A Brief History Of Absence
Folds
3 a.m. At Newport Pagnell Service Station
A Brief History Of Absence I read about your death in the local newspaper. There was no grained photograph of you: you were faceless to the end. In death, you took your place among reports of road accidents; drunken brawls; bingo wins; notices of planning consent; lottery numbers; the latest football results – lower league. Like me, you came from the Highlands to live in this Lowland town but you were a stranger to me - you were a stranger to everyone. I may have passed you many times on the street; perhaps I brushed against you in the crowded aisle of the supermarket: our shoulders may have touched, if only for an instant: an unregistered meeting of separate loneliness. The coroner could not ascertain how you died: a precise verdict defeated by days, weeks, months of decay. A soiled till receipt, dated 15 November, was found lying like a fallen birch leaf beneath the Formica topped table revealing the recorded details of your final purchase: three cans of Del Monte peaches - on Special Offer in Spar that day. I imagine bills and circulars flowing through your letter-box each week to form an unstable cairn on the hall mat: mail sorted by official fingers seeking for the address of a friend or relative. Mould would form and creep across unwashed dishes. The cold water tap in the sink might drip and drip like a metronome measuring the beat of unheard music. Time would go on passing even after the battery in your wall clock died: its spindly arms shuddering to a halt. The pages of your calendar remained unturned after November: perhaps depicting, like mine, sunlit Highland cattle up to their knees in a burn; those curlicues of smoke from a croft house chimney stretching and thinning into a lucid, interminable sky. I read that on the mantelpiece above your electric, barred fire, the wedding portrait of your dead parents gazed out helplessly from an oval frame, signed Lochinver Free Church, 1949, as you lay silenced and slumped on that bed, guarding your secrets to the end in that flat whose rented rooms resounded with your absence more palpably than they did with your presence. Some nights when sleep evades me like a dissolved dream, I hear owls calling with the ghosted voices of lost strangers hovering and swooping above the lives they might have lived. Copyright © 2010 James Knox Whittet
Folds The subsidence of mounds of leaves that fold over in layers as they burn when dusk shortens the drive to the castle lighting oblongs on the river that folds lines of smudged silver over the weir. Apples folded in yesterday's news; waxed skin printed with the lives of others: all those traumas transmuted into scent to fill the attic, its rafters articulating rain which folds with flecks down drains. Those pressed folds of sheets on hospital beds starched by sunlight through wide windows where emptied cars wait out afternoons in squares, bordered by marigolds, liveried by dust that falls in folds over spaced kerb stones. The folds of soil as it descends on graves when the green canvas, drawn in with strings of frost, is folded back to reveal the opening below us; our feet loosening the knots of sawn boards diagramed with the folds of their grain. Those folds of light when mist lifts up from lochs like vinegared windows rained with sea; the folds of water pushed aside by oars with descended swans' wings drawn back and folded in their resting place. Copyright © 2009 James Knox Whittet
3 a.m. At Newport Pagnell Service Station I slide my wood effect tray along the smudged metal runway with iconic images above my head of frothing cups of cappuccino, Danish pastries, summits of glistening baked beans and burnished beef burgers hung like Vermeers from brightly painted walls. I carry my frothless coffee to a table beside the massive panes of the window through which traffic, grown strangely silent, forms six strings of a diamond necklace of red and white lights into the darkness with no beginning and no end in sight. Across the aisle, a woman who has strayed from a Hopper painting, sits alone and keeps searching through her handbag as if in search of some official document that might tell her who she is and why she sits here in this room, laid bare by fluorescent strips, at 3 a.m. on the 6th of March. At another table, a man with a beard endlessly rotates a tea bag in a white mug with a spoon. I gaze at the slow rotations of the spoon and see how the colour of his tea deepens and darkens. An elderly woman with her hair in a bun, bends her head over a crossword in search of answers. I sip my chilling coffee and listen to Sinatra crooning from the dead. With lowered eyes, I create patterns from the varying islands of the spilt blood of tomato ketchup left by former customers and wonder what decipherable patterns I might leave behind when I choose to rejoin the necklace of lights below. I look up again at my few fellow pilgrims who have entered, like me, by chance into an unsleeping communion of silence in this glass cathedral, scented not with incense but with frying oil, built for travellers who take time out of their journeys to destinations not wholly of their own choosing. Copyright © 2009 James Knox Whittet