Meet Cute

Alice was very beautiful. Her hair was black and curling, and she preferred to wear it pulled back from her face. She always painted her lips and nails a ripe pink, complementing her dark eyes and pale complexion. Her little nose turned slightly up at the end—a trait her children, grandchildren, and grandchildren’s children failed to inherit.

It is said that the first time the Doctor beheld Alice, he declared, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’

No such thing had ever been said of Mary Anne. Or Anne, for that matter.

* * *

Beautiful Alice answered the phones in the lobby of the Med School. Staked behind a desk, she watched the students, professors, doctors come and go, clack clacking across the marble floor.

Usually plenty of people stopped by her station for idle chatter, but today was different. Rain drummed on the windows; Alice drummed her pink fingernails against her cheek. There was nothing doing. Occasionally wet shoes squeaked through the door with the rustle of umbrella and exhalation of breath—but it was otherwise still.

She sighed at the thought of the magazine she had left on her bedside table; reading material was scarce and she was quite bored if she cared to admit it.

Really quite bored indeed. With a slender finger she pushed an apple to edge of her desk. The fruit teetered on the brink and Alice was obliged to scramble and rescue it back again. Absurdly, the apple’s brush with death brought colour to Alice’s cheeks and made her heart flutter. Never mind, for when the Doctor stumbled into the lobby, she was rendered all the more radiant by her excitement.

* * *

Of course, the Doctor was not yet a doctor and he had forgotten his umbrella that morning. The ambitious student entered the building sodden and dripping, the pages of an ineffectual newspaper limp between his fingers.

His equally drenched friend skittered in after him exclaiming, ‘Dammit all!’

As the exclamation echoed through the lobby, the two men (boys) bent double with laughter.

Alice narrowed her eyes at the delinquents… although… was one of them handsome?—the one with the silly newspaper umbrella and the full lips?

Miraculously, Frances appeared at Alice’s shoulder with some pretence of a memo in her hand and gossip on her lips. Alice turned her best silhouette to the ambitious student and spoke to Frances with self-conscious animation.

For Frances, Alice had charming smiles and merry laughter. [Frances fancied herself quite hilarious all of the sudden!]

She could feel eyes on her—those dark eyes beneath the dripping, black head of hair—as she rambled on, flirting at nothing, flirting with the air around her.

Then, perfectly placed, one haughty look in his direction—fleeting under arched eyebrows.

At last, when Frances was gone, Alice looked down so her black lashes showed to their best advantage against her white cheek.

* * *

Robert was transfixed. And very soggy.

Paul was saying something to him, they had been laughing—who the hell cared—he was transfixed by the dark-haired beauty guarding the phones.

She paid him no mind, wet dog that he was. She was engaged in conversation with homely red head—lucky receiver of smiles and looks! Her laughter bounced sweetly off the walls while her delicate fingers were engaged in twisting the stem of an apple.

In an instant, the beauty’s eyes flashed to meet his and then away, sending a thrill through his breast.

The stem snapped from the apple and her feathery lashes drooped to survey the damage.

He felt sick, he felt sweaty.

Grabbing Paul by the elbow, Robert declared, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry!’

No-See-Ums

Mary Anne was conscious of the fact that, unlike her mother, she was no great beauty. This is not to say that Mary Anne was not pretty, just that her features lacked Alice’s precision. She was a bit like a blurry replica of her mother, quickly rendered with blunt tools. Like all of the family, she was dark and would grow to be middling in stature. Like her father, the Doctor, she had a nice head of hair and wide shoulders—indeed slightly wider than desirable for a little girl.

In the summer, Mary Anne got brown as a berry. On warm days, she played outside with her brothers: collecting sticks in a Radio Flyer and racing down the slope of the drive with the wagon roaring behind her. On hot days she stayed inside with Rose and prattled or sat quietly, which ever suited her mood.

It was often her mood to be quiet, and her penchant for reflection led her to prefer the company of adults. Her expression being set in horizontal lines (and not the placid curves of childhood), she had the look of being rather a serious little girl.

* * *

Anne was rather a serious adventurer.

It was steep work heading south from the front door of her house. But, setting off downhill, she was alone, obscured by the great trees that struggled forth from thick blankets of ivy. There was a spot along the way, she knew, a dog’s grave covered in vine and leaf. She pulled back the ivy and traced the lettering on the small stone. She didn’t know the dog; it was a dog she’d never met. It was the dog belonging to another family—a family come before. There was always a before and a before before that.

The ivy was ankle-deep, harvesting all manner of slithering creature. Anne picked her way gingerly down the slope. The air was always thick and damp, alive with no-see-ums annoying her legs and arms and face. So hot, it was always so hot, humid, relief-less.

At last Anne reached the creek that tripped along at the base of the hill. She zigzagged from bank to bank, occasionally dampening her sneaker in the shallow water. (An imaginary beast was by her side—a silent, unconditional companion following her to the ends of the earth. Sometimes it was a fox, sometimes a dog or a cat. Always was it wise and knowing, noble and loyal.)

Zig zag zig zag…ZIG – she leapt over an aberration on the bank. Anne knew instantly it was a dead dead dead body. A racoon. Horrible sight, his lips peeled back to reveal his sharp teeth and blanched gums. Flies and midges buzzed around his eye sockets and creek water gently lapped against his body, coating the fur in grotesque white foam.

Anne reeled backwards up the bank, sick, disturbed. Her companion vanished; she was alone.

Sticky with sweat, no-see-ums swarming round her ears, she scrambled back up the hill—away away away from death.

Safe inside the house, Anne stretched her body on the cool peach tiles. She drank in the air-conditioning, and soon she was shivering.

Coming

Cool autumnal morning walking to the train station: Anne pulls her scarf closer around her neck and can’t believe it’s only August. It’s like the Augusts of her childhood when it was cold enough to wear a new fall outfit on the first day of school.

Past the pubs, dusty and stale in the light of day, their pint glasses and cigarettes abandoned for sweet sleep. Someone should clean them, really clean them, but no one ever will – the sun will set again and warm bodies will mask the grim stagnation.

Past the Polish, Pakistani, Ethiopian storefronts shuttered, baring iron teeth. Above, bright signs promising (in dubious grammar and clumsy puns) myriad off-brand treasures and curiosities would that the stores but open their mouths. And higher still, brickwork the colour of rust: older, Elegant London. In some spots, the signage ghosts of older, Elegant London whisper across the bricks in lead paint.

And past too where the block had been corded off last weekend.  Where they walked on the pavement opposite an abandoned bus with flashing lights. Next to it, a pool of blood – surely not blood, she had said looking up at Byron, dismayed – so much blood but no body from which it had spilled. Thankfully no body to see, thankfully the body had been carried off, and Byron put his arm around Anne’s shoulders and turned her away.

Now, past that spot too, scrubbed away, carried away.

The sky has the pale, thin aspect of early morning. She climbs the hill and passes the churches twinning on adjacent corners of the high street. In the green, even the pigeons are still asleep, huddled under their stone bench porticos.   

Down the green and up again to Station Approach where cafes reluctantly yawn and open their doors as she passes. Anne enters the station, and the boards happily read ‘ON TIME’. Past the turnstiles, the morning paper still stacked neatly – as yet unmolested by snatching, rushed readers.

And now, she opens her book and waits for the train to come three minutes early, as it always does.

(Early to work [with heavy looks], late to home [from their books]).

Unstuck

Ghostly memories closed in around Anne as she descended the stairs to the ground floor. Although she had visited her grandmother’s house hundreds of times, she had never set foot in the basement. In her Mind’s Eye, it was an undesirable underworld, quite possibly filled to the brim with the hoarding of the years.

Instead of Hades, at the foot of the stairs Anne found an almost perfect preservation of her grandfather’s life. It was as if, after the Doctor’s death, Alice had reverentially sealed up his history.

There was his poker table, his bar, covered in dust, waiting patiently. His examination table, his desk. Peeling floral wallpaper and a prescription pad yellowed with age, proudly bearing his name in block letters.

And, strangely enough, a housekeeper’s little room, empty and bare.

* * *

But now Alice too is gone, and all histories are unstuck and set into motion.

* * *

The housekeeper slept in a little whitewashed room, very neatly made up, in the basement. Her little bed was pushed in a little corner next to a little hearth, and from a little window, she could survey the neighbour’s quite large yard. She had everything she needed, and in this little room, she was reasonably happy.

Often, a little girl was wont to slip off her little sandals (in an effort to preserve the little white coverlet) and curl up on the housekeeper’s little bed. Rose preferred to do her ironing in the little room, and Mary Anne was content to quietly watch her at her work.

There was a clatter at the basement door, and Mary Anne scrambled to peep her head out of the little room. It was after hours and a patient had come to see the Doctor.

We find the Doctor in another little basement room, this one perfectly suited for receiving late visitors. Here, Mary Anne’s father, the Doctor, sat at his desk and fingered his pink prescription pad. The patient perched on the examination table, legs swinging, and complained of one common ailment or another. Here, the wallpaper was of a pleasing floral pattern, desperate to escape the wrought iron bars that braced the window. It—the floral wallpaper—retained its masculinity with hues of blue and green.

Bare feet—Mary Anne’s—feel sticky on the linoleum floor. Pat pat pat.

The smooth cement floor of the whitewashed room cools Mary Anne’s naked feet.

And if Mary Anne ventures elsewhere still in the vast network of this basement (or rather the ground floor, if we are being precise), her bare toes are eaten alive by shag carpet of olive-y green.

On this voracious carpet, the Doctor gathered gentlemen and played cards.

The gentlemen sat around the Doctor’s well-kept poker table and drank Budweiser from the can. Cumulus clouds hung in the air and ashes rained down on the felt inlay from diligently puffed cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. An assiduously outfitted bar was spread opposite the table.

Mary Anne watched the secret and manly proceedings from the stairs leading up to the first floor. Sometimes the Doctor, her father, would call her down and take her on his knee. There, he whispered stratagem in her ear and let her taste his pipe.

* * *

Maybe now we go up the pale blue stairs (the pale blue stairs habitually covered in slugs or the evidence of slugs or the deterrence of slugs in the form of salt) at the back of the house and reach the main entrance. Say we crunch up these salty stairs, pale blue in colour, and we reach a screen door.

Alice was always on the other side of that screen door waiting to greet Anne. CREAK(POP!) the door would spring open, and amidst a sea of clay pots and green gardening foam, there Alice would stand with her arms widespread.

‘Come here to me, my Little An-gel!’ she would squeal. And Anne would sheepishly fold herself into the soft embrace of her grandmother.

Through the porch she is gathered up and brought into the kitchen pat pat pat that sticky linoleum again and ‘tell me all about your week, ohhhhweee my Little An-gel!’

For now, let’s leave Anne and Alice there to catch up.