What is made after dinner

We had made a perfect couple.

‘Perfect’ is typically a superfluous adjective, especially when applied to ‘couple’ – as I myself have often heard  ‘ a perfect couple’ exclaimed fleetingly, even adoringly, I have even once before used it to reference myself and another.

But despite all, I am largely convinced – Lilly and I made a perfect couple.

I remember the very afternoon when she sat facing me over dinner at The Anchor, allowing me the privilege of seeing my own reflection swim towards me in her own eyes.  That afternoon she wore a single white rosary over one of her wrists where the skin sheathed the bone so fine that it seemed diffused with the marble-blue of her veins. That was when I knew she loved me, a love she seemed to orchestrate perfectly – right down to the way she slid the champagne flute through her fingers like a pen.

The way she said, allowing the breath to unfurl like a rich smoke as she spoke - “He’s paying,” – and the almost imperceptible wink of a lightly shadowed eye, which accompanied it, for me, just for me.

I wasn’t the only one there, mind you.

No, it had become a feature of custom that every Friday evening – following the weeks work or lack of it – my wife and I would go to dinner with Mr and Mrs Wieht. Lily – I always knew she hated to be known by the title of ‘Mrs Wieht’ would roll her eyes at her husband who sat beside her at dinner and say ‘O yes, he’s half German you know’ in an undercutting mimicry of surprise which never  failed to make me laugh. He would always half-laugh too – in a strange disjointed kind of way, shaking that poorly combed head of hair of his.

There was always the tuned tinkling of laughter following Lily’s usual quip of ‘he’s paying’ –  and whilst the rest gave themselves the momentary indulgence of a guffaw, I would look lingeringly to Lilly’s eyes upon mine. Only then the laughter would escalate a little too uncomfortably for my liking – with Frieda, my wife, beginning that disjointed whine of mirth which I always assumed came more commonly to domestic animals than people. She would sit alongside me – snuffling and whining under the immensity of a laugh seemingly reflective of the immensity of her character.

Even when I met her, Frieda had been one of those girls referred to through a thick tone of artificial affection as ‘bubbly’. Five years into marriage and she seemed soapy and superfluous before my eyes – a natural decline, I told myself. I supposed there was little I could do about it – she was efficient anyhow, and filled the inevitable silences of suburban living even just by the meandering of her movements.

She seemed happy – even when going out for the meal with the Wieht’s – for I knew that really she would much prefer a night in with a bottle of tasteless wine and a big home-cooked meal equally tasteless but serving as an illustration of her nights effort. It was increasingly she would keep herself in the kitchen as the weeks went on and our routine continued – the working week – seeing the Wiehts – and back again, and she would occasionally survey me with the quick fastidious gestures of a cat, big-eyed and wary. When I asked her what the matter was, she would say –

“Nothing!” In a sugar-thick voice which wobbled like blancmange.

I decided to leave it at that, and I assume that so did she. It would sort itself out, I resolved, just as the previous problems had. It was increasingly into the Winter months I noticed Frieda dissolving aspirins, a crumbled palmful in water and drinking the putrid solution with an almost religious regularity. Even that stopped after a while – ‘everything stops’ – as Lilly said, her lips rolling as the clear circle of the coin she sent across the table towards me, her face apparently everywhere in the unwrapping of after-dinner mints. For me, it was a significant ceremonial gesture.

Anyhow, I digress.

But ‘digression’ it surely is not to contemplate one of such charm, so utterly alive! Her very gaze was suspended with delicacy – as if her eyelids were coated with an imperceptible weight. Tiredness,  I sometimes dread to think, though it rarely entered my mind that such perfection could succumb to the strains of  mortality. Even her husband seemed aware of her superiority, sitting beside her – flitting nervous glances between my wife and I. At our Friday gathering we would sit typically at  one of those regular rectangular dining tables – nothing special, but significantly elevated in my esteem – for on one side I would sit beside Frieda, and on the other side would sit Lily and her husband, Lily always positioning herself directly opposite me. The candle tapered between us, as if thick with our mingling breaths and the awareness of significance of these moments.

“”Roog. Roog? Is that what you call it -?”

It was at one of our early dinners I was interrupted with a great pawing at my arm, with Frieda beside me simultaneously engaged in this rude molestation whilst also straining over the menu. – splayed crudely over her lap. I opened my mouth to speak, and yet the voice which emerged was not mine.

“Mrs. Ray, I think you’ll find that it is pronounced – rouge.”

Perhaps it was actually then I knew Lily loved me. Her voice flowed, tinged with the very intensity of the wine she described – her one deliberate, almost tingling condescending which rather than made me pity my wife, sent me crimson with embarrassment.

“Frieda never had a talent for languages.” I responded quickly, emphasizing my wife’s name in the hope that it would infer to Lily the level of regard I held for her talents.

 It was a talent extended when Lily ordered the white wine instead for herself, watching Frieda take  hungry almost blood-ruddy mouthfuls of the rouge before dipping her head across the table, speaking to us all – “I prefer white – casts a better reflection of you all”, finishing with a lacquered laugh she smothered into a napkin and settled over her lap.

But when she said “You” – I knew that it was especially for me.

They began entering Winter and it was into the Spring our dinners continued. Always the same restaurant – The Anchor -  for my interest remained with Lilly and  thus the food, the wine, the location, seemed to slip to the superfluous. Not that I minded, as for myself, a new necklace aligning the lengths of her throat, a new rosary encircling the wrist – was an indulgence enough.

Only sometimes it was interrupted. Interrupted as I am now – with assessments and questions, doctors face tipped angularly towards mine as if attempting an exhibition of understanding, an upturned palm pressed to my arm in the form of restraint.

“I don’t need restraining!” I cry – now more often than not at each visit. The words wash over me in an etherizing echo – becoming something numb and awful. The same series of words which circulated my mind as I looked into her eyes, extending my hand under the table – I don’t need restraining…

Sometimes my fingers would brush hers and she would sigh, those imperceptible tremors of breath meant only for me, a sigh which caressed the arrangement of hair she seemed to sculpt around herself. Sometimes I would just be on the point of seizing her hand when – we were interrupted, as I said.

Frieda and Lily’s husband would  penetrate the moment with their ringing laughter.

“And she said – what?!” He whinnied, slapping his paper-thin palms on his thighs with such audacity I thought it would be close to drawing blood. He was all together a fragile man, who seemed to stare upwards from an assemblage of bone – he seemed more constructed of air than anything else, just like his name, which was seldom mentioned and something I cannot at this moment want  Lilly talked little about him, and even less to him – occasionally addressing him with a cautionary glance as if examining a purchase for lasting flaws. Then she would look back at me, when their laughter would be finally coming to a close.

Out of the corner of my eye I would watch Frieda lean in towards him, her lips undulating in that wobbling way of hers – “Say, I haven’t even needed to wear my rouge today – I haven’t laughed so much in ages…”. Her voice stuttered unpleasantly in slow bursts – making me faintly nauseous. Oh, to be able to leave them both at home and for just lilly and I to be itemized for an evening! Occasionally I succumbed to the temptation of the thought that I would only be asking for a table for two – Lilly, feather-light and enchanting on my arm…

Her voice slid down my spine with that sensation as she spoke to me one evening when the roses at the centre of the table burned to an orange beneath the lingering candle-light. We had been there a long time – Frieda chattering away to lily’s husband about the oh-so-hot-weather, and similar….

“Listen, Tom” Lily spoke my name with an urgency which thrilled me, stirring the very depths of my consciousness as if shifted through a seashell  “These Friday meetings,” – she  pronounced ‘meetings’ with a way that was more-than-suggestive, I am sure “ – are charming and all that, but…”

Her sudden negation caught my sweet immersion by surprise. I dipped my head closer to hers.

“… It’s just that with the – you know – finances being difficult, especially considering his lack of rise over this past year; I was thinking that perhaps we ought to cut these dinners off. I mean, we could all meet up for the occasional walk or something…”

Her harsh reference to her husband and his lack of funds made me seethe – not at her, but for her. He already declined me of her arm – he was not going to decline me of her company, I was sure. O Lilly! Lovely Lilly – her eyes crystalline across the table as if expectant to be ringed by some rich reply, her head interrogatively on one side. A pearl bracelet sashayed slightly against her wrist as she rested her chin and sighed almost longingly.

“it’s not an issue,” – that night I met her sigh with mine “I don’t mind paying.”

My words worked my lips hot and impulsive like a kiss – intentional, entirely intentional.

Her smile was sudden, almost overwhelming in its intensity.

“Well that’s settled then.” She declared boldly – finally defiant of all who might have heard. But Frieda and  Lily’s husband were too busy furling gossip by the forkful. Their idle chatter and sharp insinuations seemed to mar the sincerity of my words.

It would be alright, I resolved, I would show the final sincerity in summarising the meal with a flourish of banknotes – leafing through the peeled green which Lilly’s eyes seemed to desperately feed upon, as if admiring some rich foliage. Poor girl, I thought, it must be very bad at home. As I began to pay for these Friday dinners the spring spiced itself into summer, stoking a palpable heat which I kindled between my fingers in increasingly presenting Lilly with little trinkets  - objects of affection, ornaments, jewellery.

At this, she would always bridle her head as if responding to a touch upon the cheek I so very much intended, though instead my hands were fast to cool metal cutlery which I pictured to be her smooth, fine wrists which rose at points where the bone skimmed through.

It was only once that her husband commented on the delicacy of her frame, referring to her significantly in the second person.

“Oh, I don’t know what she does, always out of the house… rushing around most likely.’ He chuckled. “What are you like, eh Lil?”

The idiomatic inferences of his voice only intensified by dislike for him – underlined by the awful eclipsed utterance of ‘Lil’, which was said in the mock-heroic melodrama of the young which made Frieda laugh and laugh until she was quite pink at the gills. It was  that night Frieda had forced herself into this sleek black assemblage, her hair combed back behind her with equal severity – quite striking actually. It was like having a good bottle of wine on the table – I might not care much for it myself, but it was a pleasing article to have by. Most of the time I was just relieved at the fact she provided ample entertainment for Lilly’s husband – their discussions infantile and arguments uneducated, but accumulating in  their intensity over time which increasingly allowed me the privilege of an additionally long look into their eyes, a precious minute in which I could present her with some love-token or another.

“It’s nothing,” I would insist with the very lacquer of a gentleman as I  would pass her rich candies, lace handkerchiefs, hairpins crusted with polished stone. Although Frieda became red in the face sometimes, I assured myself it was only because of her excitement in unaccustomed conversation – she had never got out much before we started these dinners. Besides, as Lilly accepted my gifts with a  blush and the bend of the head, I told myself I was the luckiest man alive. I even felt lucky   in that Frieda did not seem eager to question the fact that these weekly meals were paid from our income – perhaps the first time I  my life I told myself, albeit a little cruelly, that she had actually been quiet about something! This made me chuckle myself, a chuckle which was met the unfurling of Lilly’s little laugh.

Once she was laughing at her husband asking for another glass of wine – my triumph! I paid for the refill of his glass with a vacuous, almost soupy rouge in a way I hoped was adequately condescending – after all, the very chap seemed to be flaking away – it was only wine that seemed to keep him pink-cheeked and talking.

As summer simmered and bruised to autumn I noticed that Lilly’s cheeks were sometimes tipped with pink too. She stirred more against the stiff back of her sheet, coursing her long hair through the complex cradle of her fingers, tracing her cheekbones with a silk-paper touch. A woman’s way of beguilement I told myself – she  was the executor of her own exhibition, sometimes setting her clothes at jaunty angles too, for me, in a way that accentuated the figure beneath, breathing in sporadic little bursts which came to a climax as she spoke.

It was one of these evenings of the famed romantics where the rain pelted its confetti with all the fury of passion. Meant for me, I thought, meant for me.

“Well, yes, as I am spending more time apart from him than ever...” She mused across the table to me, twisting a ribbon of courgette caught like a shined serpent in her fork, her undertones similarly succulent “Then I’m sure he would have no reason to object if… well if we…”

“If we…” I urged, as if easing the words with the intensity of my eyes, my fingers clasping the cloth until I felt moisture, the same liquid tension in my very stare, suspended around that plurality – ‘we’.

“…If we came to an agreement that I could go back to stay in France.”

Her idea of our escape? A beautiful engagement?  I attempted to be optimistic, I attempted, I meant it.

“But France, why France?”

One side of my hearing was dominated by Frieda loudly discussing summer preserves.

“Well, my husband knows I have a fondness for it,  I always have. I cannot keep up the marriage much longer, I know that. Besides  - I am excellently acquainted in the area, I have my advisor,  Conrad…”

“Con-?”

“Aw, Tommy – there’s no need to congratulate me!” She interrupted in her ecstasy, evading my point completely and intensifying to a sudden surging whisper “I’ve been seeing Conrad for a very long time – yes, he knows how unhappy how things have been at home, and my weekends away with him have only affirmed that…”

I could listen any more. My ears rang.

“Oh yes, it really is sweet,” Frieda’s voice dripped beside me.

And there we sat – Frieda still talking away to Lilly’s husband, the candle gasping at an angle between the faces, and Lilly sat opposite me – watching the pair and smiling. I joined her in watching, my final alliance, watching Frieda’s hand reciprocated beneath the cloth, something which I had never noticed – a reformulation stared me sharply in the face and it bittered me.

Over the course of those dinners we had done it – we had made a perfect couple. 

Is this a story about your friend and mine?

‘Well, if you put it that way yes… it is medication in a cigarette form…’ The doctor spoke, slightly shifting the complex cradle of his fingers. ‘Very strong, very effective. Also, because of the nature of your condition, it provides means of occupation…’

Lola was sitting opposite the doctor in a poorly constructed chair she perceived immediately as placing her in a subordinate position – lowly and straw-like in the legs. The table between them warped in its dirty beige as she glowered up at him.

“But what I want to know is – isn’t it harmful? You know, in terms of second-hand smoke and all that?”

She was conscious of the colloquial ring of her speech beside the clipped and pruned pronunciation of the doctor. A hot haze of humiliation seemed to flower in her face, the thorns simultaneously singeing her skin. Holding her own ground at home was customary – John simply sat and shrivelled in the corner – but here the matter was different.

The doctor appeared almost to take relish in Lola’s apparent struggle, responding with a ceremonial slowness as if selecting each word individually.

“Well, Miss Lack – “

It was a start – the first medical professional finally to recognise that she wasn’t married. John was her partner. PART – ner – she remembered enunciating to one psychologist with especial emphasis . People seemed to assume she was someone else’s problem, sent by a seething husband exhausted with the hours of melancholy, and so forth. Sometimes she liked to think that it was John who was HER problem.

But a slight sense of power never stayed for very long.

“ – Miss Lack, I can only assure you that the method of medication will do no harm to your loved ones. It is tailored to yourself, your environment… the product of many years of medical innovation… “

A layer of scepticism seemed to shine thickly in each of her eyes. The doctor continued.

“It is not to be used in public, mind you, but as I have said… there are no effects on those who you love.”

There seemed something incomprehensible in the concept, Lola thought, but then again, much of her life itself had been incomprehensible, and sometimes she liked it that way. It made the acceptance of things easier, even automatic – allowing for a needle sharp transition of thought. After all, the method of medication itself had been very good according to her judgement – that morning she recounted how she had enjoyed the security of the cigarette between her fingers, the spreading sensation as the ferrules of smoke seemed to dissipate the anger and anxiety she imagined cold inside her like a layer of calcite. Any thoughts of imagery thrilled her, and anyhow, the image of her, cigarette balanced between the fingers in an almost ornate arrangement, was somewhat pleasant –

“Well,” She was evidently musing now, and the doctor leaned back as if assuming an easy triumph. “If that’s what you guarantee, I might as well give it a go…”

The doctor nodded slowly as if intending to express a bearing of great knowledge as a kind of weight.

“Hopefully, Miss Lack, it will provide a much more instantaneous form of relief from those spells of anger and anxiety we have been discussing, and also a form of medication which is perhaps more convenient to take – and remember.”

Those were the words she needed, her idealisations sweet and thickening amidst the crystallisation of such a promise.

‘Yes, yes.’  Her tone was emphatic with inevitable agreement, still shaping the very same words as she shuffled behind the pharmaceutical desk – already far removed from the  doctor and his accusative ambiguity. She concluded that she didn’t like him, - didn’t like the way he looked at her, his eyes tracing her face in repeated circular motions as if smearing the contours of her face to a greasy smoke, to nothing. Men like him, in the real world – that is, were trouble, she thought.

The pharmacist gazed at her in a type of mock-sympathy, puncturing  her series of thought with a forced etiquette. “Have you been on anti-depressant medication before?”

“Yes, yes.” The same standard response – always upfront, agreeing. She allowed herself to be settled into the agenda – perhaps that was her problem, always too eager. I only wanted to help, she remembered herself repeating over and over as she would gaze up at John with tremulous eyes brimming with hysteria, busy in the breakage of some routine or other. She remembered that he once made a cake for her, heavy almost as a standing stone, which she dropped in trying to help him present it. But he dropped more that day, she was convinced, dropped everything when he spat back at her face, shaken like a layer of water which a pebble pushes through ‘You’re ridiculous! Ridiculous!’

He had ruined it – yes, yes. The same answer when her name was called forward to collect her medication, the floor under her feet florid with other people’s lives and the anxious marks of illness. The packaging seemed almost anticlimactic in its neutrality – though white with a sterility she attempted to convince herself as being good for her, passing its unusual lightness over her fingers, into her palms…

‘Is there anything else, Mrs – ?’

At the certain term of address emerging from the lips of the painted young pharmacist, Lola turned away rapidly. How long she had stood for, simply staring at the package, she could not recall, did not want to recall. Quite a pleasant exhibition to herself she thought – only, people had to ruin it. Ruined everything.  The door she rushed through seemed somehow smaller compared to when she entered it.

*

The cigarette seemed to fit with her fingers in a kind of reciprocity she thought, cradling, soothing.

She would lean almost provocatively against the counter, blowing smoke rings as she read or looked out of the window and into the imperceptible distance. The smoke which seemed to smooth a sense of power over, as if immersing her frail human body in wax to become a hardened, beautiful emblem, yet full of mystery. She liked to think like that.

John, she convinced herself, did not like to think at all. Most days now he slumped in his chair in the corner – the possessive adjective being significant – the steely grip of his fingers seemed to seize the arms of that chair with an almost maniacal possession, Lola thought. Perhaps a couple of months before she would have been jealous – with a jealousy as florid and awful as the artificial arrangements of flowers which dominated the mantelpiece, erupting into their own coloured flames. She barely turned the fire on now – and told John not to do so either – it was with this medication she felt a warmth, a warmth restored, so to speak.

‘Allowing the true self to be revealed…’

Her eyes consumed the oft-read syntax greedily from the brochure inside the medication box. It was lunchtime and an iceberg lettuce on the kitchen counter glistened as if frozen, isolated and cold like a laboratory specimen. Lola paid it little attention – she had become accustomed to one of the cigarettes at lunch, one mid-afternoon and one at dinner time. It seemed to pacify her appetite a little – not that she minded. She assumed John did not mind either, though she noticed he would occasionally cast her perfunctory glances from his usual position – his eyes exposed and questioning beneath the pale hair in a way that irritated her.

‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the house,” He mumbled, his fingers knitting anxiously around a pen with which he was completing some writing in a dishevelled pad which laid across his lap like a fallen bird ‘I’ve never liked the idea of smoking in the house…’

As ever, Lola responded with a dismissive flick of the hair and a customary creasing of the lips.

‘Doctor’s orders,” She responded, leaning in his direction across the kitchen counter. The lettuce rolled at the reverberation and hit the floor like a wet piece of flesh falls from an operating table. Her painted lips took especial pleasure from the re-iteration. “Doctor’s orders.”

After all, she thought, as the doctor said, the medicinal cigarettes did no harm to loved ones. If John had a problem with it, he was being selfish. She recalled what she thought of as his selfishness, even in the early days, when it required an additionally strong squeeze of the hand in order to get him to go the pictures again with her.

“Why can’t we just go for a walk?” He would say, an urgent appeal arising in his tone after a couple of times. “I need a walk.”

Never really did she care for such excursions – and many- a-time she had urged to make this evident, dragging on his arm, executing that appalling whine which was customary of small children and aggressive dogs simultaneously. Then he would sigh, and shake his head in the slightly lolloping way which seemed to infuse his whole movement, and submit to another night at the pictures, or at dinner, listening with a remoteness she took for fondness to her tirades of conversation. She liked him then, she told herself. Silence was romantic after all, like in the films.

It was silent now, after the lettuce has seized rolling on the floor. Ten years! Her mouth seemed to expand in a kind of surprise, although this was ultimately necessary to allow the smoke to trickle through – emerging at intervals, John thought uncomfortably, like an ashen tongue. Yes, he thought, ten years they had lived together. The faux-leather chair, chilled and discomforting beneath him, seemed somehow reflective of that space of time, hollow as he drummed his fingers, fading where the scrub of his hair rested heavily against the material.

A cough contorted him back into the frame.

He coughed raggedly in a way that made his body appear seized by some external force, shaking from the inside so that even from where Lola was standings she could hear the click, click, click, of his grinding jaw amplified by the marble fittings. She mused – it had been her plan all along to have the lounge knocked-through to connect to the kitchen – a clear expanse in a marble, open-plan affair. She could see more that way.

She could see John with the paper still straddled stubbornly across his knee. John could see her, the curvature of her body emphasized by the straight-cut stone which surrounded her, the slender cigarette which was suspended between the thread-work of her fingers, occasionally scattering ash in its salt and pepper array.

She shook her head and crossed and get herself a glass of water. His coughing irritated her – rumbling through his lips and lingering in the air like a remonstration. The medication doing so much good and john idling away in his chair like that – occasionally clocking her out of the corner of heavy eyes where the pupils moved perceptibly, as if embodying some great weight. Water soothed over her temporary soreness of nerve – the way it curved from the metal faucet, a wide curve which reflected her face infused with colour, the full lips with which spoke with a smile –

“Oh John, this medication is doing a world of good, I’m sure.”

The way she pronounced his name clashed awfully with his sense of self-conception. He swallowed audibly – swallowed old, dank air as she drank cool clean mouthfuls of water with the fastidious gestures of a little sparrow, or some small animal. He looked grey and miserable today, she thought, coughing and spluttering there in his chair, probably staining the marble tiling with those great overgrown slippers of his.  Why couldn’t he be happy for her? Why couldn’t he –

‘I need a walk.” His speech segmented her thoughts – the unusual assertion had an announcement-like ring to it.

 He groped unsteadily to his feet, the chair and its exhausted skin squealing in protest as he moved. Such a physical effort, he thought, everything now seemed such a physical effort. Perhaps it was because the writer’s block had begun to set in and he was vaguely aware of an impending deadline for Monday. Perhaps it was because he was unconsciously concerned for his ailing mother despite her willingness to exclude him from her life for the past decade or so. People made strange choices, after all. If he had a choice now – he would have given anything just to for Lola to sit beside him and let him run a tired hand through that long brown hair of hers, like they used to, her hand in his. He watched her fingers adjust on the cigarette, the lacquered nails scraping against each other as if adjusting the settings of a weapon.  He wanted to say – “Come and give me your hand, Lo, come and give me your hand!’. He wanted to write, freely and flowingly of the grass they had chased through one summer when the idle ears of corn stretched way above their ankles. He wanted to –

“Yes, yes. Walking, walking – it’s all you ever do!”

Her words cut him, intended to be evidently without affection as her exclamation was followed by a defensive draw on the cigarette. Sure, she seemed stronger since taking up the medication, almost impossibly strong sometimes, John thought. Perhaps he should be happy for her, happy with the same intensity of the tiredness, the same dark intensity of her shadow as both swept over him where  he stood. He sidled to the door – not wanting to ignore her, wanting to instead install his movements, the way his feet aligned themselves on the floor with a kind of purposefulness of invitation. Desperate invitation, even. Walk with me, Lo.

The clock needed re-aligning, Lola thought, when John stood up, even with the strange shuffling gait he seemed to adopt nowadays, it accentuated the odd alignment of the clock. She could have it sorted soon enough – with all the new energy the medication seemed to invest in her, injecting her with resolve. Smiling around the cigarette slipped between the teeth, she stepped forward determinedly.

He didn’t look back.

Her efforts to adjust the clock, manipulating it by its sharp little fingers, were only interrupted some minutes later by a dull thud on the veranda – like the sound of the flower basket falling from its hook and uprooting the straggled articles of growth, yet again. She advanced outside crossly, biting down on the cigarette in a way that almost coated her tongue with ash. Little she cared, she just wanted to get on with things – caring equally little for the slimy, sweat-laden texture of the metal door-handle beneath her palm.

It was then, crossing the threshold, she noticed. John slumped on the slated wood of the veranda floor, seized with the spasmodic tortures of what appeared beyond a fit of coughing. She rushed to his side, careful not to swallow the ash.

“John? John? What’s happened John?”

His body was convulsed as if he had been caught in the back by a very intimate blade. But there were no such marks, no blood. Only a dry retching cough from the back of his throat which dashed the lips with foam and red. John dying, dying on his own doorstep! Lola was panicking now, pressing her face close to his, close to inanimate whites of his eyes which seemed to roll in their sockets, occasionally fractured by the images of the own futility of his fight.

“Speak to me John!” Her voice came in breathy, desperate bursts, furling across his face – she hoped it may rouse him, anything –

His voice twisted to an agonized shriek.

“Smoke! That smoke, that…”

Delirium, she thought hastily, it must be delirium. She tossed away the near finished cigarette, grappled for his hands, attempted to plant a quick kiss on his forehead. She could manage this, she told herself, that is what the medication would allow her to do – stay collected, stay calm.  It was with a sense of this regained resolve with which she rose and ran for the phone.

Must ring the doctor.

She scrabbled on the phone table for where her medication box sat customarily, rifled through for the brochure and punched in the given number.

The doctor answered without apparent surprise, despite the slight tremulousness of her tone. She was a little embarrassed, despite the gravity of the situation – this was the doctor to whom she always told – yes, I am and can be a strong and eloquent person.

“It’s John – I think he’s having a fit!” She managed, gripping the receiver in a way that seemed somehow familiar. She couldn’t help it.

The doctor calmly, almost absently, asked her for the symptoms. Unnerved by this, as she could not see the form of John as she spoke – presumably still prostrate in agony on the veranda – she began to list all she could remember.

The doctor did not interrupt her, only opening his audibly dry lips to conclude her listing.

“The most evident symptoms, it appears… of smoke poisoning.”

A pulse of perspiration seemed to thicken Lola’s palm in a hot burst, the anger fizzed in her throat.

“But, but –“

“Yes? Yes?”

The doctor seemed to mimic her, an echo in her air. She continued, falteringly.

“But you told me that this form of medication – these cigarettes, antidepressant cigarettes, yes, if they are the cause, that is - you told me that they would do no harm to those I love!” She spat in an almost single hysterical outpour.

The doctor paused momentarily, as if whetting his lips. His voice arrived at her ear, earthly and measured with every word.

“But Miss Lack – you don’t love John, do you?”

A great hacking cough.

She left the receiver hanging like a shattered jaw as she ran back onto the veranda at the accumulation of another grating shriek, hardly hearing what the doctor had said. The noise foamed from John’s lips – the words in which were inaudible.

 And there, on the veranda, she looked over the convulsed body of her partner, the cold wood against which his head shook, the sun glowing sickly through the clouds, the cigarette, her cigarette, the end of which she had left burning-ever-so-slightly beside him.

Her eyes looked for distraction – falling to the medical leaflet she still clutched between her fingers.

‘Allowing the true self to be revealed…’

The words rose to meet her, as thick and sudden as smoke. er