glitter

The man from Council. A wee nyaff, clipboard, pen and baldy heid. He’d come to see the wall in the back bedroom and there was no arguing with him. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’s one of them.’

‘Is there nothing we can dae about it?’ Anna asked, with a voice unheard, like a squeaky door, but she already knew the answer. He’d written it down for all the world to see. It was official. They had an infestation.

‘I’ll let myself out.’ He stuck a pink slip on the old-fashioned dressing table with a swing mirror and carved wooded paws. Slipped away. The front door banging as it shut.  

‘Maybe I could touch it up with anaglypta.’  Her hand hovered over the back wall in the bedroom. She’d moved the bed out of the way to get a better look, even shifted the picture of the Sacred Heart, and turned Jesus’ mournful eyes to the wall. There was the sanitised smell of bleach where she’d tried to shift it, but it was no good the spot had grown into a canker and now there was a panel that glowed like a firefly.  

The raucous laughter of seagulls outside had her pulling the curtain back an inch or two and peering outside. The man from the council and an equally shiftless confederate, heads bent together and they were laughing, laughing, before they stepped round a grey wheelie bin at the edge of the kerb and into their work’s van. Her hand shaking when she let the curtain fall back into place.

‘I used to be so brave’ she said, conscious of the need for words, even a grey untruth to be spoken aloud, a spell to unsettle,  but with Jimmy gone, the word widow sucked all the life out of her.

She stood mirrored in the door and combed thin grey hair before she went out, but in the half dark, with the glow from the walls behind her, with each downward stroke of the brush her hair seemed to grow thicker and darker. The tenseness in her shoulders and arms left her and her breathing became more regular. Arm, in the crook of each other’s arms, she’d trudged up the hill that grew steeper, with the years, to the Parkhall shops with Jimmy. She could go now. The idea glowed like a tabernacle. Three walls of bright burnished gold and the fourth taking fire. The idea was to die for and yet there was something familiar she had forgotten.

She wandered into the hall. ‘I’ll go out when it’s darker.’ Palm splayed against the wall, hand an oily starfish as she got her bearings by touch. Her joints no longer ached. The glow was melting honey in her bones. The dip and turn of a car’s headlights swept past and a bird whistled, what kind she didn’t know, but she listened more closely for noises inside the house, calls inside the house. There was something. Where was their children?

She swept from room to room. Each glittered with gold. Her step lighter, legs much shorter and tighter than she remembered, but shapely ankles and hips that rolled. So long ago. She’d turned heads. ‘In the Mood’, big bops. Crossing the dance floor in the Locarno like glaze on water. Red ribbon in her hair. Mouth pink-moue and kissable. ‘In the Mood’. Red that was her colour. Flame  colour and slinky sheer dresses that shone and soaked in the sweat. ‘In the Mood’. Stilletos. Black. Killer heels. ‘In the Mood.’ Perspiration on her forehead. On her upper lip. Running between her breasts. Big bops. The lift over. The lift under. Long way to fall. You’re only young once. Slow sax, making its way home.  Smokin.