Somebody In The City Loves Me

Two posts in one day is not the norm for me but I just had to slip this story in for Search Engine Stories this week. I am hopelessly late.

The prompt last week was somebody in the city loves me.

Here is my story….

 

The distance between one moment of solitude and another can be short in the city. People with no names vanish into doorways. Lone trees, planted as an afterthought, lean back from the road in an attempt to avoid the detritus from traffic. Birds, scrawny and bedraggled, hover on window ledges, flying to the ground half-heartedly when crumbs are scattered.

The buildings are grey, looming, cold, catching the sighs of office workers as they scramble to face another day. The queues for coffee, newspapers, invigorating juice stream outward with military precision. Expressions are blank, unreadable. There are those who have accepted their fate.

Mobile phones blink, whistle, purr. Thumbs grow calloused from texting. Laptops jostle for position on café tabletops. People have two hundred emails to answer before five, forty requests for social networking friendships, but still go home alone.

I see them every day. I work in a doctor’s surgery right in the middle of it all. On my first day the doctor said :’Welcome to the hustle and bustle.’ He was right. The patients never stop. They are stressed, they are depressed. They are too fat. They are too thin. They are too busy. They are too lonely. They are overwhelmed. They are underappreciated. The emotional symptoms outweigh the physical. The requests for drugs, remedies, plans to take it all away, the ache of just being alive, never stop.

The doctor makes a fortune. Fifteen minutes – sixty dollars. Another fifteen minutes, another sixty dollars. All day they come and go. They tell me their problems like I am a bartender. I go home weary. The doctor counts his receipts and claps his hands like a child at a birthday party. He goes home happy.

Every evening after work I have a shower. It is a precaution. They say rare diseases are on the rise in the city. It’s because we are cutting down all the trees. The diseases gather under doorhandles and climb the walls of hallways, waiting to pounce.

The hot water is soothing. Particles of water splash against the tiles and fall, quick as mercury, to rejoin the larger flow being driven down the drain. Separate an atom of water from its brothers and it will curve and push and plunge around your fingers until it is once again a part of the whole.

Every night it is the same. I am drying my hair after spraying in the conditioner that smells like wildflowers when I hear the pop of the cork. It is Maxime. He has prepared a dinner for me. He is letting the wine breath.

Tonight it is wild mushroom risotto and white wine with the softest hint of vanilla. Maxime is a chef. He spends all day listening to people remove ingredients from dishes he has researched for weeks before adding to the menu. No cheese, no onions, no bread. Only green peppercorns, no black. No rosemary, only thyme. Your beef stock is too beefy, your tomatoes too sweet. Your lettuce doesn’t have the crunch I’m looking for, your egg yolk is not quite yellow enough.

Maxime and I drink our wine and laugh as the sunset throws orange splashes against the windows. We remember the knots we had in our stomachs when we woke up in the city on our own, like a hand pressing down on our very souls. Now we smile at the demands of our working day , changed from being one to being two.

We met at the arthouse cinema that has the old gum tree out front. Gumnuts crunch all over the pavement. For years every time I pass I gather handfuls of them and take them home to the special jar I keep by the window. They look like tiny caps, bonnets for the creatures of the wood who have nothing left but the solitary tree that stands with courage facing the road, bark bleached white from exhaust fumes and too much glaring light.

Maxime was going to see Jules et Jim. I had my heart set on Amelie. Our eyes met and we spent all night talking instead. Just like that.

Maxime had been alone for years. So had I. We settled in together and dreams that had previously been spent were revived.

Every morning with my freshly brewed mocha latte and my roll still warm from the oven, Maxime leaves me a gumnut from the jar that I know he has kissed. All day I keep it in my pocket, cradling it in my fingers when the day closes in. It is a form of blessedness, of revelation. For as I turn the small object in my fingers I am released and I know, deep in my heart, that somebody in the city loves me.

Oh, Wait Just A Minute Mr. Postman!

Cricket’s Slice of Life this week had a prompt which reminded me of a funny time in my life.

The prompt is a secret passion.

I had a secret passion once. It lasted for about three months. I had just had my son and was feeling bloated and frumpy, decidedly unattractive. There are lots of things people don’t tell you about the early days of motherhood. The faint smell of soured milk that follows you wherever you go. How you are so tired you often put on clothes inside out or do up buttons incorrectly so that your tops are all puffy and hanging the wrong way. Or that your hair looks unkempt no matter how often you brush it. And that you have a pattern from  the couch cushion permanently embossed across your face as a result of falling asleep face first in your own drool.

Suddenly, you feel invisible to the opposite sex.  Often you are still wearing maternity clothes without the  prominent bulge you had before. You feel dowdy and adrift in shapelessness. Men, who used to look at you before now look at you as if you are some kind of disoriented bag lady wearing someone else’s clothes.

 I was ill-prepared for motherhood. I had glamourised it in my mind long before it happened, imagining a little bouncing cherub who slept when he was supposed to sleep and just gooed and gaahhed when he was awake, allowing me to carry on with my life as it was before. The reality of two or three hours sleep a night, an endless stream of poop and projectile vomiting and a constant high-pitched wailing (my own) threw me more than anything ever had.

My husband was no help. Bewildered is the only way to describe him. His efficient, uber-organised wife had been turned into a woman who wore the same apple puree encrusted T-shirt three days in a row and could no longer talk in complete sentences, losing her train of thought after four words due to sleep deprivation.

I stumbled through the day, forgetting about my desire for an end to war or a solution to world hunger. All I could dream of was the bliss of an undisturbed night’s sleep.

And then he came along. Like a knight in shining armour riding through the mists of Avalon. My saviour. My secret passion. My postman.

Jon was a New Zealander, a Maori. Tall, strong, gliding along the street like a dancer. No one in the history of the postal service had ever delivered mail with such grace, such flair.

He spoke to everybody. Gave Australia Post stickers to the kids. All the women in the street waited for his arrival every day around noon, putting on our lipstick and freshly-pressed frocks, forcing our babies into routines that worked around the mail delivery. We were bewitched by him, transported out of our domestic drudgery for a few minutes a day by his fleeting presence, imagining we were Desdemona to his Othello.

For five days in a row I got no mail. Jon didn’t stop and flash me the smile I had become so besotted with. In desperation, I began to send mail to myself. I signed up for information on products and courses I was not actually interested in. I’m sure Jon knew what I was doing but he didn’t say a word, merely handing me the mail with a flourish.

As he paraded down the street there was a collective sigh from every female resident. Hearts were aflutter. We were as giddy as a bunch of schoolgirls catching sight of a popstar. We fell into a frenzy of gardening, planting poppies, tulips and shrubs in a bid to catch his eye, decorating our mailboxes with little wooden birds and slogans ranging from the sickeningly sweet : All Mail Welcome Here to the more straight-to-the-point Postmen Always Deliver.

Like all good things my secret passion came to an end. The spell we were in thrall to was lifted off the street. Rather abruptly. Jon was transferred to Head Office, a coveted management position. The new postman was nice but he just didn’t have the mystique Jon had. All of a sudden collecting the mail was well, rather mundane.

My secret passion has been over for many years, but I still get a little frisson of expectation when I hear the letters and bills drop into the box. Just in case The Knight Of The Mail is back.