‘Chalk Window’ by Jessica Traynor
The theme of the summer is escape. Not real escape, but imagined vanishings. I am twenty years old and in a serious relationship. He is a little older, and we mostly live together in his flat in town. Some days he doesn’t go to work, but instead sits smoking joints out of his living room window. Sometimes I sit there with him until it’s time to go to my part time job. We listen to music and argue about the lyrics. He tells me I am smarter than anyone he has ever met. He tells me I am opinionated.
When I’m not with him I’m house sitting, because my mother is in London with a show that has toured to the West End. She calls me every few days from her English mobile and our conversations have, in retrospect, a poignant tone. There is the sense that she may not come back. I am planning a trip to London, so she can show me the life she has there.
One day when I get home from my boyfriend’s flat I discover there’s been a bombing on the London Underground. I can’t get through to my mother on her phone. She is staying right beside Waterloo station. I watch the TV and call and call. Eventually a text gets through. She is unhurt, but the city around her is silenced, the streets empty. I get on a plane the next day.
In London, a lot of things happen to me that catch in my mind. In a seventh floor apartment, in Waterloo, my mother plays Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention on the long evenings while the light settles. When she goes to Covent Garden to sing her part in the show, I stay behind and read. From the apartment windows I can see the Thames darkening as the setting sun lights up the tall buildings.
On another night I lie on the sofa in my mother’s dressing room in the oppressive evening heat and listen to the show playing softly over the tannoy, interrupted by the stage manager’s intimate instructions. One of the actors drops by to ask me to come for a drink. He is handsome and a little tortured and my mother imagines me leaving my boyfriend, and staying here in this dream of an endless summer in the West End. Her dream is infectious and I say yes.
With the cast, I drink pints of flat English beer in the local, before we all go to a notorious all-night basement club. To get in, we have to give the name of our show. A mountainous bouncer studies us, studies the list of West End shows, studies us again, and we’re in. For the night that’s in it I’m an actor, a dancer, a musician, a stage manager, a dresser – the relief of a borrowed identity.
We all walk home through the hyperactive London night, crossing the river at St Paul’s. Halfway across the bridge we see a woman climb over the rails. She is coked up and frantic, muttering he’ll kill me he’ll kill me he’ll kill me. She hangs above the river for what seems like hours until we talk her down and she collapses, exhausted, back onto the bridge. It’s bright when I get back to the apartment. In the dawn light I lie awake, watching the shadows changing in an unfamiliar room.
The next day, my mother drags me along to see a psychic. I don’t believe, but she’s insistent. She promises it will be fun. The psychic is a sharp, blonde woman and my presence flusters her, as if I’m emitting a high-pitched sound only she can hear. She tells me she can’t see anything, can’t tell me anything. Somehow this is my fault. She tells me that my boyfriend is bad for me. This observation hardly requires supernatural insight. She tells me I am immature. This stings.
I get on a train to visit my friend Emma. She is a college friend, and a few years older than me. She is both fantastically sensible and a great proponent of the kind of drinking that makes adults worry about the youth. I can’t keep up with her, but she’s good, world-weary fun. At her home, I meet her parents. They are elderly and so polite. They are cricket whites and holidays in the south of France. I layer on black eye shadow and Emma spikes her hair and we go to the party.
I know no one there and Emma is having boyfriend issues. She disappears and I get drunk and talk to everyone. A man chats me up. He has the generic good looks of a Benetton model, and I am a girl who has cut her own hair with a rusty nail scissors. English house parties are different. All the women are wearing skirts and heels and I’m in torn jeans. But I suppose I must seem vaguely exotic, with my Irish accent. A woman watches us, and whenever the man goes to the bathroom, committees of her friends come up to warn me off him – he’s hers, not officially, but he’s hers. By the end of the night she’s my new best friend and he’s completely bewildered. Emma reappears and we vanish without saying goodbye, my camera full of photos: me and the handsome man, drinking tequila, smiling with limes in our mouths. Me and the handsome man, with the woman between us. Then me and the handsome man and all of his friends, with the woman wrapped around him.
The next morning I take a photo of me and Emma. Her spiked hair is flattened and my freckles are showing, as they do when I’m hung over. We look triumphant and sad. It’s the last time I’ll see her, as she doesn’t make it back to college in the autumn. When I look at the photo now I see how thin she had become.
Time blurs in London. The actor boy my mother wants me to run away with is telling me about his broken heart. And I am trying him on, and then thinking of my man back at home, smoking out the window of his apartment. Or in Fibbers with one of his friends who are not friends, buying pills or speed. I think of his shape-shifting anger, like burning oil on water. And I imagine that I am someone else.
My mother’s show is not a success. London is a ghost town since the bombings. I decide it’s time to go home and my mother will shortly follow. On the train to Gatwick, I take the only remaining seat, wondering why so many are standing. I sit beside a young Middle Eastern man who clutches a black backpack. He looks like he is about to cry. The people standing draw back and the train is a punctured lung.
Then the announcement comes that a device has been found on the tracks and something cracks a little in the atmosphere around me. Eggshell fragments of fear cling to my skin and for a moment it feels like the unspoken contract between us all that demands we don’ t show our fear will be broken, that the crowd may turn on this man, haul him from the train and beat him on the platform.
Of course, it’s a false alarm, a discarded rubbish bag blown in front of the train, but the young man doesn’t breathe until we get to the airport. I watch his shoulders slump as he merges with the crowd in the terminal, becoming anonymous. The next day the tension in the city implodes with the unprovoked shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. By then, I am back home, explaining myself to everyone I have let down by disappearing.
At home, the summer settles back into its familiar pattern. I’ve failed the test: I haven’t been brave enough to run away. But some possibility of change has emerged – a window chalked in the imagination. And even if I can’t open it yet, I can see its shape.
From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015
About the Author
Jessica Traynor’s debut collection Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press) was shortlisted for the 2015 Strong/Shine Award. Awards include the Hennessy Award and Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. A series of poems in response to Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ was published by The Salvage Press in 2017. Her second collection, The Quick, was published by Dedalus Press in autumn 2018.
