Friday 4th November:

Sunday: Mathilde

There have been times recently when Mathilde has felt that all her emotional turmoil was going to overflow, and spill out of her ‘with complete inappropriateness’ (as she’d once heard the school’s counsellor say). Sometimes, during an emotion-laden discussion at work, when she’d been trying to suppress a personal dislike for somebody, she’d found herself thinking that she’d already unleashed an articulate – if expletive-laden – tirade that dissected the bogusness and ineptitude of the other party (chapter and verse, detail and example) and left the other meeting attendees (i) amazed at, and impressed by, her coruscating insight, and (ii) stunned and embarrassed by her outburst. At other times, when she’s just got herself into a crowded but secure corner of the train carriage, when people are pushing her, and jostling to get to the doors a split-second earlier than they otherwise would, she feels an enormous righteous anger boiling in her guts, and she can almost taste its poisonous churning in her throat, pressing against the back of her tongue, urging her to ‘say it, say it…’.

It’s as if something is brewing inside her, something she can’t name or describe, but which nevertheless terrifies her with its power, welling up and threatening to burst. Nameless as it is, she knows that if this thing ever escapes from inside her and is expressed, then everything will be lost, and the comfortable, predictable life she’s always known will collapse.

She looks at the glowing green splashes of carcinogenic, radioactive paint on the end of her alarm clock’s hands, and translates their spatial configuration in the darkened room into numbers and words – 2:47 in the morning. (There’s one part of her consciousness that starts reflecting on her fresh amazement that her brain can perform this act of translation in the dark, with no visible cues beyond the faint green light, but this positive thought is rapidly swamped by a swelling panic and exasperation that it’s nearly three o’clock, and that she’s barely slept all night, and that she’ll have to get up in three hours, when her second alarm (under her pillow, but piercingly loud) will go off. Some nights, she knows that she might as well just give up, get up, and turn on the lights and make herself a cup of tea and read a book or listen to the radio. She’s not sure yet if tonight is one of those nights – but it’s not far off it. As she lies there in the dark, with the faint ‘clack’ of the alarm clock’s hands becoming gradually more audible against the background silence, she recalls other nights when she’s lain awake and felt anxious: some of these nights have fixed themselves clearly in her memory, with greater clarity and insistence than their actual content can actually warrant; and, yet, there they are – memories which, for whatever reason, by whatever accident of emotional alertness or sensory receptivity, have fused themselves vividly in her memory.

[eg] Waking up in a hotel room in a strange city whose language she scarcely knew, she’d found that sleep had dissipated the fear and speechless nervousness he’d experienced on arrival, when she had been terrified to repeat the native-language phrases she’d been rehearsing ever since she’d got off the train at the international railway terminal. She’d misjudged the walk from the station – it was far further than she’d anticipated from the map, and it had been punctuated with difficult road junctions, and milled with crowds, towards whom she felt fearful and apologetic, and of whom she was afraid, lest they detect her alienness and home in on her as a vulnerable victim.

When she entered the polished marble hotel lobby – pushing the glass door open with her shoulder while her hands gripped her bag handles like eagles’ talons, she’d had been sweating uncomfortably, conscious of her breasts against her woollen jumper, and of the chafing between her legs where her rather chubby thighs rubbed against each other. The concierge had given room details and navigation instructions in stilted English (the only language they shared) while Mathilde half-listened, feeling overly conscious of the droplets of sweat forming on her forehead and welling into larger drops that capilliaried their way down her fringe and eyelashes.

Now, with a blur of amber streetlight washing out the details of the hotel bedroom ceiling’s plaster-work, she feels calmer, disengaged from her normal existence by spatial distance, and made more alert by the experiential novelty of this new country: the distinctive architecture and yellow brickwork of the railway terminus roof; the gothic grey stone frontages and arched windows of the department stores and shop frontages, now undercut by the cheap shops that have replaced the ‘respectable’ businesses of the previous century; the metal post boxes with their weathervane caps; the way that people park their motorbikes and scooters on the pavement – so different from the clinically clear pavements of her own country; and here, abroad, she can’t help but notice how much more racially heterogeneous the demographic is – which finds this simultaneously troubling and invigorating.

There’s a faint slur of traffic over the roof tops from far away beyond the tight-packed buildings of the city, and when the net curtains blow in the breeze it reminds her of how a deep sigh feels, and of how her fear had felt earlier: hollow, expanding, palpitating and unsure. A last exhalation: that broad swelling and retreat of the curtains. It feels like loss, like life slipping away quietly, something essential and irretrievable expelled with every breath. In the dark, the sense of loss had slowly merged into sleep as she pressed her face and body to the cool, stretched surface of the cotton sheets.

The clatter of unfeasibly large aluminium pans being stacked in the kitchen of a nearby restaurant woke her again, startling her awake from a position where she had been lying – open-mouthed and snoring – on her belly. When she had registered where she was from the highlights on the wardrobe, door-jamb, dresser, smoke-detector and TV set, she listened to the comforting sounds of kitchen activity and the humour-filled voices of the night-time staff as they went about their cleaning and preparation routines. Their work made her feel somehow in touch with the world. Their voices carried quite plainly – though to her, unintelligibly – as if there were a blanket of fog at rooftop height that reflected the sound. It made her think of autumn at home, when the lowing of cows would carry across night-stilled, silent distances of field and water.

(c. 1090 words)