No, nothing inspired by Justin Timberlake here. Dan and I chose a line that we liked from each other’s work and then tried to turn it into something else. I chose the following line from a poem he had written: ‘rows of misshapen mirrors line the inner sanctum of her thoughts’. 

 

They come and visit her once every six months. Dutifully, they arrive as a foursome, leave familiarity outside in the car park and meander unwillingly across gritty tarmac, through dust smeared and sticky sliding doors and down the green corridor inhaling bleach to where she sits. A monolithic memorial to life. A lump of flesh and bone. A living historical document crumbling at the edges and slowly decaying into invisibility.

She prefers to sit by the window on a high back brown faux leather chair so she can gaze outside at a world she can no longer access. The view provides her with cyclical entertainment as buds burst and then shrivel before they become hidden under hoar frosts that spin spidery patterns across her line of vision. Her ability to sit still for hours like this amazes the others she shares the room with but that’s because they don’t understand what it means to marinade in a mind that is dissipating. A mind that was once sharp and alert to languages, music and reasoning but now lies dormant, asleep in a cloud of dementia.

Her family certainly don’t understand. To them she is now a chore to be undertaken like washing a car on a sunny Saturday morning or defrosting the fridge. Fragmented conversations with her often lead to fraying moods and guilty consciences. Unaware that rows of misshapen mirrors line the inner sanctum of her thoughts, they constantly question and then feign interest when a response comes that is in a tangent all of its own. Their voices slow like a record on the wrong rpm as though that will help piece together the fragments of memories and links that clutter her thoughts. As the hands of the clock make their seemingly soporific journey her family one by one cease to make effort and begin to distract themselves in their own ways. Her adult son sits and picks the hardened skin around his thumb nails whilst idly fantasizing about the woman they passed earlier in the car park; his wife writes out a shopping list while her grandson and daughter idly flick through photos on their phones or angrily text friends they weren’t able to meet up with because they are with her. All are bodily present in this chilly room with its aging television in one corner, frayed and out of date gossip magazines and childish board games but none of them are present. They think they are so different from her but as they sit isolated in their collective boredom they don’t realize they are all the same, lost in fleeting thoughts. The only difference is that she remains unaware of their frustration and therefore absolved of any type of embarrassment.

As the daughter looks up from her mobile, she sees reflected in the glass pane the sliding doors behind her yawn open and a nurse wheel in a trolley piled with boxes, small bowls and bottles. She stops just shy of the giant grey box of a television parked by the shelves of blockbusters and they start to line up; the decrepit somnambulists, each standing patiently awaiting medicating. Some stare at the daughter with watery eyes as she finds herself unable to look away, others stare into space with sagging chins while a few look eagerly at the nurse excited at the prospect of consuming drugs that might help pass the time.

The nurse doesn’t appear to expect their Grandmother to line up like the rest. Instead, she bustles over with a small metal tray pebble dashed with pink, blue and yellow pills in a variety of shapes and the family watch idly as frail fingers flail at the tray trying to capture them. Eventually, they submit and the fingers that resemble claws lift them to the slit like mouth where they are gobbled up. This is the only movement she makes all afternoon.

A movement in the clouds outside posts a weak shaft of sunlight through the window and this draws her son’s attention from his thumbs to hers. Crinkled like pale tissue paper, he finds himself musing on what those hands have touched. From wooden spoons heavy with strawberry jam in the summer;  soaking cuts on his knees with iodine; the wheel of their old brown Mini, bales of fabric in her shop; his late father’s hands. He wishes he could enjoy these afternoons more.

Shadows gradually creep along the skirting board, crawling up and enveloping the murmuring specters as they chew up softened medication, inhale the bleach from the cleaner’s mop in the corridor outside and wonder idly what will be served for supper.

The daughter notices that the time has come to move from this place and leave her alone again. With the most tenuous of emotions, the brother and sister say their farewells before hurtling outside into the twilight. His wife is more formal and places warm hands on her shoulders, pressing down as though there is an ‘on’ switch there that will spark her back into animation. It is left to him to tenderly kiss her furrowed forehead and stroke her silvery dry hair to say goodbye before he too retreats and heads back into the waiting arms of the Autumnal air outside.

Part ii:

What does she think about each day as she glazes over and vacantly fixates on the middle distance? If for a moment one could bend the laws of physicality and tune into her like an FM Radio, amongst the white noise and the fuzz there would be this:

The feel of leather against her sweaty palms; the glittering internal night sky of switches, buttons and dials; the smell of oil and before her the abyss illuminated only by two shocking shards of light that guide her through the thick clouds. She is a pilot and the thrill of it makes her tremble as the sky rushes past. This is the first time she has flown at night and she looks to her co-pilot sat beside her and she pauses to examine the deep lines around his eyes as he concentrates on the dashboard. The dim light of the cockpit makes his eyes seem like darkened pools and as he moves to look at the shard of red from the sunset to the right of him it is difficult to tell where his eyes stop and his hair begins. The thrill of it all overwhelms her and quickly she looks back and refocuses on what she has to do to quash the sudden desire she has to reach across and touch the hairs peeking out from the cuff of his shirt.

He is a friend of a friend and has agreed to take her up at night so she can practise. She has been jittery all week in anticipation of this evening knowing they will be alone together for a substantial amount of time and anxious that something might occur to prevent it happening. Now it is and she looks to her left  seemingly observing the slivers of light bouncing across the horizon but really her vision is looking at him in the reflection. She wonders if he can tell.

The fractured mirrors of her mind  mean she cannot piece together what happens next but in her mind are the next collection of photos, well-thumbed like a favoured photo album and greying with time…it’s not even clear to her whether these are real memories or ones formed by desire and wish fulfilment:

They’re entwined together. She re-visits the feelings of lust, joy and love; the snapshots of him lying on top of her damp and spent; him beckoning her over to sit with him on the sofa so they can read together; him imparting knowledge of topics she had never heard of before. She pulls each out of the recesses, mulling each one slowly and delicately, chewing it over and wistfully swallowing the sensations they bring. Cautiously, not to cause herself too much hurt, she thinks about the moment she fell for him…but also the moment she realised he didn’t feel that way for her and the crushing disappointment that brought. It’s a brief dalliance and after three weeks he has to leave for work reasons. They make promises to stay in touch…

A baby cries out for her and she sits alone, squatting on the floor by the bedroom door, her back up against the wall as tears cool her inflamed cheeks. He never called again. The friend who introduced them plays ignorant when she asks after him, hungry for information but always starved. It was a cruel trick to have been played out; her dark thoughts curse a God she doesn’t believe in for playing with her emotions so callously.

The memories expire as her thoughts are interrupted by the nurse with medication.

Strange how a short affair can stay with you for decades. The man is sealed in a block of ice in her mind – he never aged, he never developed faults, grey hair, a paunch or disgusting habits. In her frazzled mind he remains perfect and she thinks about him every day, seeing signs of his existence in the most mundane of items: a calendar denoting the month when they took the plane up, his name formed out of letters from her prescription, a scrabble word that sums up how she still feels about him, somebody who looks familiar on the television…

These are the thoughts that chase each other through her mind as her family sit beside her. Unaware and disinterested.