Sunday 6th November:
Sunday: Mathilde
A delivery van pulls up in the nighttime street outside, its brakes squeaking and scraping through lack of maintenance: she visualises metal grinding on metal, the stop-lights coming on, and the exhaust fumes pulsing through those red lights. The van’s diesel engine goes on chug-chugging after the driver gets out and slams the door, and the sound of the driver’s shouting and the easy, early-morning laughter of the restaurant staff ring through the street. These people are at ease: they own the street while the night lasts.
Although she’s staying in the hotel ‘on business’, she feels the pleasurable relaxation and novelty of being on vacation creeping over her. It’s nice, as it seems ages since she last felt genuinely relaxed and unselfconscious. The amber wash of light on the ceiling comes and goes with the slow, sleepy blinking of her eyes, and she drifts through sleep and into her half-lost past: the past that only returns, unbidden, involuntarily evoked by the elusive echo of a forgotten sense memory brushing across the fringes of consciousness. In that foreign hotel room, with the light on the textured plaster ceiling and the night air breathing in and out through the flimsy curtains, she remembers her childhood bedroom, when she thought her parents were still in love with each other, and she was still a happy child.
Gloom. In Mathilde’s little bedroom, upstairs in her parents’ Corporation-owned house, she hears the floor boards creak beneath the thin carpet outside her door. The light shows there at the foot of the door, filtered by the fine carpet fibres. Her father’s distinctive tread, his poised weight held suspended there, a mass of shadow and light, ears straining to hear the sound of his daughter’s breathing. Mathilde tries extra hard to stay silent, immobilising her head on the pillow and breathing through her half-open mouth, dragging the breath slowly along the roof of her mouth (it sounds quieter that way inside her head…).
She’s lying on her left side, staring into the shadowed space between the bed and the chest of drawers, her eyes wide and dry against the dusty dark. She doesn’t want her dad to know that she’s awake; she doesn’t want dad to come in, to sit on the bed, to start talking to her. Or even just to stand there silently, looking at her.
A fan of orange-yellow light from the opened door will come in over Mathilde’s raised shoulder as the door purrs slowly open across the carpet fuzz. What light there already is in the room comes from the pebbled window set into the top of the doorframe, and that light brushes over the curved fuselages and engine nacelles of the model aeroplanes that hang from the ceiling on their cotton threads: the planes and the thread and the thumb tacks make balanced triangles of tension and weight.
As the door opens, the grit and lumps in the ceiling’s emulsion paint throw little shadows, and Mathilde can see, raising her eyes to the ceiling, her own dirty thumb prints around the heads of the tacks, and little crumbly-edged craters in the plaster where the tacks couldn’t find proper purchase.
A big black bomber starts to rotate slowly in the faint draft from the door, and Mathilde focuses on it as it swings round to the fullest extent that the thread will allow, and then starts to rotate back the other way; her dad is hanging on to the handle of the opened door all this time. Mathilde tries not to blink, as if dad is less likely to realise she’s awake if she just keeps everything completely still.. The bomber starts another rotation, and Mathilde listens to the breath passing heavily through dad’s nose. (Dad has got bushy hairs in his nostrils, and Mathilde imagines that this foliage makes it harder for the breath to weave its way through, and that dad has to make an extra effort to breathe; if she was asked, this would be one of her dad’s defining characteristics.
The door handle creaks with the weight of her father’s grip. Mathilde can smell the familiar ‘dad smells’ of oil, cleaning agent, sweat and cigarettes. Dad smells like chemicals and machinery. Mathilde’s nose, eyes and throat all feel dry and stretched with dust and tension.
Dad sniffs, sighs, and closes the door; the splayed rhombus of light on the ceiling starts to contract, and the shapes and perspectives of the aeroplanes shift as the cheap latch snats into place with dry echo. Mathilde relaxes again. Dad turns out the landing light and, in a sudden shift, the room is uniformly black for a moment. Gradually, though, the light from the streetlamp outside, previously unnoticed in the more powerful cast of the landing light, seeps into visibility.
She waits for a car to come past: she likes the mysterious way that the headlights’ glow seems to track slowly across the ceiling before reaching a tipping point where it halts, then ricochets back in the other direction, seems to fold back on itself. She can’t work out the angles and mechanics of how this hypnotic tracking process works: it’s a mesmeric, nightly mystery.
There sometimes seem to be great stretches of time before sleep will come: when she’s older, she’ll look back at those times and wish that she could reclaim them – all those hours spent thinking, wondering, with no sense of urgency about going to sleep, no sense that the next day was pressing, that life was hurrying by. Sometimes, in these dead times, she’ll lie there doubling up numbers in her head, and she’ll eventually fall asleep before she can get much further than 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…
When she counts like this, she feels as if he’s in touch with something strange and distant, like the night sky or the space between the little balls of matter (red, blue and yellow in the models at school) that make up atoms. With her eyes closed to reveal the profound darkness of the back of her eyelids, she imagines that she’s rising up towards the vast, mysterious night sky that glitters with stars, like white sugar scattered on the dark tablecloth that’ s spread on the rough-topped old table in the chilly dining room every Sunday.
Now that she’s old enough to be left alone at home in the school holidays – mum goes out to work at the local packing factory – Mathilde has a secret that she has to keep: whenever she heats milk for his elevenses mug of coffee, he takes pinch after pinch of sugar and throws it onto the orange-glowing electric cooker ring, where she loves to see the coloured flashes of light as the sugar ignites in momentary flares of white, sapphire blue, and violet. In her mind, the stars and the gases in space are painted in these vivid colours, in the kind of crystal-clear images he’s seen in books and on film posters, but so rarely in real life. There’s something addictive about those brief cooker-top bursts of energy and clarity: as if the universe – from its local, familiar manifestations, all the way up to its vastest and most distant reaches – is more lively and interesting for a moment, vividly coloured and dynamic in a way that’s not sustained in the rest of her life; the circuits of grey and brown streets, the flat colours of the schoolroom and the uniform colours of school uniforms and the times’ fashions of brown and faded blue, the lumpy textures and flat colours of the food she gets at school.
At home, with the run of the house, these flashes of light in the kitchen have a conspiratorial aspect – her secret world of hidden naughtiness; she knows – even without any evidence – that she shouldn’t be burning sugar on the cooker top, and yet, at that age, she’s so insular and cut off from other people’s consciousness that she can’t imagine that her mother notices the burnt brown crust of sugar on the cooker ring, or that she doesn’t see the caramelised sugar remnants when she raises the cooker top to clean the space under the rings [which she obviously does – perhaps there’s something here about Mathilde’s inability to see beyond the world of her own imagination…slight Asperger’s thing, like a low-level inability to read emotions very well…? – this might prefigure her later emotional distance/ineptitude/closedness/anxiety?].
She’d like to go into space one day. She watches all of the television programmes that show rockets blasting off or returning space capsules parachuting towards the ocean, tracked by helicopters and big grey navy ships. She’d like to fly one of those space rockets, to sit at the top of the rocket and feel the attention of the world on her, and all those peoples’ admiration warming her; the spacemen all look handsome, clean-cut, and admirable – men who everyone likes and admires, and who are lucky enough to be able to work with wonderful machines in the beautiful world of space beyond the earth. And there are women too, sometimes, who somehow seem glamorous and attractive even when they aren’t very pretty.
When the rockets tremble on the launch pads, with the gases boiling out of them and the flames vibrating madly at their base, she feels that sense of hope and anxiety that all the world must be feeling: the sense that the brave, beautiful, noble astronauts in the rockets are carrying everyone’s hopes with them, while fearing that something will go wrong; a few years ago, one of the rockets caught fire on the launch pad, and the three astronauts were burned in the capsule. She sees a charred, twisted, collapsed metal space in her mind, with the three men in it seeming asleep – unburned and unspoiled by the fire. She can’t imagine what a burned person would look like, so she just sees White, Grissom and Chaffee in repose, eyes closed, chins on their chests.
She rolls onto her back in the gloom of her little bedroom, then lifts herself up on her elbows so that she can see the poster of the solar system on the wall at the foot of her bed. She sent off for this poster using a yellow form (with blue lettering) that she cut from the back of a cereal packet – she had to pester mum to buy three packets of the same cereal on the trot so that she could collect the necessary tokens, and she (secretly) got a bit fed up with eating the same breakfast for months on end. But the poster made it all worthwhile: it was the biggest thing that she’d ever owned – four feet by three feet, with a narrow metal bar stiffening the top edge. It had arrived rolled up in a cardboard tube, and as she’d unrolled the thick, glossily printed paper on the kitchen table, she knew already that the thick blue-black background colour, the hot orange of the sun, and the carefully chosen colours of each of the other planets would be a part of her world for ever.
It all felt so right, that beautiful object, technically correct, unrolled on the kitchen table in the bright light of an early summer morning, with the long summer school holiday stretching away in front of her. Like something that she’d always known, but which she’d just seen and touched for the first time: the seeing and the touching had made it real to her.The poster’s rather tattered now: three or four years on, the metal stiffening bar is buckled, but she can still recall that sense of rightness, the sense that this object signified something important, and encapsulated something that was both beautiful and true. It marked the change from the time when she saw space and space flight through the comic book images and the cartoon-like space vehicles on the special wallpaper that mum and dad had bought for her room; a change to a world where precision and technical correctness had become more significant. This was the point where she saw that her life – her style of being in the world – had diverged from the other girls that she used to be friends with.
The bomber is still rotating slowly. It’s a Fokker 192 ‘Anvil’: a big six-engined monster, first built in the thirties, when people thought that bombers could win wars on their own. It was cumbersome, heavy, and slow, but Mathilde always found something reassuring about its massively thick wing root and fixed landing gear: there was something almost childlike about it in its similarity to the clumsy plastic approximations of machines that toy manufacturers make for pre-schoolers. It’s one of her favourite models. She loves the way that the mould-makers (what a lovely job to have – making the masters of things that will be reproduced thousands of times, and then lovingly reconstructed by people all over the world; all in a form that breaks down the original into smaller modules that slot together to recreate the whole) – she loves the way that the mould-makers have captured the way the high, thick wing meets the fuselage, the fabric-covered control surfaces of the elevators and the twin rudders on the y-shaped split tail, and the delicacy of the depressed lines that mark the edges of the metal-skinned fuselage’s individual panels.
She can recall the feel of the Anvil’s raw plastic moulding against her fingertips when she was building it for the first time (slightly intimidated by the size of the box, by the number of parts, and by the extent of the folded instruction leaflet – in those days, the instructions combined pictures
and words), and she recalls how her initial sensitivity to the matte textures of the plastic gradually faded as she handled the model’s parts for evening after evening; it had been winter, and she remembers how she’d had her bedroom window pegged open
just a touch so as to ventilate the glue- and enamel paint-fumed atmosphere. By the time she’d finished building the model, painting its under surfaces black and its upper surfaces with a dark grey mottle pattern over a paler grey base, the feel of its individual pieces and surfaces had all been subsumed into the completed whole: it was now a finished piece, a coherent structure, and when he picked it up her hand automatically moved the plane through gentle arcing turns or simulated its slow, lumbering take off – all with the appropriate sound effects, of course – while recalling the rich smell of the black paint that she’d had to use so copiously. Looking back, she sometimes wonders if those paint and glue smells were a more important attraction than she realised at the time: a combination that nightly called her back to her bedroom to luxuriate in their rich, narcotic chemical blend.
(c. 2480 words)
