Susan Belinda Abernathy clicked her door shut and immediately went for the electric fixings switch by her left. With her room now illumed, she can see the state she had left in whence she parted with it. Three months. That was her Time away from her walkup flat in Little Market Harborough. She always called it a Room, and made a point to never call it a Home. When she lay witness to the mug with mouldy dregs of coffee inside, under a dumb ceiling lamp light, she realised all that time, and felt its age seep back to her. She dropped her little purse with a strap to the floor and went to her knees to pull out a drawer from the coffee table. She replaced some jewels and notes, pins and pens, and strings and more of the allsorts beknowst to stuffed pockets. The kitchen light blinked, sputtered pathetically and died. The telephone rang for a few bells. Susan lay on her arm and took the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello, Susan B Abernathy’ A smooth voice replied,
‘Hello, is that Missus Abernathy?’
‘Somesort of cheek, Chico?’
‘I have heard your back?’ returned a familiar voice,
‘Yes… I have been boxing, and rhino killing, ocean fishing, and through wars on seas and in mind; I fell in love with a young bull fighter, but he died and I boxed somemore before taking up a myriad of esoteric exercises, fell into an inextricable net of Death, but through Hero’s fate made it out. Back I am, Madame Jane.’
‘Where was all that then?’
‘Look Jane, I’ll call you back once I am through the door…?’
‘Okay, you sound mardeh, me duck? ’
She hung the line up and pushed her self up on to her seat with her hand and continued to put away the jewels and shit.
During her jaunt away, she only carried a little purse with a fashioned strap, her clothes had been results of self-stitched patchwork, barters, and swipes when she could manage, and now she has ended up in this shift here; which she gawks until she realised just how lost she had let her self become. Twirling a tropical braided pirtate plait in her thumb and fore finger thinking on the one time she’d worn the most fancy dress a Lady could wear. All appropriated before the dressing table fitted with a set of gilt-silver and porcelain decadence in a large array of opulent objects: combs and brushes; decorative containers for storing cosmetics, patches, and utensils; a table adorned with embroidered fabric; and the ultimate luxury object, an extravagant mirror. The Affair in Le Matin Toilette, with all the articles of toiletries helped by the hordes fingers of the intimate most dear chamber maids; like some 18th century girl with an elaborated coiffure - il n’y a pas des mouches sur grand mere. The stage set, beneath a proscenium arch, like that of the Teatro Olimpico in a personal boudoir with the mirror so flattering and with the grandiloquent table taking the centre piece. The spectacle admired by a audience gawking around the artifice of which is all a performance. The chamber maids adorn Madame with the final ribbon and the placing last few plaisters delicately upon a powder face to those who seem to have never seen a dirge of beauty and awe that follows patience and preparation, all while remaining inoffensively associated with sexuality; for Susan was a lady needing only a few cleverly placed face patches to subtly signify her status in beauty, to which, all have never witnessed before.
Not like these downtown whores who litter their faces with patches obviously hiding syphilitic scars and calloused warts; a visual language of sexual coquetry. How people would say, Wow she looks like Clara Bow! And others would, Impossible! If anything, Clara looks like her, for nothing can compare!
But here, in a teensy pocket-sized looking glass, she see it all coming back. Regression into the retrogression. She thinks. She removes this shiftwear; formidable while weathered and withered, washed out and worn, she tossed it in the bin and took up in her evening’s retire look from a boxed wardrobe by her bedside – now she really is in her Old Time Used to Be. It takes her an unconscious minuet and a short El-e-phant minute; and only spending a single cotton pad on some black stuff she puts about her face sometimes. The faint layer of foundation removed, and a few inconspicuous blemishes appear. This version of the affair is all over most too soon, From her kitchen she can see her living table and a sofabed with some clothes on hangers and some mail on the cushions. Certain angles in her perception are coming to her unfamiliar, and when she turns away, she doesn’t remember this perspective, affirming her strangership.
Time for a cup of tea. Could it be, she thinks, these items moved whilst I was away? Time has a motion to it. Seasonally, her pad has been visited with the angel of autumn. Some peach fuzz on her wing sizzles on the steel kettle boiling up. She turns to, and its whistle squeaks out. The telephone rings again and she lets ring out while fixing her tea drink. I am too dry she thinks. Susan sees the cupboard that matches the wardrobe in material and pulls a the door open to take a mug out, blows it like in the cowboy films and pours in the hot water over her tea bag. The phone is going, and as she lets her wet stew for a moment she now no longer has to keep track of, she stoops to pick up the receiver. As she ascends back up, she remembers the telephone cord has always been too short and she has to stoop to her knees again, after a brief jarring.
‘What station did ye get off at?
‘Jane, I am just fixing my wet.’ Susan replies not meaning to come off as vexed.
Susan looks over to her tea and decides to take the cord with her to it, but she had forgotten that the cord cannot make the distance, in a gauche posture, ‘Look Jane, I’ll call you back, as I say, now I am dry as hell fixing my wet. Would you let us do that before I call you back?’
‘You really are mardeh, Susie. ’
She does so, she looks at the mug and remembers where its from and feels familiar with its sense of time of ultra-familiarity. The handle has been attached to this supplicant vessel in order to drink hotter drinks more comfortably. From the time hitherto this jaunt upon the coil, Susan had been piecing her self together just as this drinking cup. From allowing her vestment to appear mere with odd patch work and never feeling bashful because of it. But she can’t stand it. Having had a taste of the other side. She wonders how Jane, or any of her familiar folk, would take to this ‘coming back’ She hadn’t left too long, though she sure threatened it.
Somewhere in the fridge of forgotten dreams, past the stank of cabbage and the reek of putrefied cheese bits and a sundry of food articles that might’ve made a meal some time ago, she finds the milk curds in the dingy glass like some beast of the milky way. She recoils. But she has always disregarded milk in tea. So while not all together changed, Susan for some reason, can no longer remember Jane’s number. She takes her mug, sipping as she goes and takes the phone to a pinch between head and shoulder. With a finger she programmes the telephone in that way where she forgot howto; ultra-cognisant. Never remember Jane’s number. She thinks subconsciously, her shadow has forgotten certain
The telephone purred a few chimes and then a few more times again, Susan wondered, might I forsake this? But before she could get too altruistically existential, Jane picked up.
‘Ever wonder Jane, why it might be called a Telephone? Tell Ye Phone?’
‘Oh yeah, I did one time, but then realised the plague and the famine in the world, and all the sad melancholic choleric and down right despondent nature this world can take, like a mate up’in and going with out a word of farewell, Di’nt leave a trace behind.’
Which was all true of her Susie. A Thursday night came and whilst out for a drink with her gals she slandered them all by calling them Briseis - lady servants not fit to be a chamber maid but to be the maid who take’s the chamber’s piss pot to refuse.
But as she thinks, hair is already changed and time is already gone and what’s it really all ado? ‘Certainly, I did’ Susan quothed ‘but don’t lets forget I am back and will return as far as you may take me, oh sweet Jane.’
Of the jewels our Lady Returning has brought back with her, is the Hope Diamond of Andhra Pradesh, originally from the Golconda Sultanate, how she came upon it, she could only lie, happenstance she was adorned momentarily by a business mogul, knew all the moves kinda guy, but that was only about six weeks ago now, she thinks. He’d bestowed a bountiful on her; that is when she wore the dress. But she is back now. Slowly she is stowing all that time as a jaunt of lapse of time, id est Holiday.
‘I was just on a Holiday Jane, Annual Leave of a sorts. I beg your pardons truly, but I am back Now.’ Susan says, feeling her point made, but Jane wants to know some details, ‘Well back you are, but disappeared we thought you were! Well, as I asked, what station you get in at?’
‘I arrived at St Pancreas. You have asked that before?’
‘Susan, for some reason, from some extraterrestrial thinking that happened in a sudden, I took the inclination from a notion to loiter around St Pancreas from around two thirty am to pm, what time did you arrive?’ Susan knew all of this.
Susan replies, ‘two thirty five’ Though truly she had really arrived at two thirty, but saw Jane aimlessly pacing about the square before the station and felt it best just to hang back a few minuets to see if Jane was just passing by. ‘Very interesting.’ Quothed Jane, sounding like her mouth is stuffed with cake. ‘You were there all night and day, after only an inclination from a notion?’ Susan remembered her tea and so through Jane speaking, Susan dropped the receiver and bound for the counter with her tea, who’s steam has dearly dwindled. Ah what’s the point in boiling it anyway. Well, least there is no caseins to latch on to the catechins and thus I will get that good heart cure from the medicinal properties of the leaf - a new learning she picked up somewhere south of America. Susan wonders if the reason she is lactose intolerant was placated on her need for independence, as she would not latch and so could not be satisfied on her mother’s teat, so elsewhere a chick will seek. She sipped her tea down, it had cooled too far, she necked the dregs and Jane’s rambling went quiet.
‘Listen Jane,’ Susan says, ‘I think its nice knowing you, but I probably will never see you again.’ Susan’s mug was placed on the floor, ‘I thought you were back?’ Jane’s tongue was heavy and she choked on it while she spoke.’
‘I am back, but I am not soon going again.’