Mourning Lane
A short story by Marcela Santos Brigida
He was not my friend, and he was not not my friend, just somebody who was there. And yet, listening to his voice, unprompted, unprepared, and unaware, brought a sharp pain to the nape of my neck. An echo of a dead cosmos that still lingers in crannies and nooks. A boy who is hardly a boy twenty years later saying, “Sorry, mate, do you mind?” to the actual boy with a backpack standing in the accessible space with large, navy-blue headphones. As the boy moves up the stairs and he locks the buggy into place, I am shocked by the awkwardness of the remainders of compulsory everyday closeness. He sits down by the window, and I can see his neck as he pulls off a scarf. He helps a pregnant lady sit beside him and says something that makes her laugh. What I hear then is a mess of elbows and post-PE sweat, cheap cologne and body spray, drugstore lip tint, jutting bones everywhere, forgotten hair ties around taps, and ladders on tights put on too quickly.
He had strawberry blond hair, and his cheeks went bright pink, not red, whenever it was cold, or hot, or when he played football, or when he was embarrassed to give a presentation. I remember my boy told me that he wanted to play tennis professionally, which, to me, sounded silly because it was so lonely and a posh person’s sport anyway. Looking at the back of his head now, from my vantage point on the elevated seat, I reached the obvious conclusion that the woman entertaining the baby in the buggy, making up animal shapes with her tanned fingers, was his wife. The baby’s delight I heard rather than saw. As the aisle became busier, the noises oscillated between high-pitched chortles and excited babbles. They had two large bags for life from Sainsbury’s, filled to the brim with assorted shapes that they soon had to pick up from the buggy area onto their own feet. I glimpsed at a single baguette protruding from the mess, and the pathetic normalcy of it made me turn away.
A conversation with his wife of no consequence at all. His voice did something, though, and at one point I could tell my nose was predicting a small cry. We stopped at Kings Cross and as the minutes flew by while the inevitable wave of tourists and commuters got in, the announcements lady passive-aggressively asked them to please move down inside the bus and use all available space. A lady wearing a habit was watching Instagram reels on full blast across the aisle. They were still talking. I bit a nail at his complaint that “if we had gone for the tube like I said, we’d already be home by now”. A strange pantomime where we were all still fifteen but with old-people problems, one of those dreams I would get when sleeping on my back, of peeling off my own skin or kissing a shapeshifter that I loved and hated at the same time. Her reply to the complaint was to wrap her fingers around his gesticulating wrist in an affectionate way and to kiss his cheek. As her hold loosened, he caught her fingers in his and kissed her knuckles.
I blushed at that gesture of understated intimacy, turning towards the window to realise a light drizzle had begun to fall. My phone assured me that there were showers forecast for the following hour, and by the time we reached Angel, the aisle was wet with the leftovers of the downpour brought in by the umbrellas of all sizes and personalities coming in and out of the bus. We flew through the next few stops and reached Highbury Grove without further incident. I looked to my left and saw that I was now sitting by myself, the aisles free, the moquette of the seats mostly visible again.
I dared a furtive look at them. The baby had fallen asleep. A girl with a bright pink beanie who had been sitting in front of me had moved to the vacant priority seat to their left. She was whispering something to his wife, and they shared a conspiratorial smile. She could be nine or twelve, but she was definitely theirs, the hair his strawberry blonde, the cheeks her Mediterranean tan. I looked down at my phone again, rummaging through Google Drive. Some people are meant to be forever of a certain age, for you at least. Hearing him sound like him, but also like a man, was like watching a film on a Wednesday afternoon, when Curzon gives you a discount. Everybody brings popcorn to the arthouse films, and you have to go through the indignity of seeing Saoirse Ronan cry while a PhD student from Birkbeck munches on a bag of Percy Pigs to your right. It’s just not verisimilar that people grow up when you are not there to watch it happening; the centre cannot hold, you know how it is.
I was still looking for it on the Drive when “Hi, sorry” happened. I looked up. It was the wife. I snapped back into polite-to-strangers mode, smiled at her and could tell he was alternating between looking at the baby and then looking back at us. I knew he would not recognise me, though. Why would he? I’d opt to shed it and look at life as individually packed experiences wrapped in single-use plastic, but it’s more like skin, multilayered and expansive, disturbing and freckled, discoloured, wrinkled, and eventually sagging. “Hi, hello!” She felt encouraged by my following of the script. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but would you have a Kleenex by any chance? The baby had a little mishap, and we ran out of wipes. We tried to rummage through the bags, but it’s a crime scene in there!”
She had to say no more, of course, no worries at all, here you go, no please take the whole thing, it doesn’t matter, no, by all means, anytime. I have a baby niece, and this happens to my sister literally every single day. She still thanked me profusely while leaving with the Kleenex and looked back to give a thumbs up, having apparently fixed whatever it was, “thank you so much.” I kept one of those ghastly tight-lipped smiles you give strangers when you arrange your face into a neutral mix of solicitude and communal spirit and kept it plastered on my face while looking through them to the announcements board, not registering where we actually were. My phone still hadn’t locked; I’d kept my right hand over the screen throughout the whole ordeal. It still gleamed with its ridiculous pixels, the photo – IMG01495.jpg – just apparent as a file, not an image. I tapped at it again.
And then there’s grief; so much of it that I could sell it by the pound. And there’s even some longing, if I’m being honest, but not for him, and not even for me, but for the not knowing at all how things would turn out. There was this one particular room where they sat us for weekly exams. It was originally meant to be a rehearsal space for dance class, so there were mirrors everywhere, then repurposed to terrorise us middle schoolers into not cheating, reflecting us into at least three different surfaces. Isn’t it splendid, in a way, that all of those days that were exactly the same left a dent? So that seeing the back of a head of blond hair sprinkled with grey manages to snap something again?
The baby squealed in delight in the background. Business as usual. The blonde girl yelled, Mummy! in a very authoritative voice. That I remember some boy’s pink cheeks like my grandmother’s cookies, while my own boy I know I forget a bit more every day, to the point of never being quite sure, when I dream of him, if that was really him or some other person. Did he really sound like that, am I filling in a blank? And that’s the thing with recollection, it’s not memory, not really, because you don’t do the work. The wife said, Honey, please don’t shout. Some boy’s voice having the power to tug at heartstrings. Disappointing. And yet, that’s how it goes. There’s recognition but not the heavy lifting of building an echo chamber in your brain for him. And maybe not caring makes it more pristine, untouched. I spent it all, each time I recalled my boy’s face, his voice, his laugh, and everything else not quite properly.
Bus will wait here while drivers are changed, the announcements board declared silently. One, two, three minutes. New driver and old driver talking on the pavement. New driver gives old driver a pat on the back and what I know to be a Christmas meal deal from Tesco, with one of those ho-ho-hog wraps. New driver closes cab door, on we go. They get off at Barnabas Road, and I wonder if they live in one of those tall, ugly blocks of flats near Homerton station. Maybe he had a point about the tube. Victoria and then the Overground at rush hour, though. No, she was right, of course. I bet that’s how it usually goes with them. Maybe they have a balcony with a bunch of nappies and onesies hanging out to dry. A large dog they walk through Victoria Park on Sundays.
How frustrating a human body is—a frail mess of noise and pain, of pain and love, of pain and pain. I got off at the last stop, and on my way back to Hackney Wick, it came streaming down my face. I was thankful for the strangers that would never notice, or at the very least never ask. I let it go on and on, running until it exhausted itself, only ever putting my face back on when I turned the corner to Packington Street. Darling, I’m home.