ELIZABETH COLEMAN
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Shivers
He said he’d seen the way her life was, he’d watched for years and she wasn’t getting what she needed, she’d wither and die without him. Now he is free, she should make herself also. And now is their chance.
And her friend says, ‘Don’t hurry.’
But it’s urgent. The madness is an urgency, a springing to life, a wanting, a need to sway and sing, to couple, really, truly couple. Unexpectedly she’s exalted and glorified. She is fifty-four.
There’s too much to negotiate. Ordinarily negotiating is difficult but negotiating whilst she simmers, whilst her mind can’t think anything except she is wanted passionately, that is impossible.
Once, in Amsterdam, she’d tried space cake. Quite suddenly it’d pulled her through herself whilst the floor dropped away, and she feels the same now, whooshed through, the floor descending out of existence and she is standing and walking funny, lifting her feet like an astronaut. Inside is urgent rushing but outside everything is slow and she sees from a vast distance. Yet her heart, her pulsing, really connects her to what life truly is, and to her deepest self.
Her friend listens to him. He says he knows what is needed. He knows he can give it. He says the name of his ex many times. He has been shat on. This time he knows that won’t happen, though love is not a word he trusts any more. Wants, yes. In bed at night he thinks of her and really wants her – for intimacy, not necessarily sex, intimacy he knows she wants and would return. She is safe, and she deserves him. He won’t have to search for anyone else with all that that entails. He’s known her for twelve years – there won’t be any nasty surprises. If he was her, he’d accept the offer, grab it with both hands, leave, join him and have a good life.
She tells her friend that sometimes, in her kitchen, she delights in the sight of her own creativity – mixing bowls and muffin tins, a tea towel over steaming buns, a half finished painting on the table by a tangled pile of material scraps, crazy yellows, purples and greens, interesting textures, waiting to be made up. She loves these scattered works in progress.
And now there’s another tangled pile, of passionate reds. Is it of her own making? Creative surges come unbidden, of their own accord, like real prayers, stuff bubbles up from within, it cannot be forced, it waits its own time to surface. This is not willed, may be a real prayer, a blessing, a bubbling reality. Behind the pile of reds, a pile of greys. Grey hair, grey skin, grey thoughts, grey, ordinary days. So many works in progress. Her friend says his place looks too neat and reeks of his ex. How long is it? Only a week?
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