Corasound - words from the start to 2006

The Infinite Sadness part 1

The Infinite Sadness part 1 [a short story]

The wind scathed her raw cheeks. The ashen, bitter morning wore ill-fitting twinkling lights draped on otherwise barren buildings as if to whisper the inevitable: 'tis the season. She stood beside the Trent and wondered just how deep it was. The wind seemed to push her a little further and brought the laughter around her, which made her look at passing folk. They were laughing at her, everyone was.

Do it, hissed the cruel winds as they swayed her. She contemplated it. How would the water feel against her skin once it soaked through her coat, shirt and jeans? How cold would her feet feel once the water seeped through her Converse? Should she wait to be alone and strip? She wanted to feel the water hit her skin, not soak in. How long would she have to wait? People would try to save her or judge her, no doubt. She looked for her window of opportunity, but the walkway seemed to become more crowded by the minute.

She shut her eyes, feeling only the wind caressing her face now. Nothing seemed as bleak, as heavy. She could only hope she wouldn't be disappointed with the depth, because in her mind she'd conceded the river to carry some twenty-feet, at least. Her worst fear had been to die drowned, but hadn't he told her to overcome her fears?

*

His phone had been off. Jamie had been at work all day and couldn't keep it on, so the news had crashed on him sometime after five o'clock when he was halfway home the opposite direction to Nottingham in fledging traffic.

Sofia had been saved from drowning in the Trent. She was still unconscious, the hospital said. Why was she doing this to him? Was she vying for attention?

It was blurred in his mind. He had gotten to the Queen's Medical Centre as quickly as traffic and time had allowed him to. A group of people with faces of practiced concern sat him in room once he had had some time with the lifeless Sofia, lying on her bed and hooked up to a number of machines.

'Jamie, may I call you Jamie? Only you look too young to be a…' the doctor's voice trailed off and his expression changed. 'My name is Dr. Parker. Sofia is stable, but it seems to us as if, well, as if she doesn't want to wake up. Did she ever speak to you about taking her life?'

This hit Jamie the hardest.

It hadn't been about that until those words were spat out. He had assumed she had fallen or had been pushed, but it never occurred to him she may have jumped. Her self-confessed great depressions could not be this deep-rooted. Or true.

That is, until he went home and unearthed her journal. In the first page, she wrote:

I'm stuck in the midland. Wandering the uneven streets of Derby I realise just how much so. I don't think anyone else sees Mansfield like I do, for what it is at its most drab, vomit-stained cash points, house alarms wailing in the distance and fish and chips wrappers instead of morning dew. It's the barflies, batting their glittering eyes to anyone who dares look their way. The loose women are so doused in alcohol they'd be alight if I flicked my fag in their proximity. The men dance inebriated, reeking of desperation and kebab. I want out. There's no diamond in this coal.

Jamie had no idea she was that finicky. In fact, she was a prick. He put the journal down, refusing to read any more. He was so tired. He explained to mum and dad she had fallen in the river, that she almost drowned, that she caught hypothermia, that she was still unconscious. He sat on the edge of their bed for a very long time thinking he didn't know her at all. Sure, she had complained, she had spoken of wishing to move, of being unhappy and had screamed the unforgivable 'I hate you' in one of her many moments of madness. But that was her, the eccentric artist wannabe, her volatile ways all part of her personality. He never thought she was for real.

Sofia's ancestors were Aztec. She resented the name Mexico – she called it the 'slave name.'

"Mexican is another name for traitor. The Americans wouldn't call themselves Benedict Arnolds, would they?"

When presented with this question, Jamie had been baffled and Sofia angered at his lack of knowledge on her background.

"The main tribes in the today Mexican territory were the Aztecs and then the Mayas. By the time the "conquest" [here she used her middle and index fingers to illustrate the quotation marks] came, the Mayan empire had fallen. The Mexicas were the first tribe to take it up the arse by the "conquerors." Now there's a massive nation of people named after them. Had they not coined the term machismo, they may as well have been named the Malinche nation." She had said and Jamie paid attention just in case she asked anything about it later. He was tired and wanted to go to bed early, without arguments. He wanted to ask what or who Malinche was but was but didn't want her to go on and on.

Her face scrounged up like crumpled paper. More and more, this look came to her. It accompanied her the more left wing she became. Jamie had assumed left-wingers were new-wave hippies and therefore relaxed stoners who didn't work or bathe. He hated that Sofia spent hours chatting online and posting notices on the injustices of the world on myspace.com. Her smile became rare to him.

"Can you come downstairs? Only Catherine Tate is on next and…"

She sat before the computer paralysed, her fingers angrily tapping away at the keyboard, her brow furrowed.

"Give me a minute."

She never left the computer. Because Jamie was hardly paying attention to the antics of the lewd grandmother character, he made his way back to his wife, a woman now seemingly devoid of a humour chip.

"Sofia."

"I said give a minute!" She snapped after seconds of silence.

"It's been twenty. Twenty-two to be exact."

For the first time that evening she turned to see her husband's face. He was clearly upset.

"What the fuck's so important? Can't you see I'm busy?" She demanded. She never used to curse this much.

"You." She seemed to soften. "But you're so angry. There's nothing you can do, you know. That you stay awake at night worrying will not stop children contracting AIDS in Africa, the Lebanese bombings or the Ipswich killings."

She went into an unprecedented rage, accusing Jamie of being a selfish twat, amongst many other insults that in Jamie's opinion should never fall from the mouths of ladies. After a row that lasted well into two in the morning, they held each other, her sobbing her apologies buried in his chest.

"I've turned into an angry black man."

They both laughed, and Jamie thought he'd had his wife back. In the coming days, she had jumped into a river on the coldest time of year