike laughter and gentle shouts skimming across the surface of the day like distant birds over water. Looking, he saw a mother walk towards a child and give it something. She walked back and sat upon a grassy slope between the play-area and the allotments. It looked so natural, so normal and so far away. Inside he was seized by a convulsive gripping claw that wrenched a part of his stomach into his mouth, but it didn't last because he was walking towards them and he couldn't be bad, not now, not here. He tried to regain some semblance of balance in his mind, but it was a struggle to which he was almost unequal. As he approached the park a little boy in shorts broke free from the collective gravity of children swings and slides and began running towards him, comically, in the way small children almost always seem to run, their bodies somehow ahead of their legs, disaster seeming at each moment inevitable and then impossible. It was almost funny, almost but not quite, watching the whirr of tiny legs, seeing the huge innocent smile of joy spread out across the pure clean canvas that is a child's face. His heart transmuted painfully into something else. Grief, anger, sorrow and confusion were overwhelmed by a distraught and agonising sensation of love as the boy, with arms opened wide enough to embrace the world, ran into the battered landscape of his father . Then he saw the boy's mother, closer now. It was frightening how she always seemed so radiant to him, how she seemed to glow out like a beacon with some kind of luminous quality which surrounded her and set her apart. He had only ever known two people in his life who did that and they were both there in front of him now, shimmering, other-worldly, something connected to him and yet separate. "Hi," she said. He forced a smile but it was hurting all the same and he couldn't bear to look at her because when he did he remembered who she once was and was forced, simultaneously, to remember who she had become. His reality clashed violently with hers somewhere in the land of identity and neither person could see the other clearly. It was as though events had placed between them towering mountain ranges which no one had ever climbed. Often he wondered if he was alone in seeing them. Was she ever able to see him marooned and alone on a high snow-clad plateau desperately trying to scale the heights that had erupted like solid boils from the tectonic upheavals their lives had become? He doubted that she could and so consequently, like a fool, he always wanted and always needed to find some confirmation that she could at least see something or, conversely, to be given an absolute proof that she saw nothing. But it was futile, he knew that. She had lost sight of him years ago and sometimes he questioned if she had ever really seen him at all. He felt that for a long time he had been left alone in his attempts to climb the un-climbable. "Hello," he said, his voice, betraying infidelity, steady and restrained. Death invited relief. He felt as though he ought to die. The knots inside were tightening their grip upon his stomach, a relentless twisting tangle of emotion bound themselves tightly about his innards as he sought to comprehend what these people meant to him and how it was that he found himself so helpless and vulnerable before this woman, a woman who had tested his resolve to continue in the land of the living to such extremes. "Do you want some juice?" she asked the boy who was still in his arms and it all seemed so natural and normal, as if nothing had ever happened to anyone. "Yes please," the boy said and she handed him a plastic bottle with some juice in it. "She's always so organised," the man reflected to himself. "So organised and so casual." He was sorry that he liked that, but at the same time, to his great regret, he felt that her organisation mirrored his own estrangement, his own lack of control and the distant role he was being forced to assume. "What have you been doing?" she said looking directly at him, unflinching, calm and confident. He suppressed the urge to speak the truth, to pour forth the horror of his every waking minute, to tell her everything, to insist that she hear of his weeping wailing daytime night-time torment. He was good at humiliating himself in front of her. Perhaps that was why she didn't like him, she could never fancy a man who had laid himself so bare before her. Instead he put down his son who ran over to play on the see-saw and said, "What is there for me to do, I can't ever fit in here now." It was a stupid loaded reply and really all he wanted was to make a connection, but then he couldn't make it happen no matter how hard he tried. He felt impotent and useless. The ice which, long ago, had frozen across the interior of his bleak polar soul tightened as she shrugged her shoulders indifferently. "Things must be going well for you," he said. "You fool," he chided himself in the back of his head but, again, he was too weak to resist the obvious. He was totally unable to suppress his destructive desire to surrender to the jealous anger that burned without warmth in his soul. How could he pretend? "Why do you have to say things like that?" Her irritation was immediate and he didn't understand why she was always so quick to express dislike, couldn't she see him perched on an icy vertiginous ledge with the wind of a thousand sorrows howling around his head? He didn't reply, an answer seemed superfluous, and he turned instead to watch the boy playing on the see-saw. They were silent for sometime. When he tried to make conversation again it was not without some suspicion that it was immaterial on her part whether they spoke or not which, considering circumstances, seemed strange but not in anyway unusual. That was what she was like now. She gave him nothing. But then she told him, often, that she liked talking to him and he could never really be sure where words left off and action began. That was the way it was with her now, nothing ever seemed to add up, words and deeds always apart, always different. "Have you finished your book?" he asked, it seemed reasonable, seemed neutral, it seemed like the sort of thing she might want to talk about, anything, he imagined, other than the things which he wanted to talk about, things which only ever made her angry. "No," she replied. "Not yet. What are you reading?" He muttered something about a couple of books he'd just read and then to his surprise and dismay found himself talking more freely, easing off the checks he had placed on his being and talking to her like a friend. He knew why and he hated himself. "The drowned and the saved," he heard himself saying and like a fool that he felt himself to be he knew that he was opening up again to a woman who had barred her doors to him years earlier. "It's about this man, a Jew, being taken to a concentration camp, and he explains how human beings function in extreme circumstances at the limits of human existence. It really interested me, especially the chapter The drowned and the saved where he was describing how people survived by not associating themselves with people who were slipping down the slope for fear they would be dragged down with them. It seemed so cold and unconsciously calculated. I think it reflects something fundamental in our nature, I mean it's something you can see taking place on different levels all the time." He cut himself short. Why did he do that? Why let her in? Of course he knew, but he resented his weakness, it made him angry inside and made him feel weak and foolish. The imbalance was plain and clear before him. The harsh glare of every conversation they had brought a stark contrast to their respective positions and highlighted, to him, the humiliation of her rejection. "Pathetic," he muttered under his breath. "What?" she said. "Nothing," he said. "Why won't you tell me?" Her question belied a false innocence. How could he tell her what he felt? How could he tell her what he wanted to say? They might as well be on different planets. "I've been thinking about love," he said. "I keep trying to work out what it is and somehow it just doesn't make any sense. I don't understand why it can hurt people so much." He wanted to tell her something but it was futile, he could only skirt around the edges of what he wanted to say and anyway he knew that she didn't want to hear. "It's just attachment," she said and he felt the horror of the words crawl all over him. It wasn't so long ago that he had heard those self-same words applied to another's abused feelings. It wasn't love it was only attachment, just a habit. If that was the case then nobody can get hurt and no one is responsible. He looked over at his son again and wondered about self-justification. It was a horrible moment. "Come on, we've got to go now," she called to the boy. He ran over and jumped onto his father. "I want my Dad to come to our house for coffee," he said archly. "He can't come he's very busy," she lied for the man. He winced at the ease with which she did it. How she managed to blank out the reality of what she was doing always amazed him. "Please, please come," the boy protested, and his voice began to waver and whimper. "I want him to come, but I want him to come." "Come on, we're going now," she said and started to pull him away but the boy took hold of his father's hand. A look of agony passed before the man's eyes, but she couldn't see it because his sunglasses concealed the pain. "She's too busy thinking about her boyfriend and getting rid of me," he thought to himself bitterly and there was no way for him to know one way or the other because at that moment the mountains seemed so huge that the sun had disappeared. Despair poured out from his eyeballs and he looked to the sky, but no one came to help him. The boy wouldn't leave go and was really crying. It was impossible for him to make the final wrench that would extricate his hand from the grip of his son. A strange electrical current seemed to be circulating around his head, he felt sharp bolts strike at him as each moment froze in the hot glare of the sun. * The man didn't want to leave the woman or his son. The son didn't want to leave his father. The mother was pulling on the son, the son on the father and for a few hideously comic moments they were reunited in a battle of wills that the mother always won. She wanted to go. * The boy was nearly hysterical, "I want him to come, I want him to come," he half chanted through the tears. The man felt as though he would explode. "My little boy, my little boy," he spoke the words far away inside a howling vortex of despair. "This is what she does," he thought, and then he looked directly at her for the first time and wondered how it must feel to put other people through a moment like that. He couldn't imagine. All he could see was her single minded determination to do what she wanted. He tried to see it another way. He tried again and again to place himself on her side of the mountainous barrier, to see himself through her eyes but each time he created a sorry picture in which the mountains reached up to the sky and he seemed tiny and insignificant in comparison. "She couldn't do this if I meant anything to her at all," he thought. "Is there any reason why I can't come?" He asked. The allusion was obvious and her terse "no" seemed to signify that, to her mind, there could never be a reason why he couldn't go to her house. "I'll come then," he said, unable to thwart the hideous sense of inevitability that was overcoming him, and immediately the boy smiled and the tears disappeared. * It wasn't far to the house and because he had never been there before the man was fighting his fear as he walked along the road from the park. It was hot and as he gripped his son's little hand he felt their sweat mingle, the boy's from the heat and his own, cold and stale, from a rising terror at what he was trying to do. He looked at the boy and attempted a smile. He left his sunglasses on even though the sun was no longer so hard in the sky. It kept him apart from the world. They were protective, removing him by one step from what he could see to be reality. Then they climbed the stairs to her flat and he pulled off the glasses. His mind seemed to leap backwards from the event and he felt his tightened consciousness vibrating somewhere deep inside his head. He had a bad taste in his mouth and it was as though he was poised upon a high-dive board, he couldn't think, he mustn't think. As he went in through the door of the flat he saw all the old familiar objects, objects from a past that mauled him like a wild animal. His son's toys, small things, large things, things he remembered buying, old decisions, old ghosts of past hopelessly lost days. Days he had foolishly believed to be happy. It seemed so far away from his own sordid reality because it was a proper house where people lived, his son and his son's mother. He couldn't think any further. "Come and see my bedroom," the boy said, full up with the fun of the occasion. But the man started to see other things around him and he couldn't stop his thoughts, he couldn't halt the desperate images from flooding in and engulfing his precarious shelter with wave after wave of disbelief. Evidence of a third party, another man's things, things also familiar could not be overlooked. Crushing reminders of a broken friendship melded seamlessly into statements of a new and happy life. A happy life once his own and now lost forever. The images seized upon his vision and shook him so viciously and with such violence that he felt he might fall to the ground. His eyes began to crack as the ice in his heart groaned and, despite the evening heat, all the winters of every season set their frozen fingers to work in the deepest mechanisms of his being. "I can't stay, I can't," he whispered. The force of his existence was crushing him. "No, no don't go," said the boy, suddenly frantic. But somehow everything had become frantic. The man was frozen by the enormity of what was happening to himself and to his son. "This is important," he was saying to himself. "This is so important." "What's wrong?" she asked him. The element of surprise in her voice shocked him. "Why can't she see?" he thought. "Can't she see that this is destroying me?" And then he was hugging the boy, fighting to control the snakes that were twisting and writhing under the skin of his face and saying, "I've got to go, I'm sorry, but I have to go." And how could he explain what was happening inside his head to a small boy of four. A small boy who proudly stated that he knew everything when all along the one thing they all knew was that he didn't know anything about the severity of the forces that were at work upon his innocent life. The sunglasses were dangling on the cord around his neck as he stumbled out of the flat and onto the staircase. The door slammed behind him and he could hear his son howling and crying, "Come back, come back, please don't go." He could sense that she was furious with him for not being strong enough, but then how strong could he be? He felt a greater weakness than he had ever known before take a hold of his body. What could he do? He turned to face the wall and hit his head so hard against it that bright electric flashes passed before his eyes. He did it four times and then stumbled out on to the street. He didn't want to go but he couldn't stay. He was trapped between two manifestations of living hell. Someone was banging on a window. He looked up and saw his son's tear-stained face on the other side of the glass and his tiny hand waving good-bye, already worlds apart. He saw the radiant woman who had given birth to the boy looking down at him standing, glassy eyed, on the street. Someone was banging on a window. The dull thud seemed to echo in his bones and it sounded like the thud of doom. He saw glass, all day he had seen only glass. Glass separating, protecting and then distorting. Now it was blinding. The glass had overheated in the furnace of despair, become molten, become his own. Someone was banging on a window far far away. He looked around and he saw no one and no windows to bang upon and as he looked closer and listened more carefully he realised that it was his own soul banging banging banging. The tears began to roll down his cheeks and he prepared himself for the shuddering sadness that he knew was going to come. He began again on the long walk away. ��� ������
Copyright © 2002 Fergus O'ferguson |