The Composition
by Ben Watkins
I remembered, faint enough to barely believe it. I remembered standing in a Picasso of shattered glass and scattered toys. I looked up at my mother (God, I must have been young); I knew I had done something wrong but I didn’t know what it was.
The dust lay thick over the upturned television and he palmed the screen clear. Misshapen and grey, he stared up from the pool of glass. The TV was a bust, dull like the lifeless eyes of a mannequin. He slid it out onto the street for the junk run.
A plastic crate held more promise. The seal took a minute or two to pop and he shifted the lid to one side. He didn’t mean it, it wasn’t deliberate; he groaned. The box was filled with paper, pens, canvases, brushes. All new. All packaged. They were stuffed tight enough to make any single object tough to shift, not that anyone had ever tried.
Never any money, huh?
Alice’s pile was starting to gather momentum; a collection of books on acrylics, watercolours, oils. All with their price-stickers intact, bold red text screaming out their bargains from their front covers. A three year old box of 35mm film, unopened. Some teddy bears followed, one wearing a purple beret fixed at a jaunty angle.
“How’s it going?”
He had been stood on an upturned sofa, reaching down; “It’s... it’s taking longer than I thought.”
“You don’t have to move my stuff too.”
“It has to get done.”
Alice stood in the doorway, framed in the over-exposed winter sunlight. Her head turned with an echo of tight brown curls. She offered a drink; tea or coffee, although she knew what he liked. Then silently she disappeared again
He sat a moment in the garage, “Not going to help then?”
It was surprisingly difficult to shift the next crate, resting it once on the back of the sofa before heaving it out into the daylight. Unseen, he caught his breath, noticing the dark circles that had formed under his arms; his twenties had never seemed so far away.
The crate was a series of files, a tatty assortment of second-handers from his office. They spilled loose paper, rough notes near-incomprehensible to Alice. Cursing, he knelt and scooped them back inside, hour after hour of revision in each armful. He stumbled upon memories of camping himself in the spare room, his head down, and Alice buzzing about, lonely.
The Corsa was near full and he needed to move some of the blankets to the passenger seat. Stacked high on his sports bag, at least it hid the cigarette burns.
How much for a new seat cover, Alice?
He waded back into the garage, stepping carefully as he crossed the sofa and plunged deeper inside. He swiped the dust off the lid of a cardboard box, enjoying the coughs that followed. He drew a Stanley knife from his pocket and sliced through the old duct tape.
Fancy dress, different costumes spun together like velvet candyfloss, pressed the box’s flaps out. He couldn’t help himself; he gathered a handful and pulled it free. He spread out the first items on an old table-top; a cowboy’s jacket (still sporting the Sheriff’s badge), beer-stained monk’s robes, and a tuxedo t-shirt.
He hadn’t always been the dour mess that he had become. He hadn’t always been the bad guy. Even in that moment the initial joy of his memories were overcome.
He drew together the items and turned back to the box and stopped.
A policewoman’s outfit.
He stumbled back through the garage with the re-sealed box and, blinking in the morning light, glanced back to the house. No sign of Alice. Nor the coffee yet. Quickly he thrust the box into the back of his car.
Still more room and plenty of boxes to take.
He moved further back, deeper amongst the dust and broken electricals.
He had bought the coffee table. They had gone together to Seconds and found it hidden away. They had barely any money and an empty new house so, for five pounds, anything solid would do the job. Alice had called him over, “Found it”. And he had agreed, arm over her shoulders, “It’s a beaut’”.
“Coffee.”
Alice stepped forward into the shadows, cupping her pale hands around the mug to ward off the cold. “Mind if I hold onto it a while longer?”
“Go ahead.”
A tilt of her head, a gesture to the table; “I made that pretty, didn’t I?”
He leaned back on an old wardrobe, the door straining its hinges behind him. “You think that when you see me?”
“Well, I did a good enough job, didn’t I?” She smiled.
That table again was all that he saw; “I’ll leave that for you.”
“Nah,” She shook her head. “You take it, it was for you. You nearly done?”
“Why? Have you got guests?”
She passed him the coffee, “Take what you want. Remember to lock up.”
He took a sip, two sugars, and felt the warmth drift down through him.
Nothing but tables and spent money.
Standing and sipping he saw the wardrobe she hid in on his twenty-fifth, the lamp he dropped and broke the day they bought it. A punishment for a flamboyant purchase. Beside it he saw another book, a dark blank cover smudged with dust, and picked it up in one hand.
He laid it flat on the coffee-table, over the inlaid montage of family photos. Inside he saw pencil sketches, page after page of interwoven images. Eyes deep, purposeful and rimmed with just a hint of a tear. Ideas were scrawled in handwriting as impenetrable as his own, offering just rumours of her thoughts. Of the Alice he remembered.
He turned page after page, seeing perfectly captured images; rich sunsets in shades of gray, cool lakes left calm by departing geese, and forests torn between hope and despair.
It all came back to him then.
