Fuse wire

FUSE WIRE
by
Kim West
I watched him slice the bread. Upright, even slices. Identical. With an
easy sawing action, like when he cut down the trees. I remember how it
was when I lived with him. My clumsiness was the bane of his existence.
Me? I somewhat relished the difference. He the technician in the men's
cardigan and me the artist with my pink hair.
I watched him place the slices into the toaster and minutely adjust the
dial to exactly the right place. If I could, I would tweak that dial,
just to show him the lack of effect. He checked his watch and went to
the fridge. Cheese was stored in a plastic container and each piece
individually wrapped so as not to contaminate its neighbour's
uniqueness. He chose Cheddar and returned the others. I watched him
slice the Cheddar perfectly and tut as one slice broke in half.
Olives from his store and ripe tomatoes from his fruit bowl completed
the meal. I used to rearrange everything into incongruous still life
sets. I used to seek out the lopsided-ness to life. A little
disorder.
Kirsty always says that she could only cope with William out of his
home. In the pub he loosens. He plays pool and he always wins. He's got
that sort of mind. When we used to go I'd make a point of not being
able to assimilate all his tutoring. I'm crap at pool anyway. He'd sort
of look distant and cope!
Kirsty was in love with him once. She went through agony trying to cure
herself. She couldn't get through his shell. She burrowed and burrowed
but she just couldn't get through. He retreats into his Meccano world.
All he needs is the right flat bit and two minuscule bolts and he's
built his suspension bridge.
He just gets nasty when he's at risk, like he's the only person with
feelings.
So Kirsty despaired when he told her he needed to limit their
relationship to a once a fortnight night out, because he needed his
brain the rest of the time for university. He has a notebook for
thoughts he won't assimilate, yet needs to think. It's an extension
memory.
Ronnie stole it once for a joke with some batty idea about making an
installation. Ronnie's like that: A berk. He tried to apologise when he
realised how much he had upset him, but things were never the same.
Misdemeanours are never forgiven.
Good job I hadn't been his lover. Good job I was only staying here
overnight. Returning to this town with the possibility of a research
post at my old university was proving to be a very ambivalent
experience. Memories of embarrassingly drunken student fun mingled with
my ever-increasing certainty that I had really not known what was going
on half the time. Life at that time had circulated entirely around the
pursuits of pleasure, as we lived impervious to the larger world in our
own little arty microcosm, all distressed fabrics and
corporeality.

William takes our lunch through to the front room. Everything is the
same as three years ago. He pulls out a small stool for my plate and
another for his. I kick off my Doc Martens and we sit there on his
Fifties furniture as he asks what I want to listen to. I say "You
choose" and he plays me an early Kinks track. He always did have crap
taste in music. How many people in this town are playing vinyl this
afternoon? Maybe just us.
I'm feeling a familiar reactive level of claustrophobia, like nothing
has changed or ever will, when the door opens and a young man in
leather trousers suddenly wanders in.
"Ah Harry. This is Mo, my artist friend. Remember, I told you she was
once my lodger."
The slender young man bows and in lowering his head gives me a very
penetrating look through his long fringe.
"Sit Harry and I'll rustle you up some lunch."
Sounds from the kitchen confirm that Harry's lunch is being prepared
with familiar meticulous care. I just noticed that the photo Will used
to keep of me in my faithful old dungarees had gone from the mantle
piece.
"Tell me about yourself Mo," says Harry. " William was always talking
about you. It was very bad when you left. He was distraught." He shakes
his head haughtily and his fringe dances. He's telling me things that I
didn't know and I'm very taken aback.
"I didn't know that Harry" I retort.
"Come on Mo you must have been aware of his feelings," he says as he
stretches out comfortably on the sofa with unsettling
familiarity.
Tension is building in my stomach. I remember this tension and I recall
William's tendency to be territorial about me and the nervousness this
caused. I didn't define it then but it seemed like Harry was now doing
it for me with alacrity. Suddenly explaining a heck of a lot. It's a
"wood for the trees" sort of thing. Feeling overheated, I pull off my
chunky sweater and moodily chuck it to the floor.
"So Mo, what's happening in your life? Is this a social visit, or are
you on an interview or something?"
"Just passing through Harry." I didn't feel like opening out.
"Things have changed around here."
I stare at him and I'm wondering what has changed, when William returns
with the extra lunch and I notice that they have identical slippers
on.
There are wild geese on the wall for a joke and I'll swear one of them
winks at me.
"I was just asking Mo what's going on in her life Billie."
"I was just about to ask you the same,"
I manage smartly, catching William's fine profile, as he looked away. I
had many drawings of that profile in my college portfolio.

That night I lay in my old room unable to uncoil. Sometimes in the old
times evenings with Will had made me feel that way, and I would sit up
half the night reading and sketching and trying to loosen myself. It
was cold, so I pulled on my tracksuit trousers and running socks.
Throughout that whole evening Harry had been digging at me and yet
somehow William didn't seem to notice. For instance, Harry commented on
my height, saying "little things pleased little minds." What he meant
by that I don't know, but it wasn't a compliment and it stuck in my
mind. Call me paranoid, but what else could you think? Something in the
way he passed me things or laughed far too loudly at my jokes gave the
evening a kind of edgy- ness beyond what's relaxing. So I retired
early, tucked up in my Rupert Bear pyjamas, and overheard them in
William's room, chatting and, well, other things.

That day when I had driven us down south to visit, Will's father
greeted me like a celebrity.
"Mo Bradley, Will's little artist friend! Heard all about you. Come on
in. Come on in." Now I keep thinking I should have guessed, but what
does it matter, 'cos he's got Harry. Or did Harry get him? I don't
know. I feel so confused.
That day at the farm everything had been perfect. Will was so relaxed
and so funny too. He was my best mate, warts and all. If I were to
believe Harry's inference, then all the time Will must have been
thinking of more than that.
The tree was huge. The top had snapped over in the storm and narrowly
missed the house. I made a batch of quick sketches for my degree
portfolio. His dad and I set to with handsaws and pruners to trim the
branches. Will started up the chainsaw and methodically set about
slicing perfect logs for his dad's stove. The old oak tree's heart had
been broken, as though a giant hand had ripped its head off and just
left the jagged neck stump. Will and his dad roped the stump and
tethered it to another big old tree. Then Will cut out a wedge while
his father and I held fast to the ropes.

My reveries were fractured by a yell from Will's room. I sat bolt
upright and wanted to run in and tell Harry to leave him alone.
But Will's not my child. Maybe it wasn't Will anyway. Perhaps it was
Harry. It sounded like pain. Like a wounded animal. Was that it? Did
they wound one another? I didn't want to know. I kept thinking of what
Ronnie said about the Pet Shop Boys and I knew that I hated
Harry.
"Why don't you fuck yourself, Harry?" I thought. "Just leave Will
alone! He may be anally retentive but you won't cure him like
that."

The first wedge wasn't big enough. The tree stood fast and so Will cut
deeper. Then we all pulled on the ropes and Will and his dad
shouted
"Heave. Heave." like we were sailors pulling up the leathery sail of a
schooner.
"Heave. Heave" I joined in, pulling like mad.
The old oak began to groan. The ropes creaked and our hands, even
through thick gardening gloves, were chaffing now. Then suddenly Will's
dad shouted
"Timber" and we all fled as the old tree tumbled to the ground. I
grabbed my camera and photographed its slow descent. This photo later
gained me "highly commended" in the end of year show. The earth
shuddered and then all fell silent, so all afternoon we laboured with
its logs. Will sliced the stump again and again and his dad split the
sections with a huge axe, as I loaded the wheelbarrow and stacked logs
against the house wall and in the storehouse. Will and his dad worked
long into the evening and I lit a bonfire and took supper out to
them.
That night Will and I swam in the river. Naked, but not touching, we
broke the moonlit steel surface with quiet respectful ripples. Then we
dried and dressed hastily because, to be frank, it was bloody freezing
and we raced back to the house. We crept in to find Will's dad fast
asleep in the arm-chair with his mouth hung open, so we sat in the
kitchen with cocoa and biscuits and played Scrabble. Will, of course,
won.

So there I was in my old room in his flat, trying not to hear or
imagine the goings on in his room and trying to locate how I actually
felt. Was I just reacting to the certainty that Will was no longer
available? I pulled on a sweatshirt. Three years ago I'd been angry
when I left here and we'd barely been speaking at that point. My degree
had come to an end, so I was due to leave in July and go home, but Will
had urged me to stay on for a bit. There was nothing much going on at
home so I stayed, but that had been the wrong decision, because being
together during the day we became very tense. We were so edgy, snapping
at each other constantly. Will was so picky and I had had enough of his
fastidious routines. The last straw was when he started lecturing me
about plugging in two appliances at the same time. How was I to know
everything had one amp fuses and that they'd blow? I just saw red and
blew my own one amp fuse. One amp fuses. Whoever uses one amp fuses? I
gave him a massive lecture about the need to ease up and stop being
such a control freak and a nerd and a geek and one or two other things
based around getting a life. He turned stony and asked me to leave. I
became furious and left. Of course I had nowhere to go and so I had to
crash at Ronnie's, who tried to seduce me every night until in
exasperation I decided to go back home at last. Bloody Ronnie!

The night settled into its quiet blanket and eventually I uncoiled
enough to catch hold of a little sleep, waking very early with games of
Tig in my head. The idea of me and William was peeping at me round a
playground corner going "Catch me if you can" with the certainty I was
too old to run that fast. The idea that I was a real fool for
re-visiting this flat rushed up and waggled its tongue and I just said,
"You're right."
I pondered what it was that turns a friend into a lover? Where did I
draw a line that wised me out of William's life? What blew those one
amp fuses?
In any case, it was too late now with Will embroiled in the male to
male thing. Should I leave early, perhaps now before dawn? Take myself
off to stupid Ronnie and cope with pesterings? Could I go back to sleep
and let the day come? No, I couldn't rest in that bed. I got up, raked
through my scraggy mop, catching an unwanted look at myself in the
mirror. I was certainly no sight for an interview. That was definitely
off. I moused about, gathering my untidy belongings. I'd decided to
leave, but not until I had left some messages.
The living room curtains were drawn. Street light filtered onto that
fateful plug point, into which I plugged an electric fan heater and
everything that would fit onto the adapter. I moved the sofa and turned
the mat over, leaving it at an angle. I swapped ornaments around and
adjusted the angle that the wild geese were flying at. In the kitchen I
found the slippers. I placed the larger pair into the bin. The fruit
from the bowl I placed in odd settings around the place. On the door
lintel, balanced on the edge of a shelf, on the tap, (which I left
dripping.) Toaster on full power and kettle boiling dry.
Then I tore a page from his precious notebook, which I found in his
coat pocket and wrote, " I love you William."
So now I'm sat in the morning caf? round the corner feeling
dumbfounded. The interview's definitely off and I can't live in this
town again. I probably can't even visit it again. I've been and tried
to get back into his flat and undo my messages, but the key on the
string was gone. Then the lights went on and I legged it. So I've blown
it again, haven't I?