I remember you well...

I remember you well... by Manu Emmanuel

The window is a milky square the size of a travel chess set. It is the colour of her eyes, the way they were as she lay on the sodden ground, dead as a log, her mouth gaping into a void. It, the window, floats high up enough in the blue wall to be of no use to me, milky or clear.  It might as well be in another country, on another wall. All four walls are in navy blue, a colour I have always been indifferent to, except when it has inexplicably dug from within me some alien sense of pride or valour. The bed is a plastic mattress, thin and squeaky and uncovered, flat on a stainless steel base the size of a bathtub. They offered me a blanket but I refused it on principle. There is a sink in the room, at the foot of the bed. God knows if that's the foot or if I'm lying here with my head to my toes, as the saying goes. Is there such an expression? Never mind. Below the sink is a toilet, also shiny. The ceiling is so high as to suggest this prison cell is in a building that was once a rich man's house in a time when high ceilings were symbols of a kind. I cannot remember what it looked like from the outside. Regardless, it was dark when we arrived and all the buildings seemed to me like one long, hostile, grey blanket. I imagine it has columns of some sort at the entrance or perhaps all around. I was never good at naming them, columns that is. There is doric, ionic... or is it iambic? But this is not why I started writing.

They gave me the pen (a crayon, in fact) and this empty notebook and said I should recall the details of last night and put them on paper and then ring the bell by the door when I had finished writing or if I wanted something, a cup of tea, to talk to someone, anything. I imagine they expect an explanation or even a confession. There is a yellow tinge to the milky window now, as though stained. Daylight out there. Her eyes were clear white. I suppose then that the rest of my life depends on what I write before ringing that bell. I'm here assuming that events follow each other, in sequence, as in experiments, one piece setting the other to fall or to rise or to seemingly become something other than itself or to disappear altogether. I won't get into it. The rest of my life has probably already happened, predicated by a fart I never heard nor smelled. Right. Here goes. The tale of last night. How I came to look into those eyes for an eternity, milky as the fog, before I was found standing there above her and was hence brought here to this becolumned palace.

I wrote to her for the first time in June. It is December now. I had not thought of her much since she had left the house all of a sudden what I imagine to be no more than 5 years ago. I came back from work hoping I could surprise her with the L. Cohen tickets I had spent half my wages on. Her favourite song was Chelsea Hotel No. 2. Mine was Joan of Arc. If he played both, I would ask her to marry me. If he played neither or just one, I would ask her to marry me. If, for some reason, we did not manage to go, or L. Cohen died, or if... whatever the case, I would ask her to marry me. At the time I was convinced I loved her, the way people love each other in old stories, or in Rumi poems where love is a gnatting obsession set to music you can writhe to. But I walked in and she was sat at the kitchen table and her back was straight, and she was writing something, and she turned slowly to me as I walked in and she said she was leaving, at which point I saw the fat black bag on the table. I giggled, out of nerves perhaps. I asked her if she wanted a cup of tea and she chuckled and told me I might pretend to ignore what she had just said but she really was leaving and there would be no more of we, us. She crumpled up the paper she had been writing on and stood up. I was by the kettle, still in my coat, listening to the grumbling of the water and looking at the blue light that would turn red when water had boiled. I told her to sit down. She picked up her bag, came over to where I was standing and whispered that she just had to leave, something to do with preserving sanity. The details are all clear apart from that final whisper. I didn't turn to face her. I stuck my hand into my pocket and stroked the grain of the perforated lining on one of the L. Cohen tickets. I heard the door open, then her saying in a loud voice that she was leaving her bike, and that I could sell it since it was technically mine anyway.

I did not go in to work the next day. The day after that I phoned Mike at the office and told him I was resigning and how invaluable... I took to drinking. I was only 23 at the time. You don't really take to anything at that age, you simply immerse yourself in a new hobby. My hobby became drinking. I stopped paying the rent and started borrowing money from friends that soon became enemies. I slept rough for a while, and once, in a pub toilet, I looked at my cracked lips in the mirror for a few moments and grabbed the fire extinguisher and smashed the mirror and when some handsome boy came to check on the commotion, I flung the extinguisher at him and ran out and walked to the train station and turned up at my sister's house with a fine for not having paid the fare. My sister is a kind woman with big arms and an ugly face. She locked me in a room and paid a lot of money to have the windows barred and I lived like that for 7 months, and found my old body again, and hated booze, then asked my sister to stop locking the door. We lived like that happily for another 9 months until one day I was on the bus on the way to work. I worked for a man that grew Christmas trees. So I was on the bus, and I saw her. I had even forgotten about her. She was on a bus going the other way and it could not have been anybody else. It was less than a second, the time I saw her face for. But every detail stuck. Her mouth had shrunk, her eyes were thinner, not so bright blue, and she had dyed her hair brown.

My sister said maybe it was somebody else, but I relented and decided I would send her an email, asking when she had moved to this side of town, explaining how I had seen her on the bus, and that her hair colour suited her. She did not reply. I sent her another, telling her about all the things that had happened since she left, that I was now also on the south side, saying how sorry I was for selling her bike, but that I stopped working and so. She did not reply. I sent her another email bewailing how unfair it was that she never explained why she had left, that I could not blame her for the booze, but I felt my life would have been different had she stayed and we had gone to the L. Cohen gig. She did not reply. There were other emails. She never replied. I stopped working and dedicated myself full time to writing to her. And to finding her. Then last night I was walking onto the bridge and she was running coming my way but on the other side, her new chestnut hair waving in the yellow street light. I ran across and as I grabbed for her shoulder, she turned with such a fright her body swivelled over the steel railing and she went over and plummeted to the bank below. The river water seemed to stop, the reflections of the lights becoming arrested in a dank impression as in a painting. I ran to where she was and looked into her eyes and found no magic in the silent abysmal scream of her lips and it was not her and I stood there until they came to get me and brought me to this room.