Fantastic Metropolis

When I got home from the studio Annie was smashing crockery on the back step. I laid my guitar case down and watched my lover standing at the kitchen door, silvered by the two am moonlight, dropping mugs and plates and breakfast bowls one at a time onto the concrete. From the living room jungle noises and David Attenborough’s voice provided a sonorous counterpoint. Eventually I found my voice, shouted, “Annie!”

She turned and said cheerfully, “Hi, Lorna. You’re back. How was the session?”

I was astonished. When I left that morning, she hadn’t even seemed aware that I was going, let alone where, but I ignored this for the moment.

“What are you doing?”

Annie had the grace to look a little abashed, “Oh, right. Bit messy, yeah?” Then she actually beamed, “I’m getting back to work.”

I watched her, speechless, as she crouched and began to sort through the mess of fragments. Such transformation. Up to that morning she had been so withdrawn, so tightly, bitterly wound, living in her dark, curtains-drawn world, doing nothing except sleep and watch her nature videos; and now everything about her seemed to deny it. The brightness of her expression, almost overt excitement; the renewed lightness in her step and posture; the long since familiar spark of drive in her eyes, replacing that smudged, haunted cast. All this spoke of some remarkable but so welcome return of normalcy, of the Annie I knew and loved and had wanted back so hard every night of these long weeks.

But. However much I wanted to believe this, however much I found myself grinning too, infected by whatever inspiration had sparked this shift of mood, I was equally fearful that it signified some darker, internalising twist of Annie’s psyche.

I was tired and my head was too full of the jingles we had been recording to take all this in. Already I had so many questions, but then was not the time to start asking them. I mumbled something like okay then, and went to run myself a bath.

Annie was sitting on the step, carefully breaking up the larger pieces with pliers. I came up to stand behind her, feeling soft and renewed. Without turning, she said,

“You smell of apples.” I ran my fingers through thick strands of damp hair.

“I borrowed your shampoo. Sorry.”

She gave me no sign, and I could read nothing in the curve of her spine under her thin, stretched Greenpeace t-shirt as she bent over her work, so I took a chance. Slowly, braced for rejection, I lowered myself to the floor behind her, wrapping my arms and legs around, resting my head on a shoulder, breathing in warm body scent, relishing the proximity. And Annie responded, laying down her pliers, leaning back and relaxing into my embrace. We sat like that in a silence I almost felt powerless to break until the weight of questions forced words from my lips.

“How are you?” Weak, insipid, open to as non-committal a reply as you could get. At first it seemed that Annie was not going to give even that, but then she spoke.

“I’m all right I suppose. I wake up every morning hating myself for bringing a child into this terrible world and go to sleep hating myself double for not being able to do anything to make it better.”

Straight to the point; and nothing had changed. Annie had been running this conviction around since she discovered she was pregnant, digging it deeper, etching out the grooves of it in her mind. How many times had I tried to reason her out of this and met with violent rejection, or with that blank silence, so intense, which I found even scarier. That was before. Maybe now she would listen. My fingers described light, calming circles on her brow as I searched for some new combination of words that would convince her.

“It’s not all so terrible, you know.” I said it lightly but Annie twisted round fast, fixing me with a hot stare, and everything that I was going to say withered in my mouth. Her stare softened, her eyes brimming and spilling twin tracks down her cheeks as she reached up to shush me with one finger, one minute shake of the head. I felt the tension drain from her, and her body sagged against me, head resting this time on my shoulder. My fingers resumed their tiny movements at her brow and in her thick hair. Quietly, into my chest, she said,

“All I wish is that we could have our own little corner where everything is good and safe and just right for us.”

Don’t we all?

My reply, “People like you make the world better, Annie,” was feeble but Annie seemed to take a measure of comfort from it, cuddled in a little closer, squeezed my arm lightly. I was grateful for that at least. Presently a growing coolness in the air set us both shivering and I coaxed her to stand and come inside, asking,

“What are you doing out here anyway?” For the second time that night, she smiled, and that one was genuine, one hundred per cent Annie.