Play Me.
Her name was Genevieve Monteresse and she shut all the doors and windows when she left. It might have been a statement, but it’s difficult to tell. She walked with straight legs, bounced with every step, and she could walk just a pace in front of you and turn to talk to you and she never fell off a kerb or walked into a stranger or got tangled up in a dog lead. The whole world parted for her as she walked blindly through, looking only at you.
Of course, it’s always the ones you love the most who leave you. Almost as if the gravity of your affection grips them just that little bit too tightly that, in trying to gain a higher orbit from the one you afford them, they achieve escape velocity and spin off into outer space, travel to other systems, meet other worlds, orbit other stars. How many lonely and abandoned planets are there, do you think, in the universe?
Perhaps she was your moon, a satellite tinting the dark and lonely night with reflected sunlight, just enough to grey the blackness and give you light to see by. Perhaps she was.
And the inside of your throat feels like tin now, tastes like metal left out in the rain and dried in the sun and frozen by the night and it gets worse every time you swallow, so you stop. It’s easy when you know how.
You know you could possibly get your scalp to stop itching if you could manage to wash your hair. If that could be done, somehow. But it’s so much to imagine; too much, in fact. People do it every day, this unimaginable feat. They turn the taps and fill a basin, strip to the waist and ladle hot water over their heads. They apply shampoo, either liquid from a bottle or a solid bar, and lather it in. It’s a good feeling, rubbing the bubbles into your scalp with strong fingers. Remember how you used to love it when your mother washed your hair when you were small? The feel of fingertips with just a hint of fingernails moving through the soap and massaging the skin that never sees the light of day, never gets seen, rarely gets touched. What a feeling. So much love in such a simple act.
Genevieve used to wash your hair for you sometimes, I imagine. Did she offer or did you ask her? A revealing question, I suspect. Just something more for you to miss.
In your post-box this morning, you’ll have found a plain brown A5 envelope. I know that you still leave your flat to check the post. Maybe one day there’ll be a letter from her there. Maybe one day. But not today. Today there was a brown envelope which you took slowly and sadly upstairs, because you knew that it wasn’t from Genevieve: it was plain and brown where it should have been cream or palest green, and the script was blocky capitals where you would have wished to see smooth and precise italics like a row of skinny men strolling down a hill.
And it doesn’t – it just doesn’t – have that most endearing of idiosyncrasies that charmed you from the outset. Remember the first time you saw her write; how, every so often when she wrote an English word that happened to be spelled the same as some other French word, she would accidentally add the accents to it? How exotic! How could the world not love such a creature?
How could you not love her until your heart felt like it would burst from your chest and keep beating there, disconnected and bloodless and beating just for her. How could you not?
But this is not from her.
It does not carry the faintest scent of lemons and patchouli. It is not from Genevieve.
She is somewhere in the world, drinking coffee and smiling, watching interesting new films and finding new books and drawing the things she sees and she isn’t writing letters and sending them away in brown envelopes.
This is from nobody you know and it contains this cassette and two words of instruction. Even in your current state, that should be simple enough. I can help you. I wish to.
Even now the clock is ticking down. As you sit here in a mire of self-pity, with your itchy scalp and sore throat, your diminishing stack of crockery and increasing pile of washing up, somewhere out there another man has just met the most beautiful girl in the world. In an instant, his world has stopped and hiccupped and then moved on, different than before. Maybe he won’t get as long as you did, maybe he’ll get more. Only she knows, and she doesn’t know it yet.
She smiles and tries to hide it, but her mouth stays shut while the edges of her lips pull further to the sides in glee. She puts French accents on English words and never trips over the cats that walk out in front of her. She wears a beanie hat pulled down all the way down to her eyelashes which, of course, are long. And when she listens to you speak, her head lolls more and more perceptibly to one side, and she does that grin and she looks completely into you. Her eyes, which anyone who has ever met her would tell you, are blue; except late at night, when red wine and good sex give them just the faintest tinge of violet. Just a trace that only you can see. And you know that you’ve seen that colour once before and you want to see it again. It’s the shade of a particular type of poppy, and you’ll spend months and years looking for that flower just to see that again and be reminded of the thing you can’t forget. Will you ever find that flower? How could you not.
Her name is Genevieve Monteresse. And she shut all the doors and windows when she left.
I can tell you why.
Listen…
