J

And so she finally got it all off her chest and admitted she hated having to wait for J to turn up for dinner, having to put up AGAIN with his treacherous delays, his uncaring attitude, especially on weekends when it was their turn to cook, I mean, how rude of him! not even a phone call, not even a message… and anyway that wasn’t all she couldn’t stand…for one thing she definitely couldn’t bear that filth piling up on the living room table, those old newspapers scattered around the toilet floor with no function whatsoever other than gathering more and more hair balls around the edges, like a nauseating organic carpet flipping at the constant draft sneaking beneath the old doors of the flat… no point in mentioning those candy wrappers left on the window sill to slowly discolour like shiny dead insects unwillingly reminding her of nights spent doing nothing, absolutely NOTHING AT ALL! and what about that walking stick of his, always in the corner of her eye, the same walking stick which we all know he didn’t really need any longer and why on earth was he still using it, what the hell was he trying to demonstrate with that… was he really expecting to carve out some easy fuck with it? maybe deceiving a poor young student into taking pity on him and dropping on their knees to crave benediction or extreme unction... because if that was his idea, if that was the ingenious plan behind the whole stick business, clearly he was wasting his worthless time, obviously it wasn’t going to happen, it really wasn't, not in a million years! And anyway it wasn’t just his filthy mind that was disconcerting, depressing her, no… it wasn’t just his cut price, peccaminous fantasies that were getting on her nerves… it was precisely that THING you know, that object, the walking stick itself, with its pathetic ribbing pattern, its cheap finish and its horribly varnished wood that stunk from miles away of second rate charity shop – if that was even an option – and inevitably reminded her of the person who must have died with it or next to it or on it, how its previous owner must have croaked suddenly or after a painfully long disease, leaving nothing behind for posterity other than this stupid walking stick and possibly a dog or something similar because that’s what old people do when they die don’t they? they leave behind those kinds of things… and so why not bring back the dog as well? why hadn’t he brought home the fucking dog together with that idiotic stick… like some fucking shepherd… at least it would have been an attempt at something kind, a nice gesture, saving a life or something, but no, not in his scheme of things, oh no… he just went for the easiest option, the lowest common denominator, a stick and a fuck, by hook or by crook… like a beast! he was more than satisfied with that stick and the potential for even an imaginary increase in libidinous activity without ever, no, not for one minute beginning to think creatively… well, that was his problem you know, his absolute limit! no imagination whatsoever, not even enough to envisage how a dog might have afforded him one or two more opportunities on the fantasy shagging spectrum, some random animal-loving woman or boy perhaps, I don't know... not that she wanted to help, to become some weird pimp, an accomplice in his lecherous plans, not one bit! but PLEASE not THAT object, not that stupid stupid stick… and besides, she had almost tripped over it the other night, she could have broken her neck you know… and who else would have bothered to clean up that mess of male pubic hair and scum daily clogging  and befouling the shower drain? certainly she couldn’t picture him or J doing it... the two princes, the aristocrats, the gran signori, not really… and so she continued going on and on, until it became clear she couldn’t stand lots of other things but it didn’t really matter because while she was shouting out all her disgust, her rage  and regret for what she considered a less than pitiful existence, he was in the kitchen, down on his knees, his face pressed against the cold white Formica, aluminium handle touching lips, his arm blindly projected forward fiddling with one of the bottom drawers where they piled up pots and oven dishes, a mess really! just like their life… A MESS! unable to hear any of what she had to say and anyway even if he could have, it didn’t matter because he was far too busy trying to remember all the essential ingredients for his famous Sunday stuffed chicken, his bird a la punk as he liked to call it and which title was attributable to a certain freedom taken regarding both the recipe’s orthodoxy and the levels of basic hygiene absent throughout the entire venture, yet nevertheless J’s favourite and their sister’s favourite too, even if she would never have admitted it openly, not in a million years and not in front of him… in fact, just to piss him off, she would not even have sat down to eat without first looming up there at the end of the table like some fucking Medea, a ghost at the feast, horrified, with that inquisitive gaze of hers, contemplating the egg stains encrusting the prongs of a fork, the one between the second and the third place from the left, standing there, Eurydice turned to salt, when instead she longed to be tucking in to that succulent dish, the dish HE KNEW she loved so much, that punked-up bird he could sense she adored at least as much as he or J did and CHRIST if that annoyed him, better not to think about it, better to concentrate on preparing it all to perfection with the chopping, the cleaning, the stuffing, and anyway J would be back home soon and wasn’t it a great idea to welcome him with some great food ready on the table, well served and all that… I mean, for once! even if he had skipped his turn to cook, simply not bothering to show up again and he really didn’t deserve it, let’s face it… I mean, not-even-a-phone-call-not-even-a-message, he could hear her screaming from the other room, but that’s just J you know, that’s how he is take him or leave him… and after all it’s just a dinner for God’s sake, just a dinner, no reason to get so irredeemably sour about it! let’s just ask him to wash up afterwards and that’s will be enough… instead how nice to go on preparing it all regardless, so that their brother would get home to find a steaming chicken a la punk, imagine! surely it would plant the idea in J’s head that he should come back earlier next week and cook something special himself… surprise them for once… A SURPRISE for Christ sake! just once! enough of a reason for all of them to sit down, relax and forget about the buzzer not working, the front door needing repair, the carpet generally spotted with equivocal stains and cigarettes burns appearing more and more like a bizarre representation of the solar system and its adjacent galaxies drawn by a four year old child and less and less like the respectable floor of a good, honest, Christian home… and so while finally getting hold of what he recognised by touch as the rectangular serving dish and while his sister was still screaming her head off about the walking stick affair, he fixed his gaze on a feeble yet steady line of grease marking the entire inner margin of that pot, a line of fat that appeared to resist consecutive attacks of both a metal sponge and the large flat head of a butter knife, so that he had nothing else to do other than engage all his powers of positive thinking to envisage in that scummy residue of one-week-old lasagne a mighty boost to today's meal, a sacred sign, an alchemic token spurring him to consequently move towards the fridge, pick up onions, garlic, rosemary and the bird itself and start the whole messy business, not before having turned the radio’s volume right up to be completely sure he would not to have to listen to any more of that annoying litany about his brother’s sexual habits delivered at the top of his sister’s voice from next door and probably to the great enjoyment of the neighbours… and while adjusting the radio’s antenna, which by the way was made up from some sort of metal wire they had torn off the trellis in Mrs Jameson’s rose garden, he thought to himself how absolutely necessary it was to concentrate on his cooking right now, still keeping some mental space free for that metallic voice coming right through the crackling speaker directly into his brain, a certain Eastern European accent, Latvian maybe, most probably Lithuanian, a voice trying not without difficulties to explain the differences between time in writing and cinema making, the way it elapses differently in each medium, with cinema having the advantage of representing the concurrency of actions, as if it was ALL HAPPENING AT THE SAME TIME, almost as if we were all breathing at the same time… actually doing it now… so BREATH NOW for Christ sake! the only exception being if we were actually dead, which doesn’t seem to be the case anyway… and everything would be perfect, just perfect, only cooking and listening and thinking, fantastic even! that was if Mrs Jameson herself, that old witch, if she hadn’t decided to start banging that fucking stick of hers – another stick? what’s happening here? or was it a broom or something – on the thin partition wall dividing their kitchen and her bedroom, so that he had to point out to his sister I told you not to scream, you freak! and that old crazy lady now calling them both by their names, and how the fuck did she know their names anyway? and his sister apparently undismayed, continued her shouting while the radio voice was finally drawing some really interesting conclusion and he, knife in his hand, distracted for an instant that felt like a lifetime by a sudden dull thud coming right up from the window in front of the sink, the one facing the busy road on the north side of the building, a noise like that of heavy boxes being unloaded onto pavements, a noise distracting him just long enough to miss the explanation of the REAL difference between filmic and literary timing, his sister suddenly coming in to enquire about the noise coming from the road and did he hear that too? or the old lady threatening to call the council… and when everything settled back to normal – shit... just a split second! – there he was once again chopping onions and crying, while she was moving the mahogany cupboard to get at a troublesome umbrella wedged in between that catafalque and the magnolia wall and Mrs Jameson doing God’s-knows-what in that sad little apartment of hers and the street outside now echoing with the equally confused screams of passers-by gathering beneath their window and both of them, sister and brother, both of them and possibly also Mrs Jameson and Mr Marker and the weird Polish guy living beneath them, all wondering at the same time how could people scream that much on a Sunday morning, don’t they have some respect for their neighbours? and all of them forgetting about that whole business pretty soon just to go back to their separate activities while the screams were anyway muffled by sirens and car's tyres screeching on the dry asphalt and you would have thought they would have noticed it by now, would have detected that something was happening out there, but they were all too busy with their own futilities, Mr Shultz putting a folded wedge under his wobbly dinner-table with some old cardboard obtained from a birthday card sent by an aunt from Warsaw, Mrs Jameson adjusting the reclining back of a chair she bought a few weeks before, following the pressing recommendation of her osteopath, and the brother and sister lost respectively in the sound of frying aubergines and in a frantic adjusting of the sofa’s cushions that were simply too soft and would always get stuck under that rim covered in crumples and lost pennies, and finally they all managed to somehow miss the ambulance, the sirens, the traffic jam producing a line of cars and angry drivers causing chaos around the entire block and still J was nowhere to be seen, how rude of him! maybe they shouldn't have cooked for him after all, they shouldn't have thought about it in the first place… you know what, SCREW HIM, no stuffed chicken for J, chicken a la punk my ass, SCREW HIM! and when he finally shut up and she finally shut up too and it felt like the entire building had shut up at the very same time and the air was filled with yells and howling sirens and what the fuck is happening out there? and J was really late, absolutely, inexcusably late, and something must have happened in the street, all that traffic and all those police cars, it’s not normal, and turn the oven off will you? and why has every bloody kid in the entire neighbourhood gathered opposite our front door? and it looks like an accident… an accident happened out there… some idiot got run over! and precisely at that point… precisely at that point… precisely then, that's when the phone rang.
Well… finally a little silence!