Reminds me of a girl I met inside. Two questions right there: Inside what? And, what sparks the memory? The last is unimportant. Could be something on TV… my reflection across a chrome lighter… perhaps just this mood I’m in…
As for the first, let’s call it a room. A room within a ward, bars on the windows and a high fence outside. But is the fence keeping us in or them out? Who’s it protecting? It’s not as simple as it seems and you could think on it awhile, had you little else to do.
Anyway: the girl. She’s the kind men sing about, fools who’ve never met her, nothing close… they’re a special case of sensitive dumb, and there’s songs to be sung, so let them have their romantic mirage. My ears may be open, but the fingers slide in easy; I don’t care.
Reality hits the piano a little different to fiction. Not only the tune, the way it strikes the notes. Mostly flat. ‘The Banality of Evil’ is an old standard, much covered by those well versed in banal. I don’t know about that but, as we sit listening to godawful FM radio, it’s clear life’s less pretty than a melody; in the flesh, that is.
“You got a cigarette?” she says.
“We can’t smoke in here.”
“They’ll never know.”
“OK…”
She’s beautiful, of course. Starvation giving to the eyes what it took from the flesh. It’s just she’s got marbles where eyeballs ought to be. Sometimes they glow, when she’s describing details from her horrible past, but the light soon subsides to their present dusty dull.
She’s not feeling talkative tonight. She takes a long, slow drag on her cigarette.
“Let’s have sex,” she says.
I smile.
It’s an old routine. At first I simply refused but that hurt her feelings.
“Sure, at 5am.”
“You always say that.”
On her meds she’ll never make it.
“That’s the deal.”
Sometimes she’ll say she loves me. She says I’ve become one of the voices talking in her head. I say I love her too and I’m sorry about that. It must be very annoying.
“At least kiss me.”
I consult my watch. “In two and a half hours, yeah.”
“Now.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t.”
“You don’t love me.”
“I do.”
“Then kiss me.”
The others told me stories about her. They said she was trouble. They said all kinds of things.
I shrug. “OK.”
She smiles. I move across. We kiss.
She pulls away, gasping.
“You’re too rough,” she says. “I like it soft.”
“Sorry.”
“Let’s have sex.”
“At five.”
“Yeah…”
Some time of nothing concludes when she picks herself up… an unsteady procedure; eyes commencing their backwards roll.
I watch her shuffle out, down corridor, around corner.
Soon after a new guy comes onto the ward. They get together – she even meets his bewildered and desperate smiling parents. He’s the one, she says. But romance is shortlived. Barely a week and they’re caught having sex in the women’s dorm. He’s kicked out to the other ward, the one that’s one stark corridor. She’s not as upset as you’d think. But then, considering the things she’s seen, it’s hard to make an impression.
