Art by Gunjan Ahluwalia
It was Friday, and I was set to leave work early. I had been useless in the office, utterly, utterly: when I steadied my hands by the desktop’s strobe-light, poising them expectantly above the keyboard, they wandered, inevitably, back onto my lap. My head pounded. It was becoming clearer by the hour that my efforts to concentrate were futile. And since I wouldn’t be able to write a briefing for the next press conference—the company was in deep trouble, and those honeyed words reserved for such catastrophes were no longer coming to me with much ease—I saw myself out of the building, cursing myself, and into the darkened winter day.
I was walking to my car when I saw Sophie turn the corner. She was coming towards me headlong, in that brisk, urgent way she had when walking through the city, heeled boots coming down hard on the pavement. I panicked and crossed, ridiculously, into the traffic-choked road. But it was too late—I saw in the faint slack of her mouth that I’d been recognised, and I stiffened, walking back onto the path, crumpling my parking ticket in my fist. It was raining lightly, drops flashing and flaming in the last of the light. The concrete was slick with water, and Sophie’s boots were hurtling her along it.
“For God’s sake, David, where have you been?” Sophie, still some distance away, was half-shouting. All around us doors were slamming, while cars honked and stirred up the air. “We’ve been calling you for weeks! God, I knocked on your door on Tuesday, stood there like an idiot for twenty minutes, waiting for you to come out, but you–"
She stopped a few paces in front of me and shook my shoulder. Not with the tenderness I might have expected—from my sister especially—but violently, as if to call me back from a dream. We were standing squarely under an elm’s bare canopy. I shrugged off her hand, irritated. Wasn’t it tactless, I thought, and unforgivably so? Seeking me out in her huffing, misshapen state (and only metres away from my office, tomb-like in its greyness), when she knew about the company’s woes, about the added work I was helplessly absorbing, day after day? I wanted to counter the rising magnitude of her emotions, which I found frustratingly unnecessary—not to mention publicly embarrassing—on a day which had already exhausted me almost beyond my limits. I sighed a little, unravelling the scrunched parking ticket and folding it carefully into my pocket.
“Are you gonna answer me? It was the least you could do, you know, showing up to the goddamn service. All her friends were there, even the ones she hardly knew, and I was there, and so was Mum. And we loved her, David, but we didn’t—we couldn’t love her like you did. And you fucking vanished.”
There is no reasoning with death, I thought, looking up at a sky sluggish with clouds. My anger faded as quickly as it had flared, and I felt myself slip into a kind of trance, the outermost edges of my vision lined with grey. I was overcome suddenly by the urge to walk out onto the road again, whistling, as I pondered the futility of human death rites. What’s the use if the dead can’t see, or respond to, the living? But I must have said it aloud, because Sophie raised three fingers to her cheek, bewildered, as if struck by an invisible hand.
“So—so that’s how you feel?” I watched as her eyes began to glass. “You should have seen how crowded that little church was. It got so hot. But we stayed for a long time, singing. Her mum, though, she couldn’t get a word out, not a word. She was just holding onto the pew for dear life. You think that meant nothing? It meant nothing, but your work here—what, writing apology letters on behalf of some shitty, sinking firm? You think that means something? You don’t know how—we kept looking behind us, waiting for you to appear, and then an hour passed, and then another…”
Behind Sophie, I saw a woman dart between the cars, coat held over her head, her dark dress rippling like a book turning pages in the wind. I was startled, peering into her half-hidden face, at her lopsided mouth, arranged in an almost familiar upturn. The rain picked up, and I felt an unbearable need to be wrapped and warmed inside her coat. She motioned at the car slowing in front of her, and it took her away. I retreated further into my jacket.
Sophie was staring at me. Her hair had escaped her scarf’s swathe, and the wind was picking it up and tossing it fitfully about her head. She stepped forward and touched my arm, rubbing it up and down, all the while watching me with damp, pleading eyes. I rummaged deep inside my pocket. Above us, a streetlamp flickered on, and the pavement’s dribbling lip glinted with yellow light. Her voice softened.
“Look, I know it’s been hard on you…”
She faltered when she saw me take out the cigarette. I was careful now to look straight at her, gazing into her left and right eyes in turn. Then I lit up, taking a long drag before looking out onto the road. In the downpour, a helmeted man was leaning languorously against a traffic light; the cars were flying down the thoroughfare, eastbound, westbound, and a siren howled somewhere in the distance. When Sophie spoke again, her voice raspy and small, I was still holding smoke in my mouth.
“Nothing? You’ll say nothing?”
In one long exhale, I let the smoke pass into vapour. I couldn’t see Sophie then, the air in front of me was so dark. It reminded me of that night in the park, walking with a dead woman’s hand in mine, watching a flock of blackbirds erupt and then vanish into open sky.