Poetry is an activity on the side of life, they say.
It was the typical ‘family’ occasion. This meant
indeterminate hours seated in the pre-polished room hoping for the mercy of
easy-enough conversation. That typically was not the case though. She watched
her mother attempting that long effort called ‘engagement’ – offering coffee
and an array of biscuits which were all really slightly differing shades of
beige. The particular thing is that people paused before selecting them, as if
it was almost ‘exciting’. It was almost like the canopy suspended above the
baby’s head, offering soft colour and shapes at which to flail a limb or two. The artificial fire kept the
room an ambient temperature. Everyone was smiling.
Even Abigail had rouged just below her cheeks so that when
she assumed a smile her face would look
‘a picture of health’ as her grandmother said. To complete the ‘picture’ she had pulled back
her hair tight with pins even though they dragged against the scalp and
had covered the eye-pits over with what
felt like a layer of filler. She felt like had almost bruised her face by rubbing
so hard, so desperately. It was like her face was determined to drain colour;
and she had piled on layer after layer of liquid that morning in front of the
mirror,
The ‘family occasion’ had now assumed the stage when people were
attempting to conceal their unspoken but
awning distances from each other by nursing their mouths with slightly
overbrewed tea. The bitterness gave an excuse for any untoward expression.
“This is nice,” Her grandmother trilled, to which several heads
hastily, gratefully nodded. It was as if they were an assembly of actors
waiting for ques. An auntie was next.
“I’ve heard you’ve not been feeling too well recently, Rita.”
They provided sufficient prompt for the swivel of a number of
pairs of eyes and a gaggle of noise which allowed Abigail the time to examine
the object in her hand. She wasn’t holding a cup of tea like the rest, for she
had already downed hers minutes before, when the liquid still singed the back
of the throat.
Instead she held a hand. She squinted through its yellowing
surface, curling up at the sides of the nails like old paper. In fat, the nails
seemed like the original, slightly milky surface which the skin had swamped over. The veins appeared like slowly
guttering spools of ink, and she traced a notably thicker one with an unfeeling forefinger; it seemed it
followed direction rather than actually felt anything.
The conversation had reached the level at which it was deemed
appropriate to taper off about illness and collapse into laughter. It started
on the word “Still” – Abigail’s mother seeming to spill forth a noise like
bubbling vowels. It was met with others like the wings quickly buffet in a
flock of seagulls. A hahahahah adadadada
hhaeharahaar.
She felt the hand in hers squeeze down, slightly clammy,
though with the pressure of touch or exertion she could not tell. She looked at
her granddad, to whom the hand belonged it was strange to think that they were
presumably joined, at such a proximity, by blood. Felt nothing, although
anticipated the liquid lurch of her internals, yet only the long slow itch of a
niece’s knitted jumper against the bare flesh of her arms. Her granddad’s hand
was still in hers and her feet wrapped in a pair of socks her mother had insisted
her to wear, the clips had been leant by her grandmother still digging, digging
in her hair, her mouth ached as of for speech,
still coated with her uncle’s attempt at tea. She couldn’t move for the
badly chosen, charity-shop jeans and the
well-thumbed newspaper over her knee.
It was hard wondering
what she was amidst all of this. Almost easier, instead, to seize the adjacent coffee cup ‘belonging’ to
her aunt, that may well have been enough to cause dispute in itself, perhaps
she would take it one step further, would watch how the coffee edged against the lips of the cup of she
would twist it in her free left hand, spill the contents over her lap. She
would be met with the adjectives ‘clumsy’ and ‘careless’ even as the liquid
would singe into her skin and she would passionately care about that, those proclaiming
inspirational minutes. The minutes in which she was not only witness but caught
in some beautiful way.
She wondered why she felt so distant from the hand in hers.
She never noticed the silence and then
“You don’t look yourself today, Abigail.”
And she came forth with her usual confession that she wasn’t
Abigail but
“I’m fine.”
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