The Repeating

“Come back!”

        I’m standing in the back garden smoking, the only light the cigarette and the faint traces of a glow from the streetlight on the corner at the end of the road. My head’s tingling softly with end of the day sensations but really I just want peace and quiet.

        “Oh, please come back!”

        I’m surprised that no one else on the street seems to be awake, despite the time, because for the last fifteen minutes or so that’s what I’ve been hearing at intervals in an increasingly high pitched and strangulated voice. I suppose it’s another sign of what Gail described over dinner last weekend as my ‘callous streak’ that I have failed to develop any concern for the pathetic, lost whine or the no doubt distraught being from whence it issues.

        “Come back!”

        If I did try I’d imagine a man on his knees in the middle of the street, half dressed, holding his head in his hands, beseeching the empty sky, then gazing longingly down the road.

        It’s still quite nice out. My feet are bare and I clench and unclench my toes in the damp grass, glad that I haven’t gotten around to cutting it yet as the extra length makes it feel that much more luxurious. I like this hour, the dark, parallel rows of back gardens all to myself but for the occasional cat, maybe even a hedgehog, the opportunity of utter solitude and tranquillity amongst so many people. But someone is evidently determined to spoil it for me tonight. Why people feel the need to make their grief so public is beyond me.

        My cigarette finished, I begin to pace the length of the garden in slow, measured steps.

        “Come back!”

        Volumes spoken in two syllables somewhere in the darkness. They tell so many stories, trace outlines of lives. Epic tragedies unfold slowly, inevitably, in suburban communities, setting up the final two words of windswept desperation.

        I’m not sure I want to empathise these days.

        I reach the back gate, check it’s bolted, knowing full well that I bolted it hours ago, that I’ve already checked it once. I turn and pace back.

        Besides, it could all just as easily be someone displaying his mental instability with the proud panache of a strutting peacock.

        “Come back!”

        Back outside the kitchen door, I take the box from the windowsill, watching my reflection out the corner of my eye, and light another cigarette. Gail thought that banning me from smoking in the house would make me quit but here I am, still coming outside on my own despite everything. I’m not one for giving up. Besides, I’m used to it now. It’s as much a habit as the smoking itself. I enjoy it even. I’ve got my smoking umbrella leaning against the doorframe inside for when it rains. She should have known that trying to make me do something would only make me determined not to. I can’t help it. I don’t like being told what to do. Especially when it’s something I was doing or planning on already.

        When we first met she was a heavy smoker. At times I’ve suggested that the health issue is irrelevant, that she only wants me to quit so I experience the cravings and misery she ceaselessly told me about when she was pregnant.

        I look up at Tommy’s window. A cold, dark pool, it seems to consume what little light there is.

        “Oh, God, please!”

        A bit of variety. Another level of desperation.

        People seem to expect me to care so much. Sue me, I just find it difficult. Extremes of emotion are so draining and, ultimately, hollow. Gail said she wonders if I ever really cared anyway. How are you supposed to respond to a question like that? If she’d been someone else, someone who wasn’t there, I’d have probably hit her.

        This world.

        I mean, there comes a point where you’re better off forgetting, doesn’t there?

        Hmm, maybe Gail had a point with the whole callous thing. Or maybe my thoughts go off on strange tangents when I’m not sleeping. It has proved more difficult than I expected changing my body clock since the night work ended.

        Before… before, aah, forget about it. There’s no point thinking in befores.  

        “Come back!”

        I saw a suicide once. This is years ago now but it’s been playing on my mind of late. It was a girl. A young girl. Late teens. I was on the late bus, one of five or six passengers – this was before I came to the kind of small town where the busses stop running by eleven. It was raining. Not hard, just a drizzle really – the kind that runs down the windows and makes the neon lights look like they’re leaking – running past my face which was pressed against the glass. I noticed her because all of the other lights on that floor were off and the image of a backlit girl stood out so much more clearly for it. I’ve since wondered whether I could see her as clearly as I remember being able to. It seems unlikely. She was quite a way off and it was dark out. But in my mind I can still see her face, her serene smile.

        We were stopped at traffic lights as she climbed onto the balcony and stood there, arms outstretched.

        I don’t think she jumped so much as fell, balancing on that ledge, waiting for gravity to take its natural course. There was a jolt. The bus began to pull away and in that second she’d hit the ground.

        I could have said something, could have made the driver stop, but I was drunk and tired and the full impact of what I’d seen didn’t hit me until the next day, seeing it on the local news as I nursed a hangover and ate Weetabix, learning snippets of her life story.

        She’d been a year younger than me and she looked pretty in the photos they showed on the TV. Perhaps that’s where most of my memories from the night itself actually come from.

        Memories are tricky.

        Later that day, after watching the news over breakfast, I almost felt as if I knew the girl. I still remember her name. We could have been as close as family. More so even. I found myself quietly crying as prepared dinner that night. I turned the radio on for some distraction, but that just made it worse. Who were these people?

        That was a year before I met Gail.

        “Please! Please! Come back!”  

        I get back to mulling over that last conversation with Gail again. She got onto the subject of time. I think she’d been drinking and she seemed close to tears. She kept on referring to regret and opportunity and I just nodded and agreed. A couple of times I apologised, not for anything in particular, just because the pauses she left were apology shaped. I don’t think either of us ate much.   

        “Come back!”

        Again. Only quieter now, fading away with its last vestiges of hope.

        What comes next?

        Come back?

        A swansong for today and for everyday. It holds so many meanings. They rub and chafe and polish each other clean away until nothing is left but the words themselves, naked and helpless in the moonlight.

My cigarette’s long since dead. Again. Repetition. But I still hold the filter. I look at it a moment longer and it starts to repulse me. I flick it against the wall. Maybe I should have one more.

        “Come back!”

        What could you possibly want that much? What is worth it? Sometimes, you have to let things go.

        Imagine time as a yo-yo. Everything again always. A pretty girls leaps up to a window ledge and steps inside. She watches TV. I forget her name.

        Another day is beginning. All of these beginnings, just a series of curtains raising on the ending. And I see the ending in most things these days. There is nothing else. The big questions have a series of small and worthless answers. The only thing that’s certain is that when it does finally decide it’s time to end I’ll be here, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by emptiness and a calm that will carry on and on, but for that one voice and his two desperate last words. Everything needs a kiss off line. It’s just the way of things.

        My feet are starting to get cold. It must be time to go inside. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cut the grass.