Thursday morning, twenty to four….
Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in the shapes and folds of dropped clothing, reflections in brass, on white, in shadows, surfaces that wait, then accept, waiting surfaces that have no voices. Alba can make them speak however, in universes inflicted with her own meaning and these meanings are true to her because she invented them and she believes in them.
A large cube reflects the limits of her room, a cold bedsit room floating about aimlessly in some universe or other. The frame of the sash-cord window delimits the view outside. The sealed windows of playrooms and nurseries now bar the way back into a youthful innocence as clean and fresh and as nice as ice. Silence, but too quickly comes the word “silence”, and where there are words there is never silence.
“Are those birds outside singing to me?” She thinks to herself.
The letter under her right hand is a fine but fragile key to memory and a future temporally free of imperfections, a future whose silver threads, nerves, whose sparks, whose strategies and vaporous plans have yet to deceive or distort the moment.
Hands pressed tight over her eyes she steps outside her eyelids, out of the mask into the swirling patterns projected out here. Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in folds in dropped clothing, in shadows that cut across walls into corners, in the red smudge of biro ink, ink she had cleaned onto the corner of that tissue over there, on the corner of the table by the pile of paperbacks, sometime the day before.
“A red stain. Amaryllis belladonna. A red belladonna Lily, father used to grow them in the back garden, in the flowerbed between the apple trees on the right, there, out of the back door....” The words flickered through her thoughts.
It is deep red, the Naked Lady, and Alba is The Naked Lady, a colour of distinction, a stupid obvious symbol of love spreading out to Shakespearean proportions in her mind’s eye, growing richer and more perfect than anyone else could possibly comprehend. Belladonna, a bud’s opening, offering up a prayer for the brushing together of lovers’ lips.
More words flickered and flashed somewhere behind her eyes, “Oh, to tuck myself amongst the petals and purify all the imperfections of the script, to so overwhelm them as to nullify their sourness, to go down and feel between the petal sheets without guilt. To glow that red, that warm!”
Ruby coloured flashes and reflections reveal the beauty in little things in a hopeless heaven. She bites her bottom lip, draws blood, and fights back a tear. A thought, an image, an idea is assassinated by words.
She hears the broken sound of footsteps at a distance out there somewhere, their origin unclear. It is a silent sensation, the only memory tonight without words. She instantly forgets she ever heard them.
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