Skein Island

THE COLD SMOKE DECLARATION

‘This smoke is disgusting.’

I’m washed in cold morning air as Dave sits up, taking the duvet with him, but I try to cling to sleep regardless. I won’t be beaten that easily. ‘Ignore him,’ I mumble.

‘I’m going home.’

‘He’s not, he doesn’t…’ But Dave is up and putting on yesterday’s clothes at speed. He’s gone in no time at all.

At least I have the duvet again.

There’s a dry chuckle beside my ear.

My house-ghost is laughing at his destruction of yet another of my relationships. No matter what preparatory work I put in, my boyfriends never last the night. The problem isn’t the night itself but the dawn, when their eyelids flutter open and they breathe in that chewy smoke. The smell of an old man luxuriating in his cigar habit.

‘Screw you,’ I tell the ghost, and settle back down to sleep.

‘Do what?’ I tell the back of the receipt for croissants – bought specially for a romantic lie-in this morning – on which Dave has written his ultimatum. He’s gone from understanding, even indulgent, to accusatory. Apparently I’m to blame. When I first told him a ghost visits me early every morning, he laughed. The reality of sharing space, either with the ghost or with me, turned out to be different from whatever he was picturing.

I sit down at the kitchen table and fold the receipt many times until it’s as small as I can make it, and then flick it in the direction of the bin. I pick up a pen and grab an old envelope from the mail pile. I start to write what I can’t say.

I look over what I’ve written and realise that these aren’t words for Dave at all. They are true statements I’ve made for myself. I don’t want to stop, and I also don’t want to go on. Writing down true things sounds dangerously like creating signposts in a wilderness. Once a place has been pointed out, sooner or later somebody will end up travelling to it.

A few months ago Susan, a work colleague, went to Skein Island. We all laughed at her. She smiled patiently at the jokes about getting in touch with her feelings and wearing a pair of dungarees; what kind of people were we? We were a pack looking for the lowest member to pick on. It wasn’t new behaviour. We do it most days, using cruelty to avert boredom, and she left for the island to the sound of our derisive comments.

When she returned she seemed the same at first, but it dawned on us all at one point or another that something had changed. We stopped making jokes at her expense. One morning I found myself alone with her in the ladies’ toilets on the fifth floor, and we looked at each other’s reflections in the mirror above the row of sinks.

‘What was it like?’ I asked her. I got the feeling from her instant response that she had been replying to that question a lot. Perhaps we’d all been sidling up to her one at a time, picking our moments.

‘It was unique,’ she said.

She stepped back from the sink and moved to the drier, and I found myself saying over the din of hot air, ‘No, really. I really want to know.’

She finished drying her hands and walked to the door. Then she said, without looking back at me, ‘No distractions. Nobody else I knew, or who thought they knew me. When there was nothing else there to keep me from seeing it, I turned out to not be what I thought I was. There was… more of me.’

A few days later Susan gave in her notice. I haven’t seen her since.

And now I’m standing in front of the mirror in the ladies’ toilets on the fifth floor. Far too often recently I’ve been daydreaming about where Susan is now, and those dreams are ridiculous and romantic. She’s parasailing or dancing the Argentine tango. She’s eating oysters or driving a Ferrari, and she’s doing all of these things with some faceless lover.

If that lover doesn’t have a face, how can I be so certain that they’re beautiful?

There are things that none of us are seeing. There are so many things that we’re not seeing.

The queue for the number 37 is longer than usual, and I find myself thinking of the unfamiliar faces, none of them beautiful, as interlopers. What’s so interesting about my route home today? Don’t these people have other places to be?

A man who looks about my age – maybe out of education for a few years but no wiser about what being an adult actually means – is handing out leaflets. He works his way down the queue and when he reaches me I take a leaflet automatically to avoid a conversation. Perhaps it’ll contain wisdom that I need. Wisdom hidden as an advertisement. I’d like to believe in serendipity, and I’m already starting to believe in the importance of words on paper.