Empt-e

I sometimes need to know why life is so empty.

 

I try to answer the question myself and it doesn’t work, the sums don’t add up.

 

I know. I know im not trying hard enough.

 

And it’s just like the proverbial bucket with a hole, or the sands of time. One day it will run out.

 

 

Short lived and frantic, I have been betrayed. By my own thirsty mind. And things that once made me tingle with excitement now make me cry. And the cold closes in around me and I dream gradually more gruesome things. And there’s not much left for me to imagine. Not much for me to try for.

 

 

Everything seems unusual, and yet – at the very same time – frustratingly familiar. And though I have the word unusual, there is a whole other story behind it, and why I chose to use it at this particular moment.

 

It is raining.

 

‘Oh, how unusual’, I say,

and he would reply wistfully, ‘yes, found it on
Camden
market, the colour stunned me too…’

‘No, not your waistcoat, Over there, That building’. I point. Across the street where a single, thin, tall spidery looking house stands, quite alone, amongst the debris of – what looks like – fifteen years of demolition.

 

I grab his elbow and we dart across the busy road, leaping from the path of the route 61 bus just in time. I notice that there is no door on the house, and a dusty green doormat sits impatiently on the step. Green from moss, and dusty from… well, dust.

 

I must have had a crazy look in my eye, because he hit me on the back, quite hard and demanded that I keep on walking to our destination, that is to his house. There awaiting us was the newest member of his family, a little baby, only recently delivered (he informed me) to his sister and her boyfriend, Jewlz and
Clark
– yes, their real names! – which they (apparently rather unorthodoxly for them) had named Petula.

 

We walked on, the noise of the traffic drowning out any conversation he spat in my direction, leaving me to my own thoughts and pretending to lip read his. My thoughts on  that occasion are hard to recall, although I am sure I was contemplating something unimportant, and trying to decide what to buy Petula for her 18th in eighteen years time. A newspaper of the day, a 2litre bottle of whiskey and some latex gloves perhaps.

 

The step up to the front door of his house was huge, it took us an hour to climb it, and when we reached the top we could barely touch the doorbell, luckily he had keys and we were soon in and with the family. They grabbed and grasped us, asked us awkward questions and allowed us to make foolish answers, as people always do on these occasions. It was truly awful, yet still we remained the guests of the minute, until Aunt Andromeda arrived with some flowers for everyone and a tale of how she had been forced to grapple with the taxi driver for her change.

 

Everyone began to play games, the kind where no one was so much bothered who’s turn it was, so long as it wasn’t theirs. And so we sat down in a corner and armed ourselves with the ultimate anti-socialites tool, cigarettes. ‘So’, he leaned over and implied, ‘that house’. ‘What about it?’ I puffed, ‘oh come on, you want it, so what are you going to do?’. ‘I am going back there, and I am going to get the lightbulb from the top room’. ‘But why?’ he practically screeched, ‘because I want to you great fool, because I fucking want to’. ‘ok’, He says. But I know he doesn’t believe me.

 

‘Oh, come on’ I scream in five minutes time, ‘bring this bloody baby out, get the champagne over with, then I can leave for fucks sake’. So they do, the baby arrives suitably over-preened, and oppressed, and I grab a bottle of champagne for the taxi home, where I sleep for fifteen hours. At home, not in the taxi.

 

The next morning the quiet explodes around me, its layers peeling apart to reveal a distinct lack of depth to the room. Past the closed, protective plate glass window the mid morning traffic buzzes and weaves towards unknown-to-me destinations. I roll out of bed, letting the tangled sheet

s fall onto the floor with a thump and stagger towards the kitchen.

 

I wonder what happened to that guy I met at the bus stop yesterday. He invited me to his nieces after-christening party, and worst of all I think I remember going. Still, we all make mistakes.

 

By this stage I have almost completely forgotten about the house. And I’ll let you know now that I do not get that lightbulb yet. (and not from the top floor of the house anyway, because the house is demolished, minutes – in fact – after I had been beaten away from it. But the lightbulb had survived, the site foreman happened to have seen the bulb himself when he was wandering round the property for the last time. ‘That’s unusual’ he’d thought, and taken the lightbulb for an antique lamp of his at home. Only in putting in the lightbulb that night he had got electrocuted and killed, and his widow – unable to bear the sight of the lamp – had it sold to a bric-a-brac shop were – unbelievably and unknowingly – I picked it up for fifty pence just a fortnight on. But that is, almost completely, a whole other story).

 

On a whim I make some coffee, I sit at the uncomfortable table, I look at my uncomfortable cat. I wonder at my uncomfortable life. I have the chorus of a ridiculous song stuck in my head, and im exhausted, my head hits the table where I lie staring along the surface of the table for several minutes. If only my world was so angular. So easy to fall off the edge.

 

I sit and gather dust, and ponder these things, before tipping my coffee down the cold drain, dropping the mug into the empty sink, and walking out the front door for air.