Extract: The Space Between

Two goldfish swim the circular route around their goldfish bowl. Downstairs two bodies are slumped in front of the television set, which is, strangely, not switched on. The toaster pops. Outside the house a bird is singing, repeating what sounds like ‘Edith, Edith, Edith’. The strip light in the kitchen hums and twitches. An ambulance, siren sounding, wails past the top of the road. Upstairs the needle of a record player is set between the grooves of a 1977 seven-inch record. Downstairs one of the bodies lifts itself briefly from the sofa and reaches for a box of matches. A match is struck against the side of the pack. It hisses and bursts into light. Its flame tapers against the end of a cigarette. It is blown out, dying only to leave the smell of sulfur in its wake. A moment later white ash is flicked into a glass ashtray. A while after this the dying cigarette is crushed into the pile of ash, fizzing with its last moments of heat.

These things are all happening, synchronized and at once. Only, we are not here. We are before here. We are before all this happens. We are with a girl who is carrying a plastic bag. Just walking.

She isn’t going anywhere because she doesn’t know what to do, or subsequently, where to go. It could be argued that this is the worst day of her life. Or course, this depends entirely upon at which time of her life we are meeting her. We are, just to clarify, meeting her now, at this time. The moments before we meet her went like this:

1. The number-twenty-six bus from the university pulled up at the stop on Willis Street ten minutes earlier than expected.
2. The girl got off the bus and made her way down Willis Street until she reached number eight.
3. She made her way down the alleyway connecting numbers six and eight Willis Street and turned left at the end, passing through the gate of number eight – thinking to herself how nice the garden could be if someone cleared away all the crap that had been accumulated – and up to the back door.
4.The back door was unlocked; she entered and moved through the house hearing noise from upstairs.
5. She took her bag off of her shoulder and placed it, along with the plastic bag she was carrying, onto the sofa where a number of coats and bags had already been dumped – she thought to herself how nice the house could be if someone cleared away all the crap that was accumulating – and she went up the staircase.
6. The room she was heading for, just opposite the bathroom, was emitting the sounds; music, she opened the door and entered the room.
7. Inside the room two - naked - people were positioned on the bed, one performing phallacio, the other, on the receiving end of the act, looked up with palpable guilt in their eyes.
8. The girl; utterly shocked, felt suddenly quite ill, sorted quickly through a thousand things to say but found that none of these sounds passed out of her mouth.
9. The girl silently retraced her steps back out of room, down the staircase and to the sofa.
10. At this point she stood for a while before picking up the plastic bag and slinging her other bag back over her shoulder. She left the house.

There are a number of things that could have occurred from this point on, although at this juncture she can only envisage two options:

1. She stands in the back garden for a while - a moment more accurately - then goes back into the house, up the stairs and back into the room. She screams at the two figures, - one of which is re-dressing themselves - an absurd sort of screaming which seems to pour forth uncontrollably. She suddenly feels too tired to scream anymore so leaves the room and the house – picking up her bags along the way - and the garden and the street and bursts into what feels like a million separate tears.
2. She stands in the back garden for a while - this time it is more of a while than a moment – before taking a rusty spade which she finds amongst the crap accumulated behind the garden shed (if you could describe it as one). She retraces her steps – with the spade slung over one shoulder like one of the seven dwarves - through the house and up the stairs and into the room, where one of the two figures is re-dressing themselves. She bludgeons the perpetrators with the back of the rusty spade in two swift movements, says a prayer for herself and leaves the house, picking up her bags along the way.

However, what actually occurred:

The girl paused for a moment in the back garden – this part is true, it was a moment and not a while – then quickly walked on as soon as she realised that she was standing there. In the street she contemplated bursting into tears but decided against it; it would have been an inconvenience and an embarrassment. Not really knowing what to do, the girl made her way down the street, along the pavement between the lime trees and the row of terrace houses. The lime trees shuddered in the breeze. It was growing cold with the early evening. The sky had darkened to a deep blue, a beautiful twilight blue that is so often missed; the twilight blue that only lasts a few moments before plunging into the dead blue of evening. The sun was making a slow sink through the sky ahead of the girl, caught directly between the gap of the semi-demolished building at the end of the street and the semi-constructed building just next it, blinking as it declined from the heavens. It was at this point; just before the bottom of the sun made contact with the visible horizon; just as someone slammed shut a car door a few cars down and started the engine; just as a blackbird emerged from a bush next to the girl then quickly darted back into the undergrowth; that the girl realised: the plastic bag she was holding was not hers.

When she got home- after taking an intentionally long route back- the girl filled the kettle at the kitchen sink and sat on the worktop opposite listening to it slowly boil. Stale smoke hung in the air. She tapped her heel against the cupboard underneath her. She kettle started to hiss. Someone had been smoking in the kitchen earlier. Her invisible housemate had been smoking in the kitchen. She knew it was him because everyone else had gone to Greece for a week. She’d never actually seen him do it. She’d never even seen him. The guy had been there for six days and he still hadn’t done any washing up. The kettle started gurgling. There was a pile of dirty plates stacked up next to the sink, the knives and forks were slotted into a coffee cup, handles up. She wondered when he was going to do the washing up. It had turned into a standoff; they were both waiting for the other to crack. That morning she had taken the dirty crockery out of the sink and piled it up neatly; cutlery in a coffee cup, plates and bowls stacked in order of size; it was her attempt to acknowledge the fact that it was there but point out that she wasn’t going to do anything about it except arrange it neatly. The kettle bubbled and spat steam. The next time she saw him she would tell him that she’d had a traumatic day and would have appreciated if he had just washed a few plates at least. An ache suddenly surged up inside of her, starting in her breastplate and bleeding its way to the pit of her stomach. The kettle clicked off.

* * *

She had tried to leave it in WH Smith’s. After contemplating throwing it in a wheelie bin on Church Street she had decided just to leave it somewhere. Somehow her conscience had overridden the decision to throw it in a bin, or a skip, or the river, and so she had gone to WH Smith’s. However, the WH Smith’s staff were too conscientious and one of them, a lanky teenager, had run after her and into the street waving it around, ‘you left your bag’. She smiled sweetly, wanting to kick him in the shins. She needed to go somewhere neutral, a big building where no one would notice. So she went to the library.

She walked around the library for a while. Asking herself over and over; what am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I doing? She ran her fingers along a bookshelf and took out a book. She placed the plastic bag on the floor and flicked through the book. She didn’t look to see what it was called. She watched the words lap past as the pages brushed over: rent laugh said that Cubbit Nothing couldn’t sharply. She closed the book and wedged it back into the shelf. Then she walked away. She walked away and sat at a computer in the middle of the library. She looked into the computer screen and sat there, her hands in her lap. Just looking.