‘It is absence which
commands us to exist’
Mina took a long slow drag on her cigarette as if it was the
necessary apparatus to sift through the artificial air of the oft-frequented
club – it was the usual accolade of 1950’s London, she could not complain. The
lights pulsed dully, intended for atmosphere, like uncertain breaths brushing
over the traffic of socialites at the bar, their enhanced hair and painted faces
glowing like the human façade in the animal kingdom. She felt sick. Her slot
was in 15 minutes, and she attempted composure.
For everything in the room wavered, as if possessed by a
kind of sewn-in insecurity. Posters boasting of the freedom to drink and dance
were accompanied with the curtail of handing over coinage – so many pounds for
a drink, so many for a dance. Life’s pleasures always have a price, Mina
thought abstractedly. We have to lose some of ourselves - otherwise they are pleasures
no longer. She glanced at the wild smile of some nearby society woman – so
happy in that she no longer knew herself – a part of her at the bar, part in
bed with a man, another part courted, another part married. It was a glorious
human dissection at every social gathering. Mina mused that it was the cheap pot-pourri
which attempted to mask the bits of blood, or at least a lust for it.
It was a lust she felt concentrated upon her, every time she
stepped onto the stage, all assembled like some extravagant act, and strangely
– not towards her body. Her body just
suspended itself – the uneven tone of her legs, her torso nervous and
overly-rounded in anticipation of childbearing or a certain tender touch which
had never occurred, a waist which caved in with no definition like a blunt
knife, all empty. But her voice was somehow infused, almost enchanting.
She ran her fingers
through the crudely cropped blonde hair, and smoothed the strange strands on
her dress which stood up pink and obvious like guilt – all the fashion in
America, hopefully empty at home. It was not attention she wanted – no, she
wished immensely to be back in the room she singularly called ‘home’ and yet
was a simple expanse of space owned by someone she did not know and had never
met, to whom she paid the rent, and just to stare through the window and let
the moment be lost. Not that it was difficult to lose oneself in the club –
people were always rapturously, desperately, giving themselves to others – but
everything stank of age and experience, the coffee stains resplendent on the
tables told of past lies, and lips, and deceit. Old ash glimmered in the
cut-glass trays beneath artificial light and stagnant heat.
A masculine voice somewhere to her left announced in the stretched
drawl of a synthetic American accent, prompting her forward ‘Mrs Mina True!’
It was the management’s insistence that they would announce
her as a married woman, when her actual circumstances were quite the opposite –
she had never been married. It was more ‘presentable’ to appear as such, they
told her – oh couldn’t she quickly find someone, they asked of her. They told
her that audience loved nothing more than a married woman singing about lost
love – perhaps they would presume she was a widow and enjoy the absence even
more. The awful absence of truth, like the absence she saw in every open eye,
the cut, cut, cutting of the clock face in the corner, every dripping night -
As Mina stumbled up to the stage, she wondered what in the
room was real – so many necessities
ultimately unnecessary and extravagantly unreal. Humans covering up humanity –
sex was taboo, and sweat masked with a scent close to collapse. Of course,
humanity happened in private, but in public – these were people, models of excellence.
Instigators of quality, who liked wine and cards and pretended to appreciate
art.
At a table just next to the arc of the stage sat a
middle-aged man with a wizened face fashionable at the time – indicating
experience and the expectation of sincerity. His table was ornamented with a
dish of empty oyster shells and several blank sheets of paper – one fast
between his fingers as if he was inspecting the thickness. He breathed loudly
beneath an age-old moustache.
‘’It would be the rocks which would kill her in the end…’ He
mused, marking the motions of the words in the air with his free hand, somehow
aiming his speech towards Mina with flickering fingers which fell through the
air as if imitating a broken body, his words peculiarly spaced. They were
resonant in her ears, as if individuals.
‘Excuse me?’ She managed, for she was shy in the social
sense, sheepish and inelegant as she stood in front of him.
‘Aw, nothing, nothing,’ He continued, still apparently engaged
in thought ‘Just an idea for my new work. I come here to write you know. I like
the – ‘
He paused with an outstretched palm in the air.
‘Exhibitionism.’ He finished, almost triumphantly ‘Yes,
that’s it. The exhibitionism. Nothing’s too real here, you could picture
anything – '
‘Perhaps you should paint then,’ Mina managed by way of
departure as she ascended the stage steps hurriedly, avoiding him – just
another attempt at another failure, to create something, to make something. Whatever
‘something’ was, she was sure it existed by itself and that moment she was
acutely aware that the management – whatever kind of conglomerate that was
- which enjoyed the particulars of it’s
times, giving the audience a certain act at a certain minute. She hurried.
When finally upon the stage she was always confronted with
the same simmering nausea which tripped the end of her nerves, almost familial
with an agonizing regularity, as she gazed down from her elevation into a sea
of painted faces beneath painted lights – ladies in their brocade finery,
men assembled as if peeled from
packaging with pins and ties and buttons to press them together. Indeed, the whole room seemed suddenly tense
with the need to retain composure. It was the same every time she stood onto
the stage, staring down at those cold, hard faces, ugly, almost abstractedly
formed heads, bringing time back to her, back to her… . Memories suddenly
flooding of how, once, she had stood on a stage of her very own, eerily distant
like a half-set dream, and how she had stared and stared at the tongues of
water below. She thought so strongly that that was what ‘something’ was – it
was ‘something’ to die when to live was empty. Absurd – how people searched
life for it! She remembered standing, the wind slicing her sides as she knew it
would be the rocks which would kill her in the end.
Not herself. No, she was not even permitted the identity of her
own death, suicide– to ‘commit’ anything or even ‘commit to’ anything still had
the connotations of crime. It had not ended, just as the singing never ended,
and the dancing, and the made-up human assembly – they all dragged on as her
feet had dragged her away from the cliff and back to the ‘home’ which meant nothing,
and the layers of old love letters and the immediacy of cold water and all the
other things people believe it necessary to live. For everyone says life must
be composed of ‘something’…
It was with these thoughts, of the past, that she began to
sing. She sang of heartbreak, of lost love. For she had lost love before, that
was why it was so significant. Everyone wants to see the gaping wound, stand
with staring eyes upon the still smarting flesh, the thickened rawness of the treble notes which everyone applauded
as if eager to aggravate the injury. Her body was insignificant, her voice went
on, a voice pierced with desire, how she yearned for the solace of human touch,
how she had lost, how her thoughts became wild and time increasingly distinct,
and drilled and drained her. Her heart coursed beneath her ribs, her mind
looked on blankly, stared into the voice so rich and bloody. She shrilled the
last few lines of the world not letting her love, or something like that, and
stumbled quickly from the stage. The women in the audience sitting at the
little glass tables inevitably with a dry Martini and a man’s hand firmly round
their waist clapped ravenously– for how they loved to see someone without! It
was a treat for them, the high-fliers, the lucky audience in the unfair trial. Flurry
after flurry of hands in the awful velvet of the air, little lights of cut-diamond
rings glinted sickly in the half-darkness.
‘She even cried!’ One of the ladies declared confidentially,
affably to another, over the long steel finger of her cigarette holder.
But Mina could hardly recall what she had done – all she
wanted was the horrible cold confirmation of money in her hand and the absence
so many waited for – sleep. Her feet seemed to unfurl with every step like a
thick human weight between the hardened rain of female glances and bodies
passing each other non-committal and cold in the night. Just as she was down
from the stage, rustling and dragging like a bird caught with a bullet – a
young man approached her, emerging from somewhere on the left with an excited
step.
‘You were really swell!’ He gushed, though the flush of
amiability in that young face and the composure of his neat hands hurt her. A
touch she would never know, a voice she may hear in one singular instant and then only ever in memory – for she
was used to people becoming immaterial before her, coming, going, no true
meaning. Dark hair and piercing eyes framed her.
He leaned closer, as if in confidence – always and ever-assumed
- so she felt the dry heat of his breath
against her cool neck like the pressure of fine jewellery on an open throat.
His hands were moving closer.
‘Let me buy you a drink. You know, you were really
something.’
She knew herself as nothing. She shook her head with the precision
of an oft-performed action.
‘No,’ she replied, quickly, deliberately ‘If I was
something, they wouldn’t applaud like that.’
He looked at her questioningly.
‘People would rather see someone with nothing than with
something, otherwise they don’t see someone anymore.’ She hurried, adjusting
the shoulders of her dress as she spoke ‘Audiences like absence – it’s humanity
they don’t have.’
She glanced round emphatically at the piles of coloured crêpe
and napkins and balloons - their torturous hues glowering as if attempting to
make up for their emptiness. Mouths open and empty, and in an attempt to fill them
– bowls empty, glass empty, a horrid human emptiness shrieking over and over…
‘I’ve got to go,’ She muttered, by way of departure. Every explanation
was accompanied with departure.
She felt the clammy fingers of exhaustion around each wrist,
easing deliberately behind the lid of each eye, her whole head. For she was
heavy, as if swollen with monotony and inevitably of another day, pulling the
stones of attempt for human contentment, jagged, desperate -
The rocks which would
kill her in the end.
