FIFTY-SIX

She passed from one darkness into another, from exhaustion into sleep, or perhaps she had slipped into extinction. She didn’t know, nor did she care much. Her only lingering wish was that the darkness remained still and empty around where she lay, so cold and spent. But inside here and inside her, darkness was the medium through which her visitors and visions travelled. They came and went, came and went. They told her nothing, as if their presence was sufficient.

On either side of her head plastic rustled. She never saw what was inside the coverings, but heard mouths panting wetly against polythene. She knew sightless eyes were close by and that old mouths had opened to mutter notions long obsolete. They only wanted to be close to her and they wanted to be heard. Maybe that was enough; she was an audience for what had been lost and forgotten in the darkness it had been given unto.

In time, the four women wearing long gowns came and stood around her with their heads on one side; they all spoke at the same time like agitated birds in a treeline, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Perhaps they were praying, because they all held little books that looked like they contained hymns.

At first Stephanie thought they were holding their heads at severe angles so they could better see her lying on the dirty floor. But then she realized their heads were bent because of what was knotted about their throats. Every time the women appeared and she tried to see where the faint phosphorescence bled from, she would find herself moving round in a circle, on the ceiling, and unable to get back inside her body down below. When she tried to work out how far away her body was from the ceiling, she found herself staring down at four people sitting at the black table with their hands raised into the air.

The bald man’s face was all loose skin that hung around his jaw; what little of his hair remained was oiled into bootlace strands over his skull. He wore a shirt, tie and braces. Of the two women, the bespectacled woman with permed hair made a crude and horrible gesture by poking her thin tongue out of her wide open mouth. The other woman wore a headscarf and dark glasses. Her face was expressionless. On the centre of the table was the wooden box.

The people all looked past Stephanie at something else that unwound on the ceiling behind her head. It made the sound of oily hands being rubbed together. All of the people’s faces were strewn with tears.

When she came to be upon the floor again, and was, perhaps, even awake, a little boy with sunken milky blue eyes, that were probably sightless even though they showed between the scarf over his face and his cowboy hat made from purple felt, skipped around her in the darkness. His knee caps were thick with scabs, his grey shirt was untucked from his shorts and his patterned pullover was dirty and full of holes. Somewhere not far away, old dry hands clapped out a rhythm to which the boy skipped. The boy only ever sang the same thing:

‘All around the Mulberry Bush, The monkey chased the weasel. The monkey stopped to pull up his sock, Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Four maids to open the door, Pop! goes the weasel.’

Sometimes there was only darkness around her body, but within it she knew she was tiny. A speck in something cold and blank in every direction that went on forever.

She was so small inside the immensity of nothing she found it difficult to breathe.