Two Lyric Essays
by Ian C. Smith
Life Looping Back on Me
Upheaval the thrum of my days, needing something smaller, a foxhole, I advertise to offload an apartment lease. This trysting place now obsolete, heart-hammered, yet the idea of escape always in my fizzing blood, I dream of leaving no trace, starting anew after my latest chain of sorry events. My surprised recognition of the first lease applicant hauls me back to a different time seething with fistfuls of frustration when I thought I knew a lot. He was my works manager when I gave my notice to quit, storming out incensed by his tactless remarks following a crisis call to the office for me concerning a family accident. No phones in pockets then. Money short, work scarce. Bosses ruled, of course. I had vowed to find another job before day’s end.
My mother, a quasi-Christian who can slap viciously, sniffs like a vixen, wringing her hands that she keeps to herself this time. My kid brother gawps at my notoriety, our father which art stiff in disapproval, silent. When I ran into big trouble my brother moved from our parents’ bedroom into mine so she has made up a bed, its mattress collapsed, in the built-on back porch. Junk furniture, newspapers, edges curled, crowd the narrow passage past my billet to our icy bathroom with a woodchip heater. The toilet my father emptied, where I mulled over boyhood sadness, still squats outside. She stipulates what board I must pay, reminds me of rigid house rules, fresh start and curfew my new cellmates. I am already thinking of a girl I met in the city, the taste of her.
I worked full-time as a bakery boy after attending many schools, unwittingly emulating my furious father. He began at thirteen, a year younger than me. A scullion on my knees toiling below huge ovens’ shimmering heat, scurrying bakers’ pastry slap and swearing, a swooning aroma of rising bread, I scraped trampled crust, rat shit, cigarette butts and other accumulated filth, a penitent in the dough. The wrong kind. My low pay didn’t stretch far, but free baked goods subsidised my sugary diet. Glorying in freedom, I rented an unheated backyard caravan, stuck scissored pictures of happiness on cupboard doors. Later, after parole, finished with my parents, a young father married to that poor girl, unskilled, I moved from job to job, always slightly better paid.
I remind my former boss of our connection. The day after my outburst I turned up to serve my notice, realised he expected to forgive me and return to normal, but having secured that other job I so hotly sought, I reaffirmed where he could stick his. Now he says he wants the apartment for his student daughter, a cue to mention my successful studies as a mature-age student at her nearby university. Needing to impress, I enjoy the double-whammy of surprising him fourteen years apart. He seems OK, mellowed, probably a better person than me with my sorry mistakes. He can have the lease. I omitted the shameful flotsam bobbing in my life’s wake: a broken family, the married girlfriend, cheap drama like a bad movie. We all want approval, want our hazardous lives to turn out magical as the future roars towards us.
Lakes Entrance
After the reception, dancing in my in-laws’ tiny lounge, we decamp to a rented two-room back yard bungalow patrolled by a sour voyeuristic widow, our new landlady. Thirty-six hours later, much of this time spent in bed, we catch the coastal train, my entire savings eked for a three-day honeymoon. Empty rural railway station waiting-rooms bringing to mind the past slide into our pasts. She is seventeen. Five years since leaving school, I am nearly nineteen.
Always obsessive, being absent from work on weekdays disorients me, as does sharing a bed all night despite the wonder of awakening to more sex. Knowledge of love, understanding, vaguely for adults, privacy paramount, I shy from other guests’ glances, their disapproval, I feel, of what we get up to. At her recent memorial service I saw forgotten photographs I took of those days evoking an eerie glad sadness though we had long been apart.
Our basic interests a vast mismatch, so not getting my dire jokes about the cinematic drowning tragedy A Place in the Sun, she laughs at my splashing ineptitude rowing us across a lake, the sun shadowed by dark cloud. She doesn’t laugh at my naked hunger when we close the door to our room, a subject of droll jokes years on when we are all done. I suspect not even a glimpse of the disorder that lies ahead.
Before I left her for the final time she said, You’ve changed since we married, and I, by then Mr Quickwithwords, said, Yes, and you haven’t. Tyres smouldered in fury, my fuse always short, actions graceless. Rain cloud darkened the evening, as it had that long-ago lake, windscreen wipers, as monotonous and desultory as our work-worn marriage, taunting, a movie cliché. Eating yet another basic evening meal on my lap I thought of this recently.
Small descendants skipping among cables captured on camera for You Tube’s time capsule, deserved eulogies highlighted by her fidelity as adored mother and grandmother are delivered. Sensing disapproval as usual, I trust this congregation can’t mind-read as my memory drifts to her hot thighs wrapping my ribs in that guesthouse, and her charm necklace jumping for joy as she straddles me in our rented bungalow quipping between gasps about the frustrated old biddy outside prowling her domain.
These diminishing days bear increasing farewells. If I were the Bede’s sparrow winging through his brilliant grand hall I would be near the end of festivities before flying on into the utter dark again. That girl from the tunnel of our past urges me to shoulder loss without panic, make the most of each moment, our wonderful luck, this sumptuous banquet. She bites down in rapture on the jiggling necklace held in her lovely young mouth.
Photo by Charles Parker in Pexels
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