Ostrich Feathers

t w e l v e - 12.00

 t w e l v e

 Midnight.

 I don’t know if it’s midnight exactly but it’s around midnight – I can see a few people emerging from their apartments dressed and ready to go, heading in the direction of my apartment, Jack’s Mausoleum, the other pubs. In all the other windows, curtains are drawn, lights off.

 There are two kinds of people – people who are asleep by midnight, and people whose lives start only at midnight. Like Lola. She left a while ago, in a leather miniskirt and a skimpy top, her hair teased into curls, red coating her lips. I noticed that she waited till Dexter was asleep to leave. Before she left she asked me are you sure you’ll be alright? and I’d nodded and said yes, and she told me not to hesitate to wake Dexter up if I needed anything and I told her that I wouldn’t hesitate but I’m not going to. Wake him, up I mean. I need a lot of things. But they are not things I can ask of him. Then Lola gave me some sheets and a pillow that smelled like old paper for the couch. When I saw the look on her face I assured her again that I would be okay.

 When she had opened the door for me, it took her a few seconds and the next thing I knew her arms were around me and she was taking me inside – it was only with someone else’s touch that I realised I was shaking – it was only in the presence of stillness that I realised how unstable I was. And I don’t know why I was shaking or why I felt something wet on my face, but when Lola sat on the couch holding me, it passed, the shaking stopped. She did not ask me what was wrong. I don’t think I had an answer to that anyway.

 When she leaves, I’m glad that she’s locked the apartment door from outside. Confined here at least I know that I can go nowhere else.

 I sit in the balcony. I had found a pack of Marlboros in the kitchen and I had taken one, lighting it with a matchbox I found lying next to the stove. Now there’s a small patch of burning skin on my thumb but it’s alright.

 It’s alright.

 It’s all right, Mrs. Denison would correct me in Creative Writing assignments. You overuse contractions, Evianna.

 I don’t actually like cigarettes but right now it’s giving me something to do. In, out, puff out the smoke (cough), tap the ashes out onto the floor of Dexter’s balcony. The smoke warms me. It reminds me of the time I went up to the mountains in Caravel with a bunch of people from college in my first year and the heater in our cabin was broken; everyone who had a boyfriend used it as an excuse to sleep in the same sleeping bag, but I only had the hot and sour soup they were serving at the camp canteen for warmth; I sat on a rock outside and felt the soup flow down into my stomach from my mouth and it was so hot it hurt, and it didn’t even taste very good, there was an excess of both pepper and sugar but it drove away the cold so I drank it all anyway. But when I got into my sleeping bag later I felt cold still so I guess it didn’t help much.

 It’s the same tonight. I can’t wake Dexter up for what I need. I don’t know what I need. I definitely need something because I can’t go on like this. I imagine him waking up, asking me what’s wrong, do I need anything? And I would say yes, I do, and he would say what is it? And I would say I don’t know and maybe I would cry again.

 In high school we had an art teacher. I don’t remembermuch about him because I never picked art. My high school boyfriend, a dickhead called Lenny who took my virginity, chose art as an elective in our last year so I used to go to the art department sometimes to see his paintings (they were shit – the only thing he could paint were tropical fruits and disfigured female nudes). His art teacher was pretty diplomatic about them. We never really spoke much, except for the one time Lenny left the room to get his bag and he asked me so what do you really think of them and I had said they suck and he had laughed. He looked like a proper art teacher – he wore tie-dye bandanas and flowly pinstriped palazzo pants and oversized cotton shirts with ethnic prints and big Woodland hiker shoes. He had a beard too. And once he told me something, something I didn’t think much of back then but right now, smoking on this balcony almost five years later, I can remember it. We were looking at a carving. It was on the wall of a mosque which we had gone to see because of the supposedly unique architecture – the carving was of a tree, with interwoven branches and an excess of leaves – it was in a small nook next to the entrance arch of the mosque. Nobody was paying much attention to it.