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A Foreign Perspective: Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 9 months ago

Today's Light Bite is another blast from the past. Owen Lysak shows us A Foreign Perspective with this beautifully written tale.

A Foreign Perspective by Owen Lysak

The combination of the heat of the water stinging against his skin, and a certain sentimentality for baths which calmed him, more than sleep ever did, prevented the young man from answering his phone. It was sentimentality that struck him like a Tibetan prayer wheel, as if any movement would break a promise he had made and repeated to himself years ago. It was the same sentimentality he had carried through his twenty-seven years – through all the shared baths as young children with his sister, through puberty, through fumbled touches with first girlfriends. And so as the phone vibrated on the bathroom sideboard, the young man stared across at it as if its very existence at this moment was blasphemous. It had stopped vibrating, and the stillness outside the water reflected his own.

The young man sat back a little in the bath, the water bumping gently under his knees. He had fallen into a caffeine diet in the last few days; his gums bled intermittently from too much tea and coffee, and ulcers had begun to develop on each side of his mouth. His lips were dry and chapped and if he pressed down with the tip of his tongue on his front teeth, he could cut his bottom lip from within. The lower back of his blonde hair was matted, wet against the top of his neck. His hair-line slightly receding on each side of his head. However, as the top and sides of his hair were quite long a hair cut would soon be necessary.

There was a faint splash as the young man’s forearm slipped from the side of the bath into the water. He had been in the bath too long and had begun to dehydrate. Perspiration beginning to build around his eyelids. New soap, partly unwrapped, had been left on the sideboard. Tubes of toothpaste, squeezed and creased, lay to the side of the sink, out of the way, alongside abandoned hair clips, tooth picks, emery boards and soiled tissues. A certain background noise, empty, local, suggested the bathwater might be draining away. The young man arched his right foot and placed his equally arched toes down onto the bathplug. Applying pressure with his toes and the ball of his foot, he secured the bathplug in place. The noise stopped for a few moments, but then continued as soon as he moved his foot away.

The young man stared across for several seconds at an unused shaving brush sitting in the sink’s soap-dish, and then stared down at his body, as if he was scarred by numerous tattoos, or stained by some other emotion. Some years ago, he had spent day after day staring at his face in the mirror. But he had stopped that now. He took what seemed a last, long look at his body, as if to see whether he was in any condition to make it through life, and then laid the side of his face on his right shoulder, against the inside edge of the bathtub.

“Francis?”

Francis, awakening with a jolt, squinted up at the bathroom door being pushed open and a taller than average twenty-five year old girl stepped into the bathroom. She had thick, straightened brown hair, and what older generations might have described as ‘child-bearing’ hips – something right-looking, comforting, that had suddenly found itself without modern comprehension. Her stature aside, her curves aside, she was memorable in stare and in smile. A perceptive unhappiness – or perhaps something as simple and as damaging as a constant tiredness – inhibited her walk and the roots of her brown eyes.

Standing in the doorway, the young woman carried a frightened expression, like a hobo idling along a pavement through crowds of pedestrians, who has been bumped and barged too many times. Indecision had seemed to fall down upon her immediately. And then she continued in, lowered the toilet seat and sat down, facing him. Francis absently scratched the outside of his right calf.

“I’ve been calling you. Where have you been?” asked the young woman.

“Sorry, I’ve been in the bath.”

“When did you get in?”

“I don’t know. Thirty minutes ago maybe.”

The young woman reached below her, to her left and opened some white cupboard doors located under the sideboard; ruffled something, searched for something, aggressively, tiredly.

“What are you looking for?” asked Francis.

“I don’t know.” She replied, sitting back upright. Her mouth was set tight. She was dressed in jeans, a blue-and-white horizontal striped hooded pullover, and green socks. She looked prettier and less pretty than she ever had done before.

“How did it go? What did the doctor say?” asked Francis.

The young woman cleared her throat for a moment, but didn’t answer. Then she reached down again, this time over the V of her legs, and touched the floor lightly with her index finger, partly in order to distract herself, and partly to help her focus. She sat back up and glanced oppressively at the bathroom mirror, and then the bathroom door, as if oppression could be a state of being – a way to live.

“Sarah?”

“What?”

“What did the doctor say?” Francis repeated. “Did you tell him everything – ?”

“Yes.”

“- the bleeding. The cramps – everything?” he felt like adding ‘your fears’, but it didn’t seem the right time.

“Yes,” Sarah replied, flinching ever so slightly. Francis’ eyes were on the corner of the bathroom above her head, where the mirror met the ceiling, so he didn’t notice this exposure. Sarah changed her position on the toilet-seat slightly, so her shoulders were more slumped, rather than square-on. Her paleness of the past few weeks seemed to be increased by the 40-watt overhead fixture of the bathroom.

“So what did he say?”

Sarah, after sitting motionless for a few minutes, answered; "It was what we thought it was.”

Francis had turned directly into the sound of her voice as he waited for the answer, but when it had come, it had been an answer that had tailed off in his mind, Francis hearing her only from a distance for a second, as if they had come to inhabit a world where everything happens just under the surface. What was worse, his only response had been a simple nod in her direction. Perhaps he had wanted a more satisfactory pause, a proper moment, before he had been required to respond. Perhaps a more satisfactory pause or moment hadn’t been possible.

He had developed a distracting habit of running his index finger through the hazy film that would materialise across the top of the bathwater, watching the shifting patterns under the weak glow of the bathroom light, perhaps looking for some religious apparition. And now he moved his right index and middle finger in a figure of eight through and then up and out of the water, his fingers twitching and holding an arabesque in the air, seemingly for his own amusement, and then he let out a heavy sigh.

Sarah absently held her thumb inside the waistband of her jeans. She considered picking up an emery board and applying it to her nails, but she didn’t. Instead, she began picking at the cuticle of her left thumb with the nail of her right thumb, pausing every so often to bite the nails of her left hand. Then, abruptly, she felt her finger slip, and her teeth pulled down on the skin that ran alongside one of her nails.

“Jesus!” She exclaimed. She passed her hand back and forth in front of her, inspecting the injury.

Francis looked at her with measured calmness.

“Do you have to say that?” he said with some control, as someone who might have come to expect to be listened to on such matters.

Sarah lifted her eyes from her hand and stared at him.

“Don’t start on me, not now.”

“It’s just that – ‘Jesus’, ‘my God’, ‘for God’s sake’ – things like that – some people find it blasphemous – offensive,” Francis replied. He stared down at his thighs, submerged and refractional in the water.

Sarah felt indignant, as though she had been censored for an act that had no meaning to either of them. She felt like speaking her mind, but then stopped, knowing from experience that what she was about to say would start an argument. Francis looked at her, noticing the pause. When had she become so scared of him that she could not say what she felt?

“I’m sorry,” she began. “I’m just way off. Even though we knew, you know – even though we had guessed, when the doctor told me -." She found herself looking at Francis, seeing his usual signs of detachment. She felt both at the same time guilty and lonely, and wanted to reach over and touch him.

“You have to try and put the whole thing out of your mind,” Francis replied.

“I know. I know. You’re right. You’re always right. I don’t know though.” She swung her left leg subconsciously, like a little girl on a swing.

“We can’t just stop everything.”

Sarah didn’t answer straightaway, but began to look now at the apparitions in the bathwater. She was annoyed. She brought her shoulders up and in, her elbows resting almost on her ribs, and drew her knees closer together.

“No, perhaps not, perhaps we can’t just stop everything,” she began, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to be upset.”

She folded her arms across her chest tightly, clamping her hands hard into her armpits. Francis tried to remove from his face any expression that might reveal how he felt, that might reveal any commitment, but Sarah was still staring at the water.

“Just because I can’t block it out like you,” she continued, “just because I am sad, doesn’t put me in the wrong. I can’t just act how you want me to, be who you want me to be. Just because I don’t feel how you feel, doesn’t make me wrong.”

There was a short silence. She had said the wrong thing, or at least, had said something which he considered to be the wrong thing. Francis stared forwards, but his eyes were now set rather more sharply. Perhaps resenting her emotions, or his own detachment. The mental pabulum of their relationship was conflict – conflicts of dreams and desires – conflict which kept their relationship alive. And that evening that conflict was a baby, lost.

Sarah could see Francis’ frustration and tiredness, and the hopelessness of trying to reconcile what different people felt about the same event. But why shouldn’t she say how she felt? Why should he be allowed to be so distant? But then, she thought, in self-disapproval, what was the correct mixture of grief and dignity? What was the correct mixture when she wanted to break down and cry?

“Just forget it. I’m just tired and I still feel sick –,” she began. But he couldn’t let it go, not until his point was won.

“Why can you never just pull yourself together?” He said finally, with considerably more heat than he had intended.

Sarah went on looking at him for a moment. She was reminded briefly of how often she had been one of the crowd, disappointed and dominated; Francis forgetting in that moment who she was, excited by a pressing impulse of masculinity to display dominance. And at that moment she was friendless.

Sarah started to yawn, but found the unhappiness of the moment made her wretch. She stopped and closed her lips, vomit entering the top of her throat and the back of her mouth.

She looked at him solemnly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t feel how you want me to feel.”

Francis let out a deep sigh, dropped his shoulders and sunk into the bath further, closing his eyes briefly. He brought to mind emotions he had reasoned out in previous spells of introspection. The patience he knew he needed to raise up within him now and that he was supposed to show in these types of moments. The restraint not to build himself up at her expense, not to put her down just because he could, just because it would make him feel easier, better – for not feeling how she felt. The patience not to pass off her feelings of guilt and remorse as just one of her own weaknesses.

They both sat motionless for five, ten minutes. The tone of his apology, when it came, was laboured; not obsequious, but compliant; an apology that was easier to give now than later. A small wave of prejudice, and then embarrassment, passed over both of them, conscious of the censures of a working relationship. Sarah didn’t choose to reply. They stared at each other, a stare devoid of any meaning.

Francis didn’t know what to say next. Being in the wrong, he was still tense, still irritated, and he was aware of how stained he must look, even if she hadn’t been there to see him. He looked at her objectively for a moment. Her face seemed darkly tanned, or burnt, an expression scarred by all the mediocre hearts she had ever come into contact with. It seemed to him a wonderfully sad expression to be wearing on such a wonderfully sad day.

“You know if you ever want out, you can?” Sarah said, pushing some hair from her forehead and across her fringe.

“Don’t. Don’t gimme the leaving stuff.”

“But you know.”

Sarah unfolded her arms and rested her elbows on her knees. Lifting both her hands, she began to rub at the side of her temples rather blindly. She knew she couldn’t leave him, partly because, like all women, she kept a side for loving, a side of her body, physical, shaped and defined now around him, and partly because she knew he would never get used to sleeping alone again. As Francis looked at her, he thought that perhaps he was the only person who really knew her body, the way it deserved to be known. He remembered that once, when they had been holding each other for a few moments in silence, he had kissed her elbows. As she had tried to squirm away, he had wrestled over her and kissed her belly-button. For no other reason than because he could; that no matter how she felt about herself, he wanted to, and he could.

“I just wish I knew what I was supposed to feel. You know?”

She was sobbing gently now, under her breath, and then they were both oddly still for a moment, as both thought about whether it was possible to mourn something that had died before they had even known it was alive. He glanced across at her and saw, for the briefest of moments, her dreams, and how they were fading.

Sarah stood up, brushing imaginary creases out of the thighs of her jeans, and then stepped across the room slowly and sat down by the side of the bath, on the floor, next to him. He wanted to move his hand inside the top of her pullover and hold her nipple. Not sexually, but just to show that nothing had changed, that she was still wanted. A male interaction which could do no more than be lost in translation. So he chose not to touch her at all.

“Do you know what I dreamt last night?” she asked.

“What?”

“I dreamt about that birthday when I was four, and when I was walking on the beach with my balloon and my bag of seeds. And then I dropped the seeds as I always do. And then the balloon floats away out of my grasp as it always does. But this time they take everything. The seagulls take everything – all the seeds, my balloon – everything. And my daddy isn’t there to pick me up.”

She was crying and she had drawn up her knees. He pulled away some stray strands of hair which had matted with her tears against the side of her face. For a moment he thought he could hear church bells; distant, carrying across a wind, as if we were all holy places, ourselves a symbol of something greater. He ran the outside of his right hand across the top of her cheek. For some minutes, before she closed her eyes, they sat quietly, watching the bathwater.

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