So far everything Sophie did was routine: opening the boot and throwing in her overstuffed little black suitcase, now moving round to the passenger seat and throwing in the road map. No. This was a little different; usually it would be on his knee for the whole journey his finger tracing their route from A to B. The water bottle would also usually be on his side and he would make sure that he watered her regularly. He always seemed to be able to judge just when she was wilting, Sophie thought as she jammed the bottle into her door. She sat in the driver’s seat and threw her CD case onto the passenger seat. She watched as it skidded over the glossy cover of the road map onto the floor. She cursed as she leaned over and scooped it up from the floor and placed it a little more carefully on the seat beside her.

“There,” she said aloud to herself as if the sound of her voice could chase away the inane thoughts of bad omens.

Next Sophie set about adjusting her mirrors, her seat, her seat belt. Fine, fine, fine, everything was fine in the car; she was fine in the car. Was she? The tears had stopped and the tight anxious feeling which prevented her from eating was lessening. I’m doing this, she reminded herself. She had packed a case; she had shut up her tiny little apartment, making sure to leave upturned bottles of water in the window boxes before she closed the windows. She had pulled all the plugs out, done the dishes, because no one was going to do it for her. Nope, she wasn’t going to come home and find that he had miraculously changed his mind and done her dishes.

Sophie checked her wing mirror, indicated, checked her blind spot and pulled out. There was nothing behind her, but old habits die hard. He always laughed at her English politeness. “When do you ever see anyone indicating to pull out of a parking space?”

“Well, maybe people wouldn’t drive around for forty-five minutes desperately trying to find a parking space, madly reversing at the least possibility of one or honking their horns to find out if someone is parking or pulling out.”

“If you don’t like it Sophie...”

How many times had he threatened her with that sentence and when had he started meaning it?

When she had first arrived and it was all new, she had had the same anxious knot in her stomach and each time he said that it was as if the knot tightened one notch. Her face would crumple and he would notice her gaze on him for that one second too long. A smile would spread across his face and he would rub his thumb along her chin, along her bottom lip, between her lips gently forcing her mouth open.

“You know I don’t mean it.”

But each time was a little reminder; you are a guest in my country, you don’t belong here. Now, as she pulled effortlessly onto the peripherique she wondered if she still felt like a guest. The radio was on Le Mouv and she knew that in between her CD’s she would flick onto France Info for the traffic news as she continued her journey southwards. What radio station would she listen to in England? Is that what made her feel at home? She had read somewhere a few weeks before that home was where your post was delivered. For months his post had still arrived at their home. She had felt lost then, afraid to leave the apartment for fear of what she would find when she returned.

The reception on Le Mouv was getting worse. She flicked onto her second pre-programmed station. Traffic was fine. Not that she had been worried, it was Monday and nobody left Paris on Monday. Nope, Parisians preferred to wait until it was a journee rouge or orange when the traffic was at its worse and leave en masse. He liked to leave with the rest of the crowd. Just because they had rented a gite from Saturday to Saturday, they left on Saturday. She had fought at first. “You don’t drive, you don’t know how tiring it is to drive in traffic.” His solution had been to get Christophe and Celine to join them on their weekends away so that the car was heavier and when Christophe took over the driving she cringed every time he clunked gears or she heard her poor engine whirring as Christophe cruised on blissfully unaware that there was a fifth gear. So that had been one more battle she had lost, and that was without even going into the whole Christophe and Celine thing. Christophe was a sexist prig and an afternoon with Celine made you want to go and hug a cactus for comfort. But she had persevered, she had eventually warmed to them both and then without warning came the big freeze. Dinner invitations, parties, cinema outings, a whole year where they were not invited at all. He had eventually confronted Christophe about it and discovered that it was due to some insensitive comment that she had made about Celine. He had been so upset with her.

“Well, you can be a little gauche at times.”

“It was a joke.” She had defended herself.

“But you don’t know Celine. She was humiliated that you made a joke about her to your friends.”

The rest of the discussion had taken place in her head as she had furiously pushed her trolley around Monoprix. My friends understood it was a joke, and that if I was making a joke about Celine it was because I considered her a friend. After three years you say I don’t know her. I don’t know her. I haven’t spent countless weekends with her miserable face in the back of my car reading her every single bloody thought. How my little Peugeot wasn’t big enough for her perfect long legs, bum or ego. How many times? How many times had she not said what she meant or rather said what she hadn’t meant. Well, no more, Sophie thought.

She decelerated a little and reached over for her CD case. She hadn’t really paid attention to what she had grabbed that morning. The CD collection had been split rather unceremoniously. On returning from a bank appointment to sort out her new single life she had found him rifling through the collection. A packed bag by the door had already signalled his presence. She had known that this was coming, but when she had seen what he had started to choose she had snapped. He had always been the one to mercilessly take the piss about her choice of music and yet that was her REM CD, her Belle & Sebastien, her Radiohead.

Sophie fell to her knees before the CD rack. “Here why don’t you take this?” John Lee Hooker flew across the room smashing into the table as his surprised expression ducked just in time. “Or this with her fucking tweetie pie voice.” St. Etienne bounced off his shoulder before sliding under the sofa. “Or this piss boring tosser.” The corner of the Jacques Brelle CD caught his hand covering his face and she knew she had hurt him and she had an uncontrollable urge to scream for joy. Good, good, good, at last. Of course it had all ended in tears as she retrieved broken pieces of plastic from the most unlikely corners for days.

So what did she have in here? She was terrible at labelling her burnt CD’s; apparently this was another fatal flaw of hers. But a smile spread across her face as it started. It was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She remembered the first time she had heard it from start to finish. It had been a Saturday morning. Five or six am, she couldn’t exactly remember, but it had been early. She had waited shivering on Mutley Plain for the mini-bus to pick her up and when it arrived the door was opened her bag was pulled in, she followed and as the door was slammed shut behind her she was handed a joint without even being fully aware of who was in the bus. After the last passenger had been picked up the music had started and so she always associated that album with that weekend, that experience with that album: Nine go off to jump out of a plane.

She had had crazy ideas back then. What the hell had she wanted to jump out of a plane for? Was she crazy? Who knows, but she had done stuff then because she wanted to, not because it was the best thing to do or because she had compromised.

“You know, in a relationship Sophie you have to compromise.” He had said to her after one of her explosions. But what had he compromised? She had moved to Paris, she had moved into his life. He hadn’t been unkind to her, he hadn’t treated her badly, abused her, but gradually her life had been packed away into neat little boxes. First her paintings. “Oh but Sophie we don’t have room to put them all up.” So they were stored in the cave while the walls of the salon stayed bare. Then a flat pack box containing a small chest of drawers from IKEA had appeared.

“I thought you could put all your paints away tidily.” How thoughtful she had thought with a tinge of pain as the brightly flecked easel was folded away and the paints were organised and put away.

Eventually the wardrobe became uniform black and one day she threw out her last pair of Doc Marten boots. Not big things, none of it was huge, but little by little what had she become? When he had come home from work and sat on the sofa staring out the window she used to bounce onto the sofa and stick her head on his lap declaring: “ME time!” When had that stopped? People change, they can’t be expected to stay the same, but where had the girl who jumped out of planes gone? When had she become afraid to take risks?

She had known, no that was a lie, she had guessed that something was wrong. She had fought; she had tried to pull him back to her, while secretly knowing that something had changed beyond repair.

There had been a longing inside of her. There were nights when she woke up, in her dreams she had been holding it, clutching it, it had named her and to wake up with empty hands filled her with a pain so deep she thought she would never have the strength to get out of bed. In those moments the space between them in bed was immeasurable.

As Sophie sang along to Getting Better she smiled. Now she could name it. Then the longing had been for a him or her, a small bundle of joy. Yes, she had been longing to give birth to something, but now she realised it was her. She wanted to break out of herself.

Sophie had been aimlessly roaming around yet another supermarket having forgotten what had made her enter and as she scanned the aisles she hoped it would return to her; instead she found a familiar face. Despite the fact that they hadn’t seen each other for years Christine had been shocked. Sophie had lost weight and looked positively gaunt. She hadn’t managed to get anything out of Sophie in the supermarket, but she had been worried enough to pay a visit to the apartment.

As Sophie opened the door, she explained that she was tackling the mountain of dishes. Christine roamed round the rooms that looked in a state of semi-demolition. The study was in particular disarray, but then Christine looked again. No, the study was the one place where something was going on. Sophie’s easel was out, paints, brushes, linseed oil mixed with the harsh smell of white spirit were scattered irreverently around the room. It was then that Christine understood he was gone.

Sophie had finally appeared with two gin and tonics and found Christine in front of her half finished canvas. “What does it mean?” Christine took her gin and tonic without tearing her eyes away from the canvas.

Sophie frowned. “I’m not sure yet.”

The two women continued to stare at the canvas.

Sophie laughed out loud as the first bars of For the benefit of Mr. Kite started. He, Bob, the prodigious joint producer had loved the song. In the evening after their first day of training, as the shadows grew darker and the yawns grew ever wider, one by one the other seven had gone to bed leaving her facing Bob. She had suddenly felt confident to reveal herself and had grabbed his notebook scribbling a silly picture. She had passed it to him and he had scribbled a line or two. This had gone on for an hour or two, he providing lines that she illustrated or vice versa. Finally his creativity had extended to joining several sheets together with rizlas to provide her with a huge canvas.When the others had risen the following morning, they had found all the chairs tables and sofas pushed out the way. The floor was covered with a huge sheet of paper covered in the biro and pencil turmoil of Bob’s words and her pictures. The bottom left corner of the paper was relatively clear and the tip of a wing could be made out. As the eye followed the outline of the wing through several shades of biro the form of an angel could be made out. Bob’s words filled in much of the feathers and body and Sophie’s frantic shading filled in the rest.

Sophie had stuck her head out from her sleeping bag and scanned seven sleep filled eyes in awestruck faces. Bob had woken up shortly afterwards and manically folded the whole damn thing up before announcing he was off to move the mini-bus, ready to take them to the jump centre. The weather had turned that night while they slept so that they didn’t even jump that day, although in a way Sophie already had.

By the time Sophie pulled into Christine’s she was nearing the end of her Catatonia CD. The afternoon sunlight was spilling into the car casting a golden glow over her dashboard. Sophie left the key in the ignition so that she could belt out the last few lines of the song. As she watched Christine come out she rolled down the window and continued even as Christine leant in laughing at her. As the last bars faded away Christine could barely contain herself.

“Did you bring them?”

Sophie nodded and got out the car. She opened the back door and carefully pulled out the blanket which had been protecting the canvases on the journey down. Sophie carefully took one and Christine the other, then she followed Christine into the house into the best lit room for this time of the afternoon. Sophie knew that Christine’s preciseness was covering a thinly disguised zeal to see what was beneath the brown paper covering.

The paintings were placed side by side and then together they ripped the paper away. They stepped back in unison and admired the two paintings. The first was set in a black gradually turning to burgundy background framing a standing woman, looking defiantly out from the canvas bound by thick leather belts with chunky silver buckles. As the eye followed her outline down to her right hand which was free from the rest of her body, it became apparent that the belts were falling away releasing her.

The second painting was of the same woman, the background was now pale blue, celestial. The woman was now naked with her head slightly bowed to one side as if looking over her shoulder. Her fingers were spread wide and she seemed to be in the process of spreading her wings.

Copyright, 2006, The Pimple Continued

Labels: short story