Peach Curtains

-Stories from the Ropewalks

            
          The end, Eleanor Cohen had hoped, would be marked by a certain kind of frothy perfection. A congregation of childhood pets on snow-white clouds, cherubs, pearly gates, and winged Cat Stevens look-a-likes wearing togas and playing harps. And light, lots of light.

***

           Her eyes were wide open, but the peach curtains she had always hated were still closed. The afternoon sun filtered through them, turning the bedroom she’d spent months decorating in shades of white a colour she’d often thought of despairingly as Uterus Coral. Donny’s voice was firm and even though he was only inches away from her face, he was over articulating as if she were a child. He was saying something about his hand: “If you can hear me, squeeze my finger.” She felt no urgency to respond to him. She would in time; he had a way of making her do things. 

            She was wearing grey. She was wearing a long-sleeved, woolen, polo-neck dress that she had bought not long after she had met him. It was a garment she relied on - it covered her. Eleanor Cohen was a women who had always strived for perfection, but even she would have smiled at the irony of herself spread-eagled and bare foot as if she’d jumped from a hundred stories, legs splayed, the dress hitched up as if it were a sweater; exposing knickers and a pantyliner which she’d supplemented with toilet paper to take up the excess bleeding. Her cheek pressed against the headboard causing her neck to jackknife against her back as if she were squeezed into a coffin six inches too small. She was crying…perhaps leaking is a better word, as the act was mute and constant. It occurred to her as she drifted in and out that she was dribbling from mouth and nose, the fluid congregating on the lily-white sheets in an ever-increasing circle. Paralysed, she wondered if he would fuck her. She blinked.

                                                                                   

It was a strange occasion for her to be calm, considering she was out of control…finally letting go. Years spent deliberating over shades of Parchment, Champagne and White Ibis for her Georgian town house, to the years of successfully hiding bruises; the only blemish on an otherwise perfect marriage. To the neatly lined dust free bottles of French perfume in the en-suite, which she had taken to mixing to create the perfect fragrance. To the opaque and flawed anti-wrinkle creams in elaborate shaped receptacles that failed to make her feel safe from ‘the ugliness of nature’. All quests for perfection, now redundant, because of rage on a perfect, sunny, autumn day.

            Hers was suburban violence, a respectable white-collar violence. – The type of violence that dwells behind white stucco walls and hides behind beautifully handmade peach curtains. The violence was so regular it had almost become mundane – like a Greek marble statue that had been placed in the hall for so long, she hardly noticed its presence anymore. If it hadn’t of been for the pregnancy then perhaps they could have lived with the tragic sculpture ‘happily ever after’.

She was crying for her mother. Just as once she did – as a child – when she’d found her guardian, dressed in white cotton, hanging from the first floor banister. She had looked like an angel with pewter eyes and broken wings. Today, however, something was different. Something inside Eleanor Cohen had collapsed. It was as if a curtain had been ripped from its rail inside her and was falling. Falling to the ground in a room with no floor. – Her unborn baby was dead.

The words on the bottle of pills read: do not exceed the stated dose and do not mix with alcohol. So she swallowed them – every last circle of white perfection – with warm Baileys. It was when she blinked that she remembered she was holding onto Donny’s finger. He said, “It's not your fault, little love. Just…please…if you can hear me, squeeze my finger.”

***

            The drugs had started to detach her from herself. They helped her to be free of her form; free of the body that failed to save their baby. To be able to turn away from her eyes and the vista where Donny, the peach curtains and rage lived was sublime. Her pain had never gone away or healed, her body had simply absorbed it; accepted it; learned how to conceal it - she knew that now. Then she remembered. She remembered the hose; a meter of green hosepipe that her mother would sink between her legs in order to, “Clean inside and out.” It was a memory that she had put behind thick white drapes…until now.

She cried. She cried differently, shamelessly, effortlessly and unlike before, silently – not choking and gasping for air like a newborn baby or a tortured child. Her stupor finally taking her somewhere the unworn shoes in her walk-in wardrobe had not. Somewhere she thought the shoes would take her, but they had not. If he fucked her now, she would be able to watch - know he was to blame.

***

                                                                                               

            Everybody, but her, loved Donny Cohen. Neither exceptionally funny nor good-looking he was average; to her he was the personification of average. His height, weight and face unremarkable. His eyes small and close together, and in his pale tissue-paper skin she saw her own flaws; her own middle-agedness. They had met in their late-twenties, at her flat in Crystal Palace. He arrived with some friends of hers. He had been forgettable, except for when he looked at her - the microseconds beyond a casual glance had made her feel slightly uneasy. It had always struck her as odd that – on entering her apartment – he’d put his wallet, keys, and change in a small pile on the table beside her cream leather Chesterfield, “For safe keeping,” only to return the next night, claiming he had forgotten something. Over the next ten years, she had time to realize someone as obsessive and compulsive as Donny can only forget intentionally.

            “You’re not leaving me, DO YOU HEAR ME?!? YOU’RE NOT LEAVING ME! I’m calling an ambulance. Hold on!” His voice was weak, but gilded with determination. Barely breathing, barely dressed, motionless in a pool of her own spit and tears; she had never felt so powerful. – She knew he would never make that call to the emergency services. The violence had always resided in a secret place. It belonged to them, like a deformed child they had raised behind peach curtains - hidden for its own protection from the outside world. A child that had grown stronger and angrier over time. Until today, today it had killed their precious, little, unborn baby. Besides, the house was untidy.

            She could hear something sporadically filling the room, slipping past the white mullioned windows, seeping under the curtains like an overflowing bath and hauling her back into reality. She hoped a hope it was dwarfs singing ‘Hi-ho, hi-ho…’ returning to wake her from a terrible nightmare. It was the sound of children leaving the school next door. Children and their mothers walking past the house; a cocktail of giggling, shrieking and car doors slamming shut. They, oblivious to the scene behind the peach curtains. She screamed, "SAVE ME!" The sound traveled no further than the thought.

            She let the overdose hold her hand. Let it tell her there was no one was in the bedroom with her; there was no bedroom; no curtains; no dead baby and no blood soaked white silk sheets. But there it was, under the bed, coiled into the shape of a heart: a meter of green plastic hosepipe. Still in the room all these years later, it slipped in and out of her thoughts like a serpent; puncturing her drug-induced safety.

***

            Sometimes she made him eggs - when she did, she used olive oil as it was better for his heart. Sometimes she’d run her fingers through his hair to reduce his stress. She would worry that he was not getting enough sleep, worry that he wasn’t getting enough exercise, and worry that she was worrying him by worrying too much. Sometimes, when he was asleep, she believed she could protect him; she believed she could love him. She’d whisper, “Sorry, Donny” into his ear. Maybe that’s why he stayed?

One thing was perpetual: Eleanor Cohen had always beaten him. First slaps and pinches, then punches and belts - his belts. Until in recent years when she’d had an idea – an idea she thought was her own – with a length of hosepipe.

The whitewashed bedroom was speckled with his blood, as were the peach curtains. She exhaled.

–Cheyelle Omar

COPYRIGHT ©2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: CHEYELLE OMAR