News Where You Are

53. Michael, October 2009

It’s dark now — or as dark as it gets in the city. He sees no stars in the sky above him, just an orange glow from the street lights. The last bus left hours ago. At some point he realizes that he’s never leaving the bench. There are worse ways to go. He thinks of Elsie. He thinks of Phil.

Phil told him that he’d saved his life once. He said, ‘All I’m asking is for you to undo that.’ Michael hadn’t realized that’s how it was supposed to work.

He’d agreed to do it because Phil asked him and because he thought he could. He thought his hands could do anything. After Elsie died they had carried on tying his shoelaces in the morning, polishing the furniture in the lounge, cold-bloodedly functioning through it all. Why not hold a gun and pull a trigger? There didn’t seem much difference.

But his hands surprised him. They faltered and refused. The cold metal lay inert in his palm. His busy hands stilled. His fingers limp. They wouldn’t let him do it.

Phil thought that age would rob him of everything. Michael told him it couldn’t. He told him to look in the mirror and he’d see something in his eyes that had never changed and never would. Michael had seen it in Elsie’s eyes, even at the end, still there burning through everything else. Still Elsie.

A smile flickers on Michael’s face. Poor Phil. Always scared. Always running before he needed to. Michael always tried to tell him that running never solved anything.

Elsie was standing under the tree at the side of the park. A breeze moved the shadow of the leaves across her face, revealing and hiding glimpses of her as he walked towards her. For months all he’d had were photos and letters and memories and now he wanted to see all of her. She was looking towards him, her face impossible to see. Eventually he broke into a run, laughing at the corniness of the gesture, the returning soldier, running to embrace his sweetheart. She came out to meet him, walking out of the shadows, into the daylight and he saw she was laughing too, the happiest most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

The park has gone now, buried under the ring road, the bandstand has been replaced by a traffic island and there is no trace left of the trees. Except for their tree. It too has gone, but a bench marks the place where it once stood. It’s a strange place for a bench. He’s walked past it hundreds of times and never seen anyone else on it. He wonders if it’s been waiting for him.

Some people say they feel the presence of the dead. They sense some disturbance in the air and they know their dead husband is standing beside them, their dead cat curled on their lap, their dead wife still battling with the pile of ironing.

He’s never once felt Elsie’s presence since she died. He watched the last breath leave her body and then the world changed. She was gone.

He feels her absence, though, all the time.

It’s there in specific things:

the dip in the bed where she used to lie,

the shape of the crack in the vase that she dropped,

and it’s everywhere:

the air around him,

the colour of night in their bedroom,

the shapes he sees on the insides of his eyelids.

He understands now. Our absence is what remains of us.