It Only Rains: Chapter One

What drew you back?

I lit another cigarette clumsily and inhaled, watching the glimmer of flame from between half-closed eyelids. The sky outside was a confused, indecisive mix of pink and blue, seeping into mauve and then to orange where the sun set in fiery bands of gold. Trees stencilled over the extreme burst of colour were in the last shade of autumn, bare, sickly looking, and bleak. Autumn in suburbia.

What is my addiction?

I took another drag lazily, looking out the stately sash, which rattled loosely in the wind. I flicked ash into the saucer by my hand, watched it settle against the off-white china. The red leather Windsor, almost garishly worn on its arms, immersed me in a smell of nicotine, beeswax and eau de cologne as it caught the last drops of sunset from the open window. Light streamed through the nine murky panes meticulously blown into gyrating circles by some long-dead craftsman; that curiously dark evening light that seems to be the absence of itself. The haze glowed more orange, like Seville but brighter. I stubbed out the smouldering end in my fingers, making a charcoal murk of dust on the saucer before I got up.  The bare boards of my apartment creaked under my reluctant tread as I stumbled across the room. Perhaps one of the Victorian’s greatest achievements was their scale; my drawing room was massive, flanked by the seven enormous sash windows looking out onto the thoroughfare below.

The road was mostly empty, greying in the last beams of light that washed through the darkening branches, like errant waves through a rocky crevice. A car rolled past, spluttering phlegmatically.  It was about that time of day when people were not around, staying ensconced in their households. Grey men home from work, idling by the fire with cigarettes, ashy housewives in their neatly pressed pinafores cooking dinner amongst a gaggle of children. Poor bloody souls.

I eventually reached my record player, a ghastly, faux-wood contraption perched somewhat whimsically on a cantankerous old mahogany dresser with spindly legs and brassy castors, long since seized with age. What can I say? My parents had money. I fumbled around with it until it came on; a perky jazz score bounded out of it as soon as the needle hit, midway through the song and I pulled it off quickly. It jarred with my mood, brought back the days when the sunlight through those antiqued panes was brighter, when my footfalls were not alone in that huge apartment. I gazed around at the bare boards, the shabby chair with its yellowing saucer, the beige trench coat yellowing in the cadmium sunset, the heavy cases of neatly bound books and the tumbledown pile of well-thumbed paperbacks on the floor. I turned back to the record player and put on another song at random. Staccato piano embraced me in the midst of my paralysed apartment, a warm voice, the jaunty rhythm of repressed springs, and a crescendo. I let the song play and pulled a cut glass decanter off the shelf and a tumbler. Whisky. I pored a double and downed it. I turned the volume up, filling the room.

Yeah, I’m addicted. I was running away every bit as much as that man was, but I’d forgotten, forgotten that I was, forgotten to try. I downed another double, feeling the burn as it coursed down my throat. The jazz was going hell for leather in the background, the instruments building up to their ecstasy. I closed my eyes and wallowed luxuriantly in the glow; part jazz, part whisky and part nicotine.

Running can wait for another day.

The door slammed, tentatively I thought. A chair creaked; two muted thuds. A cool draft whistled through the hall carrying the heady scent of peppermint and paper. Muted footfalls approached the room. I turned swiftly back to the record player, cutting the song of just before its climax. The door creaked open to the sounds of a September twilight, the clumsy crystal knob never quite working.
“Darling?” I gritted my teeth, assuming my respectable face; the face of the ashy housewife. The face, in short, not of the woman who downs two neat doubles of whisky before her husband comes home I turned to look at him, My Husband. His weak, pallid face with hair greying around the temples a little, the prominent yet unrefined cheekbones, a little too proud for his weaker jaw. We stood at opposite ends of the room, like two strangers on a station platform.

“Oh, hello” I said, as if I hadn’t been expecting him.

“I’m home” he said by way of a reply, his rabbit lips twitching. I nodded. Well, obviously. He shifted in his stockinged feet on the bare boards. “Why is it so dark?” he asked after a pause.

“Is it?” I looked around me. The sun had set and murky streetlight poured onto the floor. “How odd.” I wandered negligently passed him, across the huge expanse of wood and flicked on the light switch. The room was at once in a sulphurous glow.  He watched me, that strange glimmer in his dull brown eyes before moving to draw the heavy blackout blinds. We still hadn’t got round to taking them down. He stood by the last curtain a moment seeming to contemplate me, as was his routine.

“I’ll go and cook dinner then, shall I?”

“Yes, why not.” He said, moving to my chair and reclining languorously into it.