Solid Gold continued


        It's not a particularly attractive park that I look down on. I can see the crisp packets and coke cans spilling out of the bins from my fourth floor window, and I often see dogs huddled while their owners smoke a cigarette, and then walk straight past the poop bins without bothering to deposit the cake of excrement in there. The path directly below my window has become a dumping ground. I don't know who first decided to leave a bulging heap of black binbags there but now people have decided to follow suit, leaving an old TV with a smashed screen, a battered blue cot, a black umbrella hunched up and wing-jutted like an injured bird, and something else which must have been left last night. It has caught my eye because the sun is glinting off its metal surface, but I'm not actually sure what it is. It just looks like a hunk of metal, and normally that would suffice, but today my curiosity has been piqued. In an unfathomable moment of decisiveness I jump from the windowsill and slip on my shoes. I'm going to take a look.
        It's cold. It's Sunday morning and the park is empty but for a couple of joggers who pay me no heed as they canter past, breathing heavily their bitty conversation. I linger in front of the object. I see now that it is not simply a cube of smooth metal but made up of several components. It is in fact an engine. Somewhere, a car has been crudely gutted. One side, the side I couldn't see from the window, is red and orange smeared with black oil over rusty hinged segments. There are fat and thin tubes like ligaments connecting all over the machine, like the arteries tracing the pig heart I remember from school. Dissecting its chambers had proved too much and I had fainted in front of the class. This metal body of work, its craftsmanship, is fascinating to my untutored mind. Here a line of black nozzles, there a short strip of leather, like a belt connecting two separate pieces. Without thinking, I place the palms of my hands flat against the metal, almost expecting to feel a slight vibration, an oozing of warmth. But it is cold and still like a corpse. I wonder if the heat of my hands might seep through, or would its chill prove stronger?
        "Ahem."
        I turn to see Joe paused at the front door, key in hand, staring at me. I guess I must look strange in my cotton nightdress, but I hadn't noticed the cold and now I see the fuzz of blonde hairs standing up on my arms.
        I smile. "Well don't just stand there," I say. "Give me a hand."
        I don't know how we manage it but we get the engine into the lift and across to my front door.
        "Shoes off please," I say, sliding out of my own.
        We drag it, inch by inch puffing and blowing shallow breaths and sweat beading our skin, across the wooden floor and into the bedroom. When we stop Joe raises his eyebrows and leans against the door frame. I look at my dress. It is filthy with black grease and a thread has pulled free, leaving a line of fabric tugging at my hem. I pull the dress back into place with my dirty hands and motion to the front door.
        He might be after a kiss, sex, a cup of tea and a cake. But I don't want him messing up my flat any longer. If he had thrown himself onto me I probably would not have rejected him. He is a good looking young man after all. But he reminds me of myself in so many ways. The way I was at his age, the way I am now. It's obvious he came from the same dirty, common English roots as myself. It's not snobbishness on my part, of this I am adamant. It is an unwillingness to go back to what I have spent the last fifteen years struggling out of, like a tight-fitting skin. When Uncle Phil died, leaving me this wealth out of the blue, I saw the opportunity to attain my dreams of a beautiful life and I set about immediately doing so. It is only occasionally that I wonder what a person does once all their dreams are fulfilled.
        "Thanks, goodbye." I say. Joe puts on his shoes to leave and soon I can hear him clattering about downstairs, his rock music, his skulking.
        I don't know why I wanted the damn thing. I look at it. So out of place. Taking up half the space in my room. There is a thick track mark leading from the machine to the front door. The white carpet flattened and inky black, and the metal tread has come lose where part of the carpet has been dragged out from under it and has left a gap big enough for a mouse to crawl under. My hands feel gritty and there are flakes of rust between my fingers. I feel disgusting. But in a way I don't care. I won't wash my hands and I won't take off this dress yet. And when I do, I won't throw it away but hang it back up in the wardrobe instead.
        I pick up my book and lie on the bed, try to read, try to ignore the music from downstairs. But my gaze keeps wandering. Keeps moving slyly from the page to the engine sitting there on the floor like some piece of modern art.
        So I roll off the bed and scuff my way into the kitchen, remembering I haven't eaten yet and it is getting on for one o'clock. I have no food in the cupboards, and don't remember when I last went shopping. During the week I stop off at the Windmill on my way home from work for an evening meal, grab breakfast in the work canteen in the morning. I barely eat at home anymore. But in the freezer I discover a half-eaten loaf and after prizing apart a couple of slices I stick them in the toaster. I carry the hot buttered toast in my hands, back into the bedroom. I sit on the bed and devour. I stare at the engine. The crumbs fall onto my lap and I shake them onto the floor absent-mindedly. Tiny buds of yellow and brown that mingle with the colours carefully chosen a few years before.
        The rest of the day is spent in some kind of disarray. Is it a lethargy I feel, an ennui? Is it the onset of a belated winter depression? I seem unable to concentrate on any one thing, and the music from downstairs is beginning to grate on my nerves. It's getting into my blood and running rough-shod through every artery, thumping with a kind of precision.
        With nothing better to do I climb into bed and immediately I feel sleep pulling at me like a tide, pushing me back and forth between oceanic depths and shallow pools, waking momentarily before being pulled under once more. A drowning woman. It is while beneath the surface, passing through downstreams and warm currents, that I begin to hear a different kind of music. Subdued at first, and distorted like a gramophone record far into the distance. But it is getting clearer, and louder, as though I were moving closer to it. Except that I am not moving at all. I am simply being, with limbs floating as if held by string. Out of the dark it comes in a dull halo of light. Like a creature of the sea, some blind, silver-bellied monster of fictional proportions. And there am I, right behind it, behind the engine which has become an organ and I am the starlet grinding out the music. Turning the handle to make the seismograph roll, the keys jumping over the lumps and bumps in the shape of musical notes. And there, sitting on my shoulder is a small capuchin monkey, dressed in a blue waistcoat, nibbling on my ear and wearing Joe's superfluous grin.
        I wake with a shudder. The engine still sits where I left it. I see the outline of its solid form in the now-darkness. I blink. It stares. I grab the gold coverlet from the bed and spread it neatly on the floor, pull it flat, ensure the corners are not folded, smooth out the crumples. Then, with all my strength, I strain and push and breathe like I am about to give birth, and heave the engine onto it, which folds one corner and crumples the smoothness out. I push him onto his side with a crash, and then I lie down next to him. From below, Joe's heavy music begins. Like me, he cannot sleep. He takes comfort in these disparaging sounds and usually I would be roiling with anger at this intervention but tonight it seems right. It provides a canvas for this scene, thunderous and ominous and consciously non-human. I can almost feel him hum as I touch him, thrumming my name. I wonder if he is thinking of me now. I stretch one arm uncomfortably around his silver body, close my eyes to the tang of grease and copper like a spent lover, and let myself drift back into a restful sleep.

END

First published in Nemonymous, May 2005