Imogen lives in Brighton and writes on the train up and down to London. She is currently working on a collection of stories. Some short, some very short; they are vignettes that give insight into the mess and murk of womanhood. The collection is intended to be read slowly, medicinally. One a day before a meal, with a glass of water or wine.
imogenrosephillips (@gmail.com)
AOIFE
There was always a little extra flesh than one thought. Our half bird’s-eye view is biased. Not solely because it belongs to our own bird’s eyes, with their dysmorphic varifocals, but because we just can’t see it all.
She very much liked the view she had of her thigh, the lace and cotton line of underwear, and the veiny foot up ahead. She reached out to touch it, this image before her which she was happy to call her own. Her hand found the extra flesh, hidden by a corner of duvet, spilling over the top of her knickers. It wasn’t much, she decided, but an unwelcome reminder of reality, and a souring agent spoiling the unblemished cup of morning she held to her lips.
It being there, the unexpected flesh, brought attention to her present company, who was just waking up himself. They hadn’t had sex, but had shared a bed the night before. They had, of course, had sex, but not for a month or so. They’d also shared a bed many times, and tended to wake up within ten minutes of each other. He understood her need to wake up early, after the bakers and fishermen, but just before the primary school teachers and restaurant owners. It was not to catch any particular worm, but just so that she had enough time for morning rituals. Aoife had a long, soft body, and he loved to hear the rustle of covers as she stretched it, uncurling her sleep-self into the one that carried her through the day. When she wasn’t there, the duvet and its cover did not separate, running from each other in the night as the bodies beneath them turned. But, half the bed remained cold.
Aoife’s own bedroom was nest-like and hard to leave. She slept there only occasionally, guarding what time she spent in it as a mother bird would her home. Aoife brought things back to the nest every morning. The radio, if she awoke with the fishermen, or a cup of tea if it was closer to eight o’clock when she opened her eyes. Although not as big as her mother’s had been, Aoife’s feet were long, and stretched beautifully like a dancer before starting practice. It sent a worm of tingling pleasure up her legs when she did, piecing her together again from standby-sleep-mode. Sometimes, these moments of physical self-recognition made her feel more loved than any of the men she knew ever had. Time with them was finite it seemed; Aoife’s visions of breakfasts for two at her little kitchen table, with coffee-pot steam rising never materialised. Instead she drank the coffee alone, and too much of it, the final cups-worth left cold and staining the glass.
Her first boyfriend had been very handsome, but Aoife had had an awkward fringe at the time, which had curled upwards on either side. Before she became his girlfriend, he told her that if he had seen her walking down the street, he would not have thought her beautiful. He wouldn’t have turned to his friends and said Did you see that girl? She was beautiful! Or if he had been alone when Aoife walked towards him, he wouldn’t have thought to himself I wonder if anyone else saw that beautiful girl who walked past me just now? This had been fairly difficult information for Aoife to digest, but she decided that if she pinned her fringe back and stopped eating between mealtimes, it might be alright. He had taken her virginity, and liked her singing voice, which she hoped would be a strong enough foundation from which to build.
Each time, before they were due to spend a few days together, she would take herself to the bathroom with a razor in her dressing gown pocket, and perch on the side of the bathtub, the hot tap running gently over both feet. Like an intrepid skier, she passed the blade down the slope of her calf, being just careful enough to not break her skin. After that, she cocked each leg up on the lip of the tub, to shave the darker, curlier hairs that had started to grow after her eleventh birthday, long before the other girls. What she was aiming for, Aoife believed, was a clean, triangular patch of dark. Concealed by underwear, but still pleasing to the eye that uncovered it. A tidy shadow that proved her to be both a sexual being and a considerate lover.
Now that there was no longer one male voice in Aoife’s head, she did not keep razors at home. There were so many voices passing through Aoife’s bed, she could have compiled a weighty anthology of their differing attitudes to her hair, her sex, her brain and all that wove between. In fact, Aoife had never known a collection of humans unrelated to one another to have so much to say about the same things. She had wondered at least once before whether she should host a Meet-Cute for them all, in order that they might pool their ideas together and establish a party line on the issues at hand. She could bake something, or make a batch of hummus and cut up some vegetables for crudités. Maybe she would call her Grandmother for her smoked mackerel dip recipe, emphasising just how much it did feel like the right occasion to pass on the family favourite.
This parent-teacher style conference, the Aoife-and-Her-Sexual-Conquests Meet-Cute, could be just what was needed. It was time for a quarter-century review. A comprehensive best-bits compilation of all the ways in which she had succeeded at losing herself in the search for someone else. It had the potential to be documentary-worthy, she thought, as she started her walk, away from last night’s bed fellow and his wrinkled linen sheets.
Not one to play the numbers game, Aoife thought instead of how the individuals to attend this gathering might be connected. Some of them would know each other of course, and two of them were brothers. The group would also include an ex-boyfriend and girlfriend, who Aoife had helped get over each other by getting beneath both of them. It had been a very enjoyable time with those two, particularly Simone, who had revolutionised Aoife’s attitude towards misshapen fruits and vegetables. Taking her hand in the local Syrian greengrocer, she had guided her fingertips over the complicated surfaces of many a gourd. In fact, Aoife intended on placing two large, rambunctiously malformed squashes in the centre of her kitchen table whilst her sometime lovers mingled around it.
The table itself was not a neutral presence. Cilò, an apprentice carpenter at the time, had made it for Aoife after meeting her at a kebab stall as the sun was rising, in a bid to get her out on a first date. Taurus looking up through bovine lashes, tripped out the words my father told me never to bother with a man who couldn’t make a set of kitchen furniture.
Such a clear image of the event had formed in Aoife’s head, that she knew she would have to wear black and smoke constantly. She decided she would fork out for a pack of Marlboro Reds and use old jam jars as ashtrays, insisting that it really was ok for everyone to smoke inside. Aoife had not yet decided whether she would need an ally, a referee of some kind to help placate this motley crew if tensions were to swell. Strangely, her first thought was of her father who, having kept Aoife at a successful arm’s length, might rather enjoy seeing all his daughter’s mistakes in one room. He would think of them as such, warming red wine in a glass between two or three fingers. Whilst before Aoife they formed a brilliant and unsubtle paint chart; some so similar that surely one could not be picked over the other.
It had been cold walking back from his house that morning and Aoife’s cheeks were bruising raspberry. She lingered a few seconds too long in the market-garden shop, staring outright at a couple squabbling over who would pay for their overpriced basket of things. Purple garlic, rye bread and celery salt. Aoife looked down at her own basket, empty. Perhaps she had better not herd all these people back into her life, into her home, back down from the shelf she’d neatly filed them away on. It could be messy. And besides, she’d have to get the hoover out.
DARK FRUITS
I spent new year’s day rifling through a jumbo box of Fruit and Fibre trying to find the banana chips. It had been three years since I’d bought a box of cereal at this point, but I was convinced there were less banana pieces than usual. Accepting the raisins as a consolation prize, I looked out the window to see the sky darkening. It had been two-thirty in the afternoon when I’d woken up and detangled my silver wrist-chain from the bird’s nest of hair on my head. Double figures like those perturbed me; I usually woke up with a great sense of urgency at seven-ten or thereabouts.
I put a pair of socks with drum kits on, the shoes I always wore, and crumpled a canvas shopping bag into one fist. I had my keys too, but I don’t remember where. They probably dangled from my left-hand index finger. It was unmistakeably January outside, and the few faces I saw were guilty with the knowledge that their year had already been ruined. Crow’s feet smacked of resolutions broken, and I passed daringly close to the flank of a white van in order to use its wing-mirror. I couldn’t quite see my reflection, although I squinted for a while trying to. To be honest, I was shocked that I seemed to be walking, because that meant I still had at least two of my limbs intact underneath this long bag of skin.
Why was everyone so unfamiliar? I didn’t know any of them, but it alarmed me that none of the passing faces jogged a fleeting memory somewhere back in the fug; in the final divided section of my rusty brain cabinet. Nothing. I wished then that I lived in a tiny community, where the shop was in fact the post office was in fact the town hall and the Quaker meeting house. At least there would be so little happening that my wearing drum kit socks on new year’s day might generate a conversation of some sort, and perhaps a question about my mental health. Someone nosy might come around knocking with a tub of leftover Bolognese sauce and insist on my putting it in the freezer whether I ate meat or not.
I sized up the doorways in the distance. The matte-black painted café with its bitter, high-quality coffee and nervous student-baristas. Too much chance of those young mothers being inside, women not much older than I who would recognise the ridge of fresh bruises on my shin. Or the garish signage of the second off-licence, with its overpriced tubs of hummus, bean salad and Guacamole-Dip Sauce. Maybe, but then again not, for the sake of the sweet elderly woman who liked to thrust free samosas into my pocket. I had no pockets and reeked of gin. This careful consideration had carried me to the end of the road, past all the shops without entering any of them. I turned on my heel in a surprisingly smooth movement which reminded me a gymnast’s final flourish after their turn on the equipment. Hoping for straight tens, I ascended back up the hill to the first shop I had passed.
There was a huge PUSH on the door and I pulled it indignantly toward me. This particular shop seemed to be run by three men entirely unrelated to one another, except for that they shared the same body build. Physically, they were identical. If only one could have peeled back their outer layers, one could have seen it to be true. They repulsed me equally, but I loved to linger at the till and eagerly answer their half-hearted rhetorical questions after each transaction. Staff training was clearly rigorous. Feeling the heady effects of a new calendar year, I winked at the face behind the counter, blurring it of any detail, focusing just behind at the cigarettes, making a mental note to buy some. Eyes open wide with serious intent, I started on the first aisle. There was nothing I wanted, and if there had been, I wouldn’t have found it there, next to the beans and chopped sausages and gravy granules and fish sauce.
Nonetheless, my arms were full when I approached the counter, and their contents made a confident thud. It seemed I had a need only for cold things including but not limited to; four different cans of soft drink, eight of Strongbow Dark Fruits, two large bags of ice, a kilo of Bombay mix and a family-size Viennetta. From behind his head, I asked for a shoulder of horrible and grey gin, a pack of Bensons and two lighters. There was no question of my leaving the house, and I knew full well that the lighters they sold could barely make their way through twenty cigarettes. No, I didn’t want the receipt and yes I had a bag, scrunched up in my fist, you idiot.
Outside, I felt the first wave of self-pity at still having five minutes of journey left until I would reach my front door. Just as I rode it, a very small and shuffling figure entered my vision stage-left. Oh great, I thought. Someone in a worse state than I, who is clearly over-sixty and barely able to manage this one tragic mission to the local shop. I’m sure he lives in two rooms worth of loneliness, covered with a thick film of dead spouse and a prattling television on at all times in the background. The figure in question had such a pronounced gait that he was more question mark than man. His hair impossibly wispy, he too clutched a canvas shopper in one fist. The final step up to the shop was troubling him. More than once I watched him reverse a few inches and then forward again, only to bump his toes, unsuccessful.
Back in the kitchen, I roughly sluiced a pint glass and filled it a third with ice, a third gin and half a can of Dark Fruits. Stirring distractedly with a biro, I thought of the old man’s Velcro shoe straps and how strongly he had smelt when I approached him – of equal parts scented toilet paper and soup. It hadn’t taken much to help him over the step and through the doorway, but I had run home as soon as he was clear of any further hiccups, and landed in a pile of Good Samaritan Exhaustion on my own doormat. Breathing heavily against the door, it took me at least five minutes to find the energy to mix a drink.
SLEEPING DOGS
As the breathing calmed, falling into a soft ebb-and-flow rhythm like the sound of young hooves on a paddock, she was able to relax. A man, who standing was closer to two metres than one, was asleep on top of her. One of his legs wound tight near her belly button, making relaxation barely possible. Reminded momentarily of the fate that befell Ron Weasley as he struggled against a constricting vine, she stilled, searching for her own undulating breath.
These moments of not sleeping, she found, could take many forms. Some leant towards mundanity, as she used the quiet to plan her week ahead, or to picture her spice rack and work out what she needed to pick up from Taj Superstores. At other times, she had found herself nursing a longing so deep that she bit down hard on her lip to stop its low, guttural yowl from escaping. It was then that she would lower her face down to the one close by, as though by proximity she might remind them of her presence; to create a silent, sleeping, electric connection which they would remember in the morning.
She had to be careful with how far she allowed her brain to wander, left in the boundary-less silence of a bedroom. It was the same problem she’d had at school as a child. Sing-song, lullaby-versions of French verbs hadn’t been enough to distract from the potential back story of the song’s protagonist; Mme. Vandertramp. If irregular verb declension had settled in her brain for any amount of time, it was thanks to obsessing over Mnsr Vandertramp’s contribution to family life.
Not since the age of fifteen could she remember being the sleeping one. That’s not to say that she hadn’t been woken up by a bedfellow before. On the contrary, but it seemed to be for reasons far more transactional than her own. Sometimes, she would not have awoken, but doing so several hours later, find a small pool of wet around herself. She had slept through it.
Some had long hair, which clung to their backs like silk on a hot body, others short enough to run through and still see a finger from tip to knuckle. One or two men with pale faces and dirty dreadlocks had slipped under the radar, gaining her confidence with tales of Indian yoga retreats. The owner of the bedroom with a balcony and green-striped sheets had chin-length hair, which tucked conveniently behind his lovely ears. He had liked his hair being tucked, although it did sometimes make her think of her mother’s haircut, as she had closed the car door at the end of the school run. Despite the resemblance, she gently moved a wandering lock back in place, and lay her cheek against his. He was warm, and kind.
Looking down the length of the bed, one eye closed for clarity as though poised to skim a stone, she regarded his body. He was whippet-like; smoothly curved flanks and strong bony thighs dipped elegantly from back to behind. Not so much comfort from a love-handle made of bone she had thought, earlier, as he hopped from his bed to the large window, pulling a curtain across, pulling darkness in.
He left for work, she slept a little longer. She awoke, and padded over to the mirror hanging in her sightline. There she regarded herself, and felt the familiar buzz of self-congratulation at seeing ribs poking out and belly laying relatively flat. Propelled forth by wings of dysmorphic euphoria, she grabbed at the curtain. Outside; the world and all of it. Not just a view; a panoramic revelation of all the rooftops one could ever need to see.
She had broken his lamp, not much longer than six hours earlier, in the fever of taking off her jeans. They had holes on both knees and her toes had a habit of getting stuck in them during removal, jerking her leg outwards like a responsive knee at a physical. He hadn’t laughed, but nor was he angry, and had sent her down to the exquisite first-floor bathroom for a candle. She was only gone for as long as it took to guiltily skip up and down one flight of stairs, but he was asleep when she pushed open his bedroom door. One of his large feet hung from the side of the bed, like a ripe pear poised to drop from its tree branch. Scanning the room for a lighter, she absorbed all the items that lay on the surfaces.
Her brother had called her Susie Sponge as a child, due to her absorbent memory and the way her fingertips pruned after being in the bath. The absorbance had often bothered her, except for when she had studied The Tudors, and found no need for a rhyme to help remember the fates that befell each of Henry VIII’s wives.
Her eyes lingered on the white sewing machine on his desk, and she felt her insides soften a little. What was he making? He had told her, when helping to carry her second glass of wine back to their table, she just couldn’t remember what he had said. In truth, she had been distracted by his comment about her outfit, and the approving look he had given her as she dismissed it as basically a painting uniform with a jacket thrown in. Later, as their friends chatted between them, he had touched her ankle softly, pulling the rolled trouser leg up, to look at her socks and pomegranate tattoo. She had hoped then that she would wake up in his bed the next morning. He would later tell her that he had known she would.
When he fell asleep curled around her like one would pregnancy pillow, she felt needed. She told herself that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t be able to sleep right through until his alarm rang. And for that, she couldn’t leave.