I Didn’t Mean to Make You Sad

“I don’t think you’re ever the first one to talk.”
I retrace for myself what has passed through my lips since reestablishing contact following the long night – trying to identify anything to which Mabel may have taken exception. This thought process lasts a mere second, so Mabel finds it difficult to notice any pause between her statement and my overlapping reply, which is identical to what she had just said.
It is my little attempt at humour, to lighten the gloom that has long settled upon our heavy-duty marriage. Neither of us are spring chickens, after all – and, Mabel, if a trifle batty, is not as senile as some women of her age.
“When was the last time you said anything worthwhile?” Mabel appears triumphant, as she says this. I liken her to a ghost with wrinkled skin wrapped round it, one who realises that oneupmanship is the only thing that pumps the juices around without using the corroded veins. It is as if she has discovered the way to by-pass death.

I remember earlier times when a disturbance at the dead of night was the sound of my nose-bleed. And I was so ashamed of the fuss and bother, the next day I decided to make it up to Mabel and, on the spur of the moment, said: “How about going up to see Trooping the Colour in London, today?” I smiled, automatically fingering my nose which had caused all the trouble, testing for any renewed flow.
“Trooping of the Colour? But you’re not usually interested in all that brass band stuff and pomp and circumstance . . .”
Mabel was genuinely bewildered by my suggestion following close on the heels of our sleepless night with my bleeding nose – especially since I rarely took her anywhere. She recalled the way she had needed to baby me, after I’d woken up covered with blood. In the heat of the moment, my whole face and head, she later hinted, seemed drawn out into the shape of a nose, not unlike a horse’s. Indeed, she had wanted a bit of calming down herself, after the initial shock, but soon realising it was merely a nose-bleed, if a bad one, that allowed her quickly to regather her matronly forces, as she vanished downstairs to find a cold penny to drop down my back. An ancient remedy.

Anyway, that was some time ago. Today, her new talk of us sharing forgetfulness stirs my own hackles. She has not fully appreciated the wisdom of her own thoughts, but what she has said causes me to turn some corner of reality. Not that I fully negotiate the bend: I hover at the corner’s edge: seeing simultaneously whence I come and whereto I go.
I recall a dream. There were creatures with skins far wrinklier than Mabel’s, worn like togas, or long turbans, or undulating saris, with rips and tears for normal orifices. Nothing frightful about them. The whole tone was one of sensuality – but with not a single sign of those embarrassing effects of wet boyhood dreams when one wondered if, in the morning, mother would notice the tell-tale stains on the sheets. I don’t want to be uncouth. So, I’ll leave enough rope for others to hang themselves.
“What are you moithering about?” Mabel has just emerged from one of her own brown studies, to notice mine.
“Oh, nothing, really.” I have become an accomplished liar, since entering realms of mutual weak-mindedness that ancient marriages often engender without the participants noticing.

“Come on, Mabel, a day up in London will do us both some good. Blow away the cobwebs. And you always like seeing the Queen . . .”
So, yes, back to the past. The last time she’d actually seen the Queen in the flesh was on her succession to the throne back in 1952 – and, even then, Mabel had not expressed a view one way or the other. She rarely did. It’d been far too hot, she recalled. Everybody was sweltering, kids flaking out – and, yes, plenty of nose-bleeds. It was funny how thoughts could run in circles, especially the thoughts of someone as unround as Mabel.
“We don’t even usually watch it on television, let alone traipsing all the way up there to see it properly.”
That was her last word on the matter, as she went off to see if she could dredge up any more kitchen chores to keep her busy. I shrugged. I didn’t even know myself why I’d plumped on the Trooping the Colour for an unfamiliar trip out. Perhaps it was because I had accidentally watched Beating the Retreat on telly the evening before. Soldiers threading between each other in always-resolvable ranks. The bands keeping time to the unnaturally fast marches. Just a smidgin short of goose-stepping. Quick-fire changes of routine. Ancient rallies. All for what? Mabel’s phrase about ‘pomp and circumstance’ came back to my mind as uncharacteristic of her. Other words like ‘ritual’ and ‘ceremonial’ came to me against all the odds of my feeble vocabulary of thought. The plush flags with motifs betokening brave actions in history. Killing fields where they cultivated the cropped corpses of men and warhorses. The officious shouts echoing across Horseguards Parade. The rigid stands-to-attention, held for periods on end.
The endemic patriotism of the Englishman. And, again, I had to ask: Why?

But that was then, and this is now.
Today, we are out window-shopping. The bus is late and we have decided to wait for a second one, rather than be annoyed by the first one. But this entails loitering outside shops, dithering over this and that. Where to have a coffee. Or if.
She will have to be the next one to say something or neither of us will talk again, I vow. I have often vowed this, and one of us has always surrendered and spoken, sometimes even me. But now, things are different. Her lips are pursed tighter than I’ve ever seen them, stretching her scrawny neck almost smooth, yet with residues of foxing and echoes of frown divots. The eyes squint at me. I am at the well-head of her soul, but I need to drop a bucket to test its drinkability. And, as the old song goes, there is a hole in mine, dear Liza, dear Liza.

But all those leapfrogging years ago, I gingerly touched my nose again. Not as if I regularly suffered from nose-bleeds. The last one was as a teenager. The sweet sickliness at the back of the throat. The fear of a body drained of its fluids.
Mabel returned bearing two cups of coffee.
“Perhaps, we ought to go out after all,” she said. “To Trooping the Colour?”
“Yes, why not? What time shall we get a train?”
I looked at my watch and absentmindedly remembered a dream.
Dreams were often either recurrent or obsessive, dependent on the guilt the dreamer felt and whether the dream controlled the dreamer or vice versa. A particular dream of mine, however, was sired by Obsession, out of Recurrence. The dream depicted my act of waking up to discover sleeping beside me, not Mabel, but the Queen. The most frightening part of the dream was not the fact that the Queen was actually there beside me but that she snorted like a horse.

Come evenings, today, we sit silently before the flickering square shining shrine, imbibing the coarse cultures upon which most others seem to thrive. It keeps us quiet, I suppose.
Not that we need much gagging now, after the self-imposed synchronicity of our not-talking vow. The second bus, too, has not turned up till late. Yet neither of us has groused. We show our mugshot passes to the hunched-up driver with the minimum of fuss, merely a microsecond of photo-flash. Strange – the driver looks a bit like a wrinkly creature from an erstwhile dream. And his girl-groupie, too, with tight jeans, but remarkably flabby flesh up top – one of those flighty flirt-merchants who seems to enjoy swaying on their feet with the rhythm of the bus, holding indecipherable talk-ins with someone who ought otherwise to concentrate more on grappling with the large wheel . . .
Despite our age, Mabel and I ride on the upper deck. The stairs are growing crueller, it is true, and today I am determined that I will pretend to drive the bus with the safety-bar at the front top, something I have not done since I was a wet-behind- the-ears kid. Better than a wet-after-the-dreams kid, no doubt. I laugh inside at my own silent joke. Mabel frowns as if she has read my childishly crude mind. I hope the rest of the passengers are thankful for my selfless wrestling with the unwieldy vehicle, because the joy-rider driver down below who ought to be steering is probably enjoying the girl-groupie nibbling on his ear-lobes. Better than a burger-in-a-bun, which Mabel and I are often forced to cram down our throats, because of our indecisiveness not to do so. I laugh again. Public transport is all the rage these days.

The air was like dead meat. Indeed, far from blowing away our cobwebs, the humid atmosphere festooned our faces with sticky strands of its own, with not even a single spider in attendance. Mabel fanned herself with a folded Sun, as another form of public transport (viz. a train) trundled northward toward Trooping the Colour through South London. The desolate expanses of British Rail land were a junkyard of disused tracks, whilst the rusting rails were still on equidistant parade for potential use. All the sleepers were worm-holed, except, Mabel hoped, for the ones which the train clattered above. The scrawny trees trooped brown and green, with tower-block sentries as intermittent backdrop.
“Perhaps, it wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” I suggested, as I looked away from the fleeting frames of a no-man’s-land where people lived and with whom I dreaded getting acquainted. Central London was at least an oasis, where strangers, being straightforward cosmopolitans, weren’t as strange as those true strangers of the inner suburbs. The sooner we reached London Bridge Station, the better. The sooner we returned home, even better. Excursions were probably a necessary evil, I thought. However, the less that people went out of their homes, the less evil would necessarily be evil. People wouldn’t mug, murder or maim each other, if they stayed at home, studiously forgetting the domestic variety of violence. Yes, I hadn’t threatened to hit Mabel for several years now, even though I physically loathed the tufts of old-lady hair that were now sprouting in odd patches on her erstwhile youthful face and body.
“Makes a change,” replied Mabel to my earlier comment, with barely a pause for thought. Thoughts were not her forte.
However, she hoped the railtracks held up as long as she was on them.
“Makes a change,” I echoed.
Makes a change? Whatever does she mean? Who wanted change, anyway. These days, even change itself had changed. The world could do with far less of change, to my mind. Routines were not half so bad as they were painted. Ancient routines. Like Trooping the Colour. And the train passed the open goal of one end of Tower Bridge, temporarily closed to traffic, I assumed.
Yes, I remembered. An initial study had reported that the bridge’s girders were corroded and badly in need of repair. It had been originally built for horse-drawn traffic to cross the Thames. Come to think of it, only a few years ago, the Queen used to ride her own horse in the Trooping the Colour ceremony, side-saddle, with a stiff-brushed white feather standing up in her tunic hat. Now she was too old. The soldiers were more regimented in those days, too. More colourful, despite being seen by most of the population in television’s black and white. No hint of governmental Defence cuts, then. Nowadays, the Queen was dragged behind another horse in a phaeton. Everything had a more burnished look in the Fifties, more spit-and-polish. Even trains were smarter. There had been a certain nobility in the blood. And no scandals.
London Bridge was bustling with visitors, many just idling at a loose end, some with intent on their faces, a few who decidedly had the air of being complete strangers, making my hair prickle up on the back of my neck – and I saw at least one stranger who had more in common with an actual animal than a human being. Mabel was oblivious to such concerns, wanting to sit down and have a hot drink. Yes, hot, despite the heat. We were both dressed for cold weather. One of the few affectionately secret jokes of our marriage was Mabel’s hatred of the cold – on my behalf and well as her own. Indeed, we had not plucked up the courage to remove a few things, as had the cooler, if uglier, customers milling around us. The question neither of us had yet asked ourselves was why we had come to London Bridge Station. Victoria or Charing Cross would have been far more convenient, bearing in mind the venue of the ceremony we had come to see. And, here we were, looking for Bank tube, having eschewed the station nearer London Bridge for no accountable reason other than that the Northern Line was too deep for us. The Central or Circles Lines from Bank would be better, less claustrophobic, especially on a hot day, we thought. But we hadn’t told each other the reason, in case the one laughed at the other’s madness.
The truth, which neither of us could admit, was that we were lost. We ended up walking round St Paul’s Cathedral in a rather desultory fashion. We returned home, without having the nerve to do anything else, nor even to partake of a tea and a fancy- cake. Neither mentioned to each other the original purpose of our trip to London, not even when we later saw the news and discovered that there’d been a terrorist bomb at the Trooping the Colour ceremony, which, thankfully, missed the Queen by a whisker, but had maimed one of the horses.

That night, I dreamed that I was woken up in the dead of night by the sound of clattering upon the roof above our bedroom. Followed by snorting noises in the general direction of the skylight.
In the morning, I saw that the roof slates were covered in something black and evidently sticky. Some white tufted birds seemed to be in a parlous state as they tried to hop into the air from off it, only managing it at great cost to their plumage. The bits they left behind looked more like hair than feathers. Mabel, who washed the pavement outside the house every morning, shine or showers, was quite aghast at this outrage. She looked accusingly at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Which was exactly the right thing to have said. And we went indoors for a nice cup of tea. Mabel’s looks were similar to the Queen’s, I had always thought. I squinted through a silver tea-strainer at her. She was the only person in the world who was least like a stranger. I later gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. The first for many years. She smiled, as if she knew the cold times were over. Or simply the smile knew.

But things weren’t over. Today always comes.
Mabel rises from her armchair, with the merest swish
of her bodily curtains. She obviously intends to switch off the damn shining square shrine of a screen, so that we can ritualise our preparations for yet another long incommunicado night. However, I am determined to be obstreperous. After all, men of my age are meant to be tetchy.
Before she is able to reach the strange stare-eyed creature sitting in the corner, I have, with my oilier bone-system, darted in front of her and fended off her programmes of instilled habit. Please believe me, but I never, in normal circumstances, raise a hand to a woman, nor have I ever done so vis-à-vis Mabel, despite the various provocations that might have excused me. But, tonight, I grab hold of the hem of her flesh – a neatly stitched scar which has marked her neck ever since I remember – and tug it viciously down, rupturing her blouse in the process and scattering breastfuls of plum-pudding to every corner of the living-room.
She weeps bitterly as, on hands and knees, she desperately tries to gather together the missing parts of her body. I might claim that crying was tantamount to breaking her spiteful vow of silence – but I retain at least an ancient residue of affection for the one who was once my sweetheart all those years ago.
It does not take much for a living-room to become a dying one. Nor a vow to become a curse.
“I didn’t mean to make you sad.” There, I’ve said it. I am man enough: proud not to have too much pride. At least, she will die with us on speaking terms. But then she finds what she seeks on the floor – the locket she has always worn around her neck. Inside it, a bus ticket – a souvenir of earlier days when she was the girl-groupie and me the hunky driver of the bus that failed to take the tight corner of a bend. More than just a fatal nosebleed . . . There is never a now, just a past. And our mutual silence lasts forever.

***

9.9.22

Published by Eibonvale Press in ‘Dabbling With Diabelli’ 2020

At the age of 4, I attended the late Queen’s ‘Accession to the Throne’ ceremony in London 1952

15.9.22

It just occurred to me that I am probably of an age when, for the longest period possible, I can only remember the late Queen as reigning monarch. Anyone even slightly older than me would probably remember, in their own real-time, the previous King as monarch. You see, I was taken, at the age of 4, to the Accession ceremonies in London in 1952, and I recall that occasion gave me a vague concept of a reigning monarch for the first time. And I have no real-time memories of the previous King.

19.9.22