Lennon Mhishi is a Zimbabwean-born being currently residing in London.
TAKA
You came to me, hair filled with wood dust and fragments of wood shavings, and those smells of the furniture workshop that stuck to you like a tick. I sunk my face into your chest. What is in the plastic bag, you asked. You have to guess, I replied. Those huge nostrils of yours could not miss the smell of peanut butter. A slice of a smile appeared on your face as you told me there must be some peanut butter. I was happy, and delighted, and so eager for you to taste my cooking, I just blurted it out, not waiting for you to keep guessing.
We went and sat under some nearby trees. You took a big stone to sit on, and I admonished you for sitting on these stones which made your buttocks so dark and hard. Not that I minded. We ate and talked, and watched a colony of ants, masvosve, follow each other up a tree. It was a marvel to see the order, the diligence with which they passed a piece of an object from one to the other. There is that saying, kuita mubatirapamwe semasvosve, you reminded me. Working together like ants. If only our government were as diligent as ordered as masvosve. Or even as tiny, then we could just crush them! We laughed at the misery of being governed by fools.
This moment, this day, flashes through my mind, because it is just one of the many that always showed me how fortunate I was to have you. To sit with you, and eat something like sadza nemuriwo une dovi, would turn into an event, because my heart would always overflow. The small things, like ants, meant a lot to the eyes of a man who saw the world through a lens so simple it broke down the complexities of my own heart into small pieces that I could understand. Not the way my heart is in pieces now.
……
Home was when I looked into your eyes, and saw mine, saw myself sitting there and looking in. First from a distance, and then getting closer and closer, until they were closed, those brooding eyes and I felt the soft of your lips on mine. Lips that stood, full, black and inviting. I would see them quiver, see them part as you smiled that wide and long smile, the stretching of skin on your face, and the way your cheeks would bulge upwards; your finely shaped teeth a white against the black of your lips. I felt a hunger gnawing at the insides of my womanhood, a sweet, demanding gnawing, a deep longing for you. Your lips were an island I wanted mine, my tongue, to explore and find refuge in. To settle and conquer.
I found home in tracing the contours of your body, that gap between your Adams apple and the seemingly curated line of chest hair. Feeling and seeing the sinews of your muscles as they tensed, and then relaxed, to my touch. Reading the scriptures in your eyes, my finger would linger there, until my hands moved down to trace a line along your chest, until I found the tip of your throbbing manhood, warm, pulsating, growing for me. Feeling you slowly harden made that space between my thighs, between sea and land, warm and moist and I would shiver, goose bumps all over my skin with anticipation. You knew well how to dip a finger into my womanhood, smell it, put it under my nose for me to smell myself. You always said you loved the smell of desire and pleasure that I exuded. You sucked that finger slow, but hard, tasting the wetness and sweetness of my desire. Home was when you entered me, impatiently, and I remembered my name, who I was, and then forgot, lost any idea of where I was and could only remember your name, feel the rough of your hands grazing my nipple, moving to squeeze my derriere as you moved deeper inside me, swayed me back and forth in a world of delirious excitement. I held onto you and breathed a fire which threatened to incinerate us both. I thought that was home.
The day I felt the emptiness inside me, I knew home had left. We say people leave places, leave home, leave other people. Me, home left me. I became a vacuum, a dark hollow place, cistern of toads and tears. Memories became wrenching pain. To think of you was to imagine a sustained banging of my head against a wall, to have it crack open and spill the matter of my brains out onto the ground, the body of feeling lying limp there, shorn of any life. Pleasure and desire scurried and scuttled, like chaff blown by the wind, and left me bereft, pining.
There are times when to be numb feels good. It is a paradox. Numbness should be the absence of feeling, the inability to feel. It should be when nothing, even the painful attempt to piece together from the shreds of remembrance, some sutured fabric that you can cloth this numbness in, and call it re-membering. A putting together of parts asunder, lost to the vagaries and winds of time, and the vicissitudes of existence. To know this numbness is then to be aware that it feels good to not feel at all. When home departs you, the way it left me, through you, you revel in that numbness, you crave it like my mother’s pregnancy with my last brother made her crave yoghurt. The yoghurt I so wanted but only got to lick the remains, tearing the Dairiboard plastic containers and travelling the length and breadth of it with my tongue. That last brother who came out sort of smooth and creamy, and people thought my mother had slept with that coloured man, Makaki, who owned a tuckshop at the corner of our street.
I got used to being told that I would end up like my mother, without a husband. As if a husband is all that has ever been needed for life to get better on this universe. If husbands made the world better, why didn’t men get their own? I had seen too many monsters that masqueraded as husbands to see husbands as a panacea. Those who saw me often make the trip to your small lodging room, and coming out sometimes days later, knew how to remind me that I was fatherless. I would see in their side glances, sneers, whispers, the derision. They lifted their noses as if to smell the shit and shame that was coming off me. Yet I harboured no shame, not for being with you. How can she she give her love, open her treasure trove, sofreely? It is that mother of hers who could not keep a husband. I did not care. The knowledge that I had you trumped what the naysayers could throw at me. I walked with my feet etched firmly on the earth, head held high. What would it matter, to gain the approval of a community, and lose the desires of my heart? A community that never cared about us anyway, only enough to make us the subject of conversation when they had nothing better to do, in the darkness of power cuts and unpaid electricity bills. If they talked as much about problems in this country, things might have looked different. Only you knew how sweet the juices of my being tasted. Bitterness would not contaminate them. Knowing that you loved the small and taste of me was enough.
Somewhere, home has left a young woman sitting on a fairly bare single bed, with a brown looking duvet that seems like it used to be another colour, and two pillows, dirty and ragged, with evidence of all kinds of dirt, lotion and chemical, or whatever went into the hair of the heads that rested on them; gathering clothes strewn across the unkempt floor, work overalls, throwing out left overs of now-stinking food and cleaning pots and dishes that were beginning to grow mould. You were never one to do dishes, were you? Leave them there to rot so I could come and clear up the rot for you? Now I am just cleaning up, not for you. For your lecherous landlord. For the sake of memory, so I can clutch onto the something, lest I get swept by the roaring tides of pain and misery welling inside. There is no delight in remembering that I used to make this room smell better, for you, for us, because I slept here too, sometimes. I ate from those plates, cooked from those pots growing mould. This is where the bodies, our bodies, limbs that found home in each other, found sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of the city that never sleeps, Harare. This was our haven, small and dilapidated as it usually was. Our bodies merged, dreams were shared, and our sweat and breath stuck to the walls and windows of this place. I imagine, even now, that our voices echo somewhere, and memories of us wriggle and move within, are stuck to, the walls of this small room.
I look around your room. Our room. I recognise again that it is so small. I never paid attention to how small it was, especially because you filled it with your large heart. I found plenty of room in that heart, in the pulse that reminded me that there was life in you, and so in me. We filled it with emotion, laughter, longing and screams and moans of repeated climaxes. The ceiling is flaking away, and the walls look like they could do with a new coat of paint. Leaks in the roofing meant that during the rains we had to put a small bucket beneath whichever part was leaking, and sometimes during the night, when the downpour was heavy, we had to wake up and empty the bucket just in case that little room got flooded. There was a time when we slept like dodos, and the water spilt onto the floor. We woke up to find the clothes strewn on your floor wet. Including your DENMIL FURNITURES overalls. I giggled as you tried to wring them dry, and then resigned to going into work and asking for a temporary pair. Memory. In this moment, it is more treachery.
The small bed is on the right side of the room, just behind the door. You had a thing for wanting to be on the right. You thought the right side of your face was the good looking one, but you also liked walking to my right side. Whatever funny superstitions you had about the right side, you were right for me. I used to tell you this, and you would just frown and reply saying how cheesy that sounded.
Next to the bed is a dirty looking bedside table. That is the table on which we put our drinks, or water, for when we needed to quench that other thirst, when we were not drinking from the cups of our desire. I fold an overall. DENMIL FURNITURES is printed in large letters on one pocket. I hold the overalls close to me, and they smell of grease, glue, wood shavings. I think of the machines you worked with, a language I listened to when you told me about work, but did not let become a part of my understanding of you. I liked that you worked with your hands. I liked their rough, calloused palms. It was one of the reasons why I was derided. Why could I not get an educated man, someone who lived in a bigger, better part of town, and place, with smoother hands, who works with ink and paper, and does not have a name such as Taka. Maybe an English name, they said, an Edward, or Arthur, or Winston. As if an English name meant more to me. They should have read some history to realise what was carried in those English names they so desired. They did not know that you, Taka, with your Shona name, were a haven, for and inside me.
The corner of a tattered book cover catches my eye. It peeps out from beneath The Highway Code that you had been reading in preparation for your learners drivers licence. You had hopes that maybe you can move from the factory to a driving job, and maybe in the future get your own taxi. I walk towards the small table and pull the book. A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Once in a while you picked a book from the second hand stalls in the street, and you would read me something aloud whilst we lay on your small bed. It was hilarious how you were angry at Mumbi and Karanja. They were so real to you. The power of words, and of your jealous. After your beating from Thomas the drunk, I would say, it made sense for you to be angry at a fictional character, a Gikonyo. I flipped the pages of the book, traced the worn out, brown-yellow pages, the sections you had put an asterisk on, or underlined. I see your face, focused, slowly following the events of colonial Kenya on the page, under the poor yellowish light of the single bulb in your room, whilst the noise of kids playing street football, trying to catch flying ants, recreating some scenes from the WWF wrestling that was now so popular, calling themselves Lex Luger, or Hulk Hogan, or The Undertaker- many kids had to be rushed to the local clinic due to these wrestling stunts- outside, or being naughty and shouting hure or mbavha at someone, filtered through the open window.
Do you want some chilli in the mince? I asked
Iwe Hazvi, you said, can’t you see I am focusing on this book. You have been cooking here for a while now, you know how I like it.
Mmmm, ana Taka, just because you managed to buy some mince meat today, you have all of a sudden become the literati that does not want to hear me talk whilst they read. Remember I am your girlfriend, not your maid ka. I can just go back to my mothers place wotamba chibhachura.
We laughed, we laughed a lot. I finished cooking, dished out the food, and we sat on the bed and I enjoyed watching you dip into the sadza, form it, create a slight hole in the middle, and scoop out some mince and vegetables. I watched your fingers as they moved, the rippling muscles of your arm, your mouth opening wide to take in the food, your jaw as you chewed. You just turned, smiled and said to me, eat, Hazvi!
Thinking about the moments you would read with the noise of the kids outside filtering in has reminded me of an episode when I, years ago, called someone hure. To be called hure was, and still seen as a big thing. Hure. Prostitute. Whore. There I was playing with other kids in the street when I saw a young woman I had heard in conversation being referred to as hure. In my naïve excitement, I wanted to use the word, to call her the name I had heard used to describe her. She was usually well dressed, lip stick, nail polish and all. I was convinced she was a hure, so I shouted iwe hure in her direction. She just walked on quietly and entered their house on the street. Later in the evening, as we sat down for supper, we heard a knock on the door, to which I enthusiastically responded. Standing right there in the doorway was the girl I had called hure, saying she had come to see my mother. She came in and told my mother what I had done. I got a mouthful. Did I not know that hure is what people called my mother as well? I told my mother I had been referring to an electricity pole that was in the vicinity, not to the young woman. It is one of the worst and not thought out lies I have ever told! The irony. Today, I am the hure. I have learnt to neither call anyone hure, nor care. If I was your hure, so what?
I put the book down and go back to folding your other clothes. I am not sure what to do with the few pots, pans and plates. Maybe when your brother comes from the village he will know what to do. I am not sure what to tell him when he comes. The letter said they were waiting for the harvest, because he cannot leave your mother alone to harvest the fields, and the delay will damage the crop. I think I understand. It is more about the money they need from selling some of the produce. If my heart has sunk to my knees, what about your mother, Taka? A mother’s womb cannot rest, or heal if she does not know where her child is, or what happened to them. I am in pain, yet I cannot imagine what an old woman in the village, who has ploughed fields and broken her back for her sons, is feeling right now. I fear that grief might send her heart deep into an abyss, and dark bottomless pit that she may not recover it from. Maybe she distracts herself with the work in the fields. I imagine her under the scorching sun, pulling at maize stalks and scratching the itching skin from tsine. I wish I could be there, to hold, to comfort her, to cry with her, to let her know that another woman loved your son much, maybe not as much as the womb that carried him. That I was to be, still am, her daughter, and that I will be here if she needs me. What can I really do, or help her with though? Just my delusions, the hallucinations that the piercing and searing stab of your absence inflict on me.
When you told me about your mother, your eyes beamed, and sometimes your eyes watered. I recognised that affection. To be fair, not all mothers are motherly, or good mothers, as is often expected, or claimed about motherhood. Your mother, you would say, taught you music, and love. She taught you how to see the world, as mine did, in all its gory complexions, yet to carve out and make for yourself spaces that would allow you to revel in the small and the simple, to laugh and love, like you made me do.
Today I received a letter of acceptance to Masvingo Teachers College. It is what I, what, we always wanted. I have always envied how teachers are respected, and how they shape the minds and futures of many people. I have always imagined myself in that red shoe we often saw through the windows of the Bata on Robert Mugabe Street, in a cream suit, and beautiful braids, waltzing into a class and turning the heads of other teachers at the school. I wanted you to see me go through college, for you to be Taka, the teacher’s husband. I cannot now celebrate getting into college when a darkness sits inside me, when I know I can never expect you to come visiting me, bringing me goods and news from Harare, or to write me letters, so that I can go to the post office every Friday to receive them, and to be known as Taka’s girlfriend because of the visits and the letters. That is why I would rather be numb.
Hanging on the back of your door is a green and white soccer jersey, with the name Carlos Max printed on it, number 18. I have no idea really what his position was, but I know he was one of the colored players for Caps United, the team you often dragged me to Gwanzura stadium to see. As I hold the jersey, I see you jumping up and down, embracing me after Carlos Max has scored. I jump with you. I like Highlanders, and Peter Ndlovu. That is how I came to own a Coventry City Jersey, and you a Sheffield Wednesday because of some Nigerian guy who played for them. I always wondered how you managed to keep abreast of all the football news. The Carlos Max Jersey still smells of you, your sweat, the musty smell that my nostrils have known, that I have sunk my head and face in, the musty smell that I can only reach out for in my imagination now. A shiver runs down my spine, a cold, sharp one, and my legs get weak. I need to sit down again. There is also a yellowing newspaper cutting of a CAPS United line up from some year, I do not bother to check when. You were obsessed with this Makepekepe team.
The heart that used to thump for you, I can feel it, against the walls of my chest, beating, not so fast anymore, the slow rhythm of absence, not unlike those last twitches of a goat or cows feet when their throat has been cut, and the blood has flowed towards your feet like a small stream; and the soil sucks on it, as life runs out of the animal. My throat is intact, but not my heart. I put my right hand to my chest, just to be sure that my heart is actually still beating.
A bright yellow thing catches the corner of my eye. I turn to look towards it. On another corner of the room is an old record player, and on the site a few records. The yellow thing that caught my eye is the cover of a Leonard Dembo record. You like Nzungu Ndamenya. It was your way of reminding me that I was your own, your choice, no matter the voices that would always have something to say. There is that urge sometimes, when thinking of someone deeply, to go to some place you used to go with them, touch something that reminds you of them, just do something to revive that memory. That urge wants me to put on the record, but I cannot. Your nzungu Ndamenya sits here, still holds onto the idea of you, yet the loudness of the space of this room without reminds me, the air that smells of things like you, but not you, lingering remnants of a body I have once loved, traced, felt I owned.
Thomas the drunk would have laughed. Who? He would ask. Taka? Seriously, just like that? He loved that girl so much he was prepared to lose an eye for her, hahaha. I cannot believe it. I would have laughed too, thrown my head back, and told off anyone who would suggest such. I sit here, and contemplate a life that is dull, grey, gloomy, a life of heavy clouds that linger over me, a heavy heart, forlorn.
Can you at least see me, or hear my thoughts? Can you give me a sign Taka. Do you remember that time when I came to Denmil Furnitures during lunch? I wanted to surprise you with some food I had. Sadza nemuriwo une dovi. I got to the gate, and the security guard took his time asking me all sorts of questions, looking me from top to bottom. There was that tone of surprise and disbelief that I was your girlfriend, your lover, the tone that often followed that knowledge in many people. When he had satisfied his curiosity, the guard called for you. There is a woman here who says he is your girlfriend, he said. I could imagine you smiling on the other side of the phone, then quickly getting out of your overalls and dusting yourself up.
……
Thinking of you and sadza nemuriwo une dovi forces something like a smile, a sort of painful pulling part of my lips, and a refusal to let that become a relief, in this moment. All this time that I have been in your room, I move as if I am in a vacuum, in some hazy space, where the walls expand and constrict, and the sounds from the outside world are sifted through some mechanism, that by the time they reach me, they have become harbingers of horror.
I have a mother, as you have known, who taught me to be a woman who values her strength. In this moment, her shoulders and her breast would be the strongest and softest places for me to lean my head on. I could cry the whole Manyame River onto her, leave her clothes soaking wet, and she would just hold me there, her child, and tell me that I was going to be alright. She would cry with me, and together, our tears would be their own river, tears from two women who have known the world was not made for them, who would make of the world what suited them. I cannot, I do not want to lean on her shoulders and her breast. I do not want her to tell me that it is going to be all alright, because I know it will not. It is a mother’s bottomless love that she will put her arms around her burning smouldering child, and burn with them, whilst telling them it is going to be alright. I am not sure of myself, and I do not want to burn myself and my mother together
At this rate, I am not sure I will be able to finish any packing today. Noone ever really prepares you for this kind of loss, of love, of longing. Mourning and grief, like life, love and longing, have no manuals. They are not like Nyore Nyore Furnitures, where you can put a deposit and pay in instalments. There is no hire purchase for grief and longing. Maybe if I had a child, or children with you Taka, I would refuse to be broken, for my soul to get dark for them, like my mother had to refuse to be broken for us, her children, me and my brother.
There was that moment, when my period came late. I experienced a mixture of fear, and anticipation. Getting pregnant was not the plan. Yet when it was a possibility, I took it. I did not know how to tell you. I was looking for a place to go to college. We were trying to make something out of our existence, before we started a family. My fear was that you would get scared and decide, like many other men, to run. The cliché akamitiswa has been used a lot around here for young women who got pregnant and were abandoned, by the men who were brave enough to let their sperm swim and travel to someone’s uterus, but not stand by them when they got pregnant, in whatever way possible. Cowards, these men, who have balls that dangle, and boast of nothing but empty pride.
I did not want that for me, for us, so I did not tell you straight away. I was also afraid that you would feel that getting pregnant was my fault, that I had ruined the plans we had for our future. Many women feel that way, I had heard. I was also delighted, that if I was pregnant, I would be having your child. Even though it was unexpected, life from you would be precious to me, it would be a piece of you Taka, in me. I imagined what it would be like for this life to grow inside me, to see it through my expanding tummy, that we had made this life. I imagined the kind of father, and husband, that you would be, to me and this life that I was carrying for us inside me. So I thought.
When I decided to tell you after a couple of days, I was happily surprised by how you took it. Yes, it was unexpected, but I was your nzungu ndamenya, so you were obviously happy I would be carrying your child. Some days later, the blood came trickling out of me. There was that ambiguity of emotions, as at the fear of pregnancy. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. A living part of you was not yet going to be part of me. And it never did become part of me. Now, when I am sure I shall not see you again, I want your child. Someone who will always be around as a living testament that I did not imagine you, that you were not part of some alternate reality that I came back from to discover that you were just made up.
When my father left, mother told us he would return. I was 6. Now I am 19. Father’s return having receded into a past long gone, the whispers in the neighbourhood had moved to savaging my mother and her morality, how she was not respectable because she was single and refused to remarry. I knew she had lovers. I also knew she refused to be broken by the fact that father had left, or what people said about her. She stood there, a giant, a bulwark against being pelted, assaulted by the avalanche of insults and derision. She would always say to me Hazvi, my daughter, you are a woman, yes, but you are your own woman. Do not let what people say about your father, or me, or us, bring you down. The people of this neighbourhood, even those who spend their days eating the back of your neck with rumours, do not lose sleep over our troubles. We learn how to care for ourselves.
It was my mother who made it easier for me to be with you Taka. She, like many, wanted me to be with someone they thought was educated. Yet she also knew that she had taught me to be stubborn, to not let my choices be made for me by people’s opinions. My mother learnt, and taught me how difficult the world can be, with or without a man. She, a woman who had lived with drunken violence and all sorts of abuse until she decided it was enough. Women’s bodies are battered and burnt, found lifeless in homes they are told tradition says keep on, because marriage, a husband, matter. My mother said no. For that, she became a pariah to her family. She had broken their code of womanly conduct. She had to stand on her own, and she did. We have never been rich, but mother instilled pride. Those who whispered behind our family’s back know that when Mai Hazvi is around, she brooks no nonsense. That is the woman I call mother, the woman I take after. Mai Hazvi knows that her daughter, Hazvi, me, has loved you so Taka.
Here I sit, imagining your scent in my nostrils, having to embrace the bitterness of the taste of my choice, and failing to swallow. The big lump that sits between my throat and chest grows. I feel faint. There was a time if you had told me that I would feel this weak , shake like a reed in water, and be as soft as the mealie meal porridge my grandmother used to make, I would have laughed. It is the person who walks on the granite rock who knows and can see there is a path there. The rest of us just see a granite rock. We are used to making our pathways on grass, on surfaces that are visible to us. Grief feels like that. I cannot show anyone else the path of this granite rock. It is mine, Taka.
I have become a widow before I could even become a wife. I put my hands on either end of my shoulders, across each other and squeeze. I am alone, in this room, filled with your absence. The world inside me has left. What language does one use to explain the hollowness of the insides, when it feels like someone scooped your innards and placed them on a fire, and you can feel both the heat of the grilling innards, and the cold and numbness of an empty bowel?
I am wearing that blue dress you bought me from Power Sales. Colours escape me. We used to argue what to call this dress. Sky blue, I said. You just stuck to blue. Taka, as colour blind as you were sweet. A lot. When I tried the dress on in the shop, you said you like seeing me in it as much as you did without it. It hugs you in all the right places. A tingling sensation rushed through me, to that place just above my stomach that always tingled when you were close. Hugged me in the right places, what a pervert, I said. Trying to charm the dress you just bought off me already are you?
It had been a tussle between us, I trying to dissuade you from buying me a dress with money that could go towards your driving lessons, you arguing that you just wanted to see me in blue, and it wasn’t much anyway. I have never been one for gifts. Least of all clothes. I was also aware of never wanting to make you try hard, not for me, I took you just for Taka. I liked the overalls, and the man. Well, not the overalls, but just the presence of a man who was not trying to impress me with clothes they had borrowed from their friends, like that song, who did it again, that used to talk about some guy who had to borrow everything, shoes, trousers, belt and tie, to impress a girl. In the end, you prevailed. I was your girl in blue, Hazvi, in the sky blue dress.
That dress clings onto my weak body. It’s blue, that used to be a sign of something colourful, deep and radiant, is just an empty colour. I wore it because I thought it would give me some ground to stand on, a crutch, a reminder that you thought of me beyond the things you could actually do. You wanted to be delighted with me being delighted, around you. Now I want it off my body. There has not been any ground, any crutch. Just memories that tug at the strings of my heart.
There is some shouting outside. A car almost ran over one of the kids playing street football. The driver is telling the kids he will give them a whipping. Or maybe he must whip their mothers who should be calling them home to take a bath, do their homework, or whatever other chores make children good. I stand up and look outside the window. The world outside has not stopped, but mine has
It is becoming dark outside. I have been sitting on your bed, folding things, pacing around your room, our room, for hours. I walk towards the small window that looks out into the ugliness of the big sink your landlord installed outside for you, and the clothes line where some socks and underwear hang. I used to like standing at that ugly sink, washing some of your clothes. You did not have many. I liked the rush of the water as it cascaded down into the sink, and the gurgling sound it made when I removed the stopper. I knew the creases, the holes, and the missing buttons, on your clothes. I knew your body better. The darkness that looms outside seems kinder that that which fills my inside.
There is a knock at the door. It jolts me out of my hypnosis. The landlord’s voice comes through. He asks if I am alright, and if I need anything. I think he wants me to leave now. I have told him that I just want to get some of my things. Your brother is coming from the village to collect the rest of your stuff.
I will be leaving soon, I tell him. He is a funny looking, short, balding man, with a protruding stomach. Too much masese. He used to give me lecherous looks. I never bothered telling you anyway, because I did not want you having problems with him. I knew you were a jealous one. Remember that time you ended up in a fight with Thomas, the drunk, because he kept asking me out and whistling at me. And I told you, no, Taka, you do not want to confront Thomas, I can handle him. I found you lying on your bed, with a swollen eye, and a bloody mouth. The story was that Thomas had beat the shit out of you. I laughed, and you laughed, and I laughed at you laughing with that protruding eye, and swollen lips. We laughed at your jealousy, and the beating Thomas the drunk gave you. From the snippets I heard, he had thrashed you, whilst asking you why you had to get involved, as if it was your vagina he wanted. I told you in my pretend stern voice that it is my vagina, and if drunken Thomas wanted it, he would have to wait for the afterlife. We laughed again, I kissed you and you winced.
The moment I walk out of the door, I realise when a slight wind hits my face that it is wet. The top of my dress is soaking wet. I have been crying, silently, and I did not even realise. I wipe my eyes, and walk into the darkness.
