‘Look what the storm blew in, Joan. Look!’.
Joan sat and stared.
In a room upstairs a door slammed shut.
‘It’s an Alsatian puppy’, Gordon continued.
‘Look at it! It must
be soaked to the bone’.
Joan’s glassy eyes gazed into the near distance.
Somewhere deep inside a blue flame still flickered.
But the fire would never return.
For the fire had already destroyed her body, and left Joan
trapped inside the cauterized attic walls of her mind.
Gordon half knew this, half pretended he did not.
‘Come here’, he said, sweeping the puppy up in his great
arms. ‘You are wet, aren’tchyu’.
The wind came again, and rattled the window panes,
precarious in their old lead lattices.
Gordon was a big man, in a big woollen jumper and heavy duty
black jeans turned up at the bottoms, his rain-swept dark hair gave him the
look of a mariner, so too his big, ruddy features, fat, bristling side-burns.
Joan blinked.
But these days she never missed anything, for she could not,
stationed and impotent, and yet ever vigilant.
She found in her state of paralysis she saw, and in one
sense felt so much more, the tragedy being she could express so much less.
If the Alsatian puppy were to break from Gordon’s woolly
embrace, dart across the front room and bound into her lap, and begin licking
her face, she would sense for the first time the whole coarseness of an animal
tongue, even if she would not be able to feel his dancing little feet on her
lap.
The grand-father clock in the hallway chimed the half
hour. Where time for Gordon moved too
fast, or indeed too slow, at least for Joan it was now a steady trickle, with
an end not far off.
‘Cup of tea?’, Gordon asked.
Joan blinked again.
‘Right then’, said Gordon.
‘Bet you’re a hungry, little fellow’, Gordon said to the
puppy, his voice trailing away into the kitchen with the damp thud of his heavy boots.
Life is lonely, and life is too long, thought Joan to
herself and no one else.
And the puppy barked, and the wind whistled through the
house.
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